plato philosophy of self essay

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Plato’s Concept of the Self

Plato’s concept of the self can be gleaned from his notion of the soul. This is because, and it must be noted from the outset, we cannot find in Plato a full articulation of the concept of the “self”.

In fact, in ancient Greek philosophy, we could not find any systematic articulation of the concept of self. What we can find when we study the ancient Greek’s conception of the self are questions like “What is the fundamental truth about human nature?” or “What defines the fundamental identity of an individual?”. These questions, however, give us an idea of how the ancient Greek philosophers understood the “self”, that is, as human persons capable of reason and action. And if one is quite familiar with ancient Greek philosophy, these aspects of the human person (that is, the capacity to think and act) point to the idea of the “soul”.

Again, this explains why we always refer to the soul when we study Plato’s concept of the self. As a matter of fact, in many of his dialogues, Plato contends that the true self of the human person is the “rational soul”, that is, the reason or the intellect that constitutes the person’s soul, and which is separable from the body.

So, how does Plato conceive of the soul as the true self of humans ?

Plato conceives of the self as a knower. Hence, for Plato, the concepts of the self and knowledge are inextricably linked. This is because Plato’s concept of the self is practically constructed on the basis of his reflections on the nature of the rational soul as the highest form of cognition.

But it must be noted that for Plato, the human person is composed of body and soul. In other words, the human person is a dichotomy of body and soul. The body is the material and destructible part of the human person, while the soul is the immaterial and indestructible part. Plato argues that the soul is really an entity distinct from the body. Indeed, for Plato, the soul is the self.

As we can see, the body and the soul can be separated. In fact, Plato believes that the soul is just residing in the body temporarily. Thus, in Plato’s concept of the self, we have the idea that when the human person dies, the soul departs from the body leaving the latter to decompose. And because the soul is immaterial and indestructible, it cannot die. It is eternal.

According to Plato, the soul, conceived of as self, has three parts, namely: 

1) the rational soul, 

2) the spiritual soul, and 

3) the appetitive soul

For Plato, the rational soul is located in the head. Being located in the head, the rational soul enables the human person to think, reflect, analyze, and do other cognitive functions.

The spiritual soul, on the other hand, is located in the chest. It enables the person to experience happiness, joy, sadness, abomination, anger, and other emotional feelings.

Lastly, the appetitive soul is located in the abdomen. This is the part of the soul that drives the human person to experience physical pain, hunger, thirst, and other physical wants.

Now, according to Plato, the rational soul is superior to the spiritual soul and appetitive soul as it serves as their moral and rational guide.

In the Allegory of the Chariot, which Plato developed in his work Phaedrus , Plato illustrated the role of the rational soul as the charioteer. The charioteer’s role is to drive his horses onward and upward, keeping his team working together in harmony towards the realm of the gods, a place of illumination, reality and truth.

As narrated in the Phaedrus , the chariot is pulled by two winged horses, one mortal and the other immortal.

On the one hand, the mortal horse is deformed and obstinate. Plato describes it as a “crooked lumbering animal, of a dark color, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur”.

On the other hand, the immortal horse is noble and game, “upright and cleanly made…his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only”.

In the driver’s seat is the charioteer whose task is to control both horses, guiding and harnessing them to propel the chariot with speed and efficiency. Plato says that the destination of the charioteer is the ridge of heaven, beyond which he may behold the “Forms”, that is, the essences of things like Beauty, Wisdom, Courage, Justice, and Goodness.

Now, the white horse wishes to rise and reach the destination, but the dark horse pulls the chariot back towards the earth. They pull in opposite directions. As we can see, the two horses are very different and they struggled against each other. For this reason, the task of the charioteer is difficult and troublesome. But if the charioteer wishes to reach his destination, then he must harmonize the two horses by controlling them.

In relation to the self, Plato shows that the black and white horses represent desire and spirit respectively, while the charioteer represents the person’s reason or the rational soul. And as the rational soul, the charioteer must have a vision and purpose. He must know where he is heading. And he must know and understand the nature of the two horses if he wishes to properly harness the chariot and reach his destination.

The rational soul as the true self, therefore, must at all times control the spiritual and appetitive soul. And according to Plato, if the rational soul is successful in controlling the spiritual and appetitive souls, that is, if the charioteer is able to harmonize the two horses, a well-balanced personality is attained. Indeed, this is, in a nutshell, how Plato views the true self.

Philosophy: Plato’s View on the Self

Section iii.

Plato’s view on the self is correct because it provides a clear and comprehensive explanation of the basic components of personality.

Plato presents a very interesting and logical explanation of personality in his discussion of the Divided Self. The philosopher, in his characteristic playful and creative manner, and using his characteristic systematic approach, creates a unique metaphor of personality that echoes the symbol of Chariot from the tarot cards. Plato describes the person as consisting of a Charioteer and two horses, white and black (or blood red).

The black horse looks like a frail animal that needs whipping and taming and represents the bodily inclinations or desires of a person or his appetites. The white horse represents a spiritual or energetic part of the personality that responds to the desire to establish justice in the world and can be overshadowed by an excessive desire for power, although it does not need excessive control. The white horse in this metaphor, according to Plato, is a spirited or hot-blooded part of the self. Finally, the Charioteer symbolizes the mind or mindfulness of the person who allows the wise control of the chariot.

Plato’s position is universal and does not meet with significant resistance among scientists and philosophers. At the same time, it can be compared with the position of Lucretius, which he sets out in a six-book poem De Rerum Natura. Lucretius’s vision of a person’s personality is presented for the most part from the standpoint of metaphysics since in the poem he explains his vision of the material and physical world. Lucretius says that a person can free himself from fears of gods and suffering by knowing the physics and theory of atoms. According to Lucretius, everything in the world, including man, is made of atoms. These atoms can be very close to each other and make up dense objects.

They can also represent smells, colors, and a tangible world that is depleted and re-saturated from time to time. At the same time, according to Lucretius, the personality consists of the body, as well as the soul and mind, which are in the area of the human heart. This concept contradicts Plato’s more specific concept of personality and indicates a significant flaw in Plato’s concept. In particular, Plato presents an overly practical concept of personality, which does not give consciousness new horizons for cognition, as in the work of Lucretius. Plato, in other words, views personality as a universal tool for survival or the ability to perform perfect actions in the world. However, he does not explain the role of personality in the structure of the cosmos, as Lucretius does.

Unlike Plato, Lucretius gives a universal knowledge of what a person is from the point of view of the Cosmos, and such a description can be more universal. If we apply the ideas of philosophers to everyday life, Plato frees a person from the suffering associated with not knowing how to realize perfect behavior. At the same time, Lucretius frees a person from suffering associated with the fact that he does not know what the body and soul of a person are, and what happens to the body and soul after death. Therefore, the idea of Plato frees a person from the fear of life, and the idea of Lucretius frees him from the fear of death.

Interestingly, it is really difficult to find contradictions between these two concepts, since they rather complement each other. It is natural for the philosophers of Ancient Greece to study different facets of life, from different positions, as if doing joint work for the common, universal human good of knowledge. Therefore, the most prominent ancient Greek philosophers and their most significant ideas, which they accepted as final, usually complement each other.

It is most logical to assume that Plato’s criticism boils down to the fact that his position is not exhaustive enough to describe life, since it represents only one of its active parts. In addition, it is believed that Plato’s ideas are extremely idealistic and metaphorical, in comparison with the concepts of Aristotle, who was his follower. Aristotle presented examples of how Plato’s ideas can be applied in everyday life, that is, with the participation of real residents of the state of that time.

One should not criticize Plato’s ideas about personality for the fact that they are not exhaustive enough in describing all facets of being. Plato was the first to develop his method of studying being, which became the basis of the entire system of this science. Therefore, the fact that he considers only one facet of being – life, is only evidence that Plato uses his characteristic and recognized in the scientific world, the method of cognizing reality. At the same time, Plato’s ideas cannot be called overly metaphorical or idealistic, since they are easily understood and applied in practice.

Plato’s view on the self is correct because it provides a clear and comprehensive explanation of the basic components of personality. He presents an interesting and lively metaphor, using tarot symbolism to describe a person’s personality. The existence of three foundations of being or three aspects of personality – appetites, spirited part, and mind is certainly an understandable guide to overcoming many life difficulties and developing perfect behavior. Criticism of Plato’s excessive idealism is irrelevant, as his ideas are uniquely practical and applicable in life. Criticism that the idea of Plato’s personality is insufficiently exhaustive is irrelevant since Plato uses a world-recognized and invented by himself philosophical method.

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Plato: The Ancient Greek Conception of Self and the Republic

Visual aids to Lectures on: - Questions of the Self, - Narrative Construction of the Self, - The Ancient Greek Conception of the Self, - How to Read a Platonic Dialogue, and - The Self in Plato's Republic

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Plato and the Divided Self

Peter lautner , pázmány péter catholic university. [email protected].

The volume is a collection of papers delivered on different occasions, mostly at two conferences held at University of Toronto and Cornell respectively.

In Plato, the ‘true self’ is discussed in the context of knowledge and embodiment, and involves the view that we acquire our true self when we activate our latent knowledge of the Forms. The question is whether the sheer fact of embodied existence does not raise an insurmountable obstacle to our reaching this state. Iakovos Vasiliou distinguishes two positions. In the Phaedo , philosophers search for wisdom but do not achieve it; possession of wisdom awaits death. By contrast, in the Republic philosophers are supposed to attain knowledge while embodied in the world. Wisdom involves knowledge of Forms. The citizens of the lower two classes in the ideal state described there, however, will be more similar to the philosophers described in the Phaedo . They recognize that Forms are not identical with sensible things or properties, and also recognize that sensible things have properties in virtue of participating in the relevant Form, but they cannot give an account of the Form. The relation between wisdom and the other virtues in the Phaedo is also a complicated issue, tackled thoroughly in the paper. One might claim that, by saying that wisdom is a purifying rite (69c3), whereas courage and temperance are purifications, Plato seems to attribute an instrumental role to wisdom. In that case, wisdom might not be chosen for its own sake only. The situation described in the Phaedo will be paradoxical since, if full wisdom is acquired upon death only, and courage and temperance depend on wisdom, then courage and temperance will be acquired upon death, with no practical relevance anymore.

Louis-André Dorion sets himself a threefold aim: to discuss the link between the virtue of self-mastery (ἐγκράτεια) and the partition of the soul in the Republic , to show that such a link is to be found in the Gorgias as well, and to explain why Plato never fully rehabilitates ἐγκράτεια. Tripartition, he argues, is not necessary for ἐγκράτεια since bipartition would already be sufficient: indeed, the bipartite scheme in the Gorgias allows for an assimilation of self-government (ἑαυτοῦ ἄρχειν, 491d9) to self-mastery (ἐγκρατῆ αὐτὸν ἑαυτοῦ, 491d12) with regard to pleasures. But we only ever get a partial ‘rehabilitation’ of ἐγκράτεια even in the Republic since, conceived of as a distinct force, ἐγκράτεια would be without purpose. It is reason, supported by the spirited part, that is ultimately responsible for controlling the passions.

The tripartition of the soul in the Republic invites the question, discussed by Eric Brown, of whether we are allowed to talk about the unity of the soul. According to Brown’s argument, there is a unity which is complex, both serving as the locus of moral responsibility and explaining the unity of consciousness. The complexity is shown by the ‘argument from conflict’, restated at 439b3-6, which allows a human agent to move in one part but stay still in another. The unity of the soul is a function of the order or harmony of its parts. The harmony is produced by the parts as they are causally related to one another. To me, this seems to be an excessively normative notion of unity and one may ask for an explanation of the unity of disharmonious souls. The principle of psychological hegemony serves to account for the rule of desire/spirit in the soul, but does not explain normative unity.

In order to explain the unity of the soul, we have to be clear about the nature of its parts. Rachana Kamtekar argues that Plato’s psychology represents our motivations as themselves person-like. They are personified to the extent that all three parts of the soul are considered subjects of desires and beliefs which can initiate movement. Personification is a persistent feature of Plato’s psychology and can be explained with reference to his protreptic to philosophical virtue. In contrast to civic virtue (430a-c), philosophical virtue does develop the best of our abilities and requires the disciplining of the others. We find the same model in the Phaedrus as well, and Kamtekar claims that the treatment of the soul here is quite similar to Plato’s treatment of stories about the gods in the Republic . She supposes that the immortality and the self-motion of the soul act as a kind of constraint on the content of a likely account, analogous to the god’s goodness in the Republic .

Tad Brennan focuses on one part of the soul, the spirited, and invites us to think about it from the point of view of psychogony. He argues that the introduction of the spirited soul can be best understood as a reaction to the threats posed by the appetitive soul. All of its functions involve a response to its potentially harmful activities. It works as a bond between appetite and reason and has two roles, since it deals with manifestations of appetitive activity in other people as well in oneself. The former function leads, among other things, to competitive virtues and a sensitivity to honour, while the control of our own appetites leads to moderation. Distribution of appetitive goods is tied to the system of honour. As honour can sometimes act as a value that is opposed to appetite, so spirit can choose honour instead of pleasure. The fact that the spirit responds to the concept of οἰκεῖον, referring to the cohesiveness of social groupings, shows that Plato attributes a cognitive content to spirit (116). As a kind of objection one may ask about the origin of this content. If it is the rational soul, how shall we explain the possible conflict between reason and spirit? 1

James Wilberding focuses on the education of appetite. He argues that ὁμοδοξία in the soul involves the appetitive part containing a sort of belief; it is in some sense capable of conceptualization (although this differs from reasoning). Moreover, it develops an attitude towards the abstract claim of following the guidance of reason, which happens by habituation. The Timaeus offers a good parallel (47e5-48a5 where necessity is persuaded the intellect), while Proclus’ commentary on Alcibiades I helps to elucidate different kinds of education, which are adjusted to the various parts of the soul ( in Alc. I 193.21-194.17). Wilberding takes it to support his interpretation of the Republic that appetite is trained by γυμναστική, understood as diet, and not physical exercise. We might add that the Timaeus passage highlights the limits of habituation since intellect can persuade necessity to a certain extent only.

Raphael Woolf discusses the passage on the true nature of the soul in Rep. 10, 611b9-612a6, and shows that the analogy between Glaucus and the soul is far from clear. The accretions on the sea-god cannot be likened to appetite and spirit, which are genuine parts of the soul. What is more, Socrates has doubts about whether even an immortal soul must be simple, which come from a methodological difficulty rather than metaphysical assumptions. It would be easy if we could infer that the soul must be incomposite because it is immortal; but that conclusion would have to be revoked were one to discover a soul that, in addition to being immortal, is in fact composite. Such a discovery would show that the two features are compatible. Justice poses a special problem, since in Book 4 it is defined as a harmony of the three parts. Even so, Socrates’ methodological prescription for seeing the soul in its unencrusted state leaves undetermined the soul’s relation to justice and injustice. Justice must bear on happiness and the Glaucus passage presents a challenge to explain the relation more precisely.

