Socrates spent his last day talking with his wife who was holding their child in her arms. When she saw her husband’s friends she burst into tears and Socrates asked one of them to take her home. After a lengthy discussion about the immortality of the soul (in which the Platonic Socrates believed), Socrates drank the hemlock. His friends had tears in their eyes and one broke out in a passionate cry which unmanned them. Socrates alone retained his composure and pointed out that he asked the women to leave so that they might not misbehave since he wished to die peacefully. He wrapped his head in his cloak and died quietly among his friends, believing he was going to a better world in which he would at last discover the truth and rightness of existence. At his passing Phaedo remarked that of all men of his time whom he had known, Socrates was the wisest and best. After he died the Athenians soon felt such remorse that they closed the training grounds and gymnasia, put Meletus to death, banished the other accusers, and honoured Socrates with a bronze statue.
Socrates is today regarded as a legendary figure who lived and died for the truth. But in a world which no longer values truth as he did, he is now treated as something of a relic. His dialogues are widely regarded as difficult, boring and pointless. Since the 1970s and the rise of the postmodern world, thinking has been challenged by feeling, and argument is widely regarded as aggressive, rude and confronting. Consequently, we have to endure conversations laced with ‘in my opinion’, ‘it seems to me’, ‘I feel’, ‘subjectively speaking’ and such other phrases as enable people to pretend they are friendly by not causing offence to others. What these phrases actually do is protect their users from criticism. Expressions of personal feelings cannot be true or false since no one can know another’s feelings. To immunise oneself against criticism, then, one has only to use these apologetic phrases to disarm opponents. Socrates was not interested in how people felt, but in the truth of their descriptions of the world and themselves and in the validity of their arguments. He would be appalled that, 2400 years after his death, we lack the courage to submit ourselves to debate for fear of offending others. Socrates, to his credit, went out of his way to offend others by stating the truth and arguing about human existence: he died for his belief that the truth should be acknowledged no matter whom it might offend.
Today’s political correctness guardians do not respond warmly to Socrates. They would probably put him on trial again because in following the truth wherever it led him, he offended many people. His view was that a truth unuttered is a crime against philosophy and humanity and if people did not like to hear truths expressed, they needed to be educated. But he was surrounded, as we are today, by people who feared freedom of expression and sought to prohibit it. Consequently, the great age of Greek enlightenment was characterised by many trials for ‘corrupting the public’ and Socrates and Protagoras were two of many philosophers and dramatists who were found guilty and severely punished. Very little has changed over the centuries.
Of those who succeeded Socrates, the most famous is Plato who was too distressed to be with his mentor on his last day. Born in 427 BC, Plato was a young aristocrat whose disdain for democracy increased after the democrats put Socrates to death. Philosophically, he was greatly influenced by Pythagoras, Parmenides and Socrates from whom he derived his spiritualism, ontology and ethical ideas. At age 40 he was summoned to Syracuse but he found tutoring a tyrant uncongenial and the relationship ended badly. Upon his return to Athens, he joined a group of friends who wanted to establish an institution of learning – the Academy - with Plato at its head. After writing several of his now famous dialogues, Plato was invited back to Syracuse to advise its rulers on how to build a strong and glorious city-state. Again, Plato failed to convince the politicians and he returned to the intellectual delights of the Academy where he lectured and wrote more dialogues. His most famous dialogue – The Republic – is the outcome of what proved to be three unsuccessful visits to Syracuse. The Academy lasted for more than a thousand years and has never really left us since the universities of the Western world attest to its influence and inspiration.
Plato was greatly influenced by Socrates’ obsession with the meaning of moral concepts. In his famous parable of the cave he asks his readers to imagine being members of a group of people chained together and able only to face a wall. Behind them is a source of light and between them and the light something moves, thus throwing shadows on the wall of the cave. When asked questions about the ‘real’ world the only possible answers are ‘shadowy’ because the shadows represent the world of the cave-dwellers. Imagine that one person is released from bondage. She finds an escape route. But is she courageous enough to escape into the unknown? Assuming that she is, she climbs a tunnel with difficulty (the analogy here with school and vocational training is obvious). She considers turning back because the effort is considerable (one stops studying after school). But she perseveres and discovers another escape route. Does she have the courage to take the opportunity offered to her? Assuming that she does, she encounters the sunlight. The sun is too bright and there is a strong temptation to return to her friends in the safety of the cave. She has spent considerable energy in climbing out of the tunnel (the hard work of training) and exposure to the sun is tiring and painful. However, she perseveres and eventually finds comfort and rewards in the sun: she has become enlightened. As a member of a community her duty is to return to the cave and pass on her knowledge to the other cave-dwellers. This is a dangerous enterprise because she now speaks a different language and introduces new, strange images and ideas to her colleagues. Her probable fate is, like Socrates, death and so it is prudent to keep the cave-dwellers chained until they too ‘see the light’ and in their turn enlighten others.
Teachers have for centuries followed Plato’s advice and endeavour to keep their students chained by examining them, even when postmodern students announce that exams are unreasonable because their (low) grades are based on their teachers’ feelings. It has to be said that teachers brought this upon themselves with the popular belief that education should be free of competition and stress and that students should be seen as customers who demand, and should therefore receive appropriate service by passing their subjects. And so it is suggested (half-jokingly) that students should not be failed on the grounds that this discriminates against those with low ability. Socrates would appreciate the half-joke: Plato would not.
Enlightenment is intimately connected in Plato with his theory of the Forms. While we can conjecture about images, have beliefs about objects, understand concepts, it is through pure reason that we have knowledge of the Forms. The Forms (or objective ideas) are universals, such as Justice, Courage, Love and Beauty. Perfect, adamantine, unchanging, such universals exist on their own unmixed with time and space or each other. No particular action can be called truly courageous: only Courage is really courageous. While Plato maintains that the Forms are external to the individual, it is clear that since they are spaceless and timeless, they cannot be said to be anywhere. In short, they are everywhere and nowhere. Nonetheless, if through philosophical reflection we can entertain some notion of, say, Courage, we are in a better position to act rationally and wisely with respect to courageous action. We can be trained to act courageously, but we cannot know Courage thereby. Really to know Courage we need to be educated and this requires at least some knowledge of moral concepts. As education is concerned to draw out the innate knowledge which resides in the mind, Platonic education is governed by the rules of deductive reasoning and based on the practice of dialectic.
In one of Plato’s later dialogues, Parmenides, Socrates encounters the venerable Parmenides and discusses with him the theory of the Forms. Parmenides replies with a devastating critique of the theory and reduces Socrates, for the first time in Plato’s dialogues, to despair. There are three difficult questions to be answered before the theory of the Forms can be accepted. First, are there Forms of everything? Socrates is sure that there are forms of Beauty and Goodness. But he suffers doubts about whether there are Forms of mud, hair and dirt. Second, are Forms thoughts in the mind? Parmenides objects that thoughts are of real things and so cannot be thoughts in the mind. Third, are the Forms cut off from