PLATO'S ACADEMY AND THE SCIENCES

At some time between the early 380s and the middle 360s Plato founded what came to be known as the Academy. Our information about the early Academy is very scant. We know that Plato was the leader (scholarch) of the Academy until his death and that his nephew Speusippus succeeded him in this position. We know that young people came from around the Greek world to be at the Academy and that the most famous of such people, Aristotle, stayed there for approximately twenty years. However, it appears that, at least in Plato's time, there were no fees attached to being at the Academy. Thus it does not seem likely that it had any official “professorial staff” or that “students” took a set of courses to qualify them to fill certain positions in life. The Academy was more likely a community of self-supporting intellectuals gathered around Plato and pursuing a variety of interests ranging from the abstractions of metaphysics to more concrete issues of politics and ethics.

In Book VII of the Republic Socrates describes a plan of higher education designed to turn the most promising young people of a Utopian city-state into ideal rulers. It is frequently assumed (and quite naturally) that this curriculum bears a significant relation to Plato's plans for the Academy; sometimes it has even been described as essentially the plans themselves. It is important to see that this assumption is subject to major qualifications. For, first of all, fourth-century Athens is not even an approximation to Plato's Utopia; Plato could not expect entrants in the Academy to have been honed in the way the Utopian citizens are supposed to be.

For a correct understanding of Plato, account needs to be taken of the fact that his philosophical activity spanned some fifty years, during which time certain doctrines underwent considerable changes. To trace this development and so be able to identify the final expression of his thought, it is essential to know in what order the dialogues were written, but there is little help in this quest either from external sources or from the dialogues themselves. Regarding the former, the only information likely to be reliable is Aristotle's statement that the Laws was written after the Republic. This is repeated by Diogenes Laertius (III 37) and Olympiodorus [Prol. VI 24), who add that the Laws was still in an unrevised state on wax tablets when Plato died and was published posthumously by one of his students, Philip of Opus. As for internal evidence, cross references in the Sophist (217a) and Politicus (257a, 258b) indicate the prior composition of the former, while the Timaeus (27a) mentions the Critias as its sequel. Rather less definite is the apparent reference in the Timaeus (17b- 19b) to the Republic, in the Sophist to the Parmenides (217c) and Theaetetus (216a), and in the Theaetetus to the Parmenides (183e).

Plato (427-347 B.C.) stands at the head of our philosophical tradition, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing that touches upon the wide range of topics that are still discussed by philosophers today under such headings as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, language, art, love, mathematics, science, and religion. He may in this sense be said to have invented philosophy as a distinct subject, for although all of these topics were, of course, discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, he was the first to bring them together by giving them a unitary treatment. He conceives of philosophy as a discipline with a distinctive intellectual method, and he makes radical claims for its position in human life and the political community. Because philosophy scrutinizes assumptions that other studies merely take for granted, it alone can give us genuine understanding; since it discovers a realm of objects inaccessible to the senses and yields an organized system of truths that go far beyond and in some cases undermine common sense, it should lead to a transformation in the way we live our lives and arrange our political affairs. It is an autonomous subject and not the instrument of any other discipline, power, or creed; on the contrary, because it alone can grasp what is most important in human life, all other human endeavors should be subordinate to it.

In this essay I will try to identify and explain the fundamental argument of Plato's Republic for the astonishing thesis that justice is so great a good that anyone who fully possesses it is better off, even in the midst of severe misfortune, than a consummately unjust person who enjoys the social rewards usually received by the just. Plato's attempt to defend this remarkable claim is of course the unifying thread of the dialogue, but his argument ranges so widely over diverse topics that it is difficult to see how it all fits together, and anyone who attempts to state his argument must take a stand on interpretive issues about which there is considerable scholarly controversy. The dialogue's difficulty is increased by Plato's failure to give any explicit justification for the complex moral equation he boldly announces: Justice discounted by pain and dishonor is more advantageous than injustice supplemented by the rewards of justice. Even if he manages to show that justice is the greatest single good, we are still left wondering whether its value is high enough to make this equation come out right.

