Plato 9781472541499, 9780826484086

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the Series Editor, Richard Bailey, Anthony Haynes of Continuum, Philip Gaisford, David Mirhady and an anonymous publisher’s reader for helpful comments. I am particularly indebted to Devi Pabla, without whom the word-processing and practical organization would never have got off the ground. My thanks to all these generous-spirited people.

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Abbreviations

Aristotle: An. post. Eth. Nic. Mag. mor. Metaph. Part. an. Ph. Pol. Rh. Top.

Analytica posteriora (Posterior Analytics) Ethica Nicomachea (Nicomachean Ethics) Magna moralia Metaphysica (Metaphysics) De partibus animalium (Parts of Animals) Physica (Physics) Politica (Politics) Rhetorica (Rhetoric) Topica (Topics)

Diog. Laert.

Diogenes Laertius

DK

H. Diels and W. Kranz: Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th edn)

Hdt.

Herodotus

Hor: Ars P.

Horace Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry)

Plato: Alc. Ap. Chrm. Grg. Hp. mi. Phlb. Prt. Symp. Tht. Ti.

Alcibiades Apology Charmides Gorgias Hippias minor Philebus Protagoras Symposium Theaetetus Timaeus

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Abbreviations Plutarch: Quaest. conv.

Quaestiones convivales (Table Talk)

Sextus Empiricus: Math.

Adversus mathematicos (Against the Mathematicians)

Thuc.

Thucydides

Xen: Ap. Mem.

Xenophon Apologia Socratis (The defence speech of Socrates) Memorabilia

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serpreface

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Series Editor’s Preface

Education is sometimes presented as an essentially practical activity. It is, it seems, about teaching and learning, curriculum and what goes on in schools. It is about achieving certain ends, using certain methods, and these ends and methods are often prescribed for teachers, whose duty it is to deliver them with vigor and fidelity. With such a clear purpose, what is the value of theory? Recent years have seen politicians and policy makers in different countries explicitly denying any value or need for educational theory. A clue to why this might be is offered by a remarkable comment by a British Secretary of State for Education in the 1990s: ‘having any ideas about how children learn, or develop, or feel, should be seen as subversive activity’. This pithy phrase captures the problem with theory: it subverts, challenges, and undermines the very assumptions on which the practice of education is based. Educational theorists, then, are trouble-makers in the realm of ideas. They pose a threat to the status quo and lead us to question the commonsense presumptions of educational practices. But this is precisely what they should do because the seemingly simple language of schools and schooling hides numerous contestable concepts that in their different usages reflect fundamental disagreements about the aims, values, and activities of education. Implicit within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is an assertion that theories and theorizing are vitally important for education. By gathering together the ideas of some of the most influential, important and interesting educational thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary scholars, the series has the ambitious task of providing an accessible yet authoritative resource for a generation of students and practitioners. Volumes within the series are written by acknowledged leaders in the field, who were selected both for their scholarship and their ability to make often complex ideas accessible to a diverse audience. It will always be possible to question the list of key thinkers that are represented in this series. Some may question the inclusion of certain thinkers;

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some may disagree with the exclusion of others. That is inevitably going to be the case. There is no suggestion that the list of thinkers represented within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is in any way definitive. What is incontestable is that these thinkers have fascinating ideas about education, and that taken together, the Library can act as a powerful source of information and inspiration for those committed to the study of education. Richard Bailey Roehampton University, London

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foreword

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Foreword

Arguably, Plato invented the subject of philosophy, and all that we mean by that term can be found in his writings. In Whitehead’s famous formulation, philosophy is a ‘series of footnotes to Plato’. Plato set the entire western project in motion, and our world is what it is in large part because of his legacy. Unsurprisingly then, until very recent years, Plato loomed large on the mental horizons of educated people, such that to be educated meant acquiring some acquaintance with Plato. Not only because on practically every substantial philosophical topic Plato provides a template against which we can still measure our own thoughts, but because he is deeply interested in education. Education was central to his concerns, in particular the education of the Guardians who would attend to the good of the ideal state he sets forth in the Republic. Yet almost all his dialogues can be said to be concerned with education, in a way which is true about no other topic. As Professor Barrow points out, it is Plato who most compellingly established the curriculum for a liberal arts education as something suited for free men, for he was the first to understand the centrality of education for human well-being and flourishing. In sum, Plato was the first to systematically set forth a theory of education, and to articulate the symbiotic relationship between politics and education. He was also among the first to recognize that education is a vexed and contested idea, and to point out what is at stake in the educational debate. To make such claims is to do no more than acknowledge historical truths. Yet equally it must be acknowledged that our own time is singularly unreceptive to Plato, if not forthrightly anti-Platonic. Ours is an age in which answers to difficult philosophical questions are distilled into sound-bites and slogans, and in which images are rapidly coming to displace the written word. When we raise the ancient question, ‘How should I live my life?’ we discover that Socrates has been usurped by the psychologist. Instead of pursuing the answers to such questions with Socratic subtlety and finesse, we are met with the vapid findings of social science (perhaps the latest

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compilation of statistics about happiness), the ubiquitous self-help book and the glib television guru. In education, we find an even more parlous situation. It is symptomatic of our age that we use ‘education’ as broadly synonymous with job or career preparation, such that we are rapidly losing sight of the very idea of education, as something distinct from preparing students for the workforce. This conflation of terms is a growing contagion, and we encounter it at every level, whether debating the latest curriculum proposal for schoolchildren or discussing the aims of higher education. The vocabulary of business and bureaucracy leads us to think and act in such terms. Thus in so-called higher education, we are currently witnessing a rapid and wholesale transformation of our universities, one in which ancient institutions of higher learning are rapidly becoming professional and technical schools, pure and simple, whose sole remit is to train students for the global technological-industrial society. When auditing present-day discussions about higher education, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that something has gone profoundly wrong, and that what is being debated has, in fact, little to do with education, and everything to do with making universities, colleges and vocational schools more responsive to the corporate state. What is conspicuously absent is any acknowledgement of a conception of education which speaks to human needs, desires and aspirations and suggests that education – as distinct from schooling – might be about the uniquely human mind and uniquely human achievements, rather than those pragmatic and utilitarian considerations necessary to fuel the needs of the corporate state. There is no doubt an interesting history as to why we have arrived at this particular juncture; but that we have so arrived cannot be doubted. For anyone who has seriously considered the matter, something has gone seriously amiss in our educational conversations. It is one of the many merits of this lucidly written and powerfully argued book that Professor Barrow, while explicating the educational thinking of Plato, has also shown us what is currently at stake in educational theorizing, and, by extension, what we are at risk of losing. What is urgently required is perspective, a vantage point from which to adjudicate our own times, and from which to defend something valuable and essential to human welfare. What Professor Barrow’s study of Plato forcibly brings home is that the central educational questions which exercised the ancient Greeks are questions which are similarly imperative for our own generation. It is an oddity that the formal study of education contains so few classics. John Passmore once remarked that ‘the best books on schooling, the ones most worth reading, the classics in the field, are nearly all of them fanatical, offering us educational salvation through a single recipe’. There is some truth in this remark, and there are, or course, those scholars who would

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instance Plato’s Republic as just such an example. Yet as Professor Barrow makes clear, few thinkers have provided more insight, or have provided a richer source of stimulation to our thinking about education than Plato. It is time to return to first principles in our educational deliberations, and, in so doing, it is difficult to imagine a more congenial or saner guide than Robin Barrow. Patrick Keeney Independent Scholar, Kelowna, B. C., Canada

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Chapter 1

Historical Background

Plato was born in the second half of the fifth century BC in Athens, where he also died (c. 428–347 BC). (His given name was actually Aristocles; he earned the nickname ‘Platon’ because of his broad shoulders.) This was a time during which Athens was engaged in the long-running Peloponnesian war with Sparta and her allies, and also a period of great internal political upheaval in which the democratic form of government was seriously challenged and for a while replaced by a brutal pro-Spartan oligarchy, the so-called Thirty (404 BC).1 But it was also the century that had, quite extraordinarily, seen the birth and first flowering of democracy,2 of historical inquiry, of tragic and comic theatre, of architectural masterpieces such as the Parthenon, of a host of superb sculptures and vase paintings, of systematic medical theory, of rhetoric and of philosophy. The Athenians were well aware of their achievements and among the first to claim that, in words the historian Thucydides gives to the political leader Pericles, they were ‘a lesson to all Hellas [Greece] . . . the wonder not only of contemporaries but of future generations’ (Thuc. 2.41). Beyond the dramatic and inspiring nature of his times, five factors in particular clearly impinged on Plato’s development: his friendship with Socrates; his reaction to the sophists; his personal relations (both formal and informal) with some of the leading figures of his time, including his politically active relatives Critias and Charmides; the city state of Sparta; and, of course, those thinkers who preceded him, the Presocratics. Socrates, who himself wrote nothing, was Plato’s mentor and inspiration, and is presented as the main character in most of the latter’s writings. Socrates was a notable figure, so much so that the Delphic oracle, a serious and powerful player in the politics of the time, said that there was none wiser than he (Pl. Ap. 21; Xen. Ap. 14).3 This, according to the story as told by Plato, led Socrates to question those with acknowledged expertise in the various crafts, trades, and professions, in order to try and find out what on earth the oracle could mean. His conclusion, famously, was that

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Intellectual Biography

he was wiser than others only in that he recognized his own ignorance: he knew what he didn’t know. Though he performed his civic duty, serving as a soldier and on the city’s Council, he does not seem to have spent much time pursuing his craft as a stonemason, nor, though in this he may not have been unusual, in devoting himself to his family.4 The evidence suggests that his main interest was in trying to understand in what human life should ideally consist. But he was no ivory tower academic, and on more than one occasion bravely stood up to be counted politically in the face of popular opposition (Ap. 32). As the main character in Aristophanes’ comedy the Clouds, Socrates was clearly a well known figure long before the majority of his fellow citizens, irritated by what they saw as his arrogance and evil influence, brought him to trial in 399 BC. That trial and his subsequent execution (in a prison the foundations of which can still be seen today in the ancient agora or market place), as well as the example of his life, were clearly crucial to the development of Plato’s thought. There has been much argument about where Socrates ends and Plato begins – where and how to distinguish between the thought of the two men. But this is not very profitable or important from the point of view of examining and evaluating the thought in question. For the fact is that, apart from a few Socratic writings of Xenophon, Aristophanes’ comedy already referred to, and a few references in Aristotle, the contemporary evidence that we have is Plato’s. The Socrates that we know is essentially the Platonic Socrates. So, for example, while it is generally agreed that the historical Socrates began life with an interest in metaphysical and scientific questions, we only have direct information about his views on social and moral questions. Likewise, some comments by Aristotle (e.g. Metaph. 1078b) suggest that what is generally referred to as Plato’s Theory of Forms or Ideas is a development, perhaps a significantly different development, of Socrates’ view; this is very likely true, but given that there is clearly development of the theory in Plato’s own writings, given the complexity of the theory, and given that the evidence all comes from Plato’s treatment of the subject, trying to abstract the precise nature of Socrates’ original view seems a far from urgent task. The sophists are an important phenomenon. The Greek word sophos means ‘wise’, but in context sophistai (sophists) should be understood to refer to what we would call ‘lecturers’, ‘professors’, ‘experts’, or ‘consultants’, even, at one extreme, ‘craftsmen’ and, at the other, ‘gurus’. Though reference may be found to the ‘sophistic movement’, in no sense was it truly a movement, and the individual sophists were different from one another in respect of the subjects that interested them, how they conducted themselves, their integrity, their talent, and much else besides. (On the issue of a ‘sophistic movement’, see Appendix 1.) Protagoras, for example, seems

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to have been a serious philosopher who would take on students and make a genuine attempt to educate them, on moral issues. Gorgias was a bona fide teacher too, but he was a teacher of rhetoric – a practical art rather than speculative theory. By contrast, Hippias appears to have been an altogether lesser figure, a jack of all trades, one of whose boasts was that he had made everything that he wore and carried with him (Prt. 358d; Hp. mi. 386b, but see Appendix 1). Some sophists are presented as subversive, some come down to us as fraudulent, and others as simply lacking in talent. Sometimes the evidence is hard to evaluate: Prodicus is mentioned quite often by Plato, and some interpret the references to suggest a benign fondness if not respect for this grammarian; others interpret them to suggest a hair-splitting pedant whom Plato is ironically mocking. The historical reality behind this is that in the second half of the fifth century, the wealth and freedom of the young democracy, combined with safer seas and greater ease of travel (thanks to the Athenian naval empire), attracted those with genuine ideas and knowledge to communicate (such as the historian Herodotus), those drawn to a place where they could be themselves, those who saw an opportunity to make money, and those who in some sense wanted to advertise themselves. On one level, in referring to the sophists, we are simply drawing attention to the fact that Athens at this time attracted a significant number of traveling teachers of this and that, with widely varying talents and reputations. But three things in particular should be noted. First, the sophists in general are characterized as people who expected to be paid for their services. Secondly, again generalizing, they are depicted as teaching skills (technai) of various types rather than developing intellect, and in this respect may be compared with contemporary courses in practical living or self-help books. This is significant, because it implies a view of understanding, teaching and learning that is at best contentious. There are many things, notably abilities such as riding a bike or kicking a soccer ball, that are skills in the sense of discrete, physical movements, behaviors or sets of behaviors that can be trained through practice under the guidance of the expert. The question is whether you can teach all things in that way, in particular the understanding of such things as morality, art, or human relations. Rhetoric or public speaking, at any rate if it is seen as a matter of employing various oratorical tropes, can be seen as a matter of passing on the ‘tricks of the trade’, but can teaching history? Whatever the answer to that question, the sophists should be seen as individuals who promised to teach the skills of, e.g., leadership, morality, rhetoric, and, above all, worldly success. The third and crucial point to note is that most of what we know about the sophists (as with Socrates) derives from Plato, and Plato’s agenda is transparent. He set up an image of the sophists in deliberate contrast to his

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image of Socrates: the sophists thought anything could be taught as if it were a set of skills, the sophists claimed to make you a success and the sophists charged money; Socrates did not charge money, Socrates did not claim he would make you successful, but tried to increase your understanding, and Socrates did not see the important branches of learning on the model of mechanistic skill development. For Plato the pursuit of knowledge had little or nothing to do with worldly success: knowledge is to be acquired for its own sake; truth, goodness, and beauty are interwoven, so much so that at times Plato writes as if they are one and the same; the contemplative life is the ideal life. It is a measure of Plato’s success in distinguishing Socrates the philosopher from the sophists that the words ‘sophistry’ and ‘sophistic’ today still carry strong pejorative overtones and connotations of fraud, despite being etymologically derived from the word for wisdom. A third factor influencing the development of Plato’s thinking was his political background. It is debatable to what extent we can say that Plato was anti-democratic. There are those who argue that he was hostile to some of the excesses of the Athenian democracy of his time (and there were excesses), but that he would have supported certain contemporary democracies. There are those who argue that he wasn’t in favor of any practical alternative to the Athenian democracy, but was simply interested in explaining theoretical strengths and weaknesses in all forms of government. There are those who see him as an advocate of totalitarian government. In fact here, as in much else, history suggests that you can find pretty much what you want to find in Plato (see, e.g., Russell, 1946, 1950; Levinson, 1953; Wild, 1953; Popper, 1966; Bamborough, 1967; Crossman, 1971; Barrow, 1975). But two significant facts are indisputable. Whether he was or was not a democrat, he was a relative of Critias and nephew of Charmides, both members of the murderous oligarchy, the Thirty, who briefly ruled, not to say terrorized, Athens after its final defeat by the Spartans. Plato also, at a later stage of his life, sailed to the city of Syracuse in Sicily, to act as tutor to the future tyrant, Dionysius. (The Greek word for tyrant, tyrannos, does not have any of the necessary pejorative connotations that the word ‘tyrant’ has for us. One could be a good tyrant, as some believed Peisistratus had been at Athens. But ‘tyranny’ nonetheless implies rule by one man, and therefore cannot be regarded as democratic.) One can argue against the significance of these points: Critias was his mother’s cousin and Charmides his uncle, not Plato himself, and there is evidence that Plato approved of Socrates’ courageous resistance to the Thirty (e.g. Ap. 32c). Teaching a future tyrant or king, perhaps in the hope of improving his rule for the benefit of all, does not necessarily entail approving of one-man rule. But, whatever we choose to say, these two points are widely seen as counting against Plato and confirming the view that his criticisms of democracy stem from a

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fundamental anti-democratic stance, and it is beyond question that he was, by birth, an aristocratic, well-connected man. Equally certainly, however, he was nurtured in a land of free inquiry and thought, and was a passionate lover of truth and knowledge for its own sake. (For a brief note on the evidence relating to Plato’s visits to Syracuse, see Appendix 2.) The visit to Syracuse suggests that, notwithstanding his belief in the intrinsic value of knowledge, Plato was interested in having some kind of practical effect in politics: the contemplative life might be ideal and a necessary part of the good life, but Plato also wanted the contemplation to lead to some practical advance. It is thus entirely in character that towards the end of his life he should have founded what may be considered the first University. It was called the Academy, after the hero Academus, in a grove sacred to whom it was situated, from which derive our words ‘academy’ and ‘academic’. (It lies some 3km from the ancient agora and sparse remains of buildings can still be seen there today.) The Academy probably was academic in something like our sense of the word, and in this Plato should be distinguished from contemporaries such as Isocrates. Isocrates (not to be confused with Socrates), though not as well known as Plato today, was in his time a figure similarly to be reckoned with, and he too had his followers and students. His surviving work is interesting and readable, but he is more in the business of teaching rhetoric and the art (or skills?) of practical politics than Plato. At a risk, one might liken Plato’s Academy to a liberal arts college, and Isocrates’ interests as being more in line with those of the political equivalent of a Center for Policy Studies.Or, if that is too modern an analogy, one might say that Plato’s focus was more on theory, Isocrates’ on practice.5

