Intro to Plato | Philosophy Tube

[Music] the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once described all Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato and visit but it is nevertheless true that if you want to read philosophy a passing familiarity with Plato could probably help you out and I would be only too happy to demystify him for you today part 1 what do you recollect for the uninitiated plato was an ancient Greek philosopher who wrote a lot of stuff he was the student of Socrates of whom he probably at least heard the name because he was in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and the teacher of Aristotle who was in turn the teacher of Alexander the Great so very prolific very well-connected plato was the author of some of the earliest fanfiction in the world since he liked to write his philosophy as imaginary dialogues between his teacher Socrates and various other people Plato's dialogues are usually named after the other character to whom Socrates is speaking and our starting point for today is the Meno or Meno depending on how you want to pronounce it and from the north of England so I say Meno Socrates is chatting to this bloke Meno and Socrates asked him what is virtue a Meno says I anniversaries stuff like courage and wisdom and temperance that sort of thing and Socrates absolute typical Socrates move here says ah those are all examples of virtues I asked you to tell me what virtue is in itself what is the thing that all of these disparate examples of which you have in common that makes them virtues mmm I'm Socrates gadfly of Athens I oppose you with back to logic and we could ask this same question of a lot of things what our chairs essentially if there are so many different kinds of chair what are people as distinct from any particular person or Birds what are Birds we just don't know if you study philosophy formally you might find this referred to as the problem of one over many how can many different things also be examples of the same thing keep that problem the problem of one over many in your back pocket for the moment the discussion between Socrates and Meno goes on and they encounter what's known as menos paradox which is about learning and inquiry if you're trying to learn and you look for information then either you already know what you're looking for or you don't if you already know what you're looking for then you don't need to look for it and if you don't know what you're looking for then you can't begin to search for it and even if you found it you wouldn't know it when you did therefore inquiry is impossible everybody take the search bars off your browser's sovereignties says it's useless Meno and Socrates aren't satisfied with either of these conundrums the problem of one over many or the paradox of inquiry so Socrates thinks that he's got the answer to both he says we never really learn anything in fact the soul is immortal and it exists before we are born in a kind of abstract realm around beyond what we ordinarily experience called the realm of forms a form with a capital F is meant to be the purest instance of a thing the essential master version of something which all individual instances of it are linked to somehow so there are all different kinds of virtues but what makes them all of those shoes is that they all partake in the form of virtue there are all different kinds of chairs but they're all linked to the form of chair this abstract perfect chair all birds partake in the form of bird or people partake in the form of person and so on in this way Plato thinks that the fundamental building blocks of reality the forms transcend or lie beyond what we ordinarily experience and we're going to be returning to that theme later on before we're born he says that the soul spends I'm in the realm of forms and gets to know them so when it's incarnated in a body with a little bit of prompting it remembers therefore all learning is merely recollection and we don't need inquiry bish bash Bosh we've solved the problem of the many and menos paradox Plato talks about the forms again in another dialogue the parmenides and there they encounter a separate problem the character of polarities says look okay there's these things the forms and individual things partake in them but like same as the form of the bird do all birds partake in a little bit of it or is the entire form present in all of them if they each have all of it in them then how can separate things contain all of one thing without that thing itself being separated into pieces that doesn't make sense and if they each have a little bit of it then the form itself is split into pieces and isn't a singular abstract monolith at all and if each bird partakes in a part of the form of bird then how do those parts of the form relate to the whole they would have to partake in a separate part of the form so we've got a kind of infinite regress going on of things partaking in parts of forms partaking in parts of forms forever it's really not looking good for your Plato Milton part two we don't need no education you might be wondering whether Plato was just being metaphorical about the forms or maybe he's trying to make some kind of a point about knowledge or what but I think it's generally accepted that we can read him as being literal in one of his other dialogues the Fido or fado depending on how you pronounce it he argues that the soul really does exist and it really is immortal so he means this stuff in fact in the Parmenides they talked about the possibility that maybe the forms are just patterns or thoughts in our head and both options get rejected Parmenides points out that if we go down that road we've just restated the same problem in different language what's the relationship between every individual bird and my thought bird these concerns are what motivates Plato in the Parmenides at least to say that the forms occupy their own realm figuring out how they relate to things down here in the world that we live in is just so complex that it's easier to just shunt them off to their own special dimension which opens enough to what kinds of questions like where are they and what are they made of and does it make sense to say that they're out there if we can't encounter any direct evidence of them and so on all of which are absolute staples of undergraduate philosophy essays interestingly though in his book the Republic Plato elaborates a little on what the relationship between the forms and the world is supposed to be and he appears to change his mind he says that we can imagine Humanity as being like a bunch of prisoners chained up in a cave facing the wall and they've been there all their lives they can't look around behind them is a fire and as people and objects pass between the fire and them shadows are cast on the wall and because they've been there all their lives they think that the shadows are real objects but they're not they're just glimpses of the true objects and in the same way he says the forms are what truly exists and what we experience in our lives is just aspects of them moreover true knowledge is only possible by knowing the forms knowing a world of experience only gets you opinion and maybe true belief but real knowledge has to reference things as they really are that's what he says in the Republic anyway something that could be worth noting here is that Plato appears to be saying that the grounds for true knowledge are out there in some objective realm beyond and apart from humanity accordingly his view of what it is to live a good life or to be a rational a good person which he develops elsewhere similarly appeals to objective standards writing much later in the 20th century the philosopher Max Horkheimer said inherent in Plato's system is the idea of objective rather than