Plato

1. Plato What is education? What is an educated person? What is the goal of education?

2. The Republic by Plato[Plato @438-347] • The Republic is an argument made through Socratic dialogue about the right way to live and the right society to have (a just polis). Ancient philosophers saw these as connected. You need good people to have a good society. But people cannot become good without society’s being a particular way to lead them toward being good. • Socrates famously claimed “I know that I know nothing.” Plato’s view was that this made Socrates wise. He did not take things for granted. • Socratic dialogue uses a method called the Socratic dialectic [the elenchus] that involves an argument where two people do not know the answer to a question but engage in a dialogue about a particular concept, in order to arrive at an understanding of it. (Sometimes they do not figure it out.) E.g., ‘what is piety?’ • In ’The Republic’ the question is ‘what is justice’? He has various interlocutors (partners in the dialectic. His goal is to describe the just polis [city-state]. What would a perfectly just society look like? For Plato, it has to be ruled by perfectly just people.

3. Some questions • Are educated people more ‘fit to rule’? Why? • What kind of education should rulers have? • Should we try to fit education into the various slots people have in society or should we attempt to give everyone the same education? • What is ‘wisdom’? How does it differ from intelligence? • Are there ‘special people’ who are wiser than other people when it comes to how to organize and run society? • Are wise people more moral than people who haven’t developed wisdom? Is there any connection between wisdom and being a good person? If you are really knowledgeable, will you be a good person?

4. Plato argues (through Socratic dialogue) • (1) There is an ultimate reality that is not evident purely from looking at the world. This explains everything about our world. Understanding the features of this reality happens through apprehension of it that isn’t purely a type of expertise. This is the ‘form of the good.’ • (2) Certain people are the most fit to rule. The rulers should have education that allows them to understand the good, and this requires education that makes it possible for them to apprehend the form of the good. [You discover who these people are in childhood, by focusing particularly on people who are good at math.] • (3) Rule should be by the wise.

5. ‘Turning the psyche’—Is the good pleasure? • The first thing Socrates (or Plato through Socrates, at this point in Plato’s career) tells you at this point in the dialogue is that we have to know the form of the good to know about anything else. • He considers pleasure as a candidate for the good, and says the majority considers pleasure to be the good. • Is this true? What’s the evidence for it? [Is it that people always pursue pleasure? ] • What’s the evidence against it? • Socrates in the early dialogues thought that all immoral behavior rested on a mistake. If you choose anything, it has to be because you think thing is good. Even if you choose something bad, it is because you see the bad as good. • Plato thinks “every soul pursues the good and does whatever it does for its sake...” but we cannot necessarily get it right.”

6. Why the good isn’t pleasure • One problem with thinking the good is pleasure is that there are bad pleasures. So then you would have to think the same things are both good and bad, which involves you in a contradiction. • Another problem is that people are satisfied with what is only apparently good but “[n]obody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good...everyone wants the things that really are good, and disdains mere belief here.” (16) • What are some cases where people believe something is good but they are wrong. How do we know what is good? Don’t people get this wrong all the time? Plato: ”they have opinions without knowledge.” So how do you make sure you don’t get it wrong?

7. The form of the good is the somehow the cause of all knowledge • (The city will be ruled by guardians. They are the only ones who safeguard what is good in the city. So they need to know the form of the good.) • The good is not visible. Our senses tell us what is visible but the form of the good cannot be apprehended by our senses. • Socrates argues that the form of the good is like the sun. • It is the cause of knowledge. If we want to explain how we see things, we say that light is the cause of our eyes’ ability to see. • “The sun is not sight, but isn’t it the cause of sight itself, and seen by it?...What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding, and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.” (18)

8. When we perceive what is true, we see it through the form of the good ”...that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also and objection of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things but the good is other and more beautiful than they....” But we cannot see it directly. Nevertheless, there are things we can know without being able to see them directly, and these are mathematical principles. While we use the figures we draw in geometry to reflect the ideas, the ideas we have are actually apprehended in the intellect.

9. Allegory of the line

10. Four conditions in the soul • “...there are four such conditions of the soul, corresponding to four subsections of our line. Understanding is the highest, thought for the second, belief for the third, and imaging for the last.” • What we seek is knowledge. We don’t have real knowledge until we understand that the form of the good is the cause of all that we perceive.

11. Book VII: The Allegory of the Cave • This is a very famous allegory. • See youtube illustration of the allegory of the cave • Here’s a retro one retro illustrated allegory of the cave. • Claymation! • The point is that the source of our knowledge is distantly caused. The form of the good causes true knowledge. Our belief that the world is exactly as it appears to our senses is like the shadows on the wall—not exactly an illusion since it is distant related to the form of the good. But not the whole truth. • But people don’t want to know the truth. ”...anyone who tried to free [the prisoners] and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, would they kill him?” [Note: The Athenians killed Socrates, and Plato may be alluding to this.]

12. The wise rulers have to be properly educated so the city can be happy • Education for Plato is not only of the intellect but for the whole person. • The soul [mind] is divided into three parts: (1) reasoning/logical (2) spirited (shame, anger) and (3) appetitive (desiring). • All these parts require training for a person to become wise.

13. The ‘philosopher kings’ (guardians) • Plato thinks that the wise should rule. • The city should be divided into three classes (1) the producers (2) the auxiliaries (defenders of the city, enforcers of the laws) (3) the guardians (wise and virtuous rulers). • People aren’t born into their class. They are selected for the class they are most fit for. They are selected by their character.

14. What is education • “...education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily, and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately...” • A person who is raised in such a way to avoid the ‘leaden weights’ that distract him from truth, will be turned toward the truth (which involves knowing the form of the good). • This person will also be good. They will avoid the temptations that lead them into injustice.

15. Knowing How to Rule, and Be Ruled as Justice Demands. • From Plato’s Laws. (The Athenian is the one who is given the stronger arguments. Four old men are walking in Crete, and discussing these issues.] • Athenian: To be a good at an occupation, a person has to be trained from childhood. “the correct way to bring up and educate a child is to use his playtime to imbue his soul with the greatest possible liking for the occupation in which he will have to be absolutely perfect when he grows up...” • The issue is education in virtue: “a training which produces a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled as justice demands...[people] with a correct education become good...this is a lifelong task which everyone should undertake to the limit of his strength...” (26)

16. Can we teach people to be good?[Can virtue be taught?] • What is the relationship between being wise and being good? • Plato [the Athenian]: “...those who can control themselves are good, those who cannot are bad.” • We’re each a single person that “possesses...a pair of witless and mutually antagonistic advisors which we call pleasure and pain...” Puppet of the gods—”we have these emotions in us, which act like cords or strings and tug us about: they work in opposition and tug against each other to make us perform actions that are opposed correspondingly; back and forth we go across the boundary line where vice and virtue meet. One of these dragging forces, according to our argument, demands our constant obedience, and this is the one we have to hang on to...the pull fo the other cords we must resist...This cord which is golden and holy, transmits the power of ‘calculation—a power which in a state is called the public law...’ (27)