For some time philosophers have thought of epistemology and metaphysics as different branches of philosophy, investigating, respectively, what can be known and the basic properties and nature of what there is. It is hard, though, to see any genuine boundary here. The issues irresistibly overlap. Certainly in Plato there is no such divide. His views about what there is are largely controlled by ideas about how knowledge can be accounted for, and his thinking about what knowledge is takes its character from convictions about what there is that is knowable. As a result his doctrines have a different shape from characteristically modern ones.

Some earlier Platonic writings do have a somewhat modern look. Socrates was notorious for having questioned whether he knew much of anything, and for making people hesitant about their opinions (Meno 80c, 86b-c). c). Plato exploits this side of Socratic thought. The namesake of the Euthyphro judges that an action of his is pious. Socrates wonders whether Euthyphro ought to be confident about that judgment, and tries to make him less so. Elsewhere Socrates raises questions concerning his own judgments about which things are beautiful (H. Ma. 286c). Such questions seem to suggest a general policy of doubting, reminiscent to us of Descartes or of the various programs of ancient skepticism. In Socrates' efforts to overcome ignorance (Meno 86b-c) we might see a project of justifying beliefs like that of typical contemporary epistemologists.

In most of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates professes to inquire into some virtue. At the same time, he professes not to know what the virtue in question is. How, then, can he inquire into it? Doesn't he need some knowledge to guide his inquiry? Socrates' disclaimer of knowledge seems to preclude Socratic inquiry. This difficulty must confront any reader of the Socratic dialogues; but one searches them in vain for any explicit statement of the problem or for any explicit solution to it. The Meno, by contrast, both raises it explicitly and proposes a solution.

THE PRIORITY OF KNOWLEDGE WHAT (PKW)

Meno begins the dialogue by asking whether virtue is teachable (70a1-2). Socrates replies that he doesn't know the answer to Meno's question; nor does he at all (to parapan, 71a7) know what virtue is. The latter failure of knowledge explains the former; for “if I do not know what a thing is, how could I know what it is like?” (ho de mē oida ti estin, pōs an hopoion ge ti eideiēn; 71b3-4). Nonetheless, he proposes to inquire with Meno into what virtue is. Here, as in the Socratic dialogues, Socrates both disclaims knowledge and proposes to inquire.

INFLUENCES ON PLATO

We lack the materials for a proper biography of Plato. He hardly refers to himself at all in the dialogues. The ancient “Lives” are infected by gossip, legend, and fiction and the ostensibly autobiographical Seventh Letter is probably spurious. Fortunately, however, Aristotle provides us with important evidence on Plato's intellectual development. He says that Plato was first influenced by Cratylus the Heraclitean, and later by Socrates (Met. 987a32-bio). It is unlikely that Aristotle derived his claim about Craytlus from reading Plato's dialogues; he probably had some independent source. And since he was probably well informed about Socrates and Plato, his statement deserves to be taken seriously.

Aristotle implies that Plato is influenced both by the older, “pre-Socratic” tradition of the “naturalists“ (phusiologoi; cf. Aristotle, De Caelo 289b25-9) and by the more recent application of philosophy to moral and political questions. What, then, did Plato find when he looked at these two movements in Greek philosophy?

Religion permeated life in classical Athens and in classical Greece generally. It is hardly surprising, then, that religious vocabulary - mention of gods, festivals, beliefs, and rites - also pervades Plato's dialogues. These dialogues reveal a man struggling to understand human life and how it ought to be lived, a man engaged in deep reflection about rational inquiry, the human roles in society and in the cosmos, and man's relationship to the divine. Religion, as rite, conception, motif, and vocabulary, is integral to his thinking. By showing how this is so we can illuminate Plato's thinking from the religious side, as it were, and thereby exhibit Plato's relationship to Greek religion and piety.

