Plato spent perhaps his first ten years as a young adult with his mentor, Socrates, during the last ten years of Socrates’ life. There is no question that Socrates was Plato’s inspiration and ideal. Plato made him the protagonist and leader of most of his dialogues. In Plato’s later dialogues Socrates sometimes becomes a listener, and even disappears in the late Laws. But Socrates is always the model philosopher, the voice in Plato’s head, asking the compelling questions, teaching not by lecturing but by prodding his interlocutors and, by extension, his readers, and, no doubt the author himself, to go farther, deeper, to see the truth behind the appearances, the reality behind the images.
The fact that Socrates was in so many ways the very antithesis of Plato makes his influence all the more remarkable. Plato was a haughty aristocrat who despised the Many, reviled against the ruling democracy in Athens, and could see no value in educating the masses. Socrates, himself a member of the “working class,” walked about in worn-out clothes, barefoot, mingling with the poor as well as the well-to-do, looking for wisdom among the Many as well as the Few, seeking to improve his fellows of whatever class or status they were.
Whereas Socrates was a talker, an irrepressible inquirer, Plato was a writer with sublime gifts. His gifts included the ability to bring conversation to life on the page, to capture the personality both of the questioner and the answerer, to instill into a conversation dramatic tension, to hold the reader in suspense as arguments unfolded, theses were propounded by one speaker and refuted by the other, putting reputations on the line along with philosophical movements.
The conversations were, by and large, fictional; but the dramatis personae were recreations of real figures with real commitments and agendas. In Plato’s dialogues, the intellectual life of the leading city of Greece in its golden age comes to life before our eyes. We see and hear Socrates pursuing important questions about what is right and wrong, good and bad, with his fellow citizens and some foreign visitors, challenging them and us to make sense of it all and to be thoughtful about the choices we make and the lives we lead.
Socrates had introduced the study of morality, ethics as we call it, into philosophy. He had gone so far as to make it the centerpiece of philosophy, and for him the be-all and end-all of the discipline. Plato was deeply influence by his master’s commitment to the moral life and the intellectual pursuit of his principles. But for him it was not enough that good and evil, right and wrong should be only concepts in the mind or feelings in the heart. Socrates had done his best to equate morality with logical consistency and wickedness with self-contradiction. But for Plato, that was not enough. He wanted to put morality on a firm foundation, if possible to make it the cornerstone of all reality.
Beyond the realm of human experience, Plato glimpsed a domain in which values themselves were quite real. Just as we can judge an action or a person as good but not perfect, we seem to have an innate ability to conceive in something that is completely and impeccable good, noble, perfect. There must, then, be values that do not depend on human notions or whims, but which exist in and of themselves, in a perfect realm. These are the Forms. Plato uses words for figure (idea) or shape, kind (eidos) to denote the Form. (Our English word ‘idea’ is a cognate, but in the original Greek idea does not signify a mental image.)
We cannot discern how exactly Plato came to posit Forms as ultimate realities. They appear quite suddenly in his dialogue Symposium, allegedly suggested to Socrates by the priestess Diotima of Mantinea. She introduces the Form of Beauty which is the source of all that is beautiful in the world.[1] In the Phaedo, perhaps written about the same time, Socrates introduces the Forms as though they are familiar to his intimate friends.[2] Henceforward, in Plato’s so-called middle period, we find the Forms functioning as timeless ideals that order and structure the physical world we live in, while existing in a higher plane.
What else is there? Later in the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates is reminded of something he has almost forgotten. An unnamed member of the party points out that Socrates had earlier said the larger came from the smaller and vice versa, and in general opposites came from opposites; but now Socrates was saying that opposites cannot come from their opposites. Socrates replies that he needs to make a clarification. “Before, my friend, we were speaking about things having opposites, referring to them by the name of what was in them; now, we are speaking of the things themselves which, by virtue of being in their subjects, give them their names.”[3] So young Socrates went from being smaller to being larger, but Smallness never becomes Largeness. On the basis of this clarification by Plato’s Socrates, we need to distinguish the subjects that have a property from the property itself. The property itself is what Plato calls a Form; what the subject is is barely mentioned in the dialogue, or anywhere else. But we need to distinguish the subject from the Form and decide what its status is.
There is, however, one other entity that is prominent in the Phaedo and alluded to in the Symposium: the soul. The central topic of the Phaedo is the immortality of soul. Plato’s Socrates gives five distinct arguments in favor of the thesis. And we might remember that the Socrates of the early dialogues has no strong opinion on this topic. In the Apology he speculated about the possibility of immortality, with its accompanying opportunities, without affirming it.[4] In the Phaedo, Socrates stoutly defends the view, assuming the existence of the soul before birth and multiple reincarnations through time. Here, it seems, we are getting the doctrines of Plato, not Socrates. And it appears that Plato is committed physical subjects of physical properties like Largeness, but of spiritual subjects of virtues such as Justice.
[1] Plato Symposium 201d, 210e-212b.
[2] Plato Phaedo 76d-77a.
[3] Plato Phaedo 103b-c.
[4] Plato Apology 40c-41c.