Plato in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 72

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Plato’s great discovery was radically new but has echoed down the ages. His “theory of Ideas” has shaped the whole of Western culture and his name is known worldwide. More than 2000 years ago Plato used his “allegory of the cave” – which envisaged people looking at shadows on a cavern wall and taking them for realities – to express a terrible suspicion. He saw his fellow Athenians living in a manipulated world of appearances – cut off from reality and put to sleep by material pleasures, wealth and demagogic politicians – and hoped, with this image, to shake them out of this sleep. Plato’s suspicions here are astonishingly relevant still in our Digital Age. Do we not also risk getting entirely lost in the shadows and projections of our TV-, Internet- and mobile-phone-dominated lives? To know truth, argued Plato, Man must learn to see again with his “inner eye”. We are able to sense the truth if we succeed in looking beyond the mere appearances. For behind the everyday objects and the immediately visible world, there is another invisible reality, a sort of higher level of Being, which can reveal to us the world as it truly is. This second, higher reality is the realm of the “Ideas”: above all the Ideas of the Good, the True and the Beautiful by which we must be guided in our lives. But what exactly are these Ideas? What does Plato mean when he speaks of “the Good”? And, most importantly, how can we know this “Good” and live a life in accordance with it? The book Plato in 60 Minutes uses three of Plato’s marvellous allegories – “the chariot”, “the sun”, and “the cave” – to explain the philosopher’s fascinating vision of the Ideas. But it also presents, citing key passages, Plato’s great political vision of an ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings. Finally, in a chapter on “what use Plato’s discovery is for us today”, it is shown how burningly relevant the ancient philosopher’s thoughts still are. The book forms part of the popular series Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Plato’s Great Discovery

Plato’s Central Idea

The Path to Happiness in the Analogy of the Chariot

‘Platonic’ Love

The Doctrine of the Ideas

Learning as Recollection of the Ideas

The Immortality of the Soul

The Analogy of the Sun

The Analogy of the Cave

The Ideal State

Of What Use is Plato’s Discovery for Us Today?

The Ideal State – Vision or Nightmare?

Plato – The Thinker Who Laid the Foundations of the West

We Are All Prisoners – the Ascent to the Good, the True and the Beautiful

Ultimate Knowledge as a Spur and Source of Strength

Bibliographical References

Plato’s Great Discovery

The great discovery made by Plato (428 – 348 B.C.) was as groundbreaking as it was rich in consequences. His theory of the “Ideas” has marked and formed the whole of Western culture. His name is known all over the world. But what Plato discovered was basically something very simple. He was concerned simply to find a reliable standard of truth: a final, definitive point of orientation for our lives. Again and again he posed the question: what is right and what is wrong? How can I distinguish truth from untruth?

Already in Plato’s own era – i.e. some four hundred years before Christ – this was a topic hotly debated by philosophers and citizens in the market squares of Greek cities. Everybody had his own contention and accused those who didn’t share it of naivety. But to the tireless contradictors of these ancient city squares such constant disagreement seemed only natural. For the philosophers who set the tone in this age – the so-called Sophists, whose best-known representative was Protagoras – maintained that “Man is the measure of all things”. Thus, it was natural that five different men should have five different ideas of “truth”, since each individual, having his own standard, necessarily drew his own conclusions. A single truth binding on all, argued the Sophists, was impossible in principle.

But it was just this that Plato sought: a universally valid and absolute truth. He argued, against the Sophists, that without such a truth moral decline was inevitable, since everyone would then behave as he thought and as he pleased. Plato, for his part, sought a definitive point against which every theory, thought and action could be measured. He was concerned with just one thing: what is really true, and how can one lead a “true life”?

Therefore he was the first man to pose the core question of philosophy. The word “philosophy” is formed by combining the ancient Greek words philia and sophia and thus means, literally, ‘love of wisdom’ or, if we take wisdom’s object to be truth: ‘love of truth’. Of course, the search for the ultimate truth is a huge challenge. It is no wonder, then, that Plato, in his youth, achieved no final result. But he resolved to continue posing the question until he found an answer to it. To this end, he developed his own method: the disputation, or “dialogue”. Thirty-six of Plato’s forty-one books are composed as such “dialogues” – a question-and-answer form quite new in Plato’s day – showing Plato’s philosophical idol, Socrates, disputing with various people on philosophically relevant themes.