It is hard to exaggerate the prominence of religion in Greek life. Greek religion was pluralistic and heterogeneous,- there was a host of divinities with overlapping roles and features. A dozen gods formed the conventional core of this pantheon (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Demeter, Dionysos, Hephaistos, Ares); broadly conceived as Zeus's family, these, and lesser divinities such as the goat-god Pan, are the Olympians, so called after Mount Olympus, site of Zeus's palace. They and other gods, such as Hades and Persephone, were themselves varied and multiple, each present at dozens of places in various guises, serving a variety of purposes and roles. Zeus, for example, manifest as a thunderbolt, was the strongest of the gods and the father of gods and men.

Plato does not have a comprehensive theory of love. Rather, he diverts certain received opinions about love to his own peculiarly philosophic ends. He is not interested in telling us what it would be like to live with someone as a platonic lover. Or so I shall argue, from a reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus. I shall ignore the social regulations for sexuality proposed in the Republic (III 402d-403c, V 459-461) and the Laws (VIII 835c-842a) as not directly relevant to what has most fascinated Plato's readers about his approach to love, and is the topic of this essay: namely, the bridge he constructs between love and philosophy. I shall also ignore the potentially relevant discussion of friendship (against the background of a love affair) in that subtle and complex dialogue, the Lysis, in order to leave room to stretch myself to something worthwhile on the Symposium and Phaedrus. Of these two works, I shall focus on the former, for it alone among the dialogues is concerned exclusively with love.

Although the main topic of the Philebus, the rivalry between pleasure and knowledge as candidates for the dignity of the highest good in human life, is a familiar one from the early Socratic dialogues on, for the wider congregation of Plato's admirers the Philebus to this very day remains largely terra incognita. It is regarded as one of the late and difficult dialogues, an area for the specialist who has mastered the intricacies of the late Platonic doctrine that we find more alluded to than explained in the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, and the Sophist. What frightens the student of Plato's ethics off the territory is most of all the long “dialectico-metaphysical preface” of the Philebus (14c-31b). For the first quarter of the dialogue is filled with a rather complex discussion of dialectical procedure, dealing with “the one and many,” and with a new kind of ontological classification that is, at least at first sight, more bewildering than enlightening and may exhaust the reader's patience before he has even penetrated to the lengthy discussion of different sorts of pleasures that starts at 31b and fills most of the rest of the dialogue.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato expels the poetry of Homer and his followers- “the poetry of pleasure” as he calls it- from his ideal state by observing that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. At the same time, he expresses a willingness to put aside the quarrel. His spokesman, Socrates, throws out a challenge: If the poetry of pleasure or its defenders can show that it is “not only pleasant, but also useful for cities and human life,” they would gladly receive it back (607a-e). Plato returns to this challenge in his last work, the Laws. The tragic poets approach the lawmakers and ask, May we bring our poetry to your city? The lawmakers reply that they, the lawmakers, are “poets” too, rivals and competitors in making the “most beautiful drama.” Their drama is the state, an “imitation of the most beautfiul and best life.” If the tragedians can show them dramas that agree with theirs, they will be allowed to perform; otherwise not (817a-d).

In the Laws, Plato takes the more conciliatory stance of one who admits rather than expels, but the quarrel persists. Only the type of poetry that is politically correct is permitted; the rest is banished. The reason is that poets and lawmakers are rivals in fashioning human life. Both are at once “makers” (the etymological meaning of poiētai, “poets”) and “imitators” of moral values; and in a wellordered society they must speak with one voice. This subordination of poetry to politics has offended many readers of Plato from antiquity to the present. Plato sees the poet primarily as a maker of ethics, and this concern appears strangely one-sided.

Does Plato have a “later” political theory, as distinct from an earlier? It is certainly easy to suppose so. Read the Republic and you confront the most radical political system ever devised. Plato's key argument is that ruling a state is or should be a skill, based on precise knowledge of certain suprasensible, eternal, and unchanging realities called Forms [ideai], notably those of the social and political virtues, but also those of the rest of reality. On the strength of such insight, the rulers of Callipolis (“Splendid City”), a highly trained cadre of Guardians, or Philosopher-Kings, exercise direct and total political control; and lawmaking is accordingly treated by Plato in a decidedly offhand manner, as a humdrum business on which the Guardians will spend little time.