Jennifer Whiting reads the Republic as allowing for ‘radical psychic contingency’, involving (1) contingency of the internal structure the soul-parts have in any given individual, and (2) contingency in the number of soul-parts belonging to any individual soul. (2) means that the Republic can permit a model such as that described in the Phaedo : the model described in the Republic itself is meant to refer to the soul of most folk. Based on Book 4, 443c10-e2, Whiting argues that the only agent-like thing in a person is the person himself; that Plato is open to the possibility of there being more than three parts in the embodied soul; and also that many psychic parts might become one. The argument from opposites in Republic 4 allows for the possibility of there being, between reason and appetite, more than one element which is partly but not fully responsible to reason. Even appetite is doubled since its form in corrupt souls differs from the form it has in well-ordered souls, although a difference between the collective and distributive use of the term ἐπιθυμία can take different forms.

Developments after the Republic are discussed in four papers. Frisbee Sheffield examines the accounts of ἔρως in the Symposium and the Phaedrus . Her aim is to show that these dialogues do not provide evidence for the commonly held view that Plato revised – or even renounced – the account he gave the tripartite soul. The Symposium does not contain any psychological commitment alternative to the notion of threefold soul, or incompatible with it. Moreover, the supposedly intellectualistic strand of the Symposium needs to be re- evaluated since even though Plato had an intellectualistic view of ἔρως, the dialogue avoids a more general claim about desire as such. On the other hand, the Phaedrus may also lack a clear commitment to the tripartite soul; the difference lies between the three distinct kinds of movement or desire. Furthermore, the view on ἔρως in the Symposium was not revised or recant substantially. The concept of rational desire was held throughout in these dialogues. Reason has no need to borrow desiderative forces elsewhere in the soul.

Hendrik Lorenz suggests that in the Timaeus Plato supplies appetite with cognitive resources even if he denies understanding or belief to it. It is equipped not only with information through sense-perception, but also with ϕαντασία. The nature of the liver is an important factor since it transmits – but does not reshape – the pictorial accounts formulated by reason. One might raise the question of how appetite is connected to sense-perception directly. After all, the physiology of perception suggests that it is connected to the brain, which implies that sensory information also reaches the appetite via reason. But if so, how do its pictures differ from the ones given by ϕαντασία?

Pictures are examined by Jessica Moss too, who doubts if we are entitled to generalize the claim made in the Republic that the seats of passions are the non-rational parts of the soul. She points out that both in the Philebus and in the Timaeus passions are endowed with cognitive characteristics. They can respond to evaluative appearances (distinguishing between good and bad) and, in the Philebus , are judgments that something is the case. Rational desires, pleasures and ἔρως are formed by cognition that is not image-based but rational. Hence Plato anticipates much of what Aristotle says in the Rhetoric .

Luc Brisson asks two questions: is there a radical shift between the Republic and the Laws concerning ethics and politics, and does Plato renounce the tripartition of the soul and the state? He shows that the threefold division is present in the Laws . Brisson argues that the position on ethics and politics in the Laws is much the same as in the Republic . Even if one agrees with the overall claim, it may be interesting to see that, e.g., the relation of the four cardinal virtues to one another (see Laws 1. 631b-d) differs from the one we find in Republic 4.

The section on developments after Plato is meagre, but consists of fine contributions. Jan Opsomer examines Plutarch’s theory of the world soul and human soul, showing that their structure is identical, and that both have a kinetic and cognitive aspect. In discussing Plato’s tripartition in De virt. mor. , Plutarch manages to reconcile it with his own twofold division by saying that both appetite and spirit belong to the non-rational part of the soul. The non-rational is an essential part of human nature and its cure of excessive passions is our moral task. This also shows that Plutarch’s theory of the soul is intimately linked to his ethics which promotes moderation in passions.

Unlike Plutarch, Galen is committed to the Platonic division. 3 Drawing on his arguments for tripartition in PHP , Mark Schiefsky examines the psychological and physiological sides of the theory. As sources of motivation, the psychic parts are situated in the brain, the heart and the liver, which are the principles of the three main duct systems of the body: the nerves, the arteries and the veins respectively. To prove it, especially in the case of the liver, Galen faced considerable difficulties, and his explanation of ἀκρασία seems also problematic.

Relying on Enn. VI 8.6.19-22, Eyólfur Kjalar Emilsson analyses Plotinus’ view of the link between soul and external action. Plotinus emphasizes internal activity, that is thinking and contemplation, and argues that it is hard to see how virtuous action can be ‘up to us’ since Plotinus believes that, as an event in the physical world, action is determined externally. It can only be ‘up to us’ insofar as it flows from internal activity: such action then is like an image of a paradigm, a view to be linked with Republic 443c. But there is no clear link between a harmonious soul and the nature of the action. It simply happens that some actions bolster and preserve internal harmony whereas others have the opposite effect since actions are determined by external forces. Plotinus does not account for the reason why some are harmful.

The volume is welcome addition to the study of ancient moral psychology. It is supplied with bibliography and two indices.

1 . Interestingly enough, the argument from conflict in Republic 4 is not applied to the relation between spirit and reason explicitly, except for the claim that bad upbringing may be the cause of their possible conflict.

2 . Woolf also claims that the main function of reason is deliberation. The claim may need to be modified since ruling and deliberating go together, and in 442c6 reason is said to command (παρήγγελλεν) and it must rule, which is due to its share in σωϕροσύνη (442c10-12).

3 . Although not in Meth. med. 9.10. I owe this point to a reader at BMCR.

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one Self-Knowledge in Plato

• Published: January 2017
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This chapter explains the differences in content between two kinds of self-knowledge in Plato and describes the two kinds of inquiry directed at each kind of self-knowledge. Several early dialogues are concerned with knowledge of a person’s state (is he knowledgeable or ignorant? good or bad?), which is gained by that person inquiring into some particular subject matter. Several middle and late dialogues are concerned with knowledge of one’s capacities (what is one’s nature such that one is able to become good or bad, and knowledgeable or ignorant, viz., what are one’s capacities to inquire, desire, anger, and so on? are all of these equally essential to what one is?), determining the soul’s basic constituents and exploring their behavior in different conditions. Both kinds of inquiry treat the self that is to be known as capable of being quite different in reality from the way it appears to itself.

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6.2 Self and Identity

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Apply the dilemma of persistence to self and identity.
• Outline Western and Eastern theological views of self.
• Describe secular views of the self.
• Describe the mind-body problem.

Today, some might think that atomism and Aristotle’s teleological view have evolved into a theory of cells that resolves the acorn-oak tree identity problem. The purpose, or ergon, of both the acorn and the oak tree are present in the zygote, the cell that forms when male and female sex cells combine. This zygote cell contains the genetic material, or the instructions, for how the organism will develop to carry out its intended purpose.

But not all identity problems are so easily solved today. What if the author of this chapter lived in a house as a child, and years later, after traveling in the highly glamorous life that comes with being a philosopher, returned to find the house had burned down and been rebuilt exactly as it had been. Is it the same home? The generic questions that center on how we should understand the tension between identity and persistence include:

• Can a thing change without losing its identity?
• If so, how much change can occur without a loss of identity for the thing itself?

This section begins to broach these questions of identity and self.

The Ship of Theseus

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a wooden ship owned by the hero Theseus. Within months of launching, the need to replace decking would be evident. The salt content of sea water is highly corrosive. Accidents can also happen. Within a common version of the thought experiment, the span of one thousand years is supposed. Throughout the span, it is supposed that the entire decking and wooden content of the ship will have been replaced. The name of the ship remains constant. But given the complete change of materials over the assumed time span, in what sense can we assert that the ship is the same ship? We are tempted to conceptualize identity in terms of persistence, but the Ship of Theseus challenges the commonly held intuition regarding how to make sense of identity.

Similarly, as our bodies develop from zygote to adult, cells die and are replaced using new building materials we obtain though food, water, and our environment. Given this, are we the same being as we were 10 or 20 years ago? How can we identify what defines ourselves? What is our essence? This section examines answers proposed by secular and religious systems of belief.

Write Like a Philosopher

Watch the video “ Metaphysics: Ship of Theseus ” in the series Wi-Phi Philosophy . You will find five possible solutions for making sense of the thought experiment. Pick one solution and explain why the chosen solution is the most salient. Can you explain how the strengths outweigh the stated objections—without ignoring the objections?

Judeo-Christian Views of Self

The common view concerning identity in Judeo-Christian as well as other spiritual traditions is that the self is a soul. In Western thought, the origin of this view can be traced to Plato and his theory of forms. This soul as the real self solves the ship of Theseus dilemma, as the soul continuously exists from zygote or infant and is not replaced by basic building materials. The soul provides permanence and even persists into the afterlife.

Much of the Christian perspective on soul and identity rested on Aristotle’s theory of being, as a result of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas . Aquinas, a medieval philosopher, followed the Aristotelian composite of form and matter but modified the concept to fit within a Christianized cosmology. Drawing upon portions of Aristotle’s works reintroduced to the West as a result of the Crusades, Aquinas offered an alternative philosophical model to the largely Platonic Christian view that was dominant in his day. From an intellectual historical perspective, the reintroduction of the Aristotelian perspective into Western thought owes much to the thought of Aquinas.

In Being and Essence , Aquinas noted that there was a type of existence that was necessary and uncaused and a type of being that was contingent and was therefore dependent upon the former to be brought into existence. While the concept of a first cause or unmoved mover was present within Aristotle’s works, Aquinas identified the Christian idea of God as the “unmoved mover.” God, as necessary being, was understood as the cause of contingent being. God, as the unmoved mover, as the essence from which other contingent beings derived existence, also determined the nature and purpose driving all contingent beings. In addition, God was conceived of as a being beyond change, as perfection realized. Using Aristotelian terms, we could say that God as Being lacked potentiality and was best thought of as that being that attained complete actuality or perfection—in other words, necessary being.

God, as the ultimate Good and Truth, will typically be understood as assigning purpose to the self. The cosmology involved is typically teleological—in other words, there is a design and order and ultimately an end to the story (the eschaton ). Members of this tradition will assert that the Divine is personal and caring and that God has entered the narrative of our history to realize God’s purpose through humanity. With some doctrinal exception, if the self lives the good life (a life according to God’s will), then the possibility of sharing eternity with the Divine is promised.

Think Like a Philosopher

Watch this discussion with Timothy Pawl on the question of eternal life, part of the PBS series Closer to the Truth , “ Imagining Eternal Life ”.

Is eternal life an appealing prospect? If change is not possible within heaven, then heaven (the final resting place for immortal souls) should be outside of time. What exactly would existence within an eternal now be like? In the video, Pawl claimed that time has to be present within eternity. He argued that there must be movement from potentiality to actuality. How can that happen in an eternity?

Hindu and Buddhist Views of Self

Within Hindu traditions, atman is the term associated with the self. The term, with its roots in ancient Sanskrit, is typically translated as the eternal self, spirit, essence, soul, and breath (Rudy, 2019). Western faith traditions speak of an individual soul and its movement toward the Divine. That is, a strong principle of individuation is applied to the soul. A soul is born, and from that time forward, the soul is eternal. Hinduism, on the other hand, frames atman as eternal; atman has always been. Although atman is eternal, atman is reincarnated. The spiritual goal is to “know atman” such that liberation from reincarnation ( moksha ) occurs.

Hindu traditions vary in the meaning of brahman . Some will speak of a force supporting all things, while other traditions might invoke specific deities as manifestations of brahman . Escaping the cycle of reincarnation requires the individual to realize that atman is brahman and to live well or in accordance with dharma , observing the code of conduct as prescribed by scripture, and karma , actions and deeds. Union of the atman with brahman can be reach though yoga, meditation, rituals, and other practices.

Buddha rejected the concept of brahman and proposed an alternate view of the world and the path to liberation. The next sections consider the interaction between the concepts of Atman (the self) and Brahman (reality).

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination

Buddhist philosophy rejects the concept of an eternal soul. The doctrine of dependent origination , a central tenet within Buddhism, is built on the claim that there is a causal link between events in the past, the present, and the future. What we did in the past is part of what happened previously and is part of what will be.

The doctrine of dependent origination (also known as interdependent arising) is the starting point for Buddhist cosmology. The doctrine here asserts that not only are all people joined, but all phenomena are joined with all other phenomena. All things are caused by all other things, and in turn, all things are dependent upon other things. Being is a nexus of interdependencies. There is no first cause or prime mover in this system. There is no self—at least in the Western sense of self—in this system (O’Brien 2019a).

The Buddhist Doctrine of No Self ( Anatman )

One of many distinct features of Buddhism is the notion of anatman as the denial of the self. What is being denied here is the sense of self expressed through metaphysical terms such as substance or universal being. Western traditions want to assert an autonomous being who is strongly individuated from other beings. Within Buddhism, the “me” is ephemeral.

Listen to the podcast “ Graham Priest on Buddhism and Philosophy ” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Suffering and Liberation

Within Buddhism, there are four noble truths that are used to guide the self toward liberation. An often-quoted sentiment from Buddhism is the first of the four noble truths . The first noble truth states that “life is suffering” ( dukkha ).

But there are different types of suffering that need to be addressed in order to understand more fully how suffering is being used here. The first meaning ( dukkha-dukkha ) is commensurate with the ordinary use of suffering as pain. This sort of suffering can be experienced physically and/or emotionally. A metaphysical sense of dukkha is viparinama-dukkha . Suffering in this sense relates to the impermanence of all objects. It is our tendency to impose permanence upon that which by nature is not, or our craving for ontological persistence, that best captures this sense of dukkha. Finally, there is samkhara-dukkha , or suffering brought about through the interdependency of all things.

Building on an understanding of “suffering” informed only by the first sense, some characterize Buddhism as “life is suffering; suffering is caused by greed; suffering ends when we stop being greedy; the way to do that is to follow something called the Eightfold Path” (O’Brien 2019b). A more accurate understanding of dukkha within this context must include all three senses of suffering.

The second of the noble truths is that the cause of suffering is our thirst or craving ( tanha ) for things that lack the ability to satisfy our craving. We attach our self to material things, concepts, ideas, and so on. This attachment, although born of a desire to fulfill our internal cravings, only heightens the craving. The problem is that attachment separates the self from the other. Through our attachments, we lose sight of the impermanence not only of the self but of all things.

The third noble truth teaches that the way to awakening ( nirvana ) is through a letting go of the cravings. Letting go of the cravings entails the cessation of suffering ( dukkha ).

The fourth truth is founded in the realization that living a good life requires doing, not just thinking. By living in accordance with the Eightfold Path, a person may live such that “every action of body, mind, and speech” are geared toward the promotion of dharma.

Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths

Part of the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Ideas , this clip is narrated by Steven Fry and scripted by Nigel Warburton.

The Five Aggregates

How might the self ( atman ) experience the world and follow a path toward liberation? Buddhist philosophy posits five aggregates ( skandhas ), which are the thoughtful and iterative processes, through which the self interacts with the world.