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Chapter 2

Sparta

An important influence on Plato’s thinking was Sparta, particularly in the realms of politics and education. It is perhaps difficult for readers today to recognize the significance of Sparta as an inspiration throughout history. The American founding fathers, for instance, aspired at least as much to creating a new Sparta as a new Athens. For most of Plato’s lifetime these two city-states were permanently at odds, whether actually engaged in war or not, and admiration for and loyalty to either one was pretty evenly spread – and to some extent shifting – between the two. The notion that democratic Athens was everywhere acknowledged to be the shining light and ‘education to all Greece’ that Pericles claimed is seriously misplaced. Athenians themselves (or many of them) were enthusiasts for the newly emergent democratic form of government, but a great deal of the Greek world was unimpressed, as were some notable Athenians, and, as it happens, most of our surviving contemporary sources. Of course, one of the features of a democratic community is a large degree of freedom of speech, and consequently there is likely to be more evidence of criticism and dissent than there is in more closed societies. Nor, in any case, should the satire and knock-about fun of, for instance, Aristophanes’ comedies, though they do highlight some of the possible dangers and excesses of democracy, be construed as antidemocratic. But the tract attributed to an anonymous author referred to as the Old Oligarch (i.e. supporter of oligarchy or rule by the few, as opposed to the many), the works of Xenophon, and to a lesser extent the history of Thucydides are all to some degree critical of, if not the idea of democracy, at any rate the Athenian version, particularly as events unraveled towards the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the fourth. And for some (notably Xenophon) Sparta was clearly a much-admired alternative. Sparta itself was a small city, comprising five closely situated villages on the river Eurotas in the southern Peloponnese. In myth it was famous as being the kingdom of Menelaus and his wife Helen, whose abduction by Paris led to the Trojan War. (A memorial monument to Menelaus and Helen can still

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be seen in the hills across the river from the modern town of Sparta.) Also according to legend, but clearly with reference to some kind of historical truth, at some point between 800 BC and 600 BC, a leader named Lycurgus caused the Spartans to reorganize their social and political institutions in a dramatic and rigid manner, thus giving rise to a distinctive way of life that remained, on its own terms, effective throughout most of Plato’s life. (Plato is thought to have died in 347 BC; the battle of Leuctra, fought against the Thebans, which brought an end to Spartan significance and power was fought in 371 BC.) The Spartans were Dorians who had originally invaded Greece from the north in about 1000 BC. They were thus of a different race from the Athenians (who were Ionians and liked to stress that they were indigenous Greeks, or Hellenes, to use their own word), and from those they conquered in Laconia (the district around Sparta) and, subsequently, the neighbouring area of Messenia. By about 700 BC the Dorians of Sparta had gained the upper hand, politically and militarily, over other Dorian settlements: these neighbouring Dorians were known as perioeci (‘those who live round about’) and were nominally independent, provided that they followed Sparta in matters of foreign policy (particularly war) and confined their activities essentially to crafts and trade – activities which Spartans themselves were forbidden to engage in. More significantly, all the non-Dorian inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia were reduced to slavery (and known as helots). The Lycurgan reforms can be seen as the answer to the question of how a small body of Spartans (c. 10,000) could control the immensely superior number of helots and perioeci: that answer was to turn the body of Spartan males (the so-called homoioi, the ‘equals’)6 into full-time soldiers and the city into a permanent armed camp. From this point on the best land in Laconia was divided up in lots and divided equally among the Spartans, each of whom left his land to be worked by helots. The helots were obliged to provide a fixed amount of food to the Spartan owners – anything they managed to produce beyond that amount they could keep for themselves. The customs, habits and way of life of the Spartans became starkly distinctive. At the age of 20 a Spartan male joined a syssition or dining club, to which he supplied a share of food from his estate, and which he attended every evening for the rest of his life, barring illness or absence in war. Marriage followed an unusual pattern: men lived in barracks and were not allowed to be married until the age of 30. At the time of the wedding, the bride had her hair cut short like a boy’s and her husband visited her only at night; possibly this reflects something of a homosexual sentiment fostered by the close comradeship of the military life; possibly it implies submission on the part of the female. The main purpose of marriage, however, was

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evidently to produce children, to keep the number of pure Spartans as high as possible. So important was this consideration, that childless couples would quite acceptably allow the female to take on a (Spartan) lover in the hope that she would conceive a child. (As we shall see, Plato adopts a similar position in proposing communal sexual relationships out of eugenic concerns.) The Spartan system of government was something that Plato clearly knew about, to some extent admired, and drew upon in his political thinking. Aristotle also discussed the Spartan system but, despite the attention of these analytic minds, to this day one can argue about whether it should be regarded as an oligarchy, a monarchy, a democracy, or, as seems most natural, a mixed form of constitution. There were two hereditary kings, one at least of whom was always supposed to remain at Sparta even in time of war. The kings had various religious and symbolic duties, acted as commanders in battle (at least in the early years), but were by no means the ultimate authority in the state. Yet they were held in very high regard by their fellow Spartans and some of them were extremely powerful and influential individuals. They, along with 28 other Spartans over the age of 60, formed the Gerousia or Council of Elders, one function of which was to prepare proposals to bring before the full Assembly of Equals. For there was an Assembly (of all Spartan males over the age of 30), an institution commonly associated with democracy rather than oligarchy, let alone monarchy. There is still great debate about the extent of the power of the Assembly, but certainly they elected the five ephors, magistrates who represent the final element in the constitution. The ephorate may be seen as an executive arm of government, but there is a case for saying that much of the time this is where the real influence lay. Further detail need not concern us. What is crucial is that this model of a state that was disciplined and predictable, involving a degree of specialization (e.g. soldiers, tradesmen, farmers) and consequent expertise, with shades of communal ownership (among the Spartan males themselves anyway), and characterized by qualities such as loyalty, duty, and the common good, served for Plato and other contemporaries as a powerful antithesis to the prevalent democratic assumptions in Athens. There is evidence that Sparta was not entirely unique in the ancient world, but for Plato she was the living embodiment of an alternative, in some ways more appealing, political ideal. But if his political views owe something to Sparta, his social and particularly his educational views owe even more. The Spartan upbringing was unashamedly set on moulding a certain kind of character, one for whom the highest calling was to honor the state by the way one lived and died.

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From the moment of birth the Spartan child was regarded as being in the care of the state. The weak and sickly, as judged by the city elders rather than the parents, were exposed to die. At the age of seven all boys went to live in barracks. They would only leave when they married some time after the age of 30. They were organized in companies or platoons, overseen by older boys, all under the ultimate authority of a paidonomos or warden. The emphasis was on developing physical strength, courage, endurance, and comradeship. At the age of 12 the agoge (the system of upbringing) became even more disciplined and harsh, focusing partly and literally on survival skills. There was very little in this upbringing relating to the arts, what we would term the humanities, or even the acquisition of knowledge generally (as distinct from such vocational skills as military prowess). The Spartans were famous for their lack of interest in literature, and many stories attest to their parsimony with words (hence our word ‘laconic’, meaning speaking tersely and to the point – as do Laconians or Spartans). The archaeological record, incidentally, fully confirms this in that from the middle of the sixth century at the latest Sparta becomes isolationist, ceases to engage in ship building and trade, excludes foreigners, does not adopt coinage (retaining instead awkward iron bars which do not facilitate international exchange) and, most strikingly, produces no development or advance in vase painting, poetry or literature. Such interests as they do maintain are notably focused on communal or team activity rather than individuality. Given the association between Plato and knowledge, it may seem strange indeed at this point to cite Sparta as a key source of or influence on his educational views. But so it clearly was. It is true that Plato added a great deal to the Spartan model, and that what he added was for the most part more interesting and important. But the fact remains that there was a lot he admired in Sparta, which he incorporated in his own ideal educational system in the Republic, which he also drew on along with the example of Crete in the Laws, and some of which is still to be found embedded in parts of our educational system today. Most obviously, Plato was attracted by the ideas of community and the common good, by the notion that specialism and expertise go together, and by the values of loyalty, courage and endurance. Though in my view Plato is not as hostile to art and literature as some critics maintain, there is no doubt that he exhibits something of Spartan puritanism and distrust of sensation and emotion (see Part 2, chapter 13). The discipline of the Spartans certainly appeals to him. All of this, of course, is to be understood in contrast to what he sees as the vices of democratic Athens: its attraction to novelty, its lack of stability, its concern for superficial appearances, its notion that anybody can do anything as well as anybody

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else, and its refusal to make necessary distinctions. (What may seem slightly strange is that Plato did not see in the example of Sparta a suggestion of the dangers in trying to halt change. Whatever merit he saw in Sparta, he witnessed her effective destruction by the Thebans at the battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, essentially as a result of a lack of adaptability intrinsic to her way of life.)

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Chapter 3

The Presocratics

With most thinkers, tracing their intellectual biography is a matter of tracing the development of thought that precedes them and explains the context in their field, and of locating those individuals and ideas which have particularly influenced them. In the case of Plato, though the broad approach may remain, the situation is unusual because of his position at the beginning of recorded philosophical inquiry. We have only fragments of the very few written documents that Plato might have read or known about, we have a very incomplete understanding of the thinking of his various predecessors, and such understanding as we do have has to be pieced together largely from subsequent references and comments by later authors, not least Plato himself. So to some extent working out the influences on Plato’s thinking is a matter of interpreting and extrapolating from his own texts. It is important to stress both the startling suddenness with which what we would recognize as rational inquiry emerged and the initially unpolished nature of that inquiry. Of course our evidence is meager, consisting, apart from the fragments, of isolated comments, often belonging to a period several centuries later; and of course the achievement of these early thinkers, in conceiving of and grappling with new ideas, may be considered enormous. But it must be emphasized that we are not dealing with a body of smoothly argued theory. Prior to the sixth century BC the Greeks had an oral culture. Their earliest ‘literature’, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, belonged to an oral tradition and was preserved in memory by traveling bards, until written down at Athens, probably while Peisistratus was tyrant (mid-sixth century). All writing, whether supposed to be mythological, historical, philosophical, or scientific (distinctions which the Greeks would not necessarily yet have recognized) was initially in the form of poetry. The norms, patterns and expectancies of what today would be classified as a rational argument had not yet evolved. Nonetheless, from the beginning of the sixth century there is a sudden and clear attempt to move beyond magic and myth and to

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develop rational understanding. At first the focus was clearly on cosmology or the nature of the world. The questions raised were ontological in form or about Being. Though science had yet to be distinguished from philosophy and the empirical scientific method was not yet developed, the first questioners, such as the Milesians (e.g. Thales, Anaximander (writing the first known philosophic treatise in prose), and Anaximenes) were primarily interested in how the world came into being, in what it consisted, and out of what elements it arose. Thales (famous for having predicted the eclipse of 585 BC) believed that the universe arose from water as the primordial substance. Anaximander (c. 610–540 BC) thought that the world arose not from water, but from what he called the apeiron, meaning something like the ‘boundless’. Anaximenes (fl. c. 546 BC) thought rather that the essence was air. It does not seem necessary to pursue this arcane and complex debate very far here. Sufficient to say that while some argued for this substance and others another, the focus of attention was on the nature of the world and the manner of inquiry was speculative. The first individual of whom we do need to take note is Parmenides, who figures in Plato’s dialogue of that name (somewhat ahistorically). Parmenides (c. 515–440) is said to have held that none of the answers so far given could be correct, since no one thing, be it air, fire, water or whatever, can turn into a lot of different things and thus explain the features of the world as we know it. According to him, there is simply the eternal, continuous, ‘what is’. If this is somewhat baffling to the modern ear, not to worry, because although Plato was familiar with this kind of argument, and retained a strong interest in cosmological matters, his treatment of them is somewhat more comprehensible (if only because his work survives in complete form), and anyway is not central to his social and moral or specifically educational ideas. But Parmenides needs to be mentioned for two reasons in particular. First, while unlike Anaximander he continues to write in verse, he is the first person that we know of whose work attempts to argue his case, as opposed to assert it. If the premisses are accepted, step-by-step we see the conclusion follows. Secondly, Parmenides’ argument, which seems to have been generally accepted, led to the conclusion that there could be no change. The world we see, the world of our senses, which appears to be a world of change, therefore cannot be real. This seemingly absurd paradox was to have momentous consequences both for thinkers of the past and indirectly today. It led Empedocles (c. 492–432 BC), a striking thinker in his own right (and the teacher of the rhetorician Gorgias, according to Aristotle (Diog. Laert. 8.57)), to argue that since Parmenides was correct to say that plurality could not have arisen from an initial and ultimate unity, it followed that there was no one first principle (arche) or basic element. Instead he posited four

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basic elements, fire, water, earth, and air, from which the world arose. (He was perhaps influenced by Pythagorean thought (see below) and would certainly have known that Thales had already proposed water, Anaximenes air, and Heraclitus (see below) fire, which he saw as giving rise to the other elements. It is clear that these various thinkers were taking note of one another.) He also maintained that Love and Strife are the factors that bring about movement and change in the world. And, though we no longer think in the same terms, the recognition of Parmenides’ fundamental point is implicit in our contemporary concern with the question of how, no matter what the current state of scientific explanation, there can have been a beginning to the world. How can something appear out of nothing? For Plato the impact of Parmenides was such as to make him see the sensible world as being somewhere between being and not being; more importantly, it is part of the basis for his theory of Ideas, which presumes that the Ideas, being what is, represent reality and are the true object of knowledge. Many of Plato’s dialogues refer explicitly or implicitly to Parmenides’ thinking: the Timaeus clearly reveals his influence (e.g. 270), as does the language of the Republic (e.g. 477 ff; 508 ff), not to mention the dialogue named after him. Plato probably also owes something to Parmenides’ notion of Mind (Nous), which apprehends reality. (The Timaeus, incidentally, also betrays the influence of Empedocles, as does the Meno, referring to the latter’s theories about pores and vision, reminding us that Plato is heir to a tradition, albeit a very brief one, e.g. Ti. 79c; 45b; 67c, Meno 76c). One part of Plato’s debt to the Presocratics, then, is their initiation of the search for rational justification and argument which, about a hundred years later, had become very sophisticated indeed when deployed by himself (writing in prose). Another thing that is central to the concerns of Parmenides and others inquiring into the nature of the world, and which in turn is a key concern for Plato, is the distinction between appearance and reality. Asking whether the world arises out of air or fire, whether things can change, and so forth, implies that at some level things are not simply what they seem. Anaxagoras (c. 500–428 BC), who incidentally taught Archelaus who in turn taught Socrates, was another to challenge the adequacy of the senses. According to Sextus Empiricus (Math. 7.90), he said that ‘owing to their weakness we are unable to discern the truth’, and gave as an example the fact that if we take two colors and pour one into another drop by drop, our sight will not be able to pick out the gradual alterations, although they exist. Anaxagoras, like Parmenides but with his own distinctive take on it, believed in a personified or objectified Mind which knew everything, thus establishing that for him there is truth: however, he does not seem to have felt that humans can ever have direct knowledge of certain truth,

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but can only infer it. But Mind is seen as the moving cause in the world of matter, a theory that is critically discussed by Socrates in the Phaedo (97b). To bring one part of the story to a conclusion, the debate over the basic element(s) of the universe or cosmos (a Greek word which implies order and regularity), has got as far as a prototype atomic theory by the time of Leucippus (c. second half of the fifth century BC) and Plato’s near contemporary Democritus (c. 460–370 BC). Little is known of the former (in fact Epicurus, founder of the school of thought named after him, denied he existed), but Democritus recognized that while at one level the desk before me is as it appears, at another level it consists in millions of indivisible (the meaning of the Greek word atomos from which our ‘atom’ derives, even though today theoretical physicists subdivide them) particles that can be ‘rearranged’ and thus ‘destroy’ the desk but cannot be ‘destroyed’ themselves. While it is different from Democritus’ theory, being more mathematical, which probably owes something to Pythagoras (see below), Plato also presents an embryonic atomic theory in the Timaeus. (According to Guthrie (1978: 242) Werner Heisenberg thought Plato’s atomism closer to modern conceptions.) Plato himself never mentions Democritus (although that need not be very significant. He never mentions Anaximander, but Socrates is made to adopt his view that the earth is unsupported by water or anything else in the Phaedo, 108e). On the face of it they hold conflicting views, Democritus being a materialist, Plato a realist (which means in this context what is sometimes rather confusingly called an idealist: one who believes that ideas are real). The matter can be further confused by the fact that Democritus wrote a treatise on ‘Ideas’, referring to his atoms. They certainly differed in that Democritus believed in no overall purpose to the universe and no Anaxagorian Mind that ordered everything, whereas Plato was profoundly teleological, believing that everything had a purpose or an end to which it was striving. But they were both products of their time and heir to the same traditions of thought, and both believed that only the mind could grasp the real or the true, and that our senses obscure rather than reveal, while appearances deceive. Aristotle on several occasions links Democritus to Plato when he says that Socrates was the first person who seriously set out to define the essence of things (the undoubted beginning of the theory of Ideas and of philosophical analysis in general), but that Democritus made an initial contribution to the topic (e.g. Part. an. 642a; Metaph. 1042b, 1078b; Ph. 194a). Perhaps more striking is the fragment of Democritus that says ‘he who does wrong is more unhappy than he who suffers it’ (fr 45), which is very reminiscent of the Platonic/Socratic view that the unjust are unhappy (e.g. Grg . 499e). There is also a fragment (242) that specifically refers to an educational issue and likewise has some affinities with Plato’s view: ‘training has the leading

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part [rather than natural disposition], but it can change a man’s disposition so that virtue becomes second nature’, a view that Aristotle also subsequently echoes. So far I have concentrated on providing a brief account of the scientific thought that preceded and influenced Plato. Although itself focused on ontological questions, as we shall see it transmutes itself into thinking that is directly relevant to Plato’s epistemology, and that in turn is crucial to understanding his educational views. It is not a big step to transpose talk of ‘being’ and ‘what is’ into talk of ‘what is true’ and ‘what can be known’. Furthermore, partly because of the fact that at this early date, as the first steps are taken towards systematic understanding, the vocabulary is rough and the distinctions are blurred, the scientific thinkers sometimes move on to questions that we would not regard as scientific, and, in addition, there were those who were consciously interested in questions other than those about the world and matter. Not only did Democritus, for instance, apparently make a pedagogical point about training virtuous habits, he also wrote about the arts, believing with Plato, according to both Cicero and Horace, that great poets are divinely inspired (e.g. see Hor. Ars P . 296), (though this may have been something of a contemporary commonplace), and about morality generally, where his stance, typical of his times but less fashionable today, was that emphasis should fall on prevention rather than cure, i.e. on how to promote moral behavior rather than on how to respond to bad behavior, whether by punishment, counseling, or recompense. But there was also a strand of thinking among the Presocratics pertaining directly to questions of moral and religious knowledge. Heraclitus (c. 540–470 BC) is one of the most difficult of thinkers to comprehend, even by the standards of Presocratics in general, and it has often been said that you can find what you want in him. He is the author of such enigmatic and famous remarks as ‘everything flows’ (panta rhei) and ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’. (Both of these remarks are quoted by Plato in Cratylus (402a), and may be paraphrases, since the extant fragments do not contain these precise quotations.) Whatever precisely Heraclitus meant, it is reasonably clear from his extant fragments that he is focusing on the ideas that everybody perceives a situation differently, that the senses can mislead, and that we tend to reinvent the world in our own image. Plato certainly interpreted him that way and in so doing linked him with the sophist Protagoras (Tht. 160d). Aristotle explicity says (Metaph. 987a) that Plato in his youth became familiar with Heraclitean doctrines and held to them in old age. Similarly, Xenophanes (c. 570–470 BC) had suggested that if animals had gods they would picture them as animals, and seems to have said that, though there may be a truth, we can never know that we know it.