If you are by now gasping with astonishment or even indignation at the audacity of these proposals, you have every justification; for at first sight Plato's thought seems almost unintelligible. For what are Forms, and why ought they to have such a drastic effect on practical politics? The explanation, though full of philosophical problems that cannot be explored here, can be stated quite briefly. A Form, say of virtue, is the essence of virtue, what it really is, as distinct from the individual things or actions or people that instantiate it in this world; for they only share in the Form of Virtue in varying degrees; they are not Virtue Itself. Now the Greek word usually translated “virtue” is in fact better rendered by “excellence” - excellence for something.

Plato's commitment to what has been called “self-predication” that is, to sentences of the form

Bravery is brave

The Large is large

is one of the most evident and characteristic features of his work. This commitment figures in dialogues of all three periods, and is so far from optional as to be at the foundation of Platonism. Yet these sentences immediately produce negative reactions in us. The first one displayed above, for example, seems clearly false. It seems to be attributing a feature to Bravery that it could not have - we can hardly imagine it performing deeds of valor or bearing up under adversity. The characteristic claim that the Large is large without qualification seems ludicrously to take its subject as another thing like an elephant, only bigger. The presence of claims of this type in Plato's text can make us feel that his way of thinking is not merely foreign to us, but seriously confused as well. Aristotle's rude and dismissive outburst “So good-bye to the Forms. For they are nonsense” seems about right.

Our background suspicion that the Platonic Forms may not really be respectable makes the Parmenides especially intriguing to us. For that dialogue owes its fame to the presence, in its first part, of an exchange between a young Socrates and a venerable Parmenides. The utterances of Socrates are reminiscent of statements that are widely regarded as constituting Plato's theory of Forms, as presented in the Republic and the Phaedo. Yet here, when questioned by Parmenides, Socrates fails repeatedly to uphold his views, and falls into perplexity. This passage has seemed to generations of readers to show a sensitivity to the kinds of problems they themselves associated with Platonism (including but not confined to confusion over self-predication).

Can the philosophical views of the historical Socrates be distinguished from those of his pupil Plato? And if so, how do the master's views differ from the pupil's? And do these Socratic views add up to a coherent philosophical position?

In Section I of this chapter, I explain the basis on which, following most modern interpreters, I feel able to divide Plato's dialogues into a group of (earlier) “Socratic” dialogues, where the character Socrates speaks more or less for the historical Socrates; and a group of (middle and later) dialogues in which the main character (now not always Socrates) speaks rather for Plato. I argue that the Plato of the middle and later dialogues, though some of his views remain the same, and though he attacks some of the same enemies and for some of the same reasons, has nevertheless in some ways gone well beyond the master. On some points, I suggest, he even contradicts him. In Section II, I contrast these Socratic dialogues with the other dialogues - first, in their form, method, tone, and subject matter; second, in their attitude to the sciences (arts, crafts, expertises), education, rhetoric, and mathematics; and third, in their theories of virtue, desire, and “weakness of will.” In Section III, I address myself to the question with what right I attribute any views at all to a philosopher who claimed that he knew only that he knew nothing - especially when the Socratic dialogues virtually all end negatively.

Chopin was a master of small forms. Few beliefs more centrally govern modern perceptions of Chopin than this one. It supports not only the myriad manifestations of his high stature in our culture (performances and critical analyses alike can be read as endorsements of the composer's extraordinary skill at miniatures), but also the occasional barbs that are thrown his way (some writers profess a complementary axiom that mastery of large forms eluded him).

But while the centrality of this belief may lend it the appearance of a timeless truth, it seems instead that the meaning of its fundamental term, form, has altered substantially over the past century and a half. When we unreflectively discuss form in Chopin's music as if its intent were self-evident, we therefore at least to some degree misrepresent its significance to his culture. All of us – pianists and amateur enthusiasts as well as musicologists – need to be aware of this disjunction between past and present: before we can probe aspects of form in Chopin's miniatures, we need to explore some of the ways in which the ideas of form and (to a lesser extent) smallness were construed in the first half of the nineteenth century. That these explorations can have very practical applications I hope to show in the second portion of my essay, which will focus on Chopin's smallest forms, the preludes.