At the start of these dialogues all the participants have different, and even opposite, views. But each interlocutor is obliged to answer the probing questions of the philosopher Socrates until he has either justified his view or recognized it to be wrong. These brilliantly written “disputations” enabled Plato to critique the various contradictory views of his contemporaries without settling, himself, on any idea of final truth. He even honestly admits, in the early dialogues, that he does not yet know just what such a final truth may be.

It is in this spirit that Plato has his main spokesman Socrates pronounce the famous and oft-cited dictum: ‘I know only that I do not know’. This dictum literally runs:

Plato’s early dialogues always have an ‘open ending’. It was enough for him to show that other philosophers, especially the Sophists, fell into self-contradiction. For example, he showed the Sophist teacher of rhetoric Gorgias, in a dialogue named after this latter, claiming that rhetoric is an essentially high and noble art. But Socrates forces him here, with his questions, gradually to concede that rhetoric, being an art of persuasion, can be used as easily in the service of an unjust cause as of a just one. In the end, Gorgias has to admit that rhetoric is less an art than a mere technique – and thus something that can be used for either good or evil.

In the dialogue Laches it is courage that is addressed. Socrates is not satisfied with his interlocutors’ giving, when asked about the essence of courage, mere examples of courageous men and praising their swordsmanship, stamina, fearlessness and boldness. If this were enough, then courage would be many different things, depending upon which courageous man one considered. In the end, all the participants in the dialogue have to concede to Socrates that they have, in fact, no precise standard by which to judge what courage really consists in.

It is toward such a real or essential definition that Plato has, in each of his dialogues, his protagonist Socrates skilfully lead the conversation. Socrates, moreover, is no mere literary figure invented by Plato. He really lived. For a long time he was Plato’s own most important teacher. But since Socrates taught his pupils purely orally and never wrote a book, it was easy for Plato to put into his teacher’s mouth all the doctrines which he himself held to be correct. Scholars today still find it very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Socrates’ own original ideas from those of Plato, since almost everything we know about Socrates comes from Plato’s dialogues.

There is no doubt, however, that the figure of Socrates is deliberately used by Plato to get across the central positions of his own philosophy. Plato calls the method practiced by Socrates – that of drawing his interlocutors into self-contradiction until they had to admit that their original idea was false – the “dialectic”, or sometimes the “maieutic” (i.e. the “midwife”) method, since Socrates, with his questions, gently brings truth to birth as a midwife does a baby, insistently repeating these questions until the contradictions in his interlocutors’ views are clarified and resolved and these interlocutors themselves “give birth” to truth.

In his most famous dialogue, The Republic, Plato describes this manner of discussion as a “dialectical procedure of exposure”. He believed the dialectical method alone to be capable of clearing aside all barbarian prejudices and false assumptions, leading men to the real ground and origin of truth, and cleansing the soul of the “barbaric filth” of preconceptions:

Only when the dialectical method has led the soul entirely “up above” can the inner eye perceive the truth. But what is this truth? How can what is true be distinguished from what is false? In his masterpiece, The Republic, and in the two famous dialogues the Phaedo and the Symposium, Plato gives the decisive answer: it is the Idea of the Good. In contrast to the early dialogues, Plato found in these works which he composed as a fifty-year-old philosopher a path to real truth.

We can recognize the truth, argued Plato, if we succeed in looking beyond mere appearances. Because, beyond the everyday objects and the visible world which surrounds us, there exists a second, invisible reality: a kind of higher level of being which alone reveals to us the true world. This second reality is the realm of the Ideas. Plato draws a clear distinction between the world of the deceptive and fleeting objects which we perceive, day in day out, through our physical senses and the world of the Ideas, which reveals itself only to the inner eye.