subjective or formalized reason his views about objective forms are reflected in his views about objective knowledge in the philosophy jargon we say that his objective metaphysics breeds an objective epistemology and for today's purposes we don't really need to comment on whether that's a good or a bad thing but it is worth noting that that's not the only way of thinking about knowledge we have a saying in English I'm not sure whether other countries have it too there's more than one way to skin a cat and this particular way of skinning the knowledge cat is going to have some interesting consequences later on but back to the Meno having argued that the soul already knows everything and therefore all learning is merely recollection Socrates attempts to prove this point by chatting to one of menos slaves they ask him a whole bunch of questions and the slave boy says stop keeping slaves you dicks not really sadly although that's Horkheimer put it in admiring the sweeping vistas of the Platonic universe we must not forget that they stem from and presuppose a society based upon slave labor Socrates asks this slave boy a whole bunch of mathematical questions about geometry and stuff like if a square has size that are two feet long what will its area be and so on ostensibly Socrates doesn't teach the slave boy anything and he's never been formally educated but he still manages to get the correct answers and Socrates says AHA his soul must always have possessed this knowledge the reason he's able to get the answers is because his soul existed in a realm of forms before he was born and now he's remembering the form of square the form of triangle in facts a lot of the questions Saudis asks are pretty leading and if you're a slave boy and a friend of your master who is standing right there says to you doesn't this thing look a lot like this thing you're probably gonna go yes sir it sure does so it's not really a fair test part three here's where things get really interesting and really weird zip back to the Republic for a moment in that Plato says that not only do the forms exist in their own special realm but within that realm they have a hierarchy what's at the top of the hierarchy well what is the one form that all other forms must themselves partake in they all exist so they all must partake in the form of being of existence the form of being must be pretty high up in the chain a pretty fundamental thing in the universe top dog in the realm of forms but apparently not Plato says that the form of being isn't eyes they at all in fact it's just the second highest thing the highest and most fundamental form of them all is the form of the good the form that all good things are linked to the good illuminates all activities of the soul including knowledge just as the Sun illuminates sight the soul is like the eye when resting upon that on which truth and being shine the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing that is our world then she has opinion only and goes blinking about in his first one opinion and then of another and seems to have no intelligence that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good and that might sound a little bit odd surely the form of good exists and therefore must partake in the form of being and here Plato is saying that the good is above existence itself supera ontological as the jargon goes he's a little unclear as to what the content of the form of the good actually is in the Republic he says that good can't mean pleasure or justice or beauty or even knowledge but something that all these things have in common that makes them good rather cheekily Plato thought that only philosophers and only very clever ones that that could ever have knowledge of the form of the good and for that reason they should rule literally run the government the Republic is all about him designing a supposedly perfect City which in his opinion would be run by philosophers and since he thought knowledge was attainable only by interacting with these objective forms out there in their own realm it almost stands to reason that he would privilege those he thought could get to know them still didn't quite manage to iron out the whole slavery thing them so how come the good is the highest form well it's not really entirely clear but fast forward two and a half thousand years and the modern philosopher Simon Critchley might be able to shed some light on it in his book infinitely demanding Critchley puts forward a very interesting theory of mind he says in effect that there are no value-neutral humans to be a human being to have a mind is to be split into two pieces there's the bit of ourselves that we experience and live our lives as but there's also our ideal self the self that we think we should be our best self our ideal self can be great it can be the source of our moral conscience telling us how we should behave towards others but if we have an unhealthy relationship with our ideal self it could make us feel really anxious because we'll never attain it there's an interesting parallel here - what communications professor Helen Shula says about diet and exercise she says that when we talk about diet and exercise we can sometimes elapse into thinking of the cell as being in two opposing pieces the body which is a voracious and must be tamed a little Hoover up all the food insight and the mind which needs to exercise control and discipline or at least a particular understanding of the mind and what that understanding of the mind is and the values it holds we may want to question and she explores this view advocates the bifurcation of the self such that the authentic embodied self is managed and disciplined by the social Civic agent indeed motivating oneself to exercise a concept so common that it is a founding assumption relies on this bifurcation of the self this entails as I have described an apprehension of the self a split between the authentic self and what might be understood of the Civic self which is congruent with the neoliberal imaginary of the individual as a rational and autonomous and moreover logically construed as masculine maybe Plato is hinting at something like Critch Lee's bifurcated model of the self saying that the good is what we're all aiming at necessarily so it must be the highest thing my big problem with kritch Lee's view and Shughart bears this out nicely is that sometimes our ideals aren't good as somebody who struggles with body image regularly I can tell you that sometimes our ideal self is unrealistic based on values that we wouldn't choose if we've had a choice or worse that somebody else told us to adopt because it's advantageous to them so maybe it isn't the form of the good that should be the highest but the form of value things that are thought to be good but might not be in this way we can see that Plato is attempting to reach beyond the world and find something firmer and truer and certain to explain all the wild stuff that's going on down here and maybe that's ultimately a futile quest because if Critchley and sugar are right then it isn't out there in the realm of the forms it's just over here a short trip to the other side of your brain maybe it is ultimately impasse but it has nevertheless very much set the intellectual tone for the last two and a half thousand years if you liked today's video on Plato I have a tip jar and PayPal dot me slash philosophy tubers like me put in a hat round at the end of the lecture if you could do a regular sign up patreon.com slash philosophy tube is what enables me to pay rent [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 237,163

Keywords: plato, philosophy, republic, meno, education, ancient greece, forms, parmenides, phaedo, metaphysics

Id: Rh_iRwtPNHc

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018