• Form ( rupa ): the aggregate of matter, or the body.
• Sensation ( vedana ): emotional and physical feelings.
• Perception ( samjna ): thinking, the processing of sense data; “knowledge that puts together.”
• Mental formation ( samskara ): how thoughts are processed into habits, predispositions, moods, volitions, biases, interests, etc. The fourth skandhas is related to karma, as much of our actions flow from these elements.
• Consciousness ( vijnana ): awareness and sensitivity concerning a thing that does not include conceptualization.

Although the self uses the aggregates, the self is not thought of as a static and enduring substance underlying the processes. These aggregates are collections that are very much subject to change in an interdependent world.

Secular Notions of Self

In theology, continuity of the self is achieved through the soul. Secular scholars reject this idea, defining self in different ways, some of which are explored in the next sections.

Bundle Theory

One of the first and most influential scholars in the Western tradition to propose a secular concept of self was Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Hume formed his thoughts in response to empiricist thinkers’ views on substance and knowledge. British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) offered a definition of substance in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Book XXIII, Locke described substance as “a something, I know not what.” He asserted that although we cannot know exactly what substance is, we can reason from experience that there must be a substance “standing under or upholding” the qualities that exist within a thing itself. The meaning of substance is taken from the Latin substantia , or “that which supports.”

If we return to the acorn and oak example, the reality of what it means to be an oak is rooted in the ultimate reality of what it means to be an oak tree. The ultimate reality, like the oak’s root system, stands beneath every particular instance of an oak tree. While not every tree is exactly the same, all oak trees do share a something, a shared whatness, that makes an oak an oak. Philosophers call this whatness that is shared among oaks a substance.

Arguments against a static and enduring substance ensued. David Hume’s answer to the related question of “What is the self?” illustrates how a singular thing may not require an equally singular substance. According to Hume, the self was not a Platonic form or an Aristotelian composite of matter and form. Hume articulated the self as a changing bundle of perceptions. In his Treatise of Human Nature (Book 1, Part IV), Hume described the self as “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Hume noted that what has been mistaken for a static and enduring self was nothing more than a constantly changing set of impressions that were tied together through their resemblance to one another, the order or predictable pattern (succession) of the impressions, and the appearance of causation lent through the resemblance and succession. The continuity we experience was not due to an enduring self but due to the mind’s ability to act as a sort of theater: “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume 1739, 252).

Which theories of self—and substance—should we accept? The Greek theories of substance and the theological theories of a soul offer advantages. Substance allows us to explain what we observe. For example, an apple, through its substance, allows us to make sense of the qualities of color, taste, the nearness of the object, etc. Without a substance, it could be objected that the qualities are merely unintelligible and unrelated qualities without a reference frame. But bundle theory allows us to make sense of a thing without presupposing a mythical form, or “something I know not what!” Yet, without the mythical form of a soul, how do we explain our own identities?

Anthropological Views

Anthropological views of the self question the cultural and social constructs upon which views of the self are erected. For example, within Western thought, it is supposed that the self is distinct from the “other.” In fact, throughout this section, we have assumed the need for a separate and distinct self and have used a principle of continuity based on the assumption that a self must persist over time. Yet, non-Western cultures blur or negate this distinction. The African notion of ubuntu , for example, posits a humanity that cannot be divided. The Nguni proverb that best describes this concept is “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” sometimes translated as “a person is a person through other persons” (Gade 2011). The word ubuntu is from the Zulu language, but cultures from southern Africa to Tanzania, Kenya, and Democratic Republic of the Congo all have words for this concept. Anthropological approaches attempt to make clear how the self and the culture share in making meaning.

The Mind as Self

Many philosophers, Western and non-Western, have equated the self to the mind. But what is the mind? A monist response is the mind is the brain. Yet, if the mind is the brain, a purely biological entity, then how do we explain consciousness? Moreover, if we take the position that the mind is immaterial but the body is material, we are left with the question of how two very different types of things can causally affect the other. The question of “How do the two nonidentical and dissimilar entities experience a causal relationship?” is known as the mind-body problem. This section explores some alternative philosophical responses to these questions.

Physicalism

Reducing the mind to the brain seems intuitive given advances in neuroscience and other related sciences that deepen our understanding of cognition. As a doctrine, physicalism is committed to the assumption that everything is physical. Exactly how to define the physical is a matter of contention. Driving this view is the assertion that nothing that is nonphysical has physical effects.

Listen to the podcast “ David Papineau on Physicalism ” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Focus on the thought experiment concerning what Mary knows. Here is a summary of the thought experiment:

Mary is a scientist and specializes in the neurophysiology of color. Strangely, her world has black, white, and shades of gray but lacks color (weird, but go with it!). Due to her expertise, she knows every physical fact concerning colors. What if Mary found herself in a room in which color as we experience it is present? Would she learn anything? A physicalist must respond “no”! Do you agree? How would you respond?

John Locke and Identity

In place of the biological, Locke defined identity as the continuity lent through what we refer to as consciousness. His approach is often referred to as the psychological continuity approach, as our memories and our ability to reflect upon our memories constitute identity for Locke. In his Essay on Human Understanding , Locke (as cited by Gordon-Roth 2019) observed, “We must consider what Person stands for . . . which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.” He offered a thought experiment to illustrate his point. Imagine a prince and cobbler whose memories (we might say consciousness) were swapped. The notion is far-fetched, but if this were to happen, we would assert that the prince was now the cobbler and the cobbler was now the prince. Therefore, what individuates us cannot be the body (or the biological).

John Locke on Personal Identity

Part of the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Ideas , this clip is narrated by Gillian Anderson and scripted by Nigel Warburton.

The Problem of Consciousness

Christof Koch (2018) has said that “consciousness is everything you experience.” Koch offered examples, such as “a tune stuck in your head,” the “throbbing pain from a toothache,” and “a parent’s love for a child” to illustrate the experience of consciousness. Our first-person experiences are what we think of intuitively when we try to describe what consciousness is. If we were to focus on the throbbing pain of a toothache as listed above, we can see that there is the experiencing of the toothache. Curiously, there is also the experiencing of the experiencing of the toothache. Introspection and theorizing built upon first-person inspections affords vivid and moving accounts of the things experienced, referred to as qualia .

An optimal accounting of consciousness, however, should not only explain what consciousness is but should also offer an explanation concerning how consciousness came to be and why consciousness is present. What difference or differences does consciousness introduce?

Listen to the podcast “ Ted Honderich on What It Is to Be Conscious ,” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Rene Descartes and Dualism

Dualism , as the name suggests, attempts to account for the mind through the introduction of two entities. The dualist split was addressed earlier in the discussion of substance. Plato argued for the reality of immaterial forms but admitted another type of thing—the material. Aristotle disagreed with his teacher Plato and insisted on the location of the immaterial within the material realm. How might the mind and consciousness be explained through dualism?

Mind Body Dualism

A substance dualist, in reference to the mind problem, asserts that there are two fundamental and irreducible realities that are needed to fully explain the self. The mind is nonidentical to the body, and the body is nonidentical to the mind. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) offered a very influential version of substance dualism in his 1641 work Meditations on First Philosophy. In that work, Descartes referred to the mind as a thinking thing ( res cogitans ) and the body as an extended nonthinking thing ( res extensa ). Descartes associated identity with the thinking thing. He introduced a model in which the self and the mind were eternal.

Behaviorism

There is a response that rejects the idea of an independent mind. Within this approach, what is important is not mental states or the existence of a mind as a sort of central processor, but activity that can be translated into statements concerning observable behavior (Palmer 2016, 122). As within most philosophical perspectives, there are many different “takes” on the most correct understanding. Behaviorism is no exception. The “hard” behaviorist asserts that there are no mental states. You might consider this perspective the purist or “die-hard” perspective. The “soft” behaviorist, the moderate position, does not deny the possibility of minds and mental events but believes that theorizing concerning human activity should be based on behavior.

Before dismissing the view, pause and consider the plausibility of the position. Do we ever really know another’s mind? There is some validity to the notion that we ought to rely on behavior when trying to know or to make sense of the “other.” But if you have a toothache, and you experience myself being aware of the qualia associated with a toothache (e.g., pain, swelling, irritability, etc.), are these sensations more than activities? What of the experience that accompanies the experience?

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of plato’s theory of human nature.

Plato (427-347 BCE) “was one of the first to argue that the systematic use of our reason can show us the best way to live.” [Platonic thinking is part of this rise of reason in ancient Greece—often called the Greek miracle. It replaced superstitious, religious, mythological, supernatural thinking with rational, scientific, philosophical, naturalistic thinking. The lives we live today, especially the benefits of science and technology, owe much to this Greek miracle.] Plato argues that if we truly understand human nature we can find “individual happiness and social stability.” [We can answer ethical and political questions.]

Plato’s Life and Works – Plato “was born into an influential family … of Athens.” Athens was at the center of the Greek miracle, the use of reason to understand the world. He was especially influenced by Socrates , but after Athens lost the twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War with Sparta, Socrates came under suspicion and was eventually condemned to death. [Here is my summary of the  trial of Socrates .]

Socrates was interested in political and ethical matters, especially about whether the Sophists were correct in defending moral (cultural) relativism . [This is the idea that morality is relative to, conditioned by, or dependent upon cultural conventions.] Socrates believed that the use of reason could resolve philosophical questions, especially if one employed the method of rational argument and counter-argument; the Socratic method  uses a series of questions and answers designed to uncover the truth.

Socrates claimed that he did not know the answers to questions beforehand, but that he was wiser than others in knowing that he didn’t know. [This is the essence of Socratic wisdom —he is wiser than others in knowing he doesn’t know, whereas the ignorant often claim to know with great certainty. Using the Socratic Method, he showed people that they didn’t know what they claimed to know. Needless to say, questioning people about their beliefs and implicitly asking them to defend them often arouses resentment and hostility . As Spinoza said “I cannot teach philosophy without being a disturber of the peace”]

Plato was shocked by Socrates’ execution but maintained faith in rational inquiry. Plato wrote extensively, and in a series of dialogues, expounded the first (relatively) systematic philosophy of the Western world. [The early dialogues recount the trial and death of Socrates. Most of the rest of the Platonic dialogues portray Socrates questioning those who think they know the meaning of justice (in the Republic ), moderation (in the Charmides ), courage (in the Laches ), knowledge, (in the Theaetetus ), virtue (in the Meno ), piety (in the Euthyphro ), or love (in the Symposium ).] The Republic is the most famous dialogue. It touches on many of the great philosophical issues including the best form of government, the best life to live, the nature of knowledge, as well as family, education, psychology, and more. It also expounds on Plato’s theory of human nature. [The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.]

Metaphysical Background: The Forms – Plato is not a theist or polytheist, and he is certainly not a biblical theist. When he talks about the divine he is referring to reason (logos), a principle that organizes the world from preexisting matter. What is most distinctive about Plato’s philosophy is his theory of forms, although his description of forms isn’t precise. But Plato thought that knowledge is an active process through which we organize and classify our perceptions. Forms are ideas or concepts which have at least 4 aspects:

A) Logical – how does “table” or “tree” apply to various tables/trees? How does a universal concept like “bed” or “dog” or “red” or “hot” apply to many individual things? [Any word, except proper names and pronouns, refers to a form.] Nominalists argue that words simply name things, there are no universal concepts existing over and above individuals. [Words are convenient names that demarcate some things from others.] Platonic realists argue that universal forms really exist independently, and individual things are x’s because they participate in the form of xness. [Dogs are mammals because they participate in doginess—which transcends individual dogs.] At times Plato suggests that there is a form for all general words—other times he doesn’t.

B) Metaphysical – are forms ultimately real; do they exist independently? Plato says yes. Universal, eternal, immaterial, unchanging forms are more real than individuals. Individual material things are known by the senses, whereas forms are known by the intellect. And the forms have a real, independent existence—there is a world of forms.

C) Epistemological – knowledge is of forms, perceptions in this world lead only to belief or opinion. We find the clearest example of knowledge based on forms in mathematics. [Hence the motto of Plato’s academy. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.”] The objects of mathematical reasoning are often not found in this world—and we can never see most of them—but they provide us with knowledge about the world. [Plato is challenging us to account for mathematical knowledge without positing mathematical forms. Even today most mathematicians are mathematical Platonists.]

D) Moral – ideals of human conduct, moral concepts like justice, and equality are forms. [So there are physical, mathematical, and moral forms.] Individuals and societies can participate in justice, liberty, or equality, but in this world, we never encounter the perfect forms. The most prominent of all the forms is the form of the “good.”

The parables of the sun and cave are primarily about understanding forms and the form of the good. [Plato compares the sun’s illumination of the world with the form of the good’s illumination of reality.] Plato thought that by using reason we could come to know the good, and then we would do the good. Thus knowledge of the good is sufficient for virtue, doing the good. [This seems mistaken as Aristotle will point out because our will can be weak.] Thus Plato’s philosophy responds to intellectual and moral relativism—there are objective truths about the nature of reality and about human conduct. [ The allegory of the cave, the myth of the sun , and the divided line are the devices Plato uses to explain the forms. I will explain these in tomorrow’s post .]

Theory of Human Nature – The Tripartite Structure of the Soul – [Having encountered the social self of Confucianism, the divine self of Hinduism, and the no-self of Buddhism, we come to dualism.]

Plato is a dualist ; there is both immaterial mind (soul) and material body, and it is the soul that knows the forms. Plato believed the soul exists before birth and after death. [We don’t see perfect circles or perfect justice in this world, but we remember seeing them in Platonic heaven before we were born.] Thus he believed that the soul or mind attains knowledge of the forms, as opposed to the senses. Needless to say, we should care about our soul rather than our body.

The soul (mind) itself is divided into 3 parts: reason ; appetite (physical urges); and will  (emotion, passion, spirit.) The will is the source of love, anger, indignation, ambition, aggression, etc. When these aspects are not in harmony, we experience mental conflict. The will can be on the side of either reason or the appetites. We might be pulled by lustful appetite, or the rational desire to find a good partner. To explain the interaction of these 3 parts of the self, Plato uses the image is of the charioteer (reason) who tries to control horses representing will and appetites. [Elsewhere he says that reason uses the will to control the appetites.

Plato also emphasized the social aspect of human nature. We are not self-sufficient, we need others, and we benefit from our social interactions, from other person’s talents, aptitudes, and friendship.

Diagnosis – Persons differ as to which part of their nature is predominant. Individual dominated by reason seeks are philosophical and seek knowledge; individuals dominated by spirit/will/emotion are victory loving and seek reputation; individuals dominated by appetites are profit loving and seek material gain. Although each has a role to play, reason ought to rule the will and appetites. And in the same way, those with the most developed reason ought to rule society. A well-ordered, harmonious, or just society is one in which each kind of person plays their proper role.  Thus there is a parallel between proper functioning individuals and proper functioning societies. Good societies help produce good people who in turn help produce good societies, while bad societies tend to produce bad individuals who in turn help produce bad societies.