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Both he and the historian Herodotus made the point that the Greek view of the gods was given to them by the poets Hesiod and Homer, meaning that in those poems the traditional mythology was enshrined (DK Xenophanes fr. 10; Hdt. 2.53.) This was a point firmly in Plato’s mind when he came to propose censoring the poems (see below), as was the further point that ‘they portray them [the gods] as immoral’. The fragments of Xenophanes on the gods are interesting in their own right and it seems more than likely that the thoughts influenced Plato. Taken together they suggest that the traditional picture of the gods presents them as immoral (fr 11) and parochially human, because ‘Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snubnosed, Thracians as blue-eyed and red-haired’ (fr 16). No doubt, he continues ironically, ‘if oxen, horses and lions had hands . . . horses would draw gods shaped as horses, lions as lions’ (fr 15). In contrast Xenophanes himself works towards a concept of ‘one god . . . in no way like mortals either in body or mind’ (fr 23), ‘always he remains in the same place . . . but without toil he makes all things shiver by the impulse of his mind’ (fr 26, 25). Xenophanes’ overall conclusion might be said to be: ‘No man has certain truth, nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods or about everything of which I speak; for even if he should succeed in saying what is true, even so he does not have knowledge, but only opinion’ (fr 34). This view, though possibly more moderate than Protagoras’ later similar view, nonetheless effectively summarizes a relativism and skepticism that Plato set out to rebut, notwithstanding the fact that in some respects he shared a Xenophanic outlook. Even these very brief references to individual Presocratics can be argued about endlessly. Are the translations accurate? Do we appreciate the context? How do we interpret them? But there are four conclusions we can fairly confidently draw: Plato’s thinking arises out of that of the Presocratics to some extent in his lingering interest in cosmological matters. He owes them something in that they pioneered the business of engaging in rational argument. More particularly, whatever their intentions, they broached the crucial and fascinating questions of the relationship between appearance and reality and the nature of knowledge – two related issues that are central to Plato’s philosophy. His theory of Ideas, which we shall examine below, is a theory developed in the light of a substantial (albeit relatively recent) tradition of thought concerning such issues. But Plato is interested in a great deal more than cosmological and epistemological questions. Perhaps mainly due to Socrates’ influence, who is explicitly said by Aristotle (Part. an. 642a) and in the Apology to have lost his initial interest in cosmology though Aristophanes presents him as retaining it, Plato has a pronounced interest in political, social and moral, or what we

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may summarize as human as opposed to physical questions. And here too both he and Socrates had their predecessors, most notably Pythagoras and the sophists Protagoras and Gorgias (for consideration of the latter two, see below, Chapter 5). Pythagoras (c. 570–490 BC) came from the island of Samos, but moved to a Greek settlement in southern Italy where he seems to have set up a cult with himself as the focal point. As with all of these individuals, it is difficult to disentangle fact from fiction: we rely on a variety of late sources, which are by no means uniform, and Pythagoras was another who left nothing in writing. Furthermore, after his death there were a number of Pythagorean communities and, inevitably, a number of slightly differing schools or currents of Pythagorean thought. Pythagoras is reputed to have been a vegetarian, though the evidence is conflicting. Slightly more curious was an apparent reverence for and abstention from eating beans. Various reasons have been given for this, including that beans resemble testicles and that they contain the souls of the dead. What does seem relatively certain is that he believed in the transmigration of souls, and specifically that one’s soul might return in the form of another animal or even a vegetable (for example, a bean) as readily as that of a human. He and his followers were interested in mathematics and number. We may recall the Pythagorean theorem that, for a right-angled triangle, the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. But more significant is a general interest in the connections between number and music, and an associated somewhat mystical belief in a harmony in the universe. There is no question that Plato (though he only mentions him once by name) shared both Pythagoras’ belief in reincarnation and, in some sense, harmonies in the universe, thought it is at times extremely difficult to differentiate between what one might term mathematical calculations relating to astronomy and metaphysical calculations relating more to astrology. Be that as it may, and despite the fact that we can’t be sure to what extent Plato was directly influenced by Pythagoras, such thinking is another part of Plato’s inheritance from the times in which he lived. There is also an unmistakably spiritual side to Plato’s thought and this too may owe something directly to Pythagorean theory, even while it is clearly distinct from it. (Mention should also be made of the Pythagorean Archytas, 428–350 BC, a mathematician and inventor of, among other things, a child’s rattle, who sent a ship to rescue Plato from Dionysius II in 361 BC. Also the geometer Theodorus, 465–398 BC, who is portrayed in the Theaetetus as an associate of Socrates as well as the teacher of Theaetetus himself.) According to Diogenes Laertius (1.12) Pythagoras gave new meaning to the terms ‘philosopher’ and ‘philosophy’. The story is confused, and

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Heraclides Ponticus claims he invented the words, which certainly isn’t true. But the import may be to emphasize the difference between the detached scientific ruminations of the Ionians, and the more spiritual, social and moral interests of the Pythagoreans. Certainly, for the Pythagoreans philosophy was tied up with a way of life, and intellectual endeavor was connected to an ideal of fulfillment. Their values included such typically Greek values as limit, moderation and order, and they seem to have incorporated something of the Orphic belief that immortality depended on effort, in particular performing the appropriate rites, and, in the case of Pythagoreans, living the right life. In the Republic (500c) Socrates says: ‘He whose mind is fixed upon true being has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform himself. Can a man help imitating that with which he holds reverential converse? And the philosopher, holding converse with the divine order becomes orderly and divine as far as the nature of man allows.’ A.E. Taylor sees this principle, that a person inevitably grows to assimilate to his surroundings, as Plato’s main educational principle for the early years. He also, surely correctly, sees it as a very Pythagorean principle. Two other aspects of Pythagorean thinking that probably influenced Plato are the notion of defining things in terms of their essence and the view of the soul. According to Aristotle (Metaph. 1036b), as interpreted by Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Pythagoreans recognized that a proper definition of something has to get at its essence, nature, or form rather than the material in which it is embodied: a statue is not adequately defined in terms of its marble (or bronze); it needs to be defined in terms of its design and what it represents or signifies. This, though it is not the same thing as, is the beginning of a line of thought that leads to Socrates’ search for universal definitions and the theory of Ideas. Similarly the Pythagorean view that the soul is the harmonious sum of its parts is surely a precursor of Plato’s view that the virtue of the soul is temperance (sophrosune, which he glosses as a harmony), which involves the three parts, appetite, spirit and reason, working in harmony. This brings us back to number, because harmony and music itself are seen by Pythagoreans, as are most other things, as being fundamentally and ultimately only explicable in terms of number. The essence of their theory seems to have been to give a quantitative account in terms of number to all phenomena, whether music, the movement of the planets, or justice. The Timaeus, which is Plato’s most obviously Pythagorean dialogue, is much concerned with number, the harmony of the cosmos and the music of the

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spheres. Aristotle asked (Metaph. 1092b) how qualities such as whiteness, sweetness or heat could be numbers. But as Guthrie (1962: 238) pertinently remarks: ‘Today the scientific description of everything in the physical world takes the form of numerical equations. What we perceive as physical qualities – color, heat, light, sound – disappear and are replaced by numbers representing wavelengths or masses’.

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Chapter 4

The Nature of the Times and Socrates

It is clear, as already indicated, that two further crucial factors in the emergence and development of Plato’s thought were the nature of the times in which he lived, and the figure of Socrates. Growing up in democratic Athens, particularly with relatives and friends who were politically active, brought him face to face with issues, ideas, and experiences bound to have some influence on his thinking. He witnessed Athens’ great achievements, militarily, artistically, politically, socially, her enormous pride in these achievements, and then saw her fall and humiliation.By the time he was 30 he had been a witness both to the first democracy the world had known and an extreme form of brutal tyranny in the shape of the Thirty. He had seen all manner of goods, people and customs imported from throughout the empire, he had heard widely different ideas and arguments about life, he had lived with freedom and variety, but he had also seen that freedom and openness disappear more or less overnight and had lived through times of savage repression and reprisal, when to speak too openly was to risk your life. He had seen traditional ideas about religion, morality, and politics, queried and challenged.7 At first hand, he had seen great loyalty and treachery, courage and cowardice, humility and hubris (a peculiarly Greek concept often glossed as pride before a fall, but implying intentionally shaming others),8 the mass of people as a sane and calming influence and the same people as a vengeful mob. He knew of or had met political leaders as diverse as the stern but inspired Pericles, the flamboyant and wayward, but in some ways brilliant Alcibiades, the cautious and conservative Nicias, the calculating Cleon. He had lived through war and peace. He had watched the tragedies of Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, the comedies of Aristophanes, at a time when most of the world had no conception of drama or comic theatre. If environment is important in the shaping of humans, and if rich and varied environments make for strong and imaginative intellects, then Plato was well placed. In fact, of course, as he was one of the first to argue, we are not simply the products of our time and place (or all

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Athenians would have had the stature of a Plato): we are ultimately the product of the interplay between our experience and our inner selves. So we must allow for Plato’s innate genius as a factor; but it is reasonable to argue that in a different place and time that genius might not have flowered as it did. The judgment that Socrates was one of the single most important influences on Plato can reasonably be based on his depiction of him in the dialogues. (For a list of the titles of Plato’s dialogues and a note on the order of their composition, see Appendix 2.) It is not so much the frequent use of Socrates as a central figure in the dialogues that is important – after all many authors have repeatedly used an individual as a mouthpiece without necessarily meaning to pay great homage to them. It is the nature and quality of the early dialogues such as Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, Phaedo and the Symposium. In these dialogues Plato gives us a portrait of a man who is wise, humorous, lovable (and loved), compassionate, considerate, courageous – a man of integrity and intrepid rationality, while yet imaginative and emotional. The Apology, which is Plato’s version of Socrates’ defence at his trial, and Crito, an account of his final hours in prison, are eloquent enough testimony to the impact that Socrates had on Plato at all levels. It is certain that the trial of Socrates on the charge of not believing in the city’s gods and corrupting the young – which probably signified a public reaction against the free-thinking espoused and engaged in by Socrates, intensified out of proportion by external factors such as the humiliating defeat by Sparta a few years before, and the excesses of the Thirty, among whom were associates, even ‘pupils’, of Socrates – was a dramatic emotional and intellectual turning point for Plato. Socrates, by the example of his life and death alone, profoundly influenced Plato. In addition, of course, the ideas, the arguments, the questions that he raised and expounded represented a part of what one might call Plato’s formal education.

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Chapter 5

The Sophists

One of the most important beliefs that Plato probably inherited from Socrates was the importance of resistance to what we, with hindsight, can call sophistry. From Socrates, via Plato, we get the first clear cry for the cause of truth, the first explicit claim that truth is valuable for its own sake, and that truth is distinct from convention, fashion, taste, or the will of those in power and authority. It is the belief that there are truths, that they can be known, and that it is our highest calling to seek out and cling to the truth. And, while there were some, perhaps a majority of, sophists who were reputable, the upshot of the message that all the various itinerant professors brought to Athens seemed to Socrates and Plato to be a negative and dangerous one. Taken all in all, the sophists seemed to stand for vocational training rather than education for its own sake; for useful knowledge at the expense of knowledge for the sake of truth; for applied knowledge rather than pure knowledge; for teaching people how to be successful rather than how to be good or live good lives; for treating knowledge as a commodity to sell rather than the outcome of a cooperative inquiry; for teaching that there were experts in morality and politics just as there were in shipbuilding or cobbling; for teaching that knowledge, in all fields, lay in mastery of a few skills or techniques of a practical sort, as opposed to understanding of principles at an abstract level. In creating a distinction between the sophists and Socrates in these respects, Plato laid the foundation for his own most important educational ideas. (His depiction of the false philosophy that is the enemy also anticipates to a depressing degree the ‘spin’ that is characteristic of so much modern rhetoric.) Protagoras is another individual to appear in a Platonic dialogue and to have it named after him. The dialogue is focused on the question of whether virtue can be taught and Protagoras doesn’t come out of it too badly. Nonetheless, he seems to stand more as a foil to Plato’s thinking than as a source of it. He is most famous for the doctrine summarized in the phrase ‘man is the measure of all things’. While the precise meaning

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he had in mind can be disputed, just as Heraclitus’ similar remarks can be, it seems on balance that Protagoras was professing a form of relativism (perhaps only in the realm of human as distinct from physical affairs). In other words we meet here with an early version (perhaps foreshadowed by Xenophanes’ view on the gods) of the theory that what is morally right is not a matter of objective truth, but rather of either social convention or personal taste or interest. If this is correct, then what Protagoras stands for was extremely important in relation to Plato, since it is a message that the latter spent most of his life trying to argue against. We do not, of course, have to establish whether Plato was specifically reacting to Protagoras; all we need to note is that here is another idea, current and powerful at the time his own thinking was first developing, and therefore one aspect of the many factors that contributed to the emergence of Plato’s thought. Gorgias, who like some of the others mentioned could be classified as either a Presocratic or a sophist, and who is also a character in a dialogue named after him, is no less hard than anyone else in this era to pin down. He was reputed to be a very fine rhetorician and rhetoric or public speaking was one of the most important subjects taught by the sophists. Rhetoric in anybody’s vocabulary has two sides to it. We all admire, and should admire, the rhetoric of great speakers (and writers) such as Churchill and Roosevelt, and when a great speaker uses his eloquence on the side of the good, of course we love it. But some say that Hitler was also a great rhetorician, even though most of us don’t like what he had to say. Is it possible to be a good rhetorician, a great speaker, but to use it for evil purposes? ‘Yes’ is the answer, and here lies the problem. In fifth-century Athens, still predominantly an oral culture and a democracy, the art of public speaking was extremely important. What use was the freedom to speak to those who were too shy to do so, who stammered, or who couldn’t marshal an argument? Success in life in Athens, unless you defined it exclusively as being successful in your trade, more or less demanded success in the public sphere, and political success certainly demanded the ability to speak well. ‘To speak well’ is another ambiguous phrase. It can mean to speak appropriately (whether that, depending on context, means logically, coherently, wittily, pathetically, or whatever), and it can mean to speak effectively in the sense of to win people to your side, no matter how you do it – in a phrase of Aristophanes’ ‘to make the worse cause appear the better’. What Gorgias was up to is debatable. The extant fragments of his work on the gods and on Helen of Troy certainly show that he was aware of the tricks of his trade, so to speak, and that by use of those tricks one could lead people to accept sound conclusions for bad reasons, or unsound conclusions, or both. While he may have been a master of style, he was also a master of

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what we now call sophistry. While Plato treats him with some respect in the dialogue named after him, as he does Protagoras, there can be no doubt that whatever he thought of him personally, in general the sophists’ promise to teach people to be successful or to make the worse cause appear the better, was precisely what Plato regarded as heresy. Everything that he has to say about political and ethical matters, and everything that goes into his portrait of Socrates, tells us that what Plato feared and hated more than anything else was manipulation of the truth and the subordination of knowledge to opinion, reality to appearance. It is true that Plato himself has been accused by some of his critics of manipulating truth (an issue that will be explored below); but even if we concede that in certain specific contexts he was willing to control and censor material, his fundamental commitment to reason, understanding, and truth, cannot, I think, be doubted.9

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

Plato’s educational theory cannot be disentangled from certain aspects of his wider philosophy; it is even related to his cosmological views, although we will not pursue those in detail here. But it has to be understood in the context of his epistemology or view of knowledge, his view of the human soul or human perfection, and his view of the moral good. Those views were no doubt shaped by his own intellect, but they were based on and influenced by a number of interlocking factors: the times in which he lived, during which democracy was ranged against oligarchy, traditional beliefs and values were challenged, words changed their meaning, and skepticism and relativism were rife; his intellectual predecessors; his contemporaries, including the sophists; the rival models of Sparta and Athens; his personal experience; and, of course, the figure of Socrates. The Presocratics were looking for an explanation of existence. They may not have satisfactorily answered that question but they opened the way for a rapid advance from ontological questions about Being to epistemological questions: what is involved in knowing something (as distinct from believing it) and what can be known? They also introduced the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Other cultures, notably Egypt, had knowledge, but the emphasis was on applied knowledge. The Egyptians knew how to work stone and what you could do with it, but they were not notably interested in asking what is the nature of stone. The Presocratics, in moving away from mythological and magical (loosely, religious) explanation, introduced the idea of a rational, intelligible order to the universe; they developed the scientific spirit – not science in the sense that we understand today, but systematic thinking, based on evidence and reason, whether deductive or inductive. From Pythagorean thought Plato acquired a mystical and passionate side, so that for him the pursuit of truth was not an academic exercise, in the pejorative sense, but a deep commitment to the notion that right understanding is the fulfillment of human existence. (If he did not acquire this from the Pythagoreans, he shared their similar fusion of spirituality and knowledge.)

