I’ve recently had the pleasure of re-reading two of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Sophist. Reading Plato is always a pleasure. Even when he’s wrong, i.e., when his philosophy is inadequate, he’s never wholly wrong.
To understand this, one has to see Plato in two ways at the same time: philosophically, in terms of his doctrines; and historically, or we might say developmentally, in terms of the evolution of philosophy itself. Both approaches are crucial. A lot of critical thinking, it seems, comes down to the ability to wear bifocal mental lenses.
There were some important thinkers before Plato, known as the Presocratics – Parmenides being the most important of them. (We only know Socrates through Plato’s writing, so for all practical purposes they are one thinker). But the Presocratics were groping toward philosophy, not really practicing it. They had no choice, because there was no philosophy. And Plato took that groping to a much higher level. (We’re still groping, by the way, but we’re standing, as Newton put it, on the shoulders of giants.)
Plato was certainly the first great Western philosopher, even if “philosophy” to him meant the general love of wisdom, and was not circumscribed as it is now, focused on questions about knowledge, being, value, and justice. Philosophy, in Plato’s time, meant all learning. He began the process of focusing it. (I say he’s “Western” philosopher, by the way, because there was a lot of important thinking going on (including some meta-cognitive thinking) in other parts of the world. But it wasn’t what we call philosophy in the strict sense, which I would argue is uniquely Western – but that’s for another post.)
Philosophy as we know it too two extraordinary quantum leaps in less than a century, the fifth century BCE. First, it leaped from the fragments of the Presocratics to Plato, with his twenty-plus dialogues (including the book-length Republic). Then it leaped again from Plato to his student Aristotle, another giant step that virtually completed the fledging of philosophy as a distinctive discipline based on rigorous thinking about thought itself.
One of the crucial areas of philosophy that Plato groped toward (and had no explicit conception of) was logic. Another was ethics, and a third was politics. In Aristotle, all three were further refined into their own distinct subdisciplines. And in his spare time, among other things, Aristotle systematized the study of rhetoric, and invented biology.
We can see this groping in Plato’s wrestling with the problem of existence or being, and the question of whether nonmaterial things, such as ideas or properties ( “Forms” as he called them), exist independently of the rest of the world. A modern thinker would say that of course they do. Wiser ones would add that such metaphysical judgments are necessarily pragmatic ones: if it’s useful (meaningful) to say something exists, then it exists – otherwise not. Unicorns exist – not materially, but as concepts. So do dentists and subject headings and credit ratings and all sorts of other “things”, material or otherwise.
Plato’s arguments, I would suggest, are sometimes flawed (notably, he hypostatizes his Forms as being real while everything material is unreal; that’s a stretch). But developmentally, in terms of driving philosophy forward, wrenching it into existence one might say, Plato is brilliant. He provides the outline, at least, of a foundation for all modern thought. He is stuck in binary thinking, but struggling against it, without necessarily knowing what he’s groping for: the ability to individuate things in the first place, and to identify different kinds or degrees of reality; to make distinctions and connections among things; to identify properties and concepts as well as material objects; to see beliefs (even false ones) as prima facie real. We have the luxury of nonbinary thinking, but Plato forged the path to where we are.
Plato gropes, most of all, to distinguish between material objects and things that exist in mental or conceptual space. In fact, he’s inventing that conceptual space – an architect of thought inhabiting a house while simultaneously designing and building it. Thus, he’s an incomplete philosopher in the sense that a foundation is an incomplete house. I think of him a genius in a primeval culture, straining against its limited vocabulary to refine and improve his arguments. (And some of those arguments are simply obnoxious to modern eyes). Interestingly, he more or less invented the dialogue as a philosophic form and made brilliant use of it; yet hardly any subsequent philosophers have chosen that form.
This primitive quality of Plato’s thought, however, has at least two distinct virtues. (And by “primitive,” of course, I don’t mean flawed, lest the word police catch me, but rather an early phase in an evolutionary process). One is that it’s a necessary bridge from the pre-philosophy of the Presocratics to the fully-fledged philosophy of Aristotle. There can be no philosophy without that bridge. It had to develop stepwise, building on itself. That it happened so quickly in Ancient Greece is something of a miracle. (There were many other philosophers and schools; but Plato and Aristotle stand head-and-shoulders above the rest.)
Another is that Plato’s writing has a certain charm – almost a kind of poetry; and (despite translation problems that lead to great variations) it is exceedingly clear. (Aristotle is dry by comparison, even dull, though his thought is more compelling and rigorous). As a result, Plato is much more accessible to the average reader than most philosophy since. He has neither the technical vocabulary nor the highly abstract concepts (if these don’t amount to the same thing) that have made philosophy more precise, in some ways more interesting and useful, but also more abstruse and isolated from other disciplines, in the two thousand years since.
A final note: a short essay in the New York Times by Adam Nicolson gets to the heart of the fifth-century Greek miracle. It’s called “How A Few Days Sailing in the Aegean Changed My Mind About the Fundamental Nature of Things.” It’s a beautiful preface to Plato – and to philosophy.