Plato differentiates between 5 classifications of societies. 1) The best is a meritocracy , where the talented rule. This may degenerate into increasingly bad forms, each one worse than the other as we go down the list. 2) The timarchic society, which values honor and fame while reason is neglected. In such a society spirit dominates the society and the ruling class. 3) Oligarchy , where money-making is valued and political power lies with the wealthy. In such a society appetites dominate the society and the ruling class. 4) Democracy , where the poor seize power. They are also dominated by appetites. He describes the common people as “lacking in discipline [and] pursuing mere pleasure of the moment …” 5) Anarchy is the sequel to the permissiveness and self-indulgence of democracy.  It is a total lack of government. Plato thought this would usher in a tyrant to restore order.

Prescription – Justice is the same in both individuals and society—the harmonious workings of the parts to create a flourishing whole. But how is this attained? Plato believes that education —academic, musical, and physical— is the key. Education takes place in the context of a social and political system. Not surprisingly this includes kings (rulers) being philosophers, those in whom reason dominates. If there really is a truth about how people should live, then only those with such knowledge should rule. [Think of the parallels with Confucianism, where those who rule have mastered the Confucian political texts.]

To achieve this end Plato, the guardians or rulers must engage in a long educational process in which they learn about the Forms. [After a nearly 50 year-long process, those of the highest moral and intellectual excellence will rule.] The guardians cannot own personal property and cannot have families. [The idea is that only the desire to serve the common good motivates them, rather than money or power.] He hopes that the guardians will so love wisdom that they will not misuse their power. As for those dominated by will/emotion/spirit they are best suited to being auxiliaries —soldiers, police, and civil servants. The final class is composed of the majority, those in whom the appetites dominate. They will be farmers, craftsmen, traders, and other producers of the materials necessary for living.

Critics have called Plato’s republic authoritarian or totalitarian, and Plato advocated both censorship and propaganda as means of maintaining social control.  He certainly believed that the masses [who he says like to “shop and spend”] were unable to govern the society and that an elite, composed of the morally and intellectually excellent should make the important decisions about how best to govern a society.

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36 thoughts on “ summary of plato’s theory of human nature ”.

Great compilation…really helpful. Thanks a lot.

Appreciate your comments.

Wonderful piece. Need more of this.

Thanks for the comments.

Thank you. I really appreciate this post 🙂

i love this document, its well explained and summerized

Thank you very much for your kind words. JGM

Great staff…I’m impressed

Thanks for the compliment.

That was an absolutely wonderful study guide. It helped my review immensely.

thanks for the comment Chris.

I think that you should have had also emphasized on the preaching of human rights by Plato. The rest was considerable and helpful, i believe.

nicely written and well thought through. very helpful to us as students studying of Plato. Thanks a lot for your help.

Thanks so much for your kind words.

Absolutely magnificent. Bravo and thank you very much indeed

• Pingback: Monday’s Mtg: Is human nature best grasped by science, philosophy, or religion? | Civilized Conversation

thank you so much. because can help us as a student to study more the Philosophy of plato.

thank you so much

you’re welcome. JGM

a great resource! thank you very much for this.

omg thank you this article helped me so much! i read the whole thing and it was really good

Thanks for the article. I wanted to know more of Plato’s arguments on immortality.

Thank you for your explanation about Plato. It’s a great resource

You’re welcome. Good luck in philosophy.

In search of more understanding, I stumbled across this great read. Thank you for your work, I look forward to reading more.

thanks Natasha

Thanks so much sir. Can you give us the summary of plato’s theories of human nature and there relationship to education. Then give us the reference

no, you get to do that.

Such an instructive and super clear explanation of things that certainly require a lot of time and work to understand and learn. I am getting into Plato after reading the wonderful “Memoirs of Socrates” by Xenophon. Although I had already read Crito, Phaedo and a couple other dialogues, only now I start to understand how much I love Socrates. What a character. The Jesus of philosophy!

“He describes the common people as “lacking in discipline [and] pursuing mere pleasure of the moment …”.

I agree with most things Plato says. Totalitarian he might be, but he’s right about most people being vulgar and lazy. And let it be said, ignorant and stupid. I too am all that, but I try to be aware of it.

Ironically, the more I learn, the less I can have a “conversation ” with anyone! I must be on the right track, ha ha!

“Don’t go where most people are going, for they are going the wrong ways.”. -Seneca

thanks for the compliment. And you are a real searcher after truth Luigi.

Dr. Messerly,

You have no idea how encouraging and heart warming is your approval in regard to my little mind. I’ll continue learning with even more vigor. I’ll never learn as much as you have, but I am sure it will be still worthwhile.

Thank you! Luigi

thanks for your kind words and you can learn as much as you want.

my grade will thank you

thanks Nick

I compel to re- think in between who is my natural self and constructed my self ?

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Philosophical Perspective of Self Essay

Introduction, rene descartes, meditations on first philosophy, second meditation summary and analysis, analysis and definition of “i”, other definitions of self, works cited.

Throughout history, the philosophical perspective of “self” has received myriad descriptions and analyses from many philosophers, researchers, and even scholars. In gaining this understanding, these people are important in explaining how the knowledge of this concept affects the world and how people perceive themselves and their ultimate relationships with others.

An understanding of “self,” therefore, affirms a person’s identity in a social environment, allowing him/her to recognize others besides oneself (Sorabji 13). In other words, the way human beings socialize solely depends on how they perceive themselves and others through daily social interactions.

Innumerable philosophers, including Socrates and Aristotle, have immensely contributed towards gaining clarity in defining “I.” Yet, it is believed that some have been quite outstanding with regard to their input. In this category lies Rene Descartes, whose findings remain essential in defining the concept of “self” and how this definition affects people’s thinking and interactions.

This paper goes far ahead in synthesizing Descartes’ findings to achieve a concise definition of the word “I” that seems reasonable and critical from a philosophical perspective of the “self.” This essay further digs into several research findings unearthed by renowned scholars and experts who have devoted their time and resources to studying and exploring the definition and how it influences interpersonal relationships in one’s life.

By compiling ideas from an array of thinkers, this philosophy of “self” essay intends to explore the implications of defining “I” in a given manner and how such a stance would affect our self-reflection and perceptions of ourselves or how we treat ourselves. The survey also focuses on how these definitions would affect our knowledge of ourselves and the world outside our “selves.”

Born in 1596 in France, Rene Descartes was a great philosopher, thinker, writer, and mathematician who spent his adulthood in the Republic of Dutch. He has arguably been dubbed as the father of modern philosophy with special emphasis on the Western school of thought (Smith 1).

As a result, his pieces of writing remain key reference materials for scholars across the global plane. For example, meditations continue to serve as principal textbooks in most universities’ philosophy departments today. His contribution to mathematics set unbeaten records, with his efforts being widely applied in calculus and geometry. In the development of natural sciences, his input cannot go unnoticed.

He believed philosophy was a mega entity encompassing all aspects of knowledge expressed through it. Although most of the works and thoughts have been widely considered, there has been a strong emphasis on Meditations on First Philosophy. As mentioned before, this essay will emphasize the second meditation in defining the concept of “I,” also known as “self.”

These meditations are considered the origin of modern Western philosophy. In this coverage, Descartes criticizes most of Aristotle’s arguments and designs questions that have remained debatable in the world of philosophy today. He breaks from the norm created by Aristotle that knowledge is achieved through human senses and that mental statuses usually resemble what they are. As such, Descartes is able to develop brand new concepts about the mind, ideas, and matter (Frankfurt 185).

In this portion of his findings, Descartes explains the nature of the human mind and that it is better than the body. His research revolves around the search for certainty and ignores every idea that carries any slightest doubt. Throughout his memory, Descartes believes that whatever he happens to see is actually meaningless and may not ever exist in real life (Descartes 17).

As a result, we can view place and movement as mistaken notions in human life since lack of certainty is the only certain thing that exists in his life. This is essential in defining ourselves and our existence.

Is it possible for Descartes to believe that he does not have a body and senses, yet he exists? What about the nonexistence of the physical world, as proposed by the author? Ironically, he can only posses these doubts of nonexistence if he truly exists.

In other words, one can only be misled by the devil from within if he does exist. As such, “I” has to exist in order to doubt and be deceived by the evil one. Nevertheless, it can generally be viewed that “I” is a necessary and true preposition when suggested by somebody or conceived in one’s own mind (Descartes 72).

After conceiving the existence of “I,” the mediator does not stop at this particular point but aims at defining and explaining the meaning of the “I am.” This approach makes it possible to be certain that we possess a soul which augments our thinking, nourishment, movement, and sensibility. Furthermore, human beings have a body (Frankfurt 185).

Regardless of these initial doubts, many people sink into a ditch of doubts and hang on to the fact that one has the ability to think. In other words, our existence does not solely depend on the above-mentioned attributes of human beings, but we have no doubt about our breathing power.

This implies that thinking is essential for a person to exist regardless of whether he has other qualities like body and soul, among others. By the fact that thinking defines “self,” it is possible to relate it with human existence and consider it inseparable from being. From a general perspective, we can view one’s self as simply “thinking something.”

The definition of “I” is enshrined in Descartes’ cogito argument based on its formulation in Latin, “cogito ergo sum,” translated as “I think, therefore, I am.” This line is quite famous in the history of philosophy and is most probably regarded as the origin of Western philosophy and other schools of thought that developed after Descartes. In this line, the mediator gets in touch with a grip of certainty after his continuous disbelief is manifested in the First Mediation (Frankfurt 186).

In essence, the cogito exposes a different view of the world and states that the mind is the only thing in the world that can know itself. Notably, understanding our mind first before any other thing has remained rooted in Western philosophy, even though the main point of contention has been the connection between the mind and the real world. From this perspective, the mind is no longer an aid to understanding the world but an internally locked thing (Frankfurt 186).

In analyzing Descartes’ Second Meditation, it is of immense significance to note the existing differences between “I think, therefore I am” as described in the Discourse Method from the general formulation derived from meditations.

At this point of the synthesis, it is imperative to mention that the proposition “I am, I exist” holds only when it is put forward by a specific individual and conceived by the person’s mind. The mediation is further divided into an argument of three steps, which are: whatever thinks exists, I think therefore, and I exist (Frankfurt 188).

However, in understanding “self” through syllogistic reading and analysis, denied by Descartes in other pieces of writing is the fact that there is no reason why “whatever thinks exists” should not be doubtful as portrayed by the mediator. This reading approach further analyzes the cogito as a conclusion that has been reasoned out at a specific point in the doubtful mind of the mediator, even when inferences that have been well reasoned out are called to doubt (Frankfurt 189).

The question we need to ask ourselves in this definition of self is the path somebody takes to know the cogito when everything else is doubted. As a result, several proposals have been put forth as reading formats and methodologies aimed at simplifying this reading process and step (Frankfurt 202). It would be impossible for a person to say he/she exits or even thinks of existence without being in a real state.

Consequently, the truth is achieved by the utterance concerning the concept of existence. In this line of thought, it can be argued that the existence of a person can only be confirmed by oneself in the present tense, “I am.” It is also important to double emphasize the fact that cogito can only work when one is talking about thought. One cannot say: “I sleep, therefore I am,” since the act of sleeping can be doubted. In explaining this, one cannot doubt the act of thinking because doubt on its own is a form of thought.

Besides cogito , the mediator also affirms that he “thinks,” leading to an argument commonly referred to as sun res cogitans (Rorty 215). This comprises three controversial views regarding one being a “thinking thing.” In this approach, it is essential to comprehend the meaning of “thing” and “think” to establish their definitive relationship with “I am.”

There are two approaches to defining “self” at this point. This can be done both epistemologically and metaphysically. In other words, body and mind cannot be one since one has got either to know both of them or none of them. As a matter of fact, the existence of the body ceases since one is a “thinking thing with delinked body and mind. This gives way to the conclusion that one is a “thing that thinks.”

With preciseness, “I” can be defined as the “thing that thinks.” In addition, “I” possesses other attributes besides being able to think, understand, and be willing to do certain things. These qualities include but are not limited to imagination and the use of the senses. In the understanding of “I,” it is worth noting that senses and imagination cannot be trusted (Rorty 214). This is because imagination can trigger all forms of things that may not necessarily be real.

How can one identify wax? This is made possible through a sense of taste, color, smell, size, shape, and hardness, among others. When heated, the wax changes some properties but can be identified despite the deviation from the initial form. Due to the fact that wax can be identified even when its shape is infinitely changed, it suffices to mention that this cannot be possible via imagination but through the intellect alone and proper mental scrutiny.

Based on this argument, it can be concluded that the mind knows better than the body. In this approach, the human view is that one has to know the mind more than any other thing in his or her life as a way of understanding the self better (Rorty 214). There is no doubt in perceiving the identity of something, and these actions of thought clearly imply that the item exists in reality. Therefore, confirming one’s existence is the core of ascertaining the nature of the mind through the intellect alone.

As mentioned before, various authors have defined and described the concept of “self” throughout history. According to Sorabji, the idea of “self” is real in human history. He argues that the “self” comes to play when the owner of a body is intertwined with existing psychological states (Sorabji 13).

He further notes that in explaining the “self,” there is a stream of consciousness that lacks the owner. In his description of this analogy, Sorabji asserts that his definition of “self” fits other members like animals as embodied owners of the body. Based on this approach, Sorabji further double emphasizes the fact that there is a need to protect the human way of life and not only base it on its relationship with the “self” or the interaction between members of a given stream (Sorabji 13).

The broadness of “self” also encompasses the picture of human beings developing into male or female, baker or teacher, son or daughter, Indian or American, among other development attributes. Importantly, these cannot be visualized through the metaphysical conceptualization of the “self” because of its narrowness in determining the nature of the pictures to be adopted. Additionally, the pictures are not considered to be essential and are likely to be altered under extreme pressure (Sorabji 14).

However, visualized pictures are important in describing a complete image of selfhood, even though they can be philosophically studied differently. “I am” is also described by the use of unique features, which make human beings different from other creations (Sorabji 14). In essence, thoughts and actions people execute are usually a result of the self. It can be described as a substance that persists through time. This is to say that actions and thoughts experienced at different times of the day or in life may also concern the “self.”

In most cases, philosophical definitions of “self” are discussed based on the first-person attributes. This is because third-person definitions do not identify unique identification properties. Viewed from a different point, the “self” can be principally described through the discourse and conduct of a person.

As a result, intentions can only be deduced from something being observed through actions undertaken by an individual. Of great significance is the fact that the characteristics of a given “self” have the full potential of determining its real identity (Rorty 215).

Based on this analogy, it can be argued that “I” can be divided into various concepts as defined by specific qualities and attributes. For instance, the “self” can be viewed as an illusion (Sorabji 17). This is common in ancient spiritual traditions in which the human identity is conceived as a mere illusion for the existence of individual human beings. This identification further ensures that there is a boundary between humanity and other forms of creation, especially in terms of characteristics and abilities.