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If one had to single out one cause that might be said to have driven Plato on, I would say it was the epistemological, particularly moral, relativism that we associate with the sophists. (It is said that Archelaus, Socrates’ teacher, was one of those who believed that right and wrong were a matter of convention. If that is so he taught Socrates better than he knew.) The contemporary debate, as is quite clear from non-philosophical sources such as Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Euripides, was centered on a number of key oppositions such as, in a descending order from the highly abstract to the more practical: appearance vs reality, gods vs science, opinion vs knowledge, nominalism vs realism, nomos vs phusis, rhetoric vs truth telling, interest vs justice, means vs ends, and professionalism vs amateurism. Plato was more or less firmly on the side of the second term in each of these pairs and he would have seen a connection between them. The split between those who argued that cultural phenomena (e.g. laws, moral values, words) were dictated by nature (phusis) and those who said, on the contrary, they were the product of custom (nomos, also ‘law’ or ‘rule’), was widespread and intense, and to Plato it seemed urgently necessary to establish that the good was a given truth not a changing convention. (Callicles, for example, in the Gorgias argues that the rules of conventional justice violate the natural right of the strong to exploit the weak – a view that some see, rightly or wrongly, as a precursor to the views of Nietzsche.) Similarly, while Plato could admire the skill of a Gorgias, rhetoric was a danger to the honest pursuit of truth. Rhetoric was allegedly ‘invented’ or pioneered by two Sicilians (Sicily was also Gorgias’ birthplace), Corax and Tisias, at the beginning of the fifth century. It was straightforwardly seen as a business of being trained to utilize any argument to hand in order to win a debate, to practise and therefore have at one’s disposal arguments on either side of a case. For example, if accused of assaulting someone, depending on one’s size one might come up either with the ‘argument’ that ‘it is not likely that a small person like me would attack that huge man’ or that ‘since a huge man like me would be the first to be suspected, obviously I wouldn’t do it’. This privileging of effectiveness over truth, which Progatoras was to develop into the boast that he would make the weaker argument stronger (Arist. Rh. 1402a), and Aristophanes caricatured as making the worse appear better, was anathema to Plato. The debate between interest and justice was another evident characteristic of the period, as can be judged from Thucydides’ history and some of Euripides’ plays. When characters in Plato’s dialogues identify what is morally right with what is in their own interests or the interests of the powerful, they are doing no more than echoing the political realities of the day. The reference to professionalism vs amateurism may seem a little odd, but one should recognize that to an Athenian kaloskagathos (literally

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‘beautiful or handsome and good’, better ‘fine and honorable’, but really the old-fashioned ‘gentleman’), the notion that some expert professional might teach his son virtue was repugnant. The ingrained belief was that one acquired virtue by belonging to the right kind of family and associating with the right kind of people. I suppose a rough modern parallel might be those who truly detest and distrust counselors and think that handling grief, bereavement, marital breakdown, and so forth should be a matter for the individual and his circle, and that there is no true science or art of teaching people how to cope. On this matter Plato was in fact torn: his instincts will have been with the aristocratic amateur view, but he could plainly see that in practice the sons of the good do not become virtuous. His conclusion, in outline, was that becoming virtuous does involve knowledge, so it can be taught, but it cannot be taught by the charlatan sophists; what is required is guidance from those with genuine philosophical understanding. This all comes together in what may be called a theory of education, because Plato rejected a technicist view whereby education is seen primarily as a matter of teaching techniques. He does have a limited interest in teaching method, as we shall see, but his basic assumption was that what we should teach is the key question, and that cannot be answered without understanding the nature of knowledge and what is true and important. Finally, by way of introduction, the crucial term aret¯e should be mentioned. It is conventionally translated ‘virtue’ and is indeed the forerunner of the Renaissance concept of virtue which, in turn, translates into the notions of character and codes of honor prevalent in such institutions as private boarding schools and the army. Plato’s work could, if one chose, be summarized as an inquiry into aret¯e , (although it could equally well be summarized in a number of other telling phrases). It is therefore worth commenting briefly on Greek perceptions of aret¯e . As Jaeger has said, ‘the idea of aret¯e is the quintessence of early Greek aristocratic education’ (1939: 5). The society depicted in the Homeric poems is an aristocratic one: a relatively small group of warrior nobles, marked out by their wealth, authority and power, dominate and determine the lot of a majority of artisans and peasants. But these nobles or leaders are not without aspirations to honor. They have (or, by and large, aim to have) good repute; they want to be thought well of, looked up to and admired. They have a strong sense of duty – a strong revulsion to shame. But what they see as incumbent on them, the values they cherish, are, naturally enough, related to the particular nature of their society. These values include, notably, physical courage and prowess, particularly in martial and sporting contexts. But they may also include the great cunning of an Odysseus or the great eloquence and sagacity of a Nestor or Phoenix, and, for women, there are other virtues such as those of modesty and prudence. The values may not

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all be ours, but the vital thing for the aristocrat was to excel, to be thought highly of in respect of his values. Thus, idealism and a strong sense of duty were built into the idea of pursuing aret¯e , and Achilles was, so to speak, right to sulk and refuse to join in the fighting when he was insulted by Agamemnon: for he had been shamed by the latter’s arrogant and disdainful treatment of him. Pride was an important part of the aristocrat’s make-up, being also intimately tied up with such character traits as magnanimity and liberality. This aristocratic conception of aret¯e inevitably changed as society changed and the dominance of the aristocracy waned, in particular as the polis developed and became the focal point of individual excellence. Polis is usually translated ‘city-state’, but we need to be aware of its distinctive nature. The Greek polis was, generally, a very small community (Athens and Sparta were exceptional in incorporating large areas of land within their city-state). It was also ethnically homogeneous. Subsequent interest in cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism meant little to the average citizen of a polis; on the contrary, he (for women had no specifically civic or political rights) was a member of a tight community of common blood, culture and religion. When Aristotle wrote that ‘man is by nature an animal of the polis’ (Pol. 1253a), the standard translation ‘a political animal’ may obscure the distinction between what he meant and what we understand by ‘a political animal’. Aristotle’s point was primarily that the small, self-contained and homogeneous polis was the ideal form of society, and it should always be borne in mind that Plato too takes it for granted that he is theorizing in respect of some such similar compact citizen body. Another related feature of the Greek city-state was the relative similarity of political organization. For all the philosophical argument about forms of government and for all the very real warfare between those characterizing themselves as democrats and oligarchs, the actual institutions of government varied very little from city to city. The contrast between Athens and Sparta, for example, though real, especially on a cultural and ideological level, would be very misleadingly described as analogous to the distinction between, say, China and Britain, where the machinery of government is entirely distinct. With the emergence of the polis the aristocratic conception of aret¯e naturally had to be modified. In the unusual case of Sparta, it seems to have maintained the stress on manly courage but extended its reach to all true Spartan citizens. But in Athens the idealism, the sense of duty, the urge to excel and be thought well of had to be attached to a new set of values as well as extended to the whole citizen body. For Plato aret¯e may still be said to be ‘the quintessence of education’ therefore, but aret¯e has to be redefined in such a way that being educated or developing one’s aret¯e makes one a good citizen of the polis. (And it is noteworthy that the modern preoccupation

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with unique individuality is virtually non-existent in the Greek world.) This is to be contrasted with the sophists’ emphasis on techne (‘skill’, the word from which we derive ‘technical’; plural technai). At least part of Plato’s intention is to preserve the ancient idea of education of character, but to do so in the light of a new understanding of what is required of the person of good character. His aim is to define and outline means to develop the kaloskagathos (‘a true and upright man’) for the age of the polis. Despite being embedded in his world in practical ways, and despite his fame today, Plato is scarcely referred to by name by either his contemporaries such as Isocrates or his immediate successors such as Aristotle; but then Plato himself is sparse in reference by name to his predecessors and contemporaries other than members of the Socratic Circle and certain sophists who represent views he is seeking to challenge. Slightly more surprising is that the extensive writings of Aristotle do not draw or focus on Plato’s thought very much, although there are notable exceptions such as his criticism of the theory of Ideas (e.g. An. post. 77a; Top. 143b; Metaph. 1028b; Mag . mor. 1182b). Nonetheless, his influence was considerable, his views being initially kept alive in the Academy and soon spreading beyond, as various members of the Academy moved on, sometimes to found other schools of their own. The importance of the adoption and adaptation of his thinking by early Christian philosophers, and the subsequent rediscovery of his work during the Renaissance cannot be overstated. (The story of how select Greek writings have come down to us, via the libraries at Alexandria and Ephesus in particular, and how, despite fire and vandalism, and partly thanks to Arabic scholarship, they survived, is fascinating but too long to tell here – see, e.g., Casson, 2001; Canfora, 1989; Reynolds and Wilson, 1968.) Plato is a man who lived at a very different time from us and in a very different place – a country that was in fact a city-state of about 1000 square miles, in which lived perhaps 50,000 male citizens, a similar number of females, and 100,000 slaves.10 Yet he still speaks to us directly and is taken very seriously by most noteworthy scholars and thinkers living 2,500 years later. In terms of articulate and penetrating thought about education and much else besides, in terms of rationality, in terms of the Western tradition, he is the practical beginning, the fons et origo, of it all.

Notes 1. Democracy had also been suspended during 411 BC. See Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 29 ff; Thuc. 8.65 ff. 2. The birth of democracy is usually dated to 508/7 BC and Cleisthenes’ reforms. In fact, of course, it did not emerge fully formed out of the

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Intellectual Biography blue, and Athenian democrats who later saw Solon’s reforms (c. 594/3) as an important early step on the way had a point. Equally the fifth century, during which the democracy really came into its own, involved development to its full flowering. The story of the Delphic Oracle and Socrates has always struck me as deserving far more attention than it has received (see Barrow, 1979). Is it credible? If it is, why did it not have more significance for his contemporaries? Socrates is generally judged ‘to have avoided active participation in politics’ (Alexander Nehamas, ‘Socrates’, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2003), which is perhaps fair enough, if we focus on, e.g., continued activity in the Assembly. However, it should be noted that we have clear evidence that he served as a hoplite (soldier) at the battles of Potidaea, Amphipolis and Delium, served as one of the Presidents of the Council, spoke against an illegal (but successful) motion to try (and, in the event, execute most of) the generals as a group following the battle of Arginusae (Xen. Mem. 1.1.18; 4.4.2; Grg. 473a), and ignored an order given by the Thirty to arrest an innocent citizen (Ap. 32c). From our perspective this might be seen as an unusually active political life; certainly, even in Athenian terms, he may be regarded as fairly active politically, provided that that is understood to mean in the civic life of the polis rather than pursuing a political career (though that phrase is dangerously anachronistic). Isocrates (436–338 BC) is nonetheless a significant figure, one whose standing has perhaps suffered a little in the shadow of Plato’s posthumous reputation. It has been claimed, I think rather strangely, that ‘Plato aimed to teach men what to think, Isocrates how to argue’ (Cawkwell, 2003). (Interestingly, this judgment of Plato’s dogmatism is contradicted by Julia Annas, 2003, in her entry on Plato in the same volume where she writes that Plato ‘tried to stimulate thought rather than hand over doctrines’.) The truth is that while Isocrates’ writings are generally interesting and thought-provoking, it remains unclear quite what his teaching, which, according to Cawkwell, was ‘neither purely speculative nor a mere training in rhetoric’, was. He appears to have disdained astrology and geometry as being of no practical value and to have equated dialectic (see Part 2, Chapter 15) with logic-chopping, and thus was on a theoretical collision course with Plato. I wonder, however, whether professional jealousy does not, at least to a degree, obscure a more fundamental similarity of outlook between the two men. Key passages in Isocrates include: Panathenaicus, 30ff; Antidosis, 231; and Contra Sophistas, 21. Some argue that ‘peers’ is a better translation of homoioi than ‘equals’. The literal meaning of the adjective is ‘the same’.

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7. He may well have been familiar with Herodotus’ Histories, which, particularly when describing Egyptian customs and habits, provide detailed descriptions of cultural differences (see, e.g., 2.35). 8. On hubris, see N.R.E. Fisher (1992); also Aristotle, Rh. 1378b. 9. References to oratory or public speaking go back to Homer, but it was probably in fifth-century Athens that the idea of teaching the ‘skills’ of public speaking took root. Initially, perhaps, it was a matter of professionals writing effective speeches for clients (as Isocrates wrote for various litigants); but gradually the idea, with which we are all too familiar today, that anything can be taught as a set of skills, rhetoric included, took over. Plato speaks directly to this issue (Phaedrus, 271a), arguing that an acceptable rhetoric must be based on such things as an understanding of the human soul and not simply on technical points; he also makes the point (271b) that there are no generic skills: the speaker must adapt to the particularities of each member of his audience: he must consider ‘what kind of soul is persuaded, or not persuaded, by what particular form of argument’. This has a bearing on the contemporary debate about research into teaching methods. Behind much of the empirical research lies an unstated presumption that there are a number of effective and a number of ineffective teaching strategies; the possibility that one size does not fit all and that every teacher needs to proceed differently depending on his particular situation, not least his students, is not apparently recognized. And the more one emphasizes that point, the more questionable does the idea of scientific research into teaching become. (I have spent my life arguing this point, to very little effect. See in particular Barrow, 1984 and 1990 and Barrow and Foreman-Peck, 2005.) 10. Attention should also be drawn to the relatively large number of foreigners living permanently in Athens, but lacking full citizen rights, known as metics (perhaps as many as 20,000); metics were an important part of the Athenian economy and way of life.

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Chapter 7

Primary Education in the Republic

Plato’s most interesting and timeless contributions to educational thought are tied up with his more general philosophical concerns and will be considered later as a series of distinct topics. But in one of his most substantial dialogues, the Republic, he does describe and discuss a specific educational program, which will be outlined here. He does something similar in his final dialogue, the Laws, which involves a discussion between a Cretan, a Spartan and an Athenian (not Socrates). (I will draw on the Laws where it is appropriate or useful to do so, but will not summarize it as a whole.)1 The Republic is formally a dialogue concerning justice. Socrates is combating various species of relativism, as put forward most belligerently by Thrasymachus, in an attempt to argue that it is better for the individual to be and behave justly than not, regardless of consideration of material advantage or reputation. Thrasymachus maintains that what we call just acts are merely acts that suit those in power; it therefore also suits them to hoodwink us into thinking that there is something inherently good about being honest, and so forth. But in reality this is nonsense, and anyone who sees through this humbug would gain whatever advantage he could by being dishonest whenever he could get away with it. Responding to this, and the more calmly presented but similar argument of Glaucon and Adeimantus, Socrates is led into a disquisition on the nature of justice in the state, which is seen as parallel to justice in the individual; that in turn leads to lengthy and detailed discussion of the ideal polity or state, and that leads to an account of the necessary education for such a state. Plato explicitly claims that an appropriate type of education is the key to establishing and maintaining a healthy society (424a). In making this claim he may be thinking of Sparta, just as in repudiating Thrasymachus’ argument he is certainly challenging what he sees as the kind of doctrine espoused by many of the sophists. For Sparta, though its agoge is not identical to the Republic’s system of education, unlike Athens did have a state system of upbringing. It is this belief that the state should be concerned both

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in principle and in practice with the education of its citizens, rather than certain other points of similarity between the proposals in the Republic and the situation at Sparta, that most particularly links the latter and Plato. The founding principle of the ideal state outlined in the Republic is that of specialized aptitude: people are seen as having different interests and abilities and the presumption is that, in the interests of the smooth running and harmony of society as a whole, the various roles of individuals should be assigned by reference to these differing competencies (370b, 415a). Indeed, justice is formally defined as ‘in some sense the doing of what is peculiarly one’s own’ (433a). Plato divorces role or job from consideration of rank, status, or reward, and argues that, without presuming to evaluate their relative importance, each individual should ideally pursue that trade, profession or occupation to which he is most suited. But he is acutely aware of the fact that this raises the question of the extent to which we are the product of nature or nurture, the extent to which we are born to be an academic, for example, or moulded to be one by our circumstances. Certain critics of Plato, sometimes motivated by seemingly reasonable political concerns, have nonetheless done him a grave injustice in suggesting that he took the simplistic view that we are all born to be this, that, or the other; they have gone on to argue that he believed some were born to rule and others born to serve, sometimes adding the quite gratuitous suggestion that he identified those born to rule with the already existing aristocracy (see, e.g., Crossman, 1971; Popper, 1966; Russell, 1946; 1950). This is a large topic, but it is sufficient to say here that, while it is true that he introduces a myth (415a) to the effect that some have gold, some silver, and some bronze in their souls, which taken out of context could be construed to mean that we are all no more and no less than what our heredity makes us, it is nonetheless clear that Plato’s view was that what we each end up being as adults is the result of the ongoing interplay between our innate nature and our environment. His concern with the cultural and broader environmental setting in which we place people in general, and his emphasis on education is particular, make no sense without this presumption. So, having determined that in the ideal state those who are most suited to being, variously, cook, estate agent, teacher, mechanic, doctor, etc., should be so, Plato (through the character of Socrates) turns to the particularly important role of those who are to maintain and preserve the state against both external enemies and internal dissension, whom he terms the Guardians. The initial stage of the Guardians’ education consists in the study of music and athletics and, as such, corresponds to the typical ‘elementary’ education provided for the children of aristocratic or well-to-do Athenians

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of his time. (Incidentally, Plato expects formal education to continue until the individual’s fiftieth year, and gives details of the length of the various stages of education. I shall ignore these.) His reasons for providing this education also seem to conform to those typical of his time. The purpose of the initial stage of education, apart from developing literacy, was the development of character. ‘Studying music’, at this age, did not mean for the Greeks the study of harmony, or even appreciating or enjoying music. ‘Music’ primarily denoted accompaniment to recitation, particularly of the works of Homer, which, clich´e as it has become (a rather out of date one given the decline in religious faith), was the Bible of the Greeks. That is to say, it was from their knowledge of Homer that young Athenians gained their ideals, their religious beliefs, their sense of the socially appropriate, their sense of history and identity, just as for many Victorian children the Bible represented the totality of their reading and their world view. More broadly, mousike (music), which is etymologically connected to the Nine Muses, represents ‘culture’ or ‘arts and letters’. A mousikos (musical man) was a cultivated, polished, or elegant individual, one who could recite epic poetry, and play the lyre, but also a person of good manners and refinement. A reasonably close parallel might be drawn with either the role of studying music and the piano in Victorian times or taking ballet classes today. (But it is only ‘reasonably’ close. In the first place, piano and ballet for us remain the interest of only a minority of predominantly the well-to-do. By contrast, Greeks of all social classes sang, danced and played instruments, and listened on social and religious occasions.) It should also be stressed that Plato’s view that musical styles in themselves (regardless of whether accompanied by words, movement, etc.) can affect moral character seems to have been widespread. The musicologist Damon had expressed such views in the mid-fifth century and Aristophanes’ comedies, for example, take them for granted. Aristotle discusses the topic in some detail (Pol. 1339a) and accepts the broad thesis.2 Athletics too was generally regarded as an essential part of education for Greeks, partly because they valued physical fitness in itself, partly because they valued the competitive element and the struggle for perfection, and partly because gymnastics and athletics were an integral part of their social life; so there is nothing remarkable in Plato’s proposal here. Overall the concern with both music and athletics at this stage is to ‘tune’ the mind and body respectively and to develop in the young a certain set of quasi-moral and social attitudes. As Plato has Protagoras say, ‘From the moment that the Athenian child can understand what he is told, all the adults with whom he comes into contact are primarily concerned to make him as good as possible. At a later stage the teacher too is expected to give more attention to good behavior than to letters or lyre playing’ (Prt. 325). That remains

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true for Plato, although we should see ‘the letters and the lyre playing’ as being used to develop character rather than as distinct activities of lesser importance. Plato later remarks: ‘Athletics, geometry and all branches of the preliminary education . . . should be introduced in childhood, but not in the guise of compulsory instruction. Enforced exercise does no harm to the body, but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children’s lessons take the form of play. This will help you to see what they are naturally fitted for’ (536d). This methodological point will be taken up later in relation to a passage from the dialogue entitled Meno, but here it may be noted that Plato is not committing himself to any ideological position on the nature of education of the type that several years ago used to be associated with the phrases ‘play-way’ or ‘child-centered education’ and is still current in some ‘progressive’ or ‘democratic’ views. He is making two points of a simple practical nature: if you try to force-feed children with knowledge, it very likely won’t work; and if you want to encourage individuals to follow their bent, you must give them an opportunity to reveal their talents and interests. He is also in no doubt that the early years are extremely important in education: ‘you realize . . . that in any task how one begins is the most important thing, especially when one is dealing with any creature that is young and tender. For it is then that it is most malleable and takes on whatever impression one might wish to make on it’ (377b). This first step of education is not noticeably concerned with intellectual matters; rather it is designed to develop the basic skills of literacy, musicality and physical fitness, and certain social attitudes, while giving teachers some opportunity to discern embryonic aptitudes. There is nothing here particularly remarkable either to an Athenian contemporary of Plato or to us. Potentially more debatable is Plato’s willingness to censor material (376 ff). He returns to this topic later in the Republic (595 ff), and we will return to it later in this book. At this stage, I will merely note that the censorship (essentially of the Homeric poems) is not aesthetic in any way, but entirely concerned with the moral, religious, or political messages involved, and that at this point we are talking about what it is suitable for young children to read, and not censorship in a wider sense. Plato is here, as ever, concerned about the cultural environment of the young, introducing the ancient equivalent of the modern suggestion that it does matter what influences are set before the young, whether through the medium of television, film, books, the internet or video-games, and that some control is appropriate.