In general, individual existence is considered as the representation of a human being and advocates fighting for its rightful position in the world (Rorty 216). Moreover, “self” is linked with time and mind, which determine obsessive thinking based on the future than emphasizing the present. Most religions advocate for the dissolution of humans for human nature to prevail in the world. This is commonly known as nirvana, presence, or enlightenment.

Besides viewing the self as an illusion, other philosophers approach the concept by considering the “self” as an activity. Among these philosophers were Aristotle and Plato, who defined the human soul as the principal essence of humanity but posited against differences in existence.

Unlike Plato and other religious traditions who supported separate existence, Aristotle viewed the human “self” as an activity of the body which lacks the properties of becoming immortal (Sorabji 17). To be specific, the soul is viewed as the activity of any living body. In defining the soul, Aristotle divided his argument into four major parts, including the desiderative, calculative, rational, and scientific parts.

Another renowned philosopher and psychologist today who defines “self” is Dr. Phil. He believes that a person dwells on a state of fictional self or authentic self as created by the Supreme Being. According to Dr. Phil, most people define who they are by explaining what they are doing, where they are, or their role in society.

However, Dr. Phil argues that one’s authentic self encompasses the genuine existence of a person’s identity (McGraw 1). This is to say that an authentic self demonstrates core human qualities. Additionally, the self is made up of the part of an individual that is not defined by profession or a given role in society. It consists of an individual’s talents, skills, and wisdom.

The psychologist further argues that an authentic self revolves around a person’s uniqueness, including abilities, rather than what he/she is expected to do or become. This, therefore, implies that when an individual does not live to the standards of his authentic self, he adopts a fictional self that has emptiness and incompleteness (McGraw 1).

It is doubtless that the definition of “self” has a wide range of implications. For instance, this knowledge affects the way human beings view themselves differently from animals. It gives them an understanding of their uniqueness and potential in using their senses to recognize their surrounding and their imagination ability.

Additionally, the definition of self impacts how we interact with and perceive others. In other words, human beings are able to appreciate others regardless of their shortcomings and differences since each one of them possesses unique qualities and attributes.

Although numerous philosophers have devoted their lives to defining the “I am” concept, Rene Descartes is regarded as the father of Western philosophy and a great contributor to several schools of thought. In particular, Meditations on First Philosophy has widely been used as learning at teaching materials across the globe.

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy . Sioux Falls: NuVision Publications, LLC, 2007. Print.

Frankfurt, Harry. Descartes’ Discussion of His Existence in the Second Mediation. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2004. Print.

McGraw, Phillip. “Self Matters.” Dr. Phil , 2012. Web.

Rorty, Amélie. Essays on Descartes’ Meditations . California: University of California Press, 1986. Print.

Smith, Kurt, “Descartes’ Life and Works.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. Web. < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/descartes-works/ >.

Sorabji, Richard. Graeco-Roman Varieties of Self. New York, NY: Springer, 2008. Print.

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Philosophical Perspective of Self Essay." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/who-am-i/.

1. IvyPanda . "Philosophical Perspective of Self Essay." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/who-am-i/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Philosophical Perspective of Self Essay." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/who-am-i/.

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Plato’s Four Muses: The Phaedrus and the Poetics of Philosophy

Citation:   Capra, Andrea. 2015. Plato's Four Muses: The Phaedrus and the Poetics of Philosophy . Hellenic Studies Series 67. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_CapraA.Platos_Four_Muses.2014 .

Introduction. Plato’s Self-Disclosing Strategies

What is a platonic dialogue poetry and knowledge.

• Plato’s Academy was sacred to Apollo and the Muses, the latter having their own altar (e.g. Pausanias 1.30.2). The tradition was further promoted by Plato’s immediate successors. [ 22 ]
• Not only does Aristotle include Plato’s dialogues in the Poetics , where he defines them in terms of mimêsis and poetry (1447b), but many others, including Platonic philosophers, regarded Plato as a poet, even a new Homer (e.g. Proclus on Plato’s Republic 1.196.9–13 Kroll). [ 23 ]
• Time and again, Plato’s dialogues refer to philosophy as the highest form of mousikê (e.g. in the Phaedo 60e–61a). Needless to say, the dialogues abound in myths and even invocations to the Muses (e.g. in the Phaedrus 237a, and in the Republic 545d). [ 24 ]
• Plato’s dialogues were sometimes recited during symposia along with excerpts from comedy (cf. e.g. Plutarch Table Talks 711b–c). [ 25 ]
• The anecdotal tradition reports that Plato, a former tragic poet (e.g. Dicaearchus fr. 40 Wehrli), was strongly influenced by the mimes of Sophron as well as by the comedies of Epicharmus and Aristophanes. [ 26 ]
• Plato himself, or at least the characters of his dialogues, seem to allude to his output as if it were a kind of song or drama.

Aeschylus: … Come, tell me: why should we admire a noble poet? Euripides: For his ready wit and his good counsels and because we make men better in our cities.

Interestingly, Lycurgus credits the poets with quintessentially philosophical procedures such as “argument” (λόγος) and “demonstration” (ἀπόδειξις).

Towards a Self-Definition of Platonic Dialogue

Prologue to the phaedrus.

And a plate-fish was leading them all, though it was a speaking one, and sweet-voiced at that! In his writings, he matches the cicadas, pouring out their lily song from the tree of Academus.

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Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.

1. Plato’s central doctrines

2. plato’s puzzles, 3. dialogue, setting, character, 4. socrates, 5. plato’s indirectness, 6. can we know plato’s mind, 7. socrates as the dominant speaker, 8. links between the dialogues, 9. does plato change his mind about forms, 10. does plato change his mind about politics, 11. the historical socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues, 12. why dialogues, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Many people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that are advocated in his writings: The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses. Among the most important of these abstract objects (as they are now called, because they are not located in space or time) are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. (These terms—“goodness”, “beauty”, and so on—are often capitalized by those who write about Plato, in order to call attention to their exalted status; similarly for “Forms” and “Ideas.”) The most fundamental distinction in Plato’s philosophy is between the many observable objects that appear beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) and the one object that is what beauty (goodness, justice, unity) really is, from which those many beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics. Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or dependent on this distinction. Many of them explore the ethical and practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated way. We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object from the body—so much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal. In a few of Plato’s works, we are told that the soul always retains the ability to recollect what it once grasped of the forms, when it was disembodied prior to its possessor’s birth (see especially Meno ), and that the lives we lead are to some extent a punishment or reward for choices we made in a previous existence (see especially the final pages of Republic ). But in many of Plato’s writings, it is asserted or assumed that true philosophers—those who recognize how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing that goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many things that are called good or virtuous or courageous )—are in a position to become ethically superior to unenlightened human beings, because of the greater degree of insight they can acquire. To understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are not interested in such questions, how can we become good?), we must investigate the form of good.

Although these propositions are often identified by Plato’s readers as forming a large part of the core of his philosophy, many of his greatest admirers and most careful students point out that few, if any, of his writings can accurately be described as mere advocacy of a cut-and-dried group of propositions. Often Plato’s works exhibit a certain degree of dissatisfaction and puzzlement with even those doctrines that are being recommended for our consideration. For example, the forms are sometimes described as hypotheses (see for example Phaedo ). The form of good in particular is described as something of a mystery whose real nature is elusive and as yet unknown to anyone at all ( Republic ). Puzzles are raised—and not overtly answered—about how any of the forms can be known and how we are to talk about them without falling into contradiction ( Parmenides ), or about what it is to know anything ( Theaetetus ) or to name anything ( Cratylus ). When one compares Plato with some of the other philosophers who are often ranked with him—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, for example—he can be recognized to be far more exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive, and playful than they. That, along with his gifts as a writer and as a creator of vivid character and dramatic setting, is one of the reasons why he is often thought to be the ideal author from whom one should receive one’s introduction to philosophy. His readers are not presented with an elaborate system of doctrines held to be so fully worked out that they are in no need of further exploration or development; instead, what we often receive from Plato is a few key ideas together with a series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas are to be interrogated and deployed. Readers of a Platonic dialogue are drawn into thinking for themselves about the issues raised, if they are to learn what the dialogue itself might be thought to say about them. Many of his works therefore give their readers a strong sense of philosophy as a living and unfinished subject (perhaps one that can never be completed) to which they themselves will have to contribute. All of Plato’s works are in some way meant to leave further work for their readers, but among the ones that most conspicuously fall into this category are: Euthyphro , Laches , Charmides , Euthydemus , Theaetetus , and Parmenides .

There is another feature of Plato’s writings that makes him distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author. Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue. (There is one striking exception: his Apology , which purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his defense—the Greek word apologia means “defense”—when, in 399, he was legally charged and convicted of the crime of impiety. However, even there, Socrates is presented at one point addressing questions of a philosophical character to his accuser, Meletus, and responding to them. In addition, since antiquity, a collection of 13 letters has been included among his collected works, but their authenticity as compositions of Plato is not universally accepted among scholars, and many or most of them are almost certainly not his (see Burnyeat and Frede 2015). Most of them purport to be the outcome of his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, a heavily populated Greek city located in Sicily and ruled by tyrants.)

We are of course familiar with the dialogue form through our acquaintance with the literary genre of drama. But Plato’s dialogues do not try to create a fictional world for the purposes of telling a story, as many literary dramas do; nor do they invoke an earlier mythical realm, like the creations of the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Nor are they all presented in the form of a drama: in many of them, a single speaker narrates events in which he participated. They are philosophical discussions—“debates” would, in some cases, also be an appropriate word—among a small number of interlocutors, many of whom can be identified as real historical figures (see Nails 2002); and often they begin with a depiction of the setting of the discussion—a visit to a prison, a wealthy man’s house, a celebration over drinks, a religious festival, a visit to the gymnasium, a stroll outside the city’s wall, a long walk on a hot day. As a group, they form vivid portraits of a social world, and are not purely intellectual exchanges between characterless and socially unmarked speakers. (At any rate, that is true of a large number of Plato’s interlocutors. However, it must be added that in some of his works the speakers display little or no character. See, for example, Sophist and Statesman —dialogues in which a visitor from the town of Elea in Southern Italy leads the discussion; and Laws , a discussion between an unnamed Athenian and two named fictional characters, one from Crete and the other from Sparta.) In many of his dialogues (though not all), Plato is not only attempting to draw his readers into a discussion, but is also commenting on the social milieu that he is depicting, and criticizing the character and ways of life of his interlocutors (see Blondell 2002). Some of the dialogues that most evidently fall into this category are Protagoras , Gorgias , Hippias Major , Euthydemus , and Symposium .

There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato’s dialogues, being completely absent only in Laws , which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: that figure is Socrates. Like nearly everyone else who appears in Plato’s works, he is not an invention of Plato: there really was a Socrates just as there really was a Crito, a Gorgias, a Thrasymachus, and a Laches. Plato was not the only author whose personal experience of Socrates led to the depiction of him as a character in one or more dramatic works. Socrates is one of the principal characters of Aristophanes’ comedy, Clouds ; and Xenophon, a historian and military leader, wrote, like Plato, both an Apology of Socrates (an account of Socrates’ trial) and other works in which Socrates appears as a principal speaker. Furthermore, we have some fragmentary remains of dialogues written by other contemporaries of Socrates besides Plato and Xenophon (Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, Phaedo), and these purport to describe conversations he conducted with others (see Boys-Stone and Rowe 2013). So, when Plato wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which he was involved. Aristophanes’ comic portrayal of Socrates is at the same time a bitter critique of him and other leading intellectual figures of the day (the 420s B.C.), but from Plato, Xenophon, and the other composers (in the 390’s and later) of “Socratic discourses” (as Aristotle calls this body of writings) we receive a far more favorable impression.

Evidently, the historical Socrates was the sort of person who provoked in those who knew him, or knew of him, a profound response, and he inspired many of those who came under his influence to write about him. But the portraits composed by Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato are the ones that have survived intact, and they are therefore the ones that must play the greatest role in shaping our conception of what Socrates was like. Of these, Clouds has the least value as an indication of what was distinctive of Socrates’ mode of philosophizing: after all, it is not intended as a philosophical work, and although it may contain a few lines that are characterizations of features unique to Socrates, for the most part it is an attack on a philosophical type—the long-haired, unwashed, amoral investigator into abstruse phenomena—rather than a depiction of Socrates himself. Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates, whatever its value as historical testimony (which may be considerable), is generally thought to lack the philosophical subtlety and depth of Plato’s. At any rate, no one (certainly not Xenophon himself) takes Xenophon to be a major philosopher in his own right; when we read his Socratic works, we are not encountering a great philosophical mind. But that is what we experience when we read Plato. We may read Plato’s Socratic dialogues because we are (as Plato evidently wanted us to be) interested in who Socrates was and what he stood for, but even if we have little or no desire to learn about the historical Socrates, we will want to read Plato because in doing so we are encountering an author of the greatest philosophical significance. No doubt he in some way borrowed in important ways from Socrates, though it is not easy to say where to draw the line between him and his teacher (more about this below in section 12). But it is widely agreed among scholars that Plato is not a mere transcriber of the words of Socrates (any more than Xenophon or the other authors of Socratic discourses). His use of a figure called “Socrates” in so many of his dialogues should not be taken to mean that Plato is merely preserving for a reading public the lessons he learned from his teacher.

Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato’s works. He makes no appearance in Laws , and there are several dialogues ( Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus ) in which his role is small and peripheral, while some other figure dominates the conversation or even, as in the Timaeus and Critias , presents a long and elaborate, continuous discourse of their own. Plato’s dialogues are not a static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do his speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never the same from one dialogue to another. ( Symposium , for example, is a series of speeches, and there are also lengthy speeches in Apology , Menexenus , Protagoras , Crito , Phaedrus , Timaeus , and Critias ; in fact, one might reasonably question whether these works are properly called dialogues). But even though Plato constantly adapted “the dialogue form” (a commonly used term, and convenient enough, so long as we do not think of it as an unvarying unity) to suit his purposes, it is striking that throughout his career as a writer he never engaged in a form of composition that was widely used in his time and was soon to become the standard mode of philosophical address: Plato never became a writer of philosophical treatises, even though the writing of treatises (for example, on rhetoric, medicine, and geometry) was a common practice among his predecessors and contemporaries. (The closest we come to an exception to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief section in which the author, Plato or someone pretending to be him, commits himself to several philosophical points—while insisting, at the same time, that no philosopher will write about the deepest matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion with selected individuals. As noted above, the authenticity of Plato’s letters is a matter of great controversy; and in any case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the writing of philosophical books. Whether Plato wrote it or not, it cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not wish it to be so regarded.) In all of his writings—except in the letters, if any of them are genuine—Plato never speaks to his audience directly (see Frede 1992) and in his own voice. Strictly speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues; rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on. Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly.

This feature of Plato’s works raises important questions about how they are to be read, and has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings. Since he does not himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in attributing a philosophical doctrine to him (as opposed to one of his characters)? Did he himself have philosophical convictions, and can we discover what they were? Are we justified in speaking of “the philosophy of Plato”? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato himself, are we being unfaithful to the spirit in which he intended the dialogues to be read? Is his whole point, in refraining from writing treatises, to discourage the readers of his works from asking what their author believes and to encourage them instead simply to consider the plausibility or implausibility of what his characters are saying? Is that why Plato wrote dialogues? If not for this reason, then what was his purpose in refraining from addressing his audience in a more direct way (see Griswold 1988, Klagge and Smith 1992, Press 2002)? There are other important questions about the particular shape his dialogues take: for example, why does Socrates play such a prominent role in so many of them, and why, in some of these works, does Socrates play a smaller role, or none at all?

Once these questions are raised and their difficulty acknowledged, it is tempting, in reading Plato’s works and reflecting upon them, to adopt a strategy of extreme caution. Rather than commit oneself to any hypothesis about what he is trying to communicate to his readers, one might adopt a stance of neutrality about his intentions, and confine oneself to talking only about what is said by his dramatis personae . One cannot be faulted, for example, if one notes that, in Plato’s Republic , Socrates argues that justice in the soul consists in each part of the soul doing its own. It is equally correct to point out that other principal speakers in that work, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accept the arguments that Socrates gives for that definition of justice. Perhaps there is no need for us to say more—to say, for example, that Plato himself agrees that this is how justice should be defined, or that Plato himself accepts the arguments that Socrates gives in support of this definition. And we might adopt this same “minimalist” approach to all of Plato’s works. After all, is it of any importance to discover what went on inside his head as he wrote—to find out whether he himself endorsed the ideas he put in the mouths of his characters, whether they constitute “the philosophy of Plato”? Should we not read his works for their intrinsic philosophical value, and not as tools to be used for entering into the mind of their author? We know what Plato’s characters say—and isn’t that all that we need, for the purpose of engaging with his works philosophically?

But the fact that we know what Plato’s characters say does not show that by refusing to entertain any hypotheses about what the author of these works is trying to communicate to his readers we can understand what those characters mean by what they say. We should not lose sight of this obvious fact: it is Plato, not any of his dramatis personae , who is reaching out to a readership and trying to influence their beliefs and actions by means of his literary actions. When we ask whether an argument put forward by a character in Plato’s works should be read as an effort to persuade us of its conclusion, or is better read as a revelation of how foolish that speaker is, we are asking about what Plato as author (not that character) is trying to lead us to believe, through the writing that he is presenting to our attention. We need to interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is saying. Similarly, when we ask how a word that has several different senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato means to communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word. We should not suppose that we can derive much philosophical value from Plato’s writings if we refuse to entertain any thoughts about what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say. Penetrating the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors mean by what they say are not two separate tasks but one, and if we do not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they say, and what the dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we will not profit from reading his dialogues.

Furthermore, the dialogues have certain characteristics that are most easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for inducing his readers to become convinced (or more convinced than they already are) of certain propositions—for example, that there are forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired only by means of a study of the forms, and so on. Why, after all, did Plato write so many works (for example: Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , Phaedrus , Theaetetus , Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Philebus , Laws ) in which one character dominates the conversation (often, but not always, Socrates) and convinces the other speakers (at times, after encountering initial resistance) that they should accept or reject certain conclusions, on the basis of the arguments presented? The only plausible way of answering that question is to say that these dialogues were intended by Plato to be devices by which he might induce the audience for which they are intended to reflect on and accept the arguments and conclusions offered by his principal interlocutor. (It is noteworthy that in Laws , the principal speaker—an unnamed visitor from Athens—proposes that laws should be accompanied by “preludes” in which their philosophical basis is given as full an explanation as possible. The educative value of written texts is thus explicitly acknowledged by Plato’s dominant speaker. If preludes can educate a whole citizenry that is prepared to learn from them, then surely Plato thinks that other sorts of written texts—for example, his own dialogues—can also serve an educative function.)

This does not mean that Plato thinks that his readers can become wise simply by reading and studying his works. On the contrary, it is highly likely that he wanted all of his writings to be supplementary aids to philosophical conversation: in one of his works, he has Socrates warn his readers against relying solely on books, or taking them to be authoritative. They are, Socrates says, best used as devices that stimulate the readers’ memory of discussions they have had ( Phaedrus 274e-276d). In those face-to-face conversations with a knowledgeable leader, positions are taken, arguments are given, and conclusions are drawn. Plato’s writings, he implies in this passage from Phaedrus , will work best when conversational seeds have already been sown for the arguments they contain.

If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors (or to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents), we can easily explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in his dialogues. Presumably the contemporary audience for whom Plato was writing included many of Socrates’ admirers. They would be predisposed to think that a character called “Socrates” would have all of the intellectual brilliance and moral passion of the historical person after whom he is named (especially since Plato often makes special efforts to give his “Socrates” a life-like reality, and has him refer to his trial or to the characteristics by which he was best known); and the aura surrounding the character called “Socrates” would give the words he speaks in the dialogue considerable persuasive power. Furthermore, if Plato felt strongly indebted to Socrates for many of his philosophical techniques and ideas, that would give him further reason for assigning a dominant role to him in many of his works. (More about this in section 12.)

Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of explaining why Plato so often makes Socrates his principal speaker. For example, we could say that Plato was trying to undermine the reputation of the historical Socrates by writing a series of works in which a figure called “Socrates” manages to persuade a group of naïve and sycophantic interlocutors to accept absurd conclusions on the basis of sophistries. But anyone who has read some of Plato’s works will quickly recognize the utter implausibility of that alternative way of reading them. Plato could have written into his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them. But there are many signs in such works as Meno , Phaedo , Republic , and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction. (And the great admiration Plato feels for Socrates is also evident from his Apology .) The reader is given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is successful in persuading his interlocutors (on those occasions when he does succeed) is that his arguments are powerful ones. The reader, in other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and deserving of careful and full positive consideration. When we interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers present to each other.

There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other. When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed. Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors: typically, Socrates encounters a group of people many of whom do not appear in any other work of Plato, and so, as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their character and social circumstances. But often Plato’s characters make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other works. For example, in Phaedo (73a-b), Socrates says that one argument for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already read Meno . Several pages later, Socrates tells his interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself (the form of equality) applies no less to other forms—to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions (75d). This reference to asking and answering questions would not be well understood by a reader who had not yet encountered a series of dialogues in which Socrates asks his interlocutors questions of the form, “What is X?” ( Euthyphro : what is piety? Laches : what is courage? Charmides : What is moderation? Hippias Major : what is beauty? see Dancy 2004). Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of Phaedo have already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them. In some of his writings, Plato’s characters refer ahead to the continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to conversations they had recently: thus Plato signals to us that we should read Theaetetus , Sophist , and Statesman sequentially; and similarly, since the opening of Timaeus refers us back to Republic , Plato is indicating to his readers that they must seek some connection between these two works.

These features of the dialogues show Plato’s awareness that he cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes. He will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with the conversations held by the interlocutors of other dialogues—even when there is some alteration among those interlocutors. (Meno does not re-appear in Phaedo ; Timaeus was not among the interlocutors of Republic .) Why does Plato have his dominant characters (Socrates, the Eleatic visitor) reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as provocations to thought—mere exercises for the mind—there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine. For example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are such things as forms—and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers. Furthermore, when Socrates is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea (in Sophist and Statesman ), the existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms. The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both characters—Socrates and the Eleatic visitor—as devices for the presentation and defense of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well.

This way of reading Plato’s dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration. It is, in fact, a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other. One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and, if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows him to respond to that criticism (see Meinwald 2016). In Parmenides , the principal interlocutor (not Socrates—he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training—but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides) subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms. Does the discussion of oneness (a baffling series of contradictions—or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the surface, to be contradictions) in some way help address the problems raised about forms? That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier dialogues? Can we find dialogues in which we encounter a “new theory of forms”—that is, a way of thinking of forms that carefully steers clear of the assumptions about forms that led to Parmenides’ critique? It is not easy to say. But we cannot even raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that truth to the attention of others. If we find Timaeus (the principal interlocutor of the dialogue named after him) and the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist and Statesman talking about forms in a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about forms in Phaedo and Republic , then there is only one reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly supported by powerful considerations. If, on the other hand, we find that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of these entities. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato himself had no convictions about forms, and merely wants to give his readers mental exercise by composing dialogues in which different leading characters talk about these objects in discordant ways.

The same point—that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes his mind—can be made in connection with the politics of Plato’s works (see Bobonich 2002).

It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a political philosopher. For he gives expression, in several of his writings (particular Phaedo ), to a yearning to escape from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. (Similarly, he evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty pales in comparison with that of the forms.) Because of this, it would have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical questions. Some of his works— Parmenides is a stellar example—do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life. But it is remarkable how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract questions raised in Sophist about the nature of being and not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of sophistry; and thus they call to mind the question whether Socrates should be classified as a sophist—whether, in other words, sophists are to be despised and avoided. In any case, despite the great sympathy Plato expresses for the desire to shed one’s body and live in an incorporeal world, he devotes an enormous amount of energy to the task of understanding the world we live in, appreciating its limited beauty, and improving it.

His tribute to the mixed beauty of the sensible world, in Timaeus , consists in his depiction of it as the outcome of divine efforts to mold reality in the image of the forms, using simple geometrical patterns and harmonious arithmetic relations as building blocks. The desire to transform human relations is given expression in a far larger number of works. Socrates presents himself, in Plato’s Apology , as a man who does not have his head in the clouds (that is part of Aristophanes’ charge against him in Clouds ). He does not want to escape from the everyday world but to make it better (see Allen 2010). He presents himself, in Gorgias , as the only Athenian who has tried his hand at the true art of politics.

Similarly, the Socrates of Republic devotes a considerable part of his discussion to the critique of ordinary social institutions—the family, private property, and rule by the many. The motivation that lies behind the writing of this dialogue is the desire to transform (or, at any rate, to improve) political life, not to escape from it (although it is acknowledged that the desire to escape is an honorable one: the best sort of rulers greatly prefer the contemplation of divine reality to the governance of the city). And if we have any further doubts that Plato does take an interest in the practical realm, we need only turn to Laws . A work of such great detail and length about voting procedures, punishments, education, legislation, and the oversight of public officials can only have been produced by someone who wants to contribute something to the improvement of the lives we lead in this sensible and imperfect realm. Further evidence of Plato’s interest in practical matters can be drawn from his letters, if they are genuine. In most of them, he presents himself as having a deep interest in educating (with the help of his friend, Dion) the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, and thus reforming that city’s politics.

Just as any attempt to understand Plato’s views about forms must confront the question whether his thoughts about them developed or altered over time, so too our reading of him as a political philosopher must be shaped by a willingness to consider the possibility that he changed his mind. For example, on any plausible reading of Republic , Plato evinces a deep antipathy to rule by the many. Socrates tells his interlocutors that the only politics that should engage them are those of the anti-democratic regime he depicts as the paradigm of a good constitution. And yet in Laws , the Athenian visitor proposes a detailed legislative framework for a city in which non-philosophers (people who have never heard of the forms, and have not been trained to understand them) are given considerable powers as rulers. Plato would not have invested so much time in the creation of this comprehensive and lengthy work, had he not believed that the creation of a political community ruled by those who are philosophically unenlightened is a project that deserves the support of his readers. Has Plato changed his mind, then? Has he re-evaluated the highly negative opinion he once held of those who are innocent of philosophy? Did he at first think that the reform of existing Greek cities, with all of their imperfections, is a waste of time—but then decide that it is an endeavor of great value? (And if so, what led him to change his mind?) Answers to these questions can be justified only by careful attention to what he has his interlocutors say. But it would be utterly implausible to suppose that these developmental questions need not be raised, on the grounds that Republic and Laws each has its own cast of characters, and that the two works therefore cannot come into contradiction with each other. According to this hypothesis (one that must be rejected), because it is Socrates (not Plato) who is critical of democracy in Republic , and because it is the Athenian visitor (not Plato) who recognizes the merits of rule by the many in Laws , there is no possibility that the two dialogues are in tension with each other. Against this hypothesis, we should say: Since both Republic and Laws are works in which Plato is trying to move his readers towards certain conclusions, by having them reflect on certain arguments—these dialogues are not barred from having this feature by their use of interlocutors—it would be an evasion of our responsibility as readers and students of Plato not to ask whether what one of them advocates is compatible with what the other advocates. If we answer that question negatively, we have some explaining to do: what led to this change? Alternatively, if we conclude that the two works are compatible, we must say why the appearance of conflict is illusory.

Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked on his career as a philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to his Apology of Socrates, a number of short ethical dialogues that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical doctrine, but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which Socrates punctured the pretensions of his interlocutors and forced them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory definitions of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their moral beliefs. According to this way of placing the dialogues into a rough chronological order—associated especially with Gregory Vlastos’s name (see especially his Socrates Ironist and Moral Philosopher , chapters 2 and 3)—Plato, at this point of his career, was content to use his writings primarily for the purpose of preserving the memory of Socrates and making plain the superiority of his hero, in intellectual skill and moral seriousness, to all of his contemporaries—particularly those among them who claimed to be experts on religious, political, or moral matters. Into this category of early dialogues (they are also sometimes called “Socratic” dialogues, possibly without any intended chronological connotation) are placed: Charmides , Crito , Euthydemus , Euthyphro , Gorgias , Hippias Major , Hippias Minor , Ion , Laches , Lysis , and Protagoras , (Some scholars hold that we can tell which of these come later during Plato’s early period. For example, it is sometimes said that Protagoras and Gorgias are later, because of their greater length and philosophical complexity. Other dialogues—for example, Charmides and Lysis —are thought not to be among Plato’s earliest within this early group, because in them Socrates appears to be playing a more active role in shaping the progress of the dialogue: that is, he has more ideas of his own.) In comparison with many of Plato’s other dialogues, these “Socratic” works contain little in the way of metaphysical, epistemological, or methodological speculation, and they therefore fit well with the way Socrates characterizes himself in Plato’s Apology : as a man who leaves investigations of high falutin’ matters (which are “in the sky and below the earth”) to wiser heads, and confines all of his investigations to the question how one should live one’s life. Aristotle describes Socrates as someone whose interests were restricted to only one branch of philosophy—the realm of the ethical; and he also says that he was in the habit of asking definitional questions to which he himself lacked answers ( Metaphysics 987b1, Sophistical Refutations 183b7). That testimony gives added weight to the widely accepted hypothesis that there is a group of dialogues—the ones mentioned above as his early works, whether or not they were all written early in Plato’s writing career—in which Plato used the dialogue form as a way of portraying the philosophical activities of the historical Socrates (although, of course, he might also have used them in other ways as well—for example to suggest and begin to explore philosophical difficulties raised by them, see Santas 1979, Brickhouse and Smith 1994).