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Chapter 8

Secondary Education in the Republic

Some years ago I attempted to defend Plato against the charge that he was only interested in the upbringing of the Guardians and that they were a selfperpetuating group, so that those born to parents outside the group could never hope to become Guardians and, in turn, the offspring of Guardians would always be brought up as Guardians (Barrow, 1975). I still believe that some of the points I made then are correct and important: some of the features of the education provided for the children of Guardians, such as the habituation to certain beliefs and attitudes, must have applied to all other children or the object of achieving harmony and identity of interest would not be achieved; Plato certainly cares about the education of nonGuardians, even if it takes a different form, just as he certainly cares about their interests – the Republic is explicitly designed to be in the best interests of and to provide happiness (eudaimonia) for all, and it is as important to the harmony of the whole that the tradesmen and craftsmen are prepared appropriately for their role as it is that the rulers are (420b; 446b; 519e; see also 415d). There is certainly provision for some kind of movement between offspring of the Guardian group and offspring of non-Guardians (415a); the Guardians are not, quite explicitly not, defined in terms of criteria that distinguish them at birth (such as being blue-blooded, wealthy, or from de facto powerful families), but rather in terms of the qualities that their education is designed to nurture; nobody who reads the Republic could be in any doubt that Plato recognizes, as well as some degree of innate character, the power of the cultural environment to form and modify human nature. That having been said, I have to admit that today I am less sanguine that Plato actually envisaged regular and routine transference between offspring of the Guardian and non-Guardian groups. Therefore, for the most part, we are dealing with a hereditary group and it is their education on which Plato focuses. This issue was of central importance to my argument then, because I was primarily interested in Plato’s political philosophy. It is of less concern now that the focus is on Plato’s educational ideas, because, while it may be true that I was wrong to suggest he believed in transference between

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Guardians and non-Guardians, it is correct to say that, in educational terms, Plato believed in notions of varying aptitude and transference from one group or organizational category to another, as a consequence of the development of differing aptitudes and abilities. Because Plato certainly believed in transference between categories within the Guardian group.3 We realize this when Plato argues that the Guardians need to be subdivided into two groups: the ‘rulers’ who, as their name suggests, are the ultimate leaders and authority, and the ‘auxiliaries’, who, being the internal police force and the army in respect of external defence, are the power behind the throne. The division is made on the basis of merit in terms of the qualities expected in any Guardian (‘a philosophic disposition, energy, acuity, and courage’ (376c)); the rulers must be the best, which is to say ‘the most regardful of the state’, and that in turn means ‘the most intelligent and capable in respect of watching over and caring for the interests of the whole state’. The rulers must be those who most love their fellow citizens (412b) and who are least amenable to irrational persuasion or influence, who are least careless and fearful. Plato now proposes that all children (and this I think must include the children of non-Guardians, the craftsmen, traders and farmers) should be told a myth about how Mother Earth gave birth to all, but gave different talents and qualities to different people making some suitable for one way of life, others for another (415a). The importance of myth in Greek culture needs to be appreciated here: Plato is drawing on his own cultural inheritance, just as he is drawing partly on his knowledge of Sparta in distinguishing between Rulers (Spartan homoioi), Auxiliaries (perioeci), and producers, craftsmen, and traders (helots). But we should see this not as akin to telling children fairy stories so much as to instilling commitment to a religion, the American way of life, or an ideology. The points that Plato wants to get across through the myth are obviously i) that, different as we are, we are all equally part of one family, and ii) that differences in our socio-political roles are related to differing abilities, and therefore appropriate. The myth will have ‘the good effect of making each of them more inclined to care for the community as a whole and each other’ (415d). Educationally, use of the myth indicates plainly enough that, while Plato believes strongly in the power of the environment and education in particular, he also believes in a degree of innate ability and inclination; that he believes that people with different aptitudes should be to some extent educated differently; and that he is not averse to the use of non-rational techniques of persuasion or influence when dealing with the young. Attention is now turned (415d) to the way in which the Guardians, rulers and auxiliaries alike, will live. This has some relevance to education, because

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it is clear that Plato regards all potential influences on character formation, and mental, moral and physical development, as aspects of education in addition to what goes on ‘in the classroom’ or formal schooling. There is strong plausibility, for instance, in the idea that Plato would approve of boarding schools in contemporary terms, given his evident belief that the state as a whole can and should superintend growth overall. At any rate, the Guardians are going to spend their entire lives in a state-wide boarding school, and, again, a partial inspiration must surely have been Sparta. The Guardians will live in communal barracks, without private property or money; their food will be provided for them by other citizens (as the helots provided the sustenance for the Spartans) (415 ff). The ultimate political objective of all this is to divorce power or authority from material reward, so that people will not be tempted to seize political power for personal advantage, and to rid the body politic of such disruptive emotions as envy and materialism (417b). And, following the logic of the various strands of his argument, Plato recognizes (which must have struck many of his contemporaries as radical if not revolutionary) that everything that is true of men is true of women too (424c ff). Therefore, women may undergo the same upbringing and end up as rulers; and therefore women too will live a communal existence, and children will belong to the community not to individual parents.4 This thoroughgoing communism leads Plato to go into some detail about who may sleep with whom, the point of this being to avoid the possibility of mother sleeping with son (this is, after all, the culture that gave us the story of Oedipus), brother with sister, etc. The details need not detain us. (In Xenophon’s Symposium, Antisthenes asks Socrates why, if he holds that women are no less capable of being educated than men, he has not succeeded in educating his wife, Xanthippe (2.10). It may incidentally be noted that Pythagoreanism is thought to have been welcoming towards women and that writings are attributed to one Thano, who may have been Pythagoras’ wife. Diogenes Laertius (3.46) also refers to a female student at the Academy named Axiothea.) The most important part, or at any rate the apex, of Plato’s educational model is that the rulers shall become philosophers; only by becoming individuals of principle and reason and, thereby, wisdom, which is what Plato means by a philosopher, as contrasted with sophist, can they become fit to lead. The curriculum that will lead to the emergence of the true philosopher is prefaced by possibly the most famous passages in all of Plato’s writings, in which he introduces his theory of Ideas, and the images or metaphors of the sun, the divided line, and the cave (502d ff). The theory of Ideas (also referred to as the theory of Forms) will be considered in detail below. Here it is enough to say that Plato distinguishes between particular instances of things and the essence or Idea that is

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common to all or the Form in which they all partake. Thus every bed is a bed in virtue of the fact that it is an instance of bedness: every occasion of being in love is so in so far as it is an instance of the Idea or Form of love. Knowledge of particulars is necessarily limited and imperfect (no actual bed is perfect; no actual instance of being in love is inviolable; no actual instance of a stone ever looks exactly the same to all people). But the Ideas of bedness, stone and love are all perfect and constant. The true philosopher is one who has knowledge of the Ideas rather than being limited to knowledge of particular instances. The Idea of the Good is said (in not altogether clear terms) to be the ultimate object of knowledge and to stand in a similar relationship to all other Ideas as the sun does to the visible world, being both intelligible itself and the cause of the intelligibility of other Ideas, as the sun is both visible and the cause of visibility in other things (507 ff). The line is a representation of different stages of mental awareness or enlightenment running from eikasia (‘imaging’, i.e. simply and uncritically picturing in one’s mind’s eye), by way of pistis (belief), dianoia (the power of logical reasoning and critical analysis), and finally noesis (understanding) which is the ability to grasp the Forms or Ideas (509c ff). As every commentator points out, the terms most appropriate to translating Plato’s terminology are highly debatable, as are the significance of the ratios that he gives to the divisions of the line and the precise categorization of the objects appropriate to each part of the line or species of apprehension. What we can say with certainty is that the two lower stages of the line, what I have called ‘imaging’ (not ‘imagining’) and ‘belief’, together constitute what Plato calls ‘doxa’ or ‘opinion’, while dianoia and noesis are stages of ‘knowledge’. The path of intellectual development is broadly a journey from a mere collection of images to an analytic grasp of the Ideas of such abstract fundamental organizing concepts as love, justice, truth, knowledge itself, and, ultimately, the good. (There is little doubt that in Plato’s view there is a hierarchy of ideas, but it would be rash to try and suggest what it was in any detail.) The parable of the Cave is easier to assimilate (514 ff). We are told of prisoners in a cave who, being bound, can discern no more than the shadows of physical objects cast by a fire on the wall of the cave. That is the extent of their ‘knowledge’. But once released from their chains they are able to see the objects themselves rather than mere shadows. Released from the cave, they can see, in the light of the sun, actual phenomena, and not just models of things or their shadows. But they cannot initially gaze on the sun, being blinded by it following confinement in the dark cave. Finally, they come to be able to gaze upon the sun itself. Clearly this is a metaphor, to be taken along with the analogy of the sun and the line, to explain our current ignorance and the need to climb to the greater understanding provided by philosophy. But there is also another clear message in the metaphor: if

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those who have gazed upon the sun return to the cave, they will not be able to function as well as those who have stayed there, since their eyes have been dazzled by the sun and they are no longer at ease within a dark world of shadows. So, although they have actually seen the real world and the sun, their fellow cave-dwellers will think them particularly blind and stupid. Just so does the philosopher, the truly educated, the one who has grasped the Forms, risk the enmity, hostility and ridicule of those whose intellect is far inferior. Behind the epistemological thesis, to which we shall return, is the message that education is a process of turning the mind in the right direction. It is not a matter of mastering physical skills, as the Spartans presumed; not a matter of developing discrete mental skills and strategies, employment skills, or winning ways as the sophists presumed; it cannot be confined to the business of rhetoric or teaching people to argue, as Isocrates presumed; it is not about useful information and conventional attitudes as many contemporary Athenians no doubt presumed. It is about a mastery of abstract thought and concentration on a certain set of moral and humanistic concepts. The curriculum that Plato now proposes as a means to ascending ever higher in terms of abstract thought consists in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and harmonics (524e ff). Once again, what is most specific and may therefore superficially seem the most relevant and useful aspect of Plato’s educational thought is in fact no such thing. The claim that needs to be considered is not whether the study of harmonics should be introduced at grade 12, but whether education is primarily and essentially, as it progresses, a matter of cultivating an aptitude for abstract conceptual thought and analysis. This is not to suggest that Plato’s own interest in the subject matter he refers to is confined strictly to its use as a means, nor that one could not attempt to argue for the importance of studying mathematics today along Platonic lines. There is no doubt both that Plato thought mathematics (involving arithmetic and plane and solid geometry) was intrinsically valuable and that as a branch of understanding it is; it is also apparent that mathematics was closely linked and still is to astronomy and some aspects of musicology. Plato is still influenced by the cosmological questions that interested many of the Presocratics, and in a dialogue such as the Timaeus he pursues the investigation into the harmony of the spheres, or more prosaically the workings of the Universe, with obvious commitment. And perhaps a case can be made for saying that studying mathematics is a good preparation for studying philosophy roughly on Plato’s grounds that it conditions one to working with abstract and ideal concepts as opposed to imperfect, physical, particulars. I am not, however, aware that there is any truly convincing argument or evidence either to confirm or refute this claim, and it should perhaps be regarded as on a par with the long-standing claim

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that those with a classical education make the best computer programmers. But regardless of one’s views on this matter, it seems safe to say that Plato’s main concern is to provide a curriculum that develops the ability to think in rational and abstract terms about the fundamental moral and humanistic questions, culminating in a sound grasp of the Ideas themselves. It is that belief that we need to make sense of, explore, and ultimately evaluate, if we want to come to grips with Plato’s educational philosophy, rather than his belief in the value of studying mathematics. Though Plato shows, throughout his dialogues, a keen interest in education, we should remember that the Republic is not ultimately about education but about political and individual justice. Thus the bulk of the text contains some key Platonic arguments that are not of immediate concern here but that should nonetheless be mentioned. Most noticeably, the doctrine of the three-part soul is introduced (435 ff) and the various possible types of political constitution are examined and evaluated (545d ff). Plato believes that just as his ideal state contains broadly three types of individual – the rational rulers or philosopher kings, the determined and stalwartly reliable auxiliaries, and the relatively uncerebral majority who largely follow instinct and desire – so within each individual there are three distinct elements: the rational, the spirited, and the non-rational or appetitive part. Choosing the appropriate words is difficult here, but it needs to be brought out that Plato does not treat the third element in the soul (appetite or desire), corresponding to the political majority, as swinish, debased or inferior. It is obvious that he regards the philosopher kings as the most fully developed of human beings and that he is committed to the idea that reason is the highest human capacity. But he nonetheless recognizes that we all have instincts, desires, and appetites and there is nothing necessarily wrong with these in themselves. Nor are those who are not intellectually developed therefore to be ignored or taken advantage of. One might understandably accuse Plato of being paternalistic, but he is no more hostile to either the appetitive part of the soul or the political mass of citizenry than a parent is to a child whom he nonetheless recognizes to be less than fully developed. To Plato the important thing is not to deny, suppress or scorn the appetites and desires but to organize them rationally. Justice, which has been formally defined as ‘doing what is appropriate to oneself’ (433b), thus becomes, on the level of the state, one in which those with rational understanding have control and, on the level of the individual, one in whom passions and desires are rationally evaluated and who has the strength of character to persist in this (for a fuller discussion of the soul see Chapter 14). Critics of Plato’s politics who argue that he is in favor of totalitarianism would do well to read the discussion of the various types of polity carefully (543 ff). Plato has harsh things to say about timocracy, oligarchy, and

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democracy, but his harshest words are reserved for the tyrant. His actual point is that there are good and bad possibilities in all types of constitution, but that in practice none are acceptable, because in practice no ruler(s) whether one, few, or many put reason and the Good before other all too familiar goals such as love of reputation, wealth, power, variety, licence, or self-interest. The simple message of the Republic is that there will be no peace, no stability, no happiness on earth until we can persuade those who are truly wise and disinterested in power to take responsibility. Similarly, the individual will only find full realization and contentment when reason is cultivated to the full and allowed to organize our outlook on life in the light of the Idea of the Good. There is more on the question of censorship in the Republic (595 ff), to which we shall return; discussion of the immortality of the soul, which was an important reality for Plato (though it must be stressed that because of the Greeks’ distinctive views on religion, this belief implies nothing religious in our sense of the word, though it certainly has its mystical side for Plato), and direct consideration of whether the just or the unjust man will lead a happier life. But the specifically educational points are now exhausted. The questions that we need to pursue are not those surrounding his suggestions about practicalities, which are clearly context-bound, so much as his principles and values. It is not, for example, particularly useful to argue about whether his idea of a communal barracks is desirable, but his evident belief that the state should control education from the provision of cr`eches to the control of the curriculum is worth thinking about. His specific curriculum proposals owe a great deal to the fact that mathematics was one of the few developed fields in his day: for us the question is more: was he on to something in arguing i) that the essence of the secondary curriculum should consist in developing the mind, and ii) that it should do so in the specific sense of leading it towards abstract conceptual thought and moral thought in particular? Is he right to play down, if not actually disparage, technical and vocational training (and right to assume that ‘vocational education’ is a contradiction in terms)? In respect of censorship, while his particular examples owe everything to his time and place, and bowdlerizing Homer is hardly an issue for us, the principle of control, selection, and censorship is extremely important, as is the related but distinct question of indoctrination. How, for example, are we to distinguish between character formation (which we do) and indoctrination (which people we don’t approve of do)? These are some of the questions that need to be pursued in more detail. But the biggest and most urgent question is what is to be made of Plato’s epistemological theory, on which so much depends.