But at a certain point—so says this hypothesis about the chronology of the dialogues—Plato began to use his works to advance ideas that were his own creations rather than those of Socrates, although he continued to use the name “Socrates” for the interlocutor who presented and argued for these new ideas. The speaker called “Socrates” now begins to move beyond and depart from the historical Socrates: he has views about the methodology that should be used by philosophers (a methodology borrowed from mathematics), and he argues for the immortality of the soul and the existence and importance of the forms of beauty, justice, goodness, and the like. (By contrast, in Apology Socrates says that no one knows what becomes of us after we die.) Phaedo is often said to be the dialogue in which Plato first comes into his own as a philosopher who is moving far beyond the ideas of his teacher (though it is also commonly said that we see a new methodological sophistication and a greater interest in mathematical knowledge in Meno ). Having completed all of the dialogues that, according to this hypothesis, we characterize as early, Plato widened the range of topics to be explored in his writings (no longer confining himself to ethics), and placed the theory of forms (and related ideas about language, knowledge, and love) at the center of his thinking. In these works of his “middle” period—for example, in Phaedo , Cratylus , Symposium , Republic , and Phaedrus —there is both a change of emphasis and of doctrine. The focus is no longer on ridding ourselves of false ideas and self-deceit; rather, we are asked to accept (however tentatively) a radical new conception of ourselves (now divided into three parts), our world—or rather, our two worlds—and our need to negotiate between them. Definitions of the most important virtue terms are finally proposed in Republic (the search for them in some of the early dialogues having been unsuccessful): Book I of this dialogue is a portrait of how the historical Socrates might have handled the search for a definition of justice, and the rest of the dialogue shows how the new ideas and tools discovered by Plato can complete the project that his teacher was unable to finish. Plato continues to use a figure called “Socrates” as his principal interlocutor, and in this way he creates a sense of continuity between the methods, insights, and ideals of the historical Socrates and the new Socrates who has now become a vehicle for the articulation of his own new philosophical outlook. In doing so, he acknowledges his intellectual debt to his teacher and appropriates for his own purposes the extraordinary prestige of the man who was the wisest of his time.

This hypothesis about the chronology of Plato’s writings has a third component: it does not place his works into either of only two categories—the early or “Socratic” dialogues, and all the rest—but works instead with a threefold division of early, middle, and late. That is because, following ancient testimony, it has become a widely accepted assumption that Laws is one of Plato’s last works, and further that this dialogue shares a great many stylistic affinities with a small group of others: Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Critias , and Philebus . These five dialogues together with Laws are generally agreed to be his late works, because they have much more in common with each other, when one counts certain stylistic features apparent only to readers of Plato’s Greek, than with any of Plato’s other works. (Computer counts have aided these stylometric studies, but the isolation of a group of six dialogues by means of their stylistic commonalities was recognized in the nineteenth century. See Brandwood 1990, Young 1994.)

It is not at all clear whether there are one or more philosophical affinities among this group of six dialogues—that is, whether the philosophy they contain is sharply different from that of all of the other dialogues. Plato does nothing to encourage the reader to view these works as a distinctive and separate component of his thinking. On the contrary, he links Sophist with Theaetetus (the conversations they present have a largely overlapping cast of characters, and take place on successive days) no less than Sophist and Statesman . Sophist contains, in its opening pages, a reference to the conversation of Parmenides —and perhaps Plato is thus signaling to his readers that they should bring to bear on Sophist the lessons that are to be drawn from Parmenides . Similarly, Timaeus opens with a reminder of some of the principal ethical and political doctrines of Republic . It could be argued, of course, that when one looks beyond these stage-setting devices, one finds significant philosophical changes in the six late dialogues, setting this group off from all that preceded them. But there is no consensus that they should be read in this way. Resolving this issue requires intensive study of the content of Plato’s works. So, although it is widely accepted that the six dialogues mentioned above belong to Plato’s latest period, there is, as yet, no agreement among students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his philosophical development.

In fact, it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of Plato’s works into three periods—early, middle, late—does correctly indicate the order of composition, and whether it is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought (See Cooper 1997, vii–xxvii). Of course, it would be wildly implausible to suppose that Plato’s writing career began with such complex works as Laws , Parmenides , Phaedrus , or Republic . In light of widely accepted assumptions about how most philosophical minds develop, it is likely that when Plato started writing philosophical works some of the shorter and simpler dialogues were the ones he composed: Laches , or Crito , or Ion (for example). (Similarly, Apology does not advance a complex philosophical agenda or presuppose an earlier body of work; so that too is likely to have been composed near the beginning of Plato’s writing career.) Even so, there is no good reason to eliminate the hypothesis that throughout much of his life Plato devoted himself to writing two sorts of dialogues at the same time, moving back and forth between them as he aged: on the one hand, introductory works whose primary purpose is to show readers the difficulty of apparently simple philosophical problems, and thereby to rid them of their pretensions and false beliefs; and on the other hand, works filled with more substantive philosophical theories supported by elaborate argumentation. Moreover, one could point to features of many of the “Socratic” dialogues that would justify putting them in the latter category, even though the argumentation does not concern metaphysics or methodology or invoke mathematics— Gorgias , Protagoras , Lysis , Euthydemus , Hippias Major among them.

Plato makes it clear that both of these processes, one preceding the other, must be part of one’s philosophical education. One of his deepest methodological convictions (affirmed in Meno , Theaetetus , and Sophist ) is that in order to make intellectual progress we must recognize that knowledge cannot be acquired by passively receiving it from others: rather, we must work our way through problems and assess the merits of competing theories with an independent mind. Accordingly, some of his dialogues are primarily devices for breaking down the reader’s complacency, and that is why it is essential that they come to no positive conclusions; others are contributions to theory-construction, and are therefore best absorbed by those who have already passed through the first stage of philosophical development. We should not assume that Plato could have written the preparatory dialogues only at the earliest stage of his career. Although he may well have begun his writing career by taking up that sort of project, he may have continued writing these “negative” works at later stages, at the same time that he was composing his theory-constructing dialogues. For example although both Euthydemus and Charmides are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they might have been written around the same time as Symposium and Republic , which are generally assumed to be compositions of his middle period—or even later.

No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are such. But it is an open question which and how many of them are. At any rate, it is clear that Plato continued to write in a “Socratic” and “negative” vein even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his career: Theaetetus features a Socrates who is even more insistent upon his ignorance than are the dramatic representations of Socrates in briefer and philosophically less complex works that are reasonably assumed to be early; and like many of those early works, Theaetetus seeks but does not find the answer to the “what is it?” question that it relentlessly pursues—“What is knowledge?” Similarly, Parmenides , though certainly not an early dialogue, is a work whose principal aim is to puzzle the reader by the presentation of arguments for apparently contradictory conclusions; since it does not tell us how it is possible to accept all of those conclusions, its principal effect on the reader is similar to that of dialogues (many of them no doubt early) that reach only negative conclusions. Plato uses this educational device—provoking the reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the contradiction unresolved—in Protagoras (often considered an early dialogue) as well. So it is clear that even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is the presentation of unresolved difficulties. (And, just as we should recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple enough to have been early compositions: Ion , for example, affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and Crito sets out the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey civic commands. Neither ends in failure.)

If we are justified in taking Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Apology to constitute reliable evidence about what the historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato’s other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely attributed to Socrates. So understood, Socrates was a moralist but (unlike Plato) not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist. That fits with Aristotle’s testimony, and Plato’s way of choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates. The number of dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small: Phaedo , Republic , Phaedrus , and Philebus . All of them are dominated by ethical issues: whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of pleasure. Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to do with the ethical life of the individual. (The political aspects of Republic are explicitly said to serve the larger question whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be just.) When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea ( Sophist , Statesman ); when they become cosmological, he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in Laws , to a visitor from Athens (and he then eliminates Socrates entirely). In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological, or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from entering these domains. This may be part of the explanation why he has Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the theory advanced in Crito , which reaches the conclusion that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison. Perhaps Plato is indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by the conversation of Socrates.

Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write one kind of dialogue (negative, destructive, preparatory) and to write only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also question whether he went through an early stage during which he refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas (if he had any), but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist, representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates. It is unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato, who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties (he was around 28 when Socrates was killed), would have started his compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing himself to think for himself only later. (What would have led to such a decision?) We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues, even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic inventions—derived, no doubt, by Plato’s reflections on and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes to Socrates in Apology . That speech indicates, for example, that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too attributes this to his Socrates. But what of the various philosophical moves rehearsed in Euthyphro —the dialogue in which Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety is? We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it (changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court). It is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of Socrates’ conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it is to reach an understanding of the central concept that Socrates’ fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to death. The idea that it is important to search for definitions may have been Socratic in origin. (After all, Aristotle attributes this much to Socrates.) But the twists and turns of the arguments in Euthyphro and other dialogues that search for definitions are more likely to be the products of Plato’s mind than the content of any conversations that really took place.

It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading public (with the exception of Apology ) in the form of a dialogue. If the question, “why did Plato write dialogues?”, which many of his readers are tempted to ask, pre-supposes that there must have been some such once-and-for-all decision, then it is poorly posed. It makes better sense to break that question apart into many little ones: better to ask, “Why did Plato write this particular work (for example: Protagoras , or Republic , or Symposium , or Laws ) in the form of a dialogue—and that one ( Timaeus , say) mostly in the form of a long and rhetorically elaborate single speech?” than to ask why he decided to adopt the dialogue form.

The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight from the mouth of its author? This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato’s reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. For example, the use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous appeal of Plato’s writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Even treatise-like compositions— Timaeus and Laws , for example—improve in readability because of their conversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato’s evident interest in pedagogical questions (how is it possible to learn? what is the best way to learn? from what sort of person can we learn? what sort of person is in a position to learn?) to be pursued not only in the content of his compositions but also in their form. Even in Laws such questions are not far from Plato’s mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving upon each other’s social and political institutions.

In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the dialogue form is being used for this purpose. The Parmenides is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato relentlessly rubs his readers’ faces in a baffling series of unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions. But several of his other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for example, Protagoras (can virtue be taught?), Hippias Minor (is voluntary wrongdoing better than involuntary wrongdoing?), and portions of Meno (are some people virtuous because of divine inspiration?). Just as someone who encounters Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he means what he says (or whether he is instead speaking ironically), so Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to infer from the arguments that have been presented to us. But Socrates does not always speak ironically, and similarly Plato’s dialogues do not always aim at creating a sense of bafflement about what we are to think about the subject under discussion. There is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works. We will best understand Plato’s works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly. Rather than impose on our reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing (because he has done such a thing elsewhere), we should bring to each dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it. That would be the most fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy.

The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Further discussion of these and other issues regarding Plato’s philosophy, and far more bibliographical information, is available in the other entries on Plato.

• Cooper, John M. (ed.), 1997, Plato: Complete Works , Indianapolis: Hackett. (Contains translations of all the works handed down from antiquity with attribution to Plato, some of which are universally agreed to be spurious, with explanatory footnotes and both a general Introduction to the study of the dialogues and individual Introductory Notes to each work translated.)
• Burnyeat, Myles and Michael Frede, 2015, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter , Dominic Scott (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ahbel-Rappe, Sara, and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), 2006, A Companion to Socrates , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Allen, Danielle, S., 2010, Why Plato Wrote , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Annas, Julia, 2003, Plato: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Benson, Hugh (ed.), 2006, A Companion to Plato , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Blondell, Ruby, 2002, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bobonich, Christopher, 2002, Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Boys-Stone George, and Christopher Rowe (eds.), 2013, The Circle of Socrates: Readings in the First-Generation Socratics , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Brandwood, Leonard, 1990, The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brickhouse, Thomas C. & Nicholas D. Smith, 1994, Plato’s Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dancy, Russell, 2004, Plato’s Introduction of Forms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ebrey, David and Richard Kraut (eds.), 2022, The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Fine, Gail (ed.), 1999, Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 1999, Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essays by many scholars on a wide range of topics, including several studies of individual dialogues.)
• ––– (ed.), 2019, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Frede, Michael, 1992, “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , Supplementary Volume 1992, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 201–220.
• Griswold, Charles L. (ed.), 1988, Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings , London: Routledge.
• Guthrie, W.K.C., 1971, Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1975, A History of Greek Philosophy , Volume 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1978, A History of Greek Philosophy , Volume 5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Irwin, Terence, 1995, Plato’s Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kahn, Charles H., 1996, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2003, “On Platonic Chronology,” in Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe (eds.), New Perspectives on Plato: Modern and Ancient , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, chapter 4.
• Klagge, James C. and Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), 1992, Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogue , Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kraut, Richard (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2008, How to Read Plato , London: Granta.
• Ledger, Gerald R., 1989, Re-Counting Plato: A Computer Analysis of Plato’s Style , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McCabe, Mary Margaret, 1994, Plato’s Individuals , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2000, Plato and His Predecessors: The Dramatisation of Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Meinwald, Constance, 2016, Plato , London: Routledge.
• Morrison, Donald R., 2012, The Cambridge Companion to Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nails, Debra, 1995, Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy , Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• –––, 2002, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics , Indianapolis: Hackett. (An encyclopedia of information about the characters in all of the dialogues.)
• Nightingale, Andrea, 1993, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construction of Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Peterson, Sandra, 2011, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Press, Gerald A. (ed.), 2000, Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Prior, William J., 2019, Socrates , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Rowe, C.J., 2007, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rowe, Christopher, & Malcolm Schofield (eds.), 2000, Greek and Roman Political Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contains 7 introductory essays by 7 hands on Socratic and Platonic political thought.)
• Rudebusch, George, 2009, Socrates , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Russell, Daniel C., 2005, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Rutherford, R.B., 1995, The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Santas, Gerasimos, 1979, Socrates: Philosophy in Plato’s Early Dialogues , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Sayre, Kenneth, 1995, Plato’s Literary Garden , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Schofield, Malcolm, 2006, Plato: Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Silverman, Allan, 2002, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato’s Metaphysics , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Smith, Nicholas D. and Thomas C. Brickhouse, 1994, Plato’s Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• –––and John Bussanich (eds.), 2015, The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates , London: Bloomsbury.
• Taylor, C.C.W., 1998, Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Thesleff, Holger, 1982, Studies in Platonic Chronology , Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 70, Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
• Vander Waerdt, Paul. A. (ed.), 1994, The Socratic Movement , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Vasiliou, Iakovos, 2008, Aiming at Virtue in Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Vlastos, Gregory, 1991, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1995, Studies in Greek Philosophy (Volume 2: Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition), Daniel W. Graham (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• White, Nicholas P., 1976, Plato on Knowledge and Reality , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Young, Charles M., 1994, “Plato and Computer Dating,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , 12: 227–250.
• Zuckert, Catherine H., 2009, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Links to Original texts of Plato’s Dialogues (maintained by Bernard Suzanne)
• In Dialogue: the Life and Works of Plato , a short podcast by Peter Adamson (Philosophy, Kings College London).

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Aristotle on the Individuality of Self

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Aristotle undeniably diverged from Plato in his view of what a human being most truly and fundamentally is. Plato, at least in many of his dialogues, held that the true self of human beings is the reason or the intellect that constitutes their soul and that is separable from their body. Aristotle, for his part, insisted that the human being is a composite of body and soul and that the soul cannot be separated from the body. Aristotle’s philosophy of self was constructed in terms of hylomorphism in which the soul of a human being is the form or the structure of the human body or the human matter, i.e., the functional organization in virtue of which human beings are able to perform their characteristic activities of life, including growth, nutrition, reproduction, perception, imagination, desire, and thinking.

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Sihvola, J. (2008). Aristotle on the Individuality of Self. In: Remes, P., Sihvola, J. (eds) Ancient Philosophy of the Self. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8596-3_6

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Plato and Aristotle on youth and politics

Young people are excessively driven by emotion and appetite, are prone to naïve idealism and an exaggerated sense of injustice coupled with arrogant self-confidence, and tend, in their intellectual efforts, toward sophistry and unreasonable skepticism toward established ways.

May 15, 2024 Dr. Edward Feser The Dispatch 9 Print

As faculty, including even philosophy professors, aid and abet student bad behavior on campus, it is worth considering what the most serious thinkers of the Western tradition would have thought about the political opinions and activities of the young.  What follows are some relevant passages from Plato and Aristotle in particular.  For purposes of the present article, I put to one side the specific subject matter of the recent protests, because it is not relevant to the present point.  What is relevant is that the manner in which the protesters’ opinions are formed and expressed is contrary to reason.  That would remain true whatever they were protesting.  Part of this is because  mobs are always irrational .  But they are bound to be even more irrational when they are composed of young people.

Don’t trust anyone under thirty

Plato held that even the guardians in his ideal city should not be permitted to study philosophy, and in particular the critical back-and-form of philosophical debate, before the age of thirty.  And even then, they could do so only after acquiring practical experience in military service, the acquisition of a large body of general knowledge, and the intellectual discipline afforded by mathematical reasoning.  As he says in  The Republic , “dialectic” (as he referred to this back-and-forth), when studied prematurely, “does appalling harm” and “fills people with indiscipline” (Book VII, at p. 271 of the  Desmond Lee translation ).  For young and inexperienced people tend to make a game of argument and criticism, a means of tearing down traditional ideas without seriously considering what might be said in favor of them or putting anything better in their place.  Describing the young person who pursues such superficial philosophizing, Plato writes:

He is driven to think that there’s no difference between honourable and disgraceful, and so on with all the other values, like right and good, that he used to revere… Then when he’s lost any respect or feeling for his former beliefs but not yet found the truth, where is he likely to turn?  Won’t it be to a life which flatters his desires? … And so we shall see him become a rebel instead of a conformer… You must have noticed how young men, after their first taste of argument, are always contradicting people just for the fun of it; they imitate those whom they hear cross-examining each other, and themselves cross-examine other people like puppies who love to pull and tear at anyone within reach… So when they’ve proved a lot of people wrong and been proved wrong often themselves, they soon slip into the belief that nothing they believed before was true… But someone who’s a bit older… will refuse to have anything to do with this sort of idiocy; he won’t copy those who contradict just for the fun of the thing, but will be more likely to follow the lead of someone whose arguments are aimed at finding the truth.  He’s a more reasonable person and will get philosophy a better reputation. (Book VII, at pp. 272-273)

Similarly, in the  Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle says that political science (by which he meant, not primarily what is today called by that name, but rather what we would today call political philosophy) is not a suitable area of study for the young.  He writes:

A young man is not a fit person to attend lectures on political science, because he is not versed in the practical business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject matter.  Besides, he tends to follow his feelings, with the result that he will make no headway and derive no benefit from his course… It makes no difference whether he is young in age or youthful in character; the defect is due not to lack of years but to living, and pursuing one’s various aims, under the sway of feelings.  (Book I, pp. 65-66 of the  Thomson and Tredennick translation )

This lack of experience and domination by feelings is commented on by Aristotle elsewhere in the  Ethics .  For example, he observes that “the lives of the young are regulated by their feelings, and their chief interest is in their own pleasure and the opportunity of the moment” (Book VIII, at p. 262).  And he notes:

Although the young develop ability in geometry and mathematics and become wise in such matters, they are not thought to develop prudence.  The reason for this is that prudence also involves knowledge of particular facts, which become known from experience; and a young man is not experienced, because experience takes some time to acquire. (Book VI, at p. 215)

In the  Rhetoric , Aristotle develops these themes in greater detail, writing:

The young are by character appetitive and of a kind to do whatever they should desire.  And of the bodily appetites they are especially attentive to that connected with sex and have no control over it… They are irate and hot-tempered and of a kind to harken to anger.  And they are inferior to their passions; for through their ambition they do not tolerate disregard but are vexed if they think they are being wronged. And they are ambitious, but even more keen to win (for youth craves excess and victory is a kind of excess), and they are both of these things rather than money-loving (they are least money-loving of all through never having yet experienced shortage…) and they are not sour-natured but sweet-natured through their not having yet observed much wickedness, and credulous through their not yet having been many times deceived, and optimistic… because they have not frequently met with failure… And in all things they err rather towards the excessively great or intense… (for they do everything in excess: they love and hate excessively and do all other things in the same way), and they think they know everything and are obstinate (this is also the reason for their doing everything in excess), and they commit their crimes from arrogance rather than mischievousness.  (Book II, Part 12, at pp. 173-74 of the  Lawson-Tancred translation )

To summarize the points made by Plato and Aristotle, then, young people: are excessively driven by emotion and appetite; lack the experience that is required for prudence or wisdom in practical matters; in particular, are prone to naïve idealism and an exaggerated sense of injustice coupled with arrogant self-confidence; and tend, in their intellectual efforts, toward sophistry and unreasonable skepticism toward established ways.  For these reasons, their opinions about matters of ethics and politics are liable to be foolish.

Democracy dumbs down

This should sound like common sense, because it is.  And notice that so far, Plato and Aristotle are describing the tendencies of the young  as such , even in the  best  kinds of social and political arrangements.  But things are even worse when those arrangements are bad.  In  The Laws , Plato warns that the young become soft when pampered and affluent.  “Luxury,” he says, “makes a child bad-tempered, irritable and apt to react violently to trivial things” (Book VII, at p. 231 of the  Saunders translation ).  And again: “Suppose you do your level best during these years to shelter him from distress and fright and any kind of pain at all… That’s the best way to ruin a child, because the corruption invariably sets in at the very earliest stages of his education” (ibid.).

In  The Republic , Plato argues that music and entertainments that celebrate what is ignoble and encourage the indulgence of desire corrupt the moral character of the young in a way that cannot fail to have social and political repercussions:

The music and literature of a country cannot be altered without major political and social changes… The amusements in which our children take part must be better regulated; because once they and the children become disorderly, it becomes impossible to produce serious citizens with a respect for order. (Book IV, at pp. 125-26)

Similarly, in the  Politics , Aristotle cautions:

Unseemly talk… results in conduct of a like kind.  Especially, therefore, must it be kept away from youth… And since we exclude all unseemly talk, we must also forbid gazing at debased paintings or stories… It should be laid down that younger persons shall not be spectators at comedies or recitals of iambics, not, that is to say, until they have reached the age at which they come to recline at banquets with others and share in the drinking; by this time their education will have rendered them completely immune to any harm that might come from such spectacles… We must keep all that is of inferior quality unfamiliar to the young, particularly things with an ingredient of wickedness or hostility. (Book VII, at pp. 446-47 of the  Sinclair and Saunders translation )

Plato’s  Republic  also famously argues that oligarchies, or societies dominated by the desire for wealth, are disordered, and tend to degenerate into egalitarian democracies, which are even more disordered.   I have discussed elsewhere  Plato’s account of the decay of oligarchy into democracy, and of democracy, in turn, into tyranny.  Among the passages relevant to the subject at hand are the following, from Book VIII:

The oligarchs reduce their subjects to the state we have described, while as for themselves and their dependents – their young men live in luxury and idleness, physical and mental, become idle, and lose their ability to resist pain or pleasure. (p. 291) The young man’s mind is filled instead by an invasion of pretentious fallacies and opinions…  [He] call[s] insolence good breeding, license liberty, extravagance generosity, and shamelessness courage… [He] comes to throw off all inhibitions and indulge[s] desires that are unnecessary and useless… If anyone tells him that some pleasures, because they spring from good desires, are to be encouraged and approved and others, springing from evil desires, to be disciplined and repressed, he won’t listen or open his citadel’s doors to the truth, but shakes his head and says all pleasures are equal and should have equal rights. (pp. 297-98) A democratic society… goes on to abuse as servile and contemptible those who obey the authorities and reserves its approval, in private life as well as public, for rulers who behave like subjects and subjects who behave like rulers… It becomes the thing for father and son to change places, the father standing in awe of his son, and the son neither respecting nor fearing his parents, in order to assert what he calls his independence… The teacher fears and panders to his pupils… and the young as a whole imitate their elders, argue with them and set themselves up against them, while their elders try to avoid the reputation of being disagreeable or strict by aping the young and mixing with them on terms of easy good fellowship. (pp. 299-300)

In short, the affluence and egalitarian spirit of a wealth-oriented society that has decayed into a democracy (in Plato’s sense of that term, which has more to do with ethos than the mechanics of governance) greatly exacerbate the failings to which the young are already prone.  In particular, it makes them even softer and thus unable to deal maturely with challenges and setbacks, even more prone to sophistry and excessive skepticism, even more contemptuous of authority and established customs, and more vulgar and addicted to vice.  Even worse, the egalitarian spirit of democracy makes adults more prone to acquiesce in this bad behavior, or even to ape it themselves.  A general spirit of license and irrationality sets in and undermines the social order, greasing the skids for tyranny (in a way that, again, I describe in the article linked to earlier).

What then, would Plato and Aristotle think of the mobs of shrieking student protesters we see on campuses today (or for that matter, the student mobs of the 1960s and of every decade between then and now)?  To ask the question is to answer it.  Nor is it a mystery what they would think of the professors who egg on this foolishness.  They are the heirs, not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the sophists to whom Plato and Aristotle sharply contrasted the true philosopher.

( Editor’s note : This essay originally appeared on  Dr. Feser’s blog  in a slightly different form and is reprinted here with the author’s kind permission.)

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“When it comes to fundamental human issues – said Dietrich von Hildebrand – often the difference between the ideas of two contemporaries can be much greater than that between two men from different epochs. The difference between Socrates and Callicrates as described in Plato’s Gorgias is much greater than that between Callicrates and Nietzsche,” or the atmosphere of youth, I might add, of Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin or the Sixties: not the cold climate of positivism, but that of warm, passionate, enlightened, German reason, which, passing through revolution, becomes the eschatology of revolution. It is a reason that awaits the establishment of the regnum libertatis, finally realized in history. An unprecedented experiment that, however, has no parallels in all past history.

It is therefore a Manichaean, apocalyptic, gnostic conception, we could say “messianic.” In this, the character of the global gnostic elites is similar to that of the “third Rome”: they indeed have a common enemy, the Catholic Church, just as Pharisees (religious messianism) and Herodians (secular messianism), enemies to each other, allied themselves against the common enemy, Christ, in their time.

Excellent essay by Feser, offering insight elicited from the Wisdom of the greats, relevant especially to this present day dilemma. “And so we shall see him become a rebel instead of a conformer” (Plato cited by Feser). If the instructor, parent or professor have become corrupt enablers, what will save our society if not a moral conversion.

Interesting article, although my opinion is more direct about today’s college kids, in that I would call them morons and pampered brats. In particular this applies to those that attend elite schools. However there is also something to said about the college presidents and faculty who tacitly and some who directly support the anti Israel chaos. Unfortunately todays wealth and abundance, combined with the secular culture feeds or promotes the ongoing idiocy and underlying evil. Think one possible solution is to send all college kids to China, Russia, Iran or similar places for a year or two of study, let them protest there and see what happens.

Mark Bauerlein (author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future,” 2008) was asked by Atlantic Magazine to explain himself on his blunt writing.

To which he responded, “Millennials in America today are the most socially conscious, hard-working, knowledgeable, skilled and savvy, globally aware, workforce-ready, and downright interesting generation in human history. Just ask them.”

Well, Peter Beaulieu, at least it can be said they have a positive image of themselves. As had the chief of staff at a medical center assured me, image is everything. Who then can dismiss success when it’s brimming with confidence in front of you? Where does that leave the moral idealist? A great sage recently said they’re committing suicide boxing themselves in from the world. To be or not to be for many is complex.

“young people: are excessively driven by emotion and appetite; lack the experience that is required for prudence or wisdom in practical matters; in particular, are prone to naïve idealism and an exaggerated sense of injustice coupled with arrogant self-confidence; and tend, in their intellectual efforts, toward sophistry and unreasonable skepticism toward established ways.”

Undoubtedly true. This is the natural result of ignorance and inexperience. Not to mention ignorance of and inexperience with one’s own ignorance and inexperience.

It’s also true of older people who have gained years without gaining wisdom, by dint of living their lives without examining them, and often enough by never having accepted a rational framework for life to start with. They often acquire confidence without competence, dispensing advice that makes those who take it worse off (e.g. “don’t worry about school loans, follow your heart!”) You can find them supporting, encouraging, and often participating in the protests. Pro-lifers on college campuses frequently have problems with over-30 professors.

If I remember right, classical education tends to use the teen years (and sometimes pre-teen years) when young people have that natural urge to ask why and how and wherefore, to question and challenge society’s institutions and practices, to enjoy arguing… to teach them why and how and wherefore, and what the institutions and practices are for, and how to argue sociably, while they are under the supervision of their parents. This seems more wise, to me, than squelching those questions until they are 30, living independently, and possibly raising children of their own without this knowledge, or, by this stage, the inclination to get it. It is when parents do not engage in these questions, that you are most likely to get college students who behave irrationally, and not merely with a surplus of enthusiasm and a deficit of experience.

Thanks Dr. Feser!

I’d riff on Plato and say no one under thirty has enough experience of life to be allowed to vote.

I agree with the classical greats’ assessment of the tendencies of youth, but would they also cancel the Debate Society at Thomas More College? Youth are for forming. As “rational animals” we have neglected our “animal” part which as in the animal kingdom should expect discipline in its social structure in the early years. If youthfulness goes astray, so does parenting and education. I had an ethics professor in college who said that one should not do ethics until the age of forty. Yet, at the age of 20 I had a better understanding of moral values through my family upbringing than did the few students in the class over 40 who had more life experience. Observation (and failure) in life can also turn people into moral subjectivists. The non-hypocritical, practicing-Christian, mother and father are the best formers of youth. But against these, and especially in a corrupt society, the children will still often rebel.

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