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Chapter 9

The Theory of Ideas

Plato’s dialogues, between 25 and 28 in all, depending on whether we accept three of them as genuine, cover a great deal of ground, especially considering that this is the dawn of written argument and the birth of philosophy as a systematic and organized activity. (Perhaps we should say that it is because various branches, distinctions, and divisions within knowledge with which we are familiar had not then been recognized that Plato covers a wide area. For a brief summary of the titles and grouping of the dialogues, see Appendix 2.) His work contributes to political theory, ethics, mathematics, and metaphysics, and even (in a theoretical rather than an empirical way) to science. He deals with cosmological questions, as had the Ionian Presocratics; he ventures into astrology. He makes a major impact on philosophic method, both through his epistemology and by the nature of the dialogue form. And, while laying down foundations in these various subjects or disciplines, he presents us with the first recorded disquisitions and arguments relating to such fundamental categories of human experience as friendship, love, integrity, justice, courage and aesthetics, as well as more unexpected topics such as reincarnation and communism. For our purposes the focus is on his contribution to the humanities, philosophy itself, and education in particular, but it is worth remembering that in a broad and informal sense all his work is related to education, since the implicit assumption is that the problems that the dialogues explore are the sorts of problem that educated people ought to examine. Famously, Socrates is made to say that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’; and this view, which is very much in keeping with wider Greek sentiment as witness the injunction inscribed at Delphi to ‘Know Thyself’ (Gn¯othi Seauton), encapsulates the presumption that being human demands being educated which, in turn, demands a considered position in relation to the general question of how one ought to live. One cannot take a reasoned position in response to that question without considering more particular questions, such as what is goodness, what is beauty or what is our duty to the law, in the way that Plato does. If one had to pick out one aspect of Plato’s thought as key, it should probably be

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his epistemology or theory of knowledge, in particular the theory of Ideas or Forms. His emphasis on the world of Ideas and on the practical importance of engaging with it, paradoxical as it may seem to claim that dwelling on abstract ideas is of practical value in the everyday world, is both his overarching claim and the one that has been most influential and debated in philosophy since his time. (The Greek words used by Plato, for the most part, are idea and eidos meaning form or shape. I favor ‘idea’ in translation, though it does run the risk that we confuse our understanding of the connotations of the English word and our understanding of Plato’s use of the term. Because the question of precisely what a Platonic Idea is is contentious, it is also problematic, though sometimes unavoidable, to refer to ‘concepts’, ‘notions’ or ‘thoughts’ in this context. I have sometimes wondered whether the theory of Ideals would not be the best name. But I shall stick with the theory of Ideas or Forms, used interchangeably. In what follows I shall always use a capital I or F to refer to a Platonic Idea or Form.) The theory of Ideas, which has already been referred to in connection with the Republic, was not confined to consideration in that dialogue. In fact it was a theory that underwent development during Plato’s life (as is clear from the treatment in different dialogues), that he himself saw as raising a number of difficult questions, and that received critical response from the beginning, starting with Aristotle. Thus Euthyphro, in the dialogue of that name (generally dated early), understands that various particulars that share the same predicate, in this case righteous acts, have certain common characteristics in virtue of which all are called righteous (6d ff). This is consistent with the Theory of Ideas and conceivably we are supposed to infer a reference to it, but it falls a long way short of explicitly adumbrating the complete theory. Despite many other references to, comments on, and critical examination of the theory in various dialogues, the only attempt to provide an account of it in a systematic way, including reference to the Ideas having independent reality or transcendental existence (which is a problematic issue), occurs in the Phaedo (where the word ‘idea’ is itself introduced late in the discussion (103e)). Here a distinction is drawn between an ideal world consisting in Beauty itself, Equality itself, and so forth (in Greek, ‘the beautiful’, ‘the equal’, which linguistic turn may have had some bearing on Plato’s thinking) and the everyday or phenomenal world that we perceive. In normal conversation most of us would regard the latter as the real world, but the paradox Plato presents is that in fact it is the ideal world that is real: for it is Beauty itself, or, as we can now say, the Idea of beauty that is divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble and unchangeable, whereas the beauty of a beautiful person (i.e. an instance of

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beauty in the phenomenal world) is not divine but is mortal, irrational or unintelligible, multiform, soluble and changeable (80b). A distinction is noted between Ideas which are always necessarily present in a particular, as oddness must always be a feature of the number three (104), and those that are not, such as an individual’s shortness, thereby introducing the distinction between what we now call the properties and accidents of a concept. But the main significance of the Phaedo is to have told us that there are Ideas, such as that of the Good or the Beautiful, which are real and true but cannot be apprehended by the senses, only by Nous (mind) after a process of reasoning. Our souls or minds (interchangeable for present purposes) are familiar with them from an existence prior to the current one in our bodies, and objects of our senses, phenomena, or everyday instances can prompt us to recall them; but the business of truly grasping them depends upon the intellect. An initial problem in discussing the theory is that of determining whether it developed significantly during Plato’s lifetime and, if so, how it developed. A further problem lies behind that, namely how to determine the order in which the dialogues were written. There are essentially four ways of trying to establish the relative dates of composition of the dialogues: tracing a pattern of philosophical development, comparing stylistic features, assessing the relative literary quality, and drawing on cross-references and references to external datable events. None of these are very reliable. For our purposes, tracing a pattern of philosophic development, besides being difficult, begs the question, since we are trying to date the dialogues in order to discern the pattern of philosophical development. Comparing stylistic features, though it is nowadays generally done using computers with something of the appearance of a science, is not really any such thing. Assessing the literary quality is even more obviously a matter of judgment and in fact can be shown to have involved quite different judgments from different scholars. The last approach is perhaps intrinsically the most reliable, but there are not sufficient data to settle all the difficulties. It seems very likely that there was development from a Socratic position, that was focused on the need for definition and what today we might call analysis, to a Platonic position, that appears to have posited a separate real existence to Ideas that one might otherwise have thought of as being figuratively immanent in particular instances. But it is difficult to establish this definitively, and hardly necessary for our purposes. Accordingly, rather than pursue an account of the development of the theory, I am going to present an interpretation of the theory as a whole, based firmly on Plato’s account but without following every doubt, query, or minor modification that he himself raises. I shall then consider the broad nature of the criticism of those who contest the theory, and, finally, argue that broadly speaking the criticism is not cogent and that

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the theory is correct (some might prefer ‘plausible’) and remains of crucial importance. Plato’s premise is that in our everyday life we come face to face with particular instances of things and experiences, and that these particular instances are in various way imperfect and our view of them is inevitably only partial. Thus, I encounter this bed: it is not a perfect bed (no carpenter or machine could conceivably produce a bed that was absolutely perfect in all respects); it is not an ideal bed; we cannot define a bed precisely and fully in terms of this bed (because if the precise specifications of this bed define ‘bed’, then all other beds turn out not to be true beds, which is absurd); but not only is this instance of a bed imperfect and distinct from the defining characteristics of a bed (since, though it meets the criteria that define a bed, its characteristics are not co-extensive with those criteria), it is also fairly obviously the case both that this bed is impermanent and that my perception or grasp of it is never definitive. That is to say, first, the bed will gradually succumb to wear and tear, changing itself, perhaps becoming a very poor bed and finally disintegrating (after all, we don’t have any of the beds that Plato knew; they have all perished and vanished). Secondly, while on one level I am very familiar with this bed, I can never in the nature of things apprehend it as a whole; from one angle it has one appearance, from another, another; because it changes itself over time, I am never actually contemplating precisely the same bed. The bed that you perceive is never quite the bed that I perceive. In a straightforward and surely undeniable sense, then, a particular bed, though it is a real and solid enough object is indeed ‘particular’: it is not the epitome of a bed, it is not bedness, it is not in itself the Idea of a bed (or even the idea of a bed). As we may put it today: this is a particular bed and as such a physical object, but that is distinct from the concept of a bed, or the concept of bedness, which is not physical and not uniquely particular, but is rather the idea the characteristics of which represent the criteria that any particular physical object needs to match to be or to count as an instance of a bed. Though Plato raises the question of whether there is an Idea corresponding to everything, be it concrete or abstract, trivial or important, pleasant or ugly, negative or positive, without providing a clear answer, it is certainly the case that the theory is not confined to physical man-made objects such as a bed. A stone, though not man-made and, by its nature pretty solid, is nonetheless subject to change and decay, just as a bed is. And while the rain gradually wears the stone away, thus changing its precise nature, so too does it appear differently to different people looking from different angles, with varying eyesight, or in different settings: the stone in water looks different from the stone on land, as, more dramatically, a straight stick appears bent when half immersed in water. The theory also clearly covers abstract ideas

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such as love and friendship, emphatically so, since in the end, while the theory may have been intended to apply to anything from mud to the gods, Plato’s real interest is not in physical objects but in abstract concepts, particularly those that pertain to the large question of what it is to be human and how to live as a human ought. (To avoid any possible confusion, it should be noted that while all concepts, whether the concept of stone, bed, or love, are by their nature non-physical or immaterial, there can obviously be concepts of both physical and non-physical things. All concepts are abstract but some (abstract) concepts are of abstract ideas while some are of not directly perceptible phenomena like love, and some are of concrete particulars.) The positive aspect of Plato’s thesis simply involves inverting the argument already made: the concepts of bedness, love, or friendship are not particular, physical things. They are abstract Ideas. As such they are not subject to the wear and tear of the world or to decay: they are eternal or immortal, inasmuch as their existence depends upon no physical laws. They do not appear in a different guise to different onlookers because of their differing vantage points. Friendship, once we have understood or defined the Idea, and provided we have a sound grip on the Idea, is what it is, and remains so regardless of where it is found or what the perspective of onlookers may be. Furthermore, particular instances of friendship are so only insofar as they meet the criteria that define the Idea of friendship. To use a mathematical example: the Idea of triangularity is the idea of three straight lines joined together and forming a shape in which the three angles add up to 180 degrees. That is what a triangle is (it is, to use another formulation, what the word ‘triangle’ means), it is what all triangles have been and will continue to be, for the definition provides the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a triangle. No actual triangle could be perfect, because, though we may not have the eyes or instruments to detect it, in fact no line drawn will be absolutely straight, no angle will be precisely what it is supposed to be. And, of course, no instance of a triangle looks the same to you and me as we look at it from different positions, and no actual triangular shape on earth will remain forever. But the Idea of triangularity is timeless and beyond physical change; it is also the Idea, the model, the concept, the set of criteria, in the light of which physical instances are judged to be triangular or not. I shall consider the problematic features of the theory under five headings, of which the last seems to me the only one on which we need to take sides for the purpose of understanding Plato’s educational thought. 1. Language: Plato, more than most philosophers, is writing about matters for which the language at his disposal is not fully equipped. He has himself introduced at least two new notions for which he does not have a ready-made language: he distinguishes between what we would call

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‘properties’ and ‘accidents’, as we have seen, without having a word for either; and, similarly, he distinguishes between ‘contrary opposition’ and ‘otherness’, but has to do so by saying that the Ideas of motion and being are different but can combine, whereas the Ideas of motion and rest can never combine. Bearing in mind this fact that the vocabulary lags behind the thought, one should in my view be very cautious about placing too much weight on the precise words Plato uses (especially when we add that we are having to translate them). Nonetheless, for some there is a problem in the fact that Plato uses a wide variety of different phrases when referring to the Ideas. Not only does he sometimes talk about the idea, sometimes the eidos, and sometimes some other circumlocution, he also at different times writes of them being ‘in’ particulars, being that ‘by which’ particulars are characterized, and being that which ‘makes’ particulars have the characteristics they do, whether by their ‘presence’ or their ‘association’. Sometimes particulars ‘have’ an Idea; sometimes they share in them; sometimes they partake of them. Related to this general point is the fact that it is not always clear whether Plato is treating a group of words as more or less synonymous or a set of concepts as interchangeable. Presumably when he seems to identify the Good and the Beautiful he is not claiming that the words are synonyms (although that would be far less paradoxical in Greek, where kalos, meaning something like ‘fine’ or ‘fitting’, has overtones of both, than in English); but one may wonder to what extent his view that existence, changelessness and absoluteness are inseparable shades into the view that they are essentially the same thing (Symp. 210a), or whether being ‘divine’ means more than being ‘invisible and eternal’. And the various different meanings of einai (‘to be’) certainly have a bearing on what precisely Plato is to be taken to mean (see below). 2. Are there Ideas of everything ? It is not clear whether Plato believed there to be an Idea for everything from physical man-made objects such as beds, emotional states such as being in love, ideals such as happiness, to trivial things such as mud, pebbles and hair. In particular, it is uncertain whether he imagined there to be Ideas of a negative or evil nature. It is true, for example, that he refers in the Republic to ‘bedness’, when making the point that the painter knows even less about it than the carpenter, who himself does not necessarily fully grasp the Idea; but it could be argued that Plato is here merely illustrating the point about the artist’s distance from true knowledge and that he has not really given any thought to the question of whether there is an Idea of bedness. Similarly, since Plato talks of Ideas always as representing the objects of knowledge to which we ought to aspire, there is something a little odd about the notion of Ideas of what isn’t the case or isn’t to be valued, but it is not impossible

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that Plato believed there could be such. We should not be misled by the passage in which it is said that ‘we are accustomed to postulate’ a Form or Idea for every group of things called by the same name (Republic 596a) into thinking either that this conclusively establishes an Idea for everything or that an Idea is simply a word. The implication here is that an Idea has to correspond to a class, group, or genus of some kind, rather than that any identifiable genus has a corresponding Idea, and there should be no doubt at all that, to Plato, the purpose of names is to classify according to essence which is independent of the naming (Cratylus 388b). I suspect that Plato did not fully work out in his own mind the answer to this question, because it is incontestable that his focus was on the fundamental, evaluative, organizing concepts relating to humans and the good life. In other words, his interest was in Ideas such as beauty, courage, friendship and justice, and not in mud or betrayal. 3. Is there a hierarchy of forms? This question follows the previous one naturally enough, and may perhaps be conjoined with the slightly different question of whether he believed in intermediate entities between the Ideas and the particulars. Aristotle’s answer to the second question was that he did – specifically that he posited mathematical objects such as ‘equals’ which were distinct from the Idea of the Equal (Metaph. 987b). What is at issue is this: in the Phaedo (74a), Plato refers to both ‘the equal itself’ and ‘the equals themselves’ (as distinct from equal sticks or equal lines), and Aristotle interprets this to mean that there is a distinction. The argument in favor of this interpretation is that it is indeed the case that as well as talking of particular physical circles and the Idea of circularity, we may talk of abstract, ideal circles in the plural. But the two circles that I conceive of as intersecting are neither earthbound in a drawing, as particular circles are, nor the Idea of circularity, which is single, so they must be something else. (It will be noted that this applies to a mathematical instance but not to something like the ‘beautiful’: there is the notion of beauty and there are instances of beauty in the physical world, but we cannot conceive of ‘perfect beauties’ as we can circles.) I am inclined to reject Aristotle’s view, while again noting that, while it is obviously a legitimate aspect of Platonic scholarship to take the question seriously, the more important task in assessing Plato is to understand what he says about the moral and social Ideas that primarily interest him. For the same reason, while there clearly is in some sense a hierarchy of Ideas, because it is manifest that the Idea of the Good is supreme, it is of secondary importance to attempt to reconstruct that hierarchy (or construct it, since it remains unclear that Plato had much more to say on the topic than to emphasize the ascendancy of the Good).

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4. The Third Man. Fourthly, there is a set of more logical quibbles introduced by Plato himself in the Parmenides and echoed by Aristotle, the essence of which is the so-called Third Man argument, a simple statement of which goes like this: if particulars resemble their Idea (circles resemble circularity), then, since resemblance is a two-way street, the Idea must resemble the particulars (circularity resembles circles). But if circularity resembles particular circles that must be, in Platonic terms, because both partake in a further Idea, and so on, ad infinitum. This is one of the few occasions on which I find myself in sympathy with those who think philosophy a trivial, hair-splitting, logic-chopping activity and an idle waste of time! It is not that I repudiate the logic, so much as wish to dismiss the concern as of being of no real consequence or interest (notwithstanding the presumably different view of Parmenides, Plato himself, and Aristotle). But the inspiration for my rejection of this line of argument hinges on the remaining objection to the Theory of Ideas, which is surely the source of all these perceived problems, namely Plato’s insistence that the Ideas are real and have a separate existence. If that were not the case, if, for example, we were dealing with what we now call ‘concepts’, then none of these problems would arise. 5. A Transcendental World? The main problem lies not in the theory of Ideas or Forms itself but in the perception that Plato believed that there was a transcendental world, parallel to the world with which we are familiar, and that the Ideas had actual existence in that world. Here of course are problems indeed: where is this world? In what manner do the Ideas of justice, bedness and love exist in that world? What is the nature of the relationship between the two worlds, and how does this particular bed come to partake in (what indeed does it mean to say that it partakes in) the real Idea of bedness that is supposed to be stalking about that other world? Critics of Plato maintain that the theory is counter-intuitive and implausible, if not clearly erroneous. While it may be true that our senses and appearance can deceive us and that things change over time, the physical world is still manifestly the real world, and the positing of an ideal world is more or less unintelligible. It is true that Plato uses terms such as ‘real’, ‘partakes in’, ‘exists’, ‘perfect’ and ‘imperishable’ of the Ideas, all of which, if taken literally, suggest that the Ideas are indeed the counterpart of instances and that their world parallels the physical world we know, as in a science-fiction story. But this is to forget that Plato is writing at a time when the language at his disposal is trying to deal with concepts and arguments that are entirely novel. One need only think of the way in which the Greeks talk about their gods to see that, whether because their language lagged behind

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A Critical Exposition of Plato’s Educational Thought their thinking or because their thinking was basically earthbound, they do not have various metaphysical, spiritual and religious concepts that have since been developed. Whether they wanted it or not, the Greeks didn’t have the language, for example, to talk of ‘the trinity’ or the peculiarly Christian concepts of redemption, original sin and heaven. And, if that point is not sufficient, it is further the case that even today Plato’s language does not have to be taken literally. I would argue that the importance and substantially the whole of what Plato wished to convey was that the world of Ideas was more real than the physical world in the specific sense that this is the world that we need to come to grips with, if we are to have the fullest understanding and control over our lives. There is really nothing very odd in claiming that the Idea of ‘love’ is imperishable – it has certainly lasted so far throughout recorded time; nor is it mysterious to claim that it is perfect in a way that actual cases of love seldom if ever are; any concept is necessarily perfect: even the concept of ugliness or brutality may quite reasonably be said to be innately perfect, not of course in the sense of perfectly good or wonderful, but in the sense of perfectly ugly or brutal. Nor is it as perplexing, as some claim, to say that the Idea of love ‘exists’ – it certainly does exist, so much so that it sometimes causes the romantics among us to commit suicide. Of course if we interpret ‘exists’ (or the Greek word einai, ‘to be’) to mean has corporeal, somatic or physical embodiment, we do have a problem, since the notion of an embodied Idea with physical presence in some non-terrestrial space cannot be taken seriously. But we do not need to do that. Einai can be used to signify existence of both the literal (the dog is) and figurative (God is) kind, not to mention predication, identification, class-membership, definition, and the truth of a statement (see Kahn, 1966). When it comes to asking whether the Ideas are real, the same choice is before us: they might be said to be real in a way that natural pearls are and artificial pearls are not, or in the sense that a physical cut is but a figurative slight is not. To suggest that Plato, notwithstanding his ornate and inspired language, such that, as Guthrie remarks, talk of the transcendence of the Ideas brings with it ‘talk of immortality, of a winged soul meeting with truth in a place beyond the heavens, of the vision of bodiless beauty’ (1975: 250), meant primarily to convey and emphasize only the unchanging, imperishable, eternal nature of the Ideas when referring to them as ‘being’, ‘existing’ and ‘having reality’, both makes his theory eminently plausible and, I suspect, is essentially correct. It may be said that to argue in this way is to make Plato’s Ideas no more than concepts, which a commentator such as Grube explicitly rejects: ‘to look upon the Ideas as concepts in any shape or form is a mistake,

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for a concept cannot by definition exist until a mind has conceived it, and this Plato quite deliberately refused to admit of his Ideas. They are rather the objective reality to which the concept corresponds, and they exist whether we know them or not. If the whole human race were senseless savages, the Eternal Form of justice would exist as fully in any case’ (1980: 49). See also Chapter 15 below, and Adam, [1902] 1965: vol. 2, 168). I do not actually disagree with most of this, but I draw a different conclusion. Certainly Plato believed that the Idea of justice in some sense exists, regardless of who is or is not conceiving of it, but why should this not be taken to mean that there are coherent and incoherent concepts? No one can conceive of a square circle, though we can talk about one, but love could be conceived of at any time, even when it is not in fact being conceived of. What matters to Plato are surely the points that actual instances of all things are imperfect and that to understand (and by extension control and improve) life one needs to grasp abstract concepts, which may be said to exist eternally in the sense that they are eternally there to be conceived. To say that the Ideas are the objective reality to which the concept corresponds, though very natural on the surface, is to beg the question; an alternative account says that the concept itself has objective reality: triangularity is, one might say, a concept waiting to be conceived. (Whether this can equally well be said of goodness is a further question; here I am only maintaining that this interpretation of what Plato means by the reality and existence of Ideas is as plausible as any other.) The argument boils down to this: Plato is generally interpreted to believe that ‘love’ is what it is, an Idea waiting to be captured like a butterfly and given its correct name. An alternative is to say that there are in principle various coherent accounts to be given of love, or various ideas of love, and various incoherent accounts. Any conceivable coherent account is an Idea. (Although Plato evidently didn’t think in terms of there being various legitimate conceptions or forms of love, he could hardly dispute that there are various species of the genus, and it conflicts with nothing crucial to his views to say as much. He talks about the one Idea of love, but there is nothing in what he says to invalidate, by extension, the notion of there being an Idea of each type of love.) What is conceivable exists as an Idea, regardless of whether anyone entertains it. There are passages, undoubtedly, that can be addressed to support either position, but in opting for the latter interpretation I draw attention to the clear statement by Plato that words ultimately or logically have to follow concepts rather than the other way round.5 There are three questions that need to be distinguished on this topic: what was Plato’s position in fact? What interpretation(s) of the texts are

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A Critical Exposition of Plato’s Educational Thought possible? What would Plato say today, given certain shifts and advances in thinking? My argument is that the two interpretations I have introduced are both legitimate (as are other variants), that today he would certainly take the view I propose (simply because he would be a child of our time and would not commit himself to Ideas that had all the hallmarks of space-beings), and that that view is in fact very possibly the one he held. The most important aspect of this, from the point of view of education, is to make the point that the interpretation of the theory of Ideas as a particular view of what we now call conceptual analysis does not weaken its relevance to education: it still implies a belief in objectivity and knowledge and a commitment to education in the sense of developing understanding of the Ideas. Plato says Love is or exists eternally; we say the same thing when we say ‘there is always an idea of love’ which at any given time particular individuals may invoke and seek to elucidate. Plato implies that it has to be seen for what it is by us; we should prefer to say that it can only be coherently understood in a certain way. It may seem that to defend Plato in this way is the equivalent of damning with faint praise, inasmuch as the thesis is now considerably less exciting and unusual than it would be if we accepted it as partly metaphysical and ontological. And incidentally I am not denying that Plato does hold views that are mystical and other-worldly. I take his belief in the transmigration of souls literally, and I can be fairly easily persuaded that he believes literally in an afterlife. But there is no evidence that I can see anywhere in his writing that he presumed that as a soul wandered about prior to re-birth in some actual (physically actual?) nether world it in some literal sense ‘encountered’ ‘embodied’ Ideas. All this, besides having no explicit textual warrant, is quite unnecessary. But the reason that this is not an empty defence is that, once again, the context, Plato’s place and time, give his thesis its significance. Today it may be said that this is just to say that Plato believed in universals, and thought it important to analyze concepts, which is a very familiar position. But it wasn’t familiar when Plato first put it forward: it was revolutionary. Furthermore, while it has become something of a commonplace among philosophers since, we should not be blind to the fact that there are nonetheless some who do not recognize the vital importance of such analysis, and others who dispute the truth even of this limited claim. For the interesting fact is that what Plato was doing historically, and what in the judgment of some he did brilliantly and successfully, was to refute the arguments for subjectivism and relativism that are now being re-peddled in the name of what some are pleased to refer to as postmodernism.

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There is no need for us to get hung up on the word ‘postmodernism’ itself. I am referring to contemporary beliefs and arguments to the effect that there is no truth, only competing viewpoints, that there is no knowledge, only opinion, that there is no right and wrong, only fashion, taste or custom, that there is no expertise, no superior or inferior achievement, no better or worse way of life, and that man or power or desire is the measure of all things. Such highly pernicious doctrines, that affect us today not only in our academic theorizing but in the way in which we conduct ourselves, were precisely the doctrines that Plato wished to combat: what his theory of Ideas, even shorn of its more poetic and some of its debated problematic aspects, does is, for the first time ever as far as we know, decisively and comprehensively destroy them. Nobody who understands the theory of Ideas could fail to see through the empty rhetoric and tedious misapplied point-scoring of ‘postmodernism’. Plato’s point, and it is of great significance for education, is that, while it is true that the customs and values of Greeks and barbarians are different, that Athens favors democracy while Sparta favors oligarchy, that habits and belief change over time, that even physical objects are perceived only from relative positions – nonetheless, the shifting world of appearances should not lead us to embrace nihilistic, relativistic, or subjectivist views. There is truth, and knowledge of it is possible. But paradoxically it does not ultimately depend upon the senses or empirical testing of the physical world in order to get beyond appearance; it depends upon our coming face to face with, or, if such physical metaphors continue to mislead us, upon our analysing and coming to understand the true or ideal nature of things. Once we know what a true or ideal democracy involves, then we can proceed to attempt to create one, or to judge whether a particular instance is near to or far from perfection, but not before. Indeed, had philosophers themselves taken better heed of Plato’s argument, less time might have been wasted over the centuries on arguing whether he was a ‘linguistic realist’ or believed in the existence of a world of Ideas, since both debates depend extensively on what one means by, respectively, ‘realism’ and ‘existence’. Similarly, the question of whether he was an ‘essentialist’ or a ‘nominalist’, that is to say whether he believed that his Ideas or Forms (or what some would now call universals) are given in nature independently of our definitions, or rather are simply definitions abstracted from particulars, might have been set aside a long time ago. As acknowledged above, Plato’s language being new to the task of and not yet fashioned to philosophical argument, does not always allow us to understand him precisely, but the only interesting part of the question of whether he was or wasn’t an essentialist is surely the aforementioned

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A Critical Exposition of Plato’s Educational Thought question of in what sense he thought his Ideas were ‘real’ and had ‘existence’ (see, further, Appendix 3). From this one aspect of his philosophy, a number of educational propositions can be derived either directly or indirectly, and in one way or another are derived by Plato himself. First, since acquiring understanding of the truth is for humans the highest goal, education, which is uncontentiously the business of bringing up the young in such a way as to enable them to flourish as adults, must be largely concerned with the development of understanding. Secondly, whatever the precise details, the aim is to ascend to competence in abstract conceptual thought. Thirdly, while there is doubt about what the full range of Ideas may be, Plato believed in the paramount importance of focusing on fundamental organizing concepts – on justice, rather than mice, for example. Fourthly, and closely related, though not explicitly hostile to or even uninterested in science, Plato clearly believes that it is social rather than scientific concepts that by and large should be focused upon. Fifthly, he clearly abhors, and believes that we should bring up the young to abhor, both confusing appearance with reality or truth in general, and confusing taste or fashion with objective truth in the realm of values in particular. Sixthly, although it is clearly implicit in the above, he argued that philosophy should be the coping-stone of the educational curriculum.

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Chapter 10

The Concept of Education

In the Laws Plato remarks that education is ‘the first and fairest thing that the best of men can have’ (644b) and so the legislator must not leave it to chance or treat it as being of secondary importance (766a). ‘A good education is one that tends to the improvement of mind and body’ (788c), and ‘a man of true nurture and education attains the fullness and health of the perfect man, but if he neglects education he walks lame throughout life’ (Ti. 44c). That Plato thought education very important is obvious, and his views about it can be pieced together, as we are doing here. But when we bear in mind both that it was Socrates who pre-eminently introduced the idea that conceptual questions are crucial and that the early Platonic dialogues frequently center on questions relating to social concepts, it is interesting that the question of what education consists in is never directly raised. (This might provide food for thought in respect of the complex issue of whether Plato believed that there were ideas relating to all universals or only to important organizational categories.) But although he does not formally ask ‘What is education?’, he does, of course, indirectly provide an answer to the question throughout his writings. His view is not revolutionary, in the context of his times, nor even entirely novel, since, as we have already seen, he is drawing to some extent on his predecessors and contemporary ideas and practice. Nonetheless, it is in some respects radically at variance with standard Greek opinion. Needless to say, every child (except those who were exposed to die) whether rich or poor, slave or free, male or female, had an upbringing in ancient Greece. But, to focus on Athens, while vase paintings suggest that girls received some elementary education, they will have been taught little more than to adopt the manners and behaviors deemed appropriate to a woman and to cultivate the skills, such as weaving and dealing with household accounts, necessary to carrying out the duties of a woman; the children of the poor will merely have been conditioned into an acceptance of the family’s way of life and apprenticed to a trade, usually that of the

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father. Only the male children of prosperous and aristocratic families will have had something recognizable to us as a formal education. The first school that we are aware of is one of which Herodotus, the ‘father of history’, tells us the roof caved in, an event which can be dated to the beginning of the fifth century BC (V.1.27). For the most part, in Plato’s time, boys probably went to small local one-room schools; they were usually accompanied to and from school by a slave, deputed to be the paidagogos or child-minder. The child had three different kinds of teacher, the paidotribes or physical-training instructor, the kitharistes or music teacher and the grammatistes or ‘one who teaches letters’. The last taught the boys the basic skills of reading and writing. The kitharistes, whose name literally refers to the playing of a harp-like instrument or lyre, did not teach music in a way that we would be familiar with in a school today. He was comparable to a private tutor hired to teach the rudiments of piano, violin, or other instrument. The purpose of this teaching was to provide a social skill and to allow accompaniment to the reciting of the corpus of epic poetry, particularly Homer. Epic poetry provided the entire content of this education, and it was presented as material to be rote-learnt and its ideals and standards emulated, rather than as food for thought of any kind. In other words, the formal education of an Athenian boy would amount to little more than a very basic elementary or primary education. No wonder that Socrates made such an impact on the youth of Athens and, more generally, that the sophists had such an eager audience. For it is in the teaching of these individuals that we first find evidence of something approaching our own ideas of education. The connection, of course, is far from accidental: Plato, notwithstanding his polarization of Socrates as good and the sophists as bad, saw in their teaching the essence of an entirely new concept of education, which he then developed and indirectly handed on to us. In much the same way as, drawing on Presocratics such as Xenophanes and Parmenides, he began to formulate a conception of God, more a characterless ‘force’ than the anthropomorphic gods and goddesses of traditional Greek religion, that ultimately found its way into Christianity, and indirectly a great many other religions, so he is probably the single most important source of a major contemporary conception of education. The key to this conception is that it involves the notion that education is primarily concerned with the development of mind. This immediately raises the question of Plato’s attitude to other types of upbringing. There is a strong tendency in Platonic criticism to see him as being hostile to manual work, trades and crafts. This is based partly on reading the Republic as a tract designed to oppress and enslave the worthless masses, in order to allow for the rule and intellectual life of the Guardians, and partly perhaps on his perceived interest in Sparta. But it is surely clear that, whatever he may have

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admired in that state, his strictly educational ideals owe nothing to Sparta, where the very idea of free thought or independent speculation was anathema. Nor should the Republic be read as hostile to the masses. Again and again it is explicitly stated that the intention is to cater to their well-being and best interests. We may not like the paternalism, we may reject some of Plato’s argument and proposals, but there is no warrant for gratuitously assuming that he was lying. It is true that he believed that the majority did not need and would not be able to benefit from the education of the Guardians; but it is not necessarily true that he despised the vocational or technical upbringing related to a craft or trade that the majority would experience: his frequent use of analogies drawn from various trades and crafts does not suggest contempt; his closest mentor, Socrates, was a stonemason by trade; the education of the majority would be similar to that enjoyed by most of his contemporaries. The situation is rather that he did not think that all people would be able to cope with and benefit from the highly cognitive or intellectual education that he proposes for some (which he undoubtedly regarded as the highest form of education), and that he regarded a more technical or vocational curriculum as, in its own way, equally important. If this is substantially correct, Plato is in much the same position as many of us today, faced with a similar dilemma: do we believe that all are equally capable of and likely to benefit from the same education, or do we think that different talents and interests may legitimately lead to different types of education, or at least curricula? Are there social benefits of importance to be gained from distinct types of education, or is it important that all study the same kind of thing in the same kind of way? Contemporary thought and practice are not very convincing on this subject: the rhetoric tends to be along the lines of ‘the same education for all’, but the practice tends in all sorts of way to involve differentiation. The inferences to be drawn from Plato’s writing about education include the following: there is a distinction between technical or vocational training and education, the former being a matter of acquiring specific skills associated with a craft or trade, the latter being a matter of developing theoretical understanding.6 Secondly, some people are not suited to the latter, whether because they are born lacking the appropriate nature or because in the course of upbringing they for one reason or another fall by the wayside. Thirdly, education in the fullest sense is a matter of acquiring understanding of abstract ideas, particularly the fundamental humanistic concepts that structure our view of life. The first point seems indisputable: a distinction can be drawn between vocational training and education, and under these labels, or very similar ones such as ‘education for its own sake’, ‘education for life’, and ‘education

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for the work place’, a debate about the relationship between them is very much alive today. As some of the phrases suggest, a further distinction between applied knowledge for the work place and for life has been introduced, as has the notion of a profession, which tries to link the notions of trade-skills and theoretical understanding, so that a surgeon is seen not simply as a skilled operator but as one who works within a substantial body of understanding. Plato does not explore such ramifications, but it is unlikely that he would be happy with a modern tendency to see everything in terms of skills as distinct from understanding. That the potter or stonemason has skills and that these can be passed on by demonstration and practice he would readily agree. But it seems doubtful whether he would accept the suggestion that teaching, counseling, being imaginative, or critical thinking can similarly be taught by modeling and practising a set of skills. He would surely argue that, while there are obviously some skills, or tricks of the trade, involved in these activities, ultimately being a good teacher or counselor, being imaginative or critical, is a matter of entering a body of understanding, including in particular knowing what good teaching (or good counseling, or being imaginative or critical) means; and knowing what counts as good teaching presupposes knowing what it means to say that someone is well-educated. Plato is not hostile to training (the Guardians will undertake physical training, and they will be taught skills of reading, writing and behavior in the early years), but he argues that education must go beyond mere training and the acquisition of skills. That individuals are different from one another in respect of talent, ability, and interest also seems incontestable, but whether that is sufficient to justify differential schooling is more open to debate, as is the question of what type of differential treatment should be provided. For Plato, introducing the idea of a distinction between the intellectually gifted and the practically inclined, the issue may not seem too problematic. Society does need people whose primary interest is in practical activity and it does need people who can think clearly and constructively on a theoretical level, and some people are fairly obviously more suited to one, some the other. One problem with this view, however, has always been the difficulty of knowing how and when to determine such difference of aptitude. I have argued that it is incorrect to see Plato as thinking that this is a simple matter of innate aptitude which can be spotted and acted on at birth. But it is very difficult to discern exactly how and when, and to what extent, he imagined transference would take place. The only clear point is that part of his strategy involves letting individuals withdraw from a particular curriculum option as and when they fall behind in it, as those Guardians who cannot compete at the highest level settle for the life of the auxiliary, while the most able

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proceed to study to be philosopher-kings. But, even here, it is a moot point who determines that an individual has fallen behind and how they are to do it. In contemporary terms, once again the situation is considerably more complex, with competing proposals for differential schooling, for differential curricula, for setting, for streaming, for similar secondary schooling but varying tertiary education, and so on. And it is difficult to see how, on any view, one can avoid the problem so graphically illustrated by the working of the tripartite system of education in England in its heyday after the Second World War: even if one accepts the premise of differences, how does one determine them? For there is plenty of evidence both that classification is difficult and error-prone, and that in categorizing a person, whether as intellectual, practical or anything else, one plays at least a small part in making them conform to that category. However, these complexities should not blind us to the fact that there are differences between people that are relevant to education, and that Plato was correct to see a person’s aptitude as one relevant factor. His most important contribution remains the articulation of a concept of education as being the development of understanding and the consequent attempt to develop an appropriate curriculum. There is nothing directly helpful to modern attempts to develop a curriculum by reference to important branches of knowledge because a noticeable absence in Plato’s work is any exploration of the distinctions between various emerging branches of inquiry. He writes about the advantages and disadvantages of the written word, he discusses the educational advantages and disadvantages of poetry, and, of course, he does spell out a curriculum involving mathematics and music. But he does not talk about history, drama or fiction (the latter not really recognized as an art form yet, and drama being rather unlike contemporary conceptions of theatre); nor does he pay any attention to empirical science (in this he was fairly typically Greek), let alone social science, religious studies, or any of the more egregious contemporary candidates for curriculum time. Nonetheless, his contribution to our thinking about the educational curriculum is considerable. Plato presents us with the first and at the time startling statement of the proposition that the highest pinnacle of human achievement, the apex of education, is not the ability to perform this or that task, not the memorization of behavior, rules, statements, and opinions, and not merely the very Greek ideal of the kaloskagathos (implying both physical fitness and good character) which he certainly endorsed, but the development of the mind, by which is meant the acquisition of understanding of abstract ideas and modes of thought. This is the original and among the most notable accounts

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of education in terms of intellect. More particularly there is the claim that philosophical or conceptual understanding, or, in his terms, apprehending the Ideas, is the mark of the educated person. Of course, philosophers of education (philosophers of anything) are likely to find this very appealing. But it is also true. Any discipline that is productive and valued, as for example science is, depends upon its organization in terms of a set of clearly articulated concepts. In other words, behind science, if it is good science, whether individual practitioners know it and are themselves philosophically inclined or not, lies philosophy of science. And similarly with other valued subjects such as history, literature, or (Plato’s main example) mathematics – though they do not require an articulated philosophy prior to their emergence, their being, their standards, their value, all depend upon a philosophically sound set of organizing concepts. When we dismiss those who deny the Holocaust as bad historians, we are going beyond historical data and implicitly appealing to an idea of what history is. Without such an idea, we cannot make judgments about the validity or soundness of historical claims. Another implication of Plato’s account is worth drawing out. The study of philosophy itself is an abstract, non-practical activity, but, and this is one of the main thrusts of Plato’s overall argument, it is quite wrong to think of it as impractical. Its practical value lies in the fact that it enables us to make judgments and decisions about action in a coherent way, as in the instance of those who understand what history is being the only ones who can detect and shame bad history for what it is. The philosopher-kings are just that: they study philosophy in order to rule more wisely. Generalizing, we may say that acquiring or developing the art of philosophical analysis not only deepens our understanding, but also enables us, whoever we may be, to formulate and hence act upon wiser courses of action. In short, while Plato recognizes the need for and the value of basic and vocational skills, and while he recognizes differences in aptitude and the fact that they may be the product of both innate and external factors, he conceives education in the fullest sense as being the development of mind. A developed mind is one that has the most valuable understanding. The most valuable understanding is understanding of the Ideas, particularly the Idea of good.

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Chapter 11

Nature vs Nurture

The issue of nature vs nurture has been referred to several times already. It is now time to consider Plato’s thought on this issue in detail and to examine how his thinking fits with ours. He has been seen by some critics as being an exponent of the view that teaching a child is analogous to filling an empty vessel; but, rather more strangely, he has also been seen by some as an early ‘progressive’ thinker who believed that teaching should be thought of as analogous to nurturing a plant: providing the appropriate environment in which the child, like the seed, can germinate and grow naturally to adult or flowerhood. This kind of polarized debate between two extreme positions is all too common in education and generally hasn’t much to recommend it. One might add that argument by analogy can be pretty suspect (although Plato himself was a great user of analogy and metaphor). Analogies have some obvious strengths, such as, very often, their vividness and memorability, but they are very seldom perfect (because ‘everything is what it is and not another thing’),7 and using them tends to beg the question. If, for example, we are trying to explain something that we do not fully understand by analogy, how do we know that the analogy holds or in what respects it holds? If we do fully understand the original concept, then we don’t need the analogy. Certainly, it could be argued that where Plato is most prone to analogy, simile and metaphor, while he may reach poetic heights, he remains fairly obscure. In any case, the polarization issue remains: we do not have to choose between the images of filling an empty bucket and letting a seed come to flower. Education in general, and teaching in particular, are very badly characterized by either image, and fairly obviously the art of teaching involves some implanting of material, some cultivating of a suitable environment and a great deal more besides. That Plato should nonetheless have been characterized as a bucket-filler is not too surprising. The myth of the metals (415a ff) is naturally taken to imply a significant innate difference between people in terms of intellect, character, and talent (perhaps needs and interests), and the general tone

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of his writing in the Republic (even more so in the Laws) and the extent to which he presumes that the entire business of living will be directed by the rulers, all suggest that there is knowledge which those who have it will convey to those that don’t. And certainly he is not of the school of thought that thinks that there is no such thing as objective knowledge. By contrast the notion of a ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centered’ Plato is surprising. It is based on the slender foundation of a claim that Plato thought the ideal teaching method to be ‘discovery-learning’ (which will be discussed below), perhaps bolstered by reference to his belief that we had perfect knowledge in another world prior to birth so that learning can be said to be a process of ‘recall’ or ‘reminiscence’, and by his evident belief in the importance of the cultural environment. It is one of the obvious premises of the Republic that what we learn and how we develop depends crucially on the setting in which we are placed. But crucial is not the same as exclusive, and the picture of Plato advocating a comfortable set of surroundings in which children of their own accord ascend the hierarchy of knowledge and come to see the truth for themselves is no more convincing then the earlier picture of a platonic Gradgrind instilling knowledge into empty minds. To understand his position, we need to focus on the incontestable points mentioned: Plato did believe in innate qualities (talents, interests, abilities) in the individual, and he probably believed that they were largely, or perhaps wholly, hereditary. But he also believed profoundly in the power of the environment – indeed in the absence of such a belief the Republic could not have been written. He believed that there was such a thing as truth and he believed in objective knowledge, while being fully aware that most of our claims to knowledge are questionable and that there is a distinction between appearance and reality. He believed in the transmigration of souls, and therefore was able to surmise that prior to rebirth our souls inhabit a world where all is known, so that on being reborn the soul, imprisoned in its new body, may be said to have knowledge but to require help (education) in recovering it. Each of these assumptions, with the exception of the belief in transmigration of souls, is commonly accepted today, and it is surely not very difficult to understand his position as being that which any enlightened person of today would hold. Recent research in the field of genetics has established, first, that we are genetically primed in the sense that we are born with a set of genes that direct and set limits on who we can be; and secondly, that our genetic make-up is inherited. However, it is also clear that precisely what the genetic base will lead to depends upon the environment in which we are placed: the environment, including education, not only affects or gives precise shape to the significance of the genes – but may also actually change the

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configuration of genes. Thus, the answer to the long-standing and unrealistically polarized debate between extreme advocates of environment such as Marxists of various hue, and extreme advocates of innate qualities such as some religious believers, is that we develop through the interaction between the two: it is a matter of nature via, rather than versus, nurture (Ridley, 2003). Not only is this the mainstream contemporary view, it is also and always has been the common-sense view, and (without the vocabulary of genetics) was the view espoused by Plato. A proper understanding of his position allows us to revisit briefly some of the problems that beset him (or might have done had he pursued the issue) and still beset us today, about the extent to which and the respects in which we should seek to provide differential education. Our current understanding certainly doesn’t suggest that we are each born with very specific differences. We are talking rather about the sort of broad distinction that interested Plato (intellectual or not intellectual, courageous or timid, artistic or practical) rather than being born to be an accountant, a taxidriver or a philosopher. There are also, as I have suggested Plato felt, some aspects of upbringing that all children should share, such as basic skills of writing, reading and number, recognition of and habituation to social values, physical activity and health. Given these considerations alone, it seems there is a strong case for following Plato, as we in fact generally do, in continuing to provide a common elementary education for all. However, while Plato cannot be said to have been wrong in thinking that some are more suited to the pursuit of academic knowledge than others, he can be criticized for seeing this in terms that are too stark (partly because he doesn’t show interest in a variety of academic fields that we recognize besides mathematics and philosophy): it is sensible and appropriate for him to point out that by carefully watching and monitoring the progress of children from the beginning, we can be alert to different natures as they develop. But we do not have to confine ourselves to a distinction between the academic and the non-academic, as was the tendency for example in the English division between grammar and secondary modern schools. We can recognize a wider variety of academic studies, we can be more generous in our estimates of individuals’ potential than Plato perhaps was and we can take some steps to guard against the danger of creating, say, a carpenter or a chemist, through classifying an individual as one or the other, in particular by making more allowance for movement back and forth between various types of study, and above all by making distinctions in relation to particulars (e.g. relatively good at mathematics, relatively good at music) rather than generalities (e.g. relatively good at intellectual subjects, relatively good at sport). Providing that we make careful provisions of this sort, Plato was surely right to see the desirability and legitimacy of the sort of distinction

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made in what is usually called ‘setting’; but he was wrong in so far as what he was advocating was actually ‘streaming’, meaning an overall classification such as academic/non-academic, or ‘A’/‘B’ student, as distinct from a more specific judgment such as ‘poor at mathematics’. Consideration of Plato’s view on the subject of the extent to which the development of our minds and characters is dependent on innate and external factors, leads naturally into consideration of his views on teaching methods. One further possible argument for the claim that he should be classified as some kind of progressive educator, advocating discoverylearning and emphasizing the student as learner, with the teacher playing a facilitating rather than a directive role, is that his remarks on teaching and his presentation of the character of Socrates as a teacher in the dialogues suggest something quite distinct from the traditional role of the teacher as one who imparts knowledge directly to students. Socrates is made to see himself, by analogy, as one who, like the gadfly that stings cattle thus provoking them out of their somnolence and into some kind of action, prods and provokes his students rather than informs them. He is almost a subversive agent, certainly a stimulator or agitator, rather than one who passively passes on knowledge. Another analogy, this time to the stingray, has similar connotations. And the fact that the charge against him made by his fellow citizens was not, for example, that of ‘preaching subversion’ or of ‘teaching falsehood’, but rather of ‘not believing in the city’s gods’ and of ‘corrupting the youth of the city’, might also be taken to imply that he did not directly impart knowledge to students, so much as indirectly cause them to form their own opinions. The most famous passage relating to teaching occurs in the Meno. In this dialogue Socrates leads a previously untutored slave to the knowledge that in order to construct a square double the area of a given square, it is necessary to construct it on the diagonal of the first square (rather than by doubling the length of its sides, as one might intuitively suppose). The process is described in detail, and consists entirely of Socrates asking questions. At the beginning the answers that he elicits are wrong, but he does not say so. The slave boy’s first reaction to the question ‘how long will the side of a square twice as long as this one be?’ is ‘twice as long, obviously’. Socrates then proceeds to draw the square proposed by the boy, who can see with his own eyes that the figure they end up with is four times, not twice, as big as the original. In the final stage of the demonstration Socrates draws in the diagonals of the four squares of original size that go to make up the 16-foot square, and asks how many segments there are half the size of the original (two by two foot) square in the newly formed central square. The boy correctly answers ‘four’, agrees that four is twice two and that therefore the square is twice the size of the original.

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SOCRATES:

‘On what line have we constructed this square?’ (pointing) ‘This one.’ SOCRATES: ‘The one which goes from corner to corner of original square?’ SLAVE: ‘Yes.’ SOCRATES: ‘That line is known as the diagonal. So your view is that the square on the diagonal of the original square is double the size of the original square?’ SLAVE: ‘Yes.’ (Meno 82b ff) SLAVE:

According to Socrates, Meno will agree that the slave discovered the truth without being taught. (He will certainly have a more realistic understanding of the statement that ‘the square on the diagonal . . . is double the size of the original square’ than one who has simply imbibed or learnt the formula by rote.) Socrates gave no instructions, explanations, or statements, but merely asked questions. The dialogue form adopted by Plato may itself suggest a distaste for didactic teaching or direct instruction, for, while Socrates generally controls and leads discussion (and, in any case, Plato of course controls the entire presentation of the argument), his style overall would be better described as ‘leading’ than ‘directing’, and it is scarcely accidental that the common notion of a ‘Socratic seminar’ is of something relatively open and questioning. It is noteworthy the extent to which the dialogues (particularly the early ones) do not tie up loose ends, do not pretend to, and do not seem to be concerned about it. There is a real sense that the journey of inquiry is at least as important as the destination of knowledge. Does such evidence as this yield the conclusion that Plato was advocating a non-directive teaching style and, more specifically, one that implies that the teacher’s job is to elicit knowledge that the student already has, rather than to impart knowledge to an ignorant mind (and hence perhaps imply that the power of the innate or of nature is greater than we have been supposing)? The first thing to note is that here again there is a danger of presenting ourselves with false dichotomies, and certainly the key terms in the debate (‘progressive’, ‘traditional’, ‘directive’, ‘leading’, ‘discovery-learning’, ‘playway’, ‘instruction’, etc.) need careful thought. What, after all, is the difference between a teacher ‘leading’ and ‘directing’? Isn’t any learning that involves at some point a sense of realization ‘discovery-learning’, where does instruction begin and end, do terms like ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ in fact have any clear and precise descriptive meaning? Just as, at the end of the day, the notion that we have to be either champions of nature or champions of nurture is absurd, so, even before debate begins, one might be inclined to suppose that the art of teaching is very likely going to involve

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some instruction, some directed activity, some undirected activity, some unstructured learning situations, some structured, some questioning, some telling, and so on and so forth. The second thing to note is the actual point and purpose of the Meno, which is not designed as a disquisition on teaching method at all. It is a discussion about virtue and whether it can be taught, and the passage involving the slave boy and the square on the diagonal is introduced in the context of Plato’s belief in the transmigration of souls; it is designed primarily as a proof that the soul of the boy pre-existed in another world or dimension where all things were known to it. Meno has asked whether virtue is to be acquired through instruction or some other method. Characteristically, Socrates replies that that cannot be answered until we know what virtue is. We then get a basic lesson in analysis, as Meno confusedly defines it in terms of various different kinds of virtue, and has to be told that we should be looking for what is common to all specific acts of virtue. They attempt to do this, but without success. (This is the occasion on which Socrates is accused of being a stingray, numbing his interlocutors. Meno claims that he is the victim of a kind of witchcraft and has been reduced to perplexity (80a).) Neither can provide a satisfactory account of the idea of virtue. It is at this point that Meno complains that one can never learn anything new, because either one knows it already, or, since one doesn’t know it, one cannot recognize it when one comes face to face with it. This conundrum leads Socrates to outline what is surely the real essence of the dialogue, namely his belief in the immortality of the soul. The soul migrates, on the death of the body, to another world where it has become acquainted with all there is to know. This knowledge is ‘lost’ when the soul is reborn in a new body, but it is latent within, and can be recalled, and this constitutes what we call ‘learning’. It is to demonstrate this that Socrates engages with the slave boy. In stressing that this is primarily a dialogue about other things, and in particular at this stage about the immortality of the soul, I am not denying that Plato is making a point about the concept of learning, to the effect that it should not be seen as a process of acquiring entirely new knowledge, but rather of coming to see what in a sense was always there to be seen. But it does seem entirely wrong to see this passage as suggesting anything about Plato’s view on ideal teaching methods: it is designed to show that the student can be brought by a process of judicious questioning (with the not unimportant additional use of diagrams) to perceive something of which he was previously unaware, and not to show that the teacher should proceed in this way. In fact, I would suggest that more than being messy the question of whether Plato favored ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’ methods of education

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is anachronistic. There was, of course, a notion of traditional education to be contrasted with the ‘new’ way in his time; in fact the comic playwright Aristophanes has fun with precisely this theme in the Clouds, in which ‘Socrates’ is a leading character. But the contrast here is the timeless one of the clash between the values of the older generation and those of the younger. There are the predictable references to lack of discipline, lack of manners, lack of decorum, worthless icons and silly ideas, but nothing to suggest a serious debate about how didaskoloi (teachers) should conduct themselves. (In any case, the focus is predominantly on higher education rather than schools.) Plato does have something to say about teaching, but it does not come from any a priori theory of teaching or opinion as to what methods are themselves more or less efficacious. Rather what he has to say about teaching derives, sometimes without conscious recognition, from what he understands the nature of knowledge, the nature of the human soul and mind, and the nature of education to be. There is plenty of evidence that he would expect teachers to draw on what today we might term ‘traditional techniques’ or ‘instruction’. ‘Knowledge’, he claims ‘is the first qualification of any teacher’ (Alc. 113),8 a not insignificant remark in an age such as our own when there are those who believe that teaching is primarily a matter of mastering a set of generic skills which one can then use in relation to any subject matter (with the practical consequence that we sometimes have teachers of history and geography who have never studied the subjects). He remarks in the Theaetetus that ‘he who transmits the sciences may be said to teach them’ (198b) and also that ‘in education an improvement has to be effected’ (167a) – language that does not fit easily with a view of learning as self-realization. The Protagoras makes explicit reference to ‘admonishment’ and ‘setting forth what is just and unjust’, and even to the use of ‘threats and blows’ (325d), in educating the young (although admittedly, given the nature of the dialogue form, it could be argued that these are not necessarily Plato’s own views). In the Republic, as we have already seen, there is reference to avoiding compulsion in the early years, but this is in order to be able to observe the child’s natural bent or inclinations and because what is learnt with pleasure and ease will more likely stick than what is unpleasantly drummed into one (536e). Certainly education itself is to be compulsory (Laws 804d), and while practice is considered to be necessary to successful accomplishment, ‘the teacher should try to direct the children’s inclinations and pleasures . . . to the final aim in life . . . The soul of the child in play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which . . . he will have to be perfected’ (Laws 643c). Even when Plato himself uses the analogy of nurturing plants he does not imply an extreme image that involves the teacher simply

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in standing back and allowing the individual to develop. ‘The philosopher . . . is like a plant, which, with the right nurture, will grow and mature into virtue, but if planted in the wrong soil . . . becomes a noxious weed’ (Republic 492a), which suggests that the teacher has a crucial role to play in creating the appropriate environment. This could mean (in contemporary terms) simply keeping all extraneous influence out of a free and pleasant classroom, where children are protected and allowed by the teacher to do what they choose. But it could equally well mean that the teacher has to provide an environment that values knowledge, encourages learning and allows the child to pay attention to the input (part of the environment or ‘right soil’) of the teacher. Given the overall argument and the evidence set out above, the latter seems likely to be nearer the truth.

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Chapter 12

Moral Education, Indoctrination and Censorship

‘A good education is one that tends to the improvement of mind and body’ (788c), says the Athenian in the Laws. But he also says: Let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or ill-defined. When we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing up of a person, we generally call one man educated and another uneducated in reference to some specific calling such as retail trader or ship’s captain [Not incidentally a usage that would be common today]. But at present we are not speaking of education in this sense of the word, but of education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only training which should be characterized as education; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and righteousness, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all. (Laws 643d) This quotation from the Laws does not significantly alter our understanding of Plato’s view: he remains committed to the view that elementary education is concerned with physical and mental development, and that the later stages of education should focus on the pursuit of knowledge and the development of mind. But it reminds us both that in Plato’s epistemology the Idea of the Good is supreme and that, in educational terms, his ultimate aim is the cultivation of a morally good person: knowledge is to be pursued for its own sake, and the acquisition of understanding will make a more fully developed human individual and contribute to the welfare of society as a whole, but grasping the moral truth, or better, the rightness and harmony of things in general, is the culmination of intellectual growth. This is to say that Plato had an interest in moral education, but it means more than that, since for him, as we have seen, the idea of the Good is what makes

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everything else intelligible. It is as if Plato cannot conceive of sense being made of the world except in the context of some evaluative framework; more prosaically, though his curriculum is largely scientific (mathematics, astronomy and harmonics), his notion of the educated person is very much tied up with a humanistic ideal. In arguing that the educated person should have understanding of the Good, be guided and inspired by it, and seek to act according to it, even to the extent of taking on the unwelcome duty of making a contribution to civic life, Plato is to a considerable extent merely a child of his times: it was the orthodox Athenian view that an individual who played no part in public life was to be faulted, and that the aim for each individual was to be kaloskagathos (noble, civil and good). But there are aspects of his view of moral education that were far from conventional as far as the average Athenian was concerned. The conventional view was probably that moral education consisted of bringing children to conform to the particular customs, rules and judgments current in Athens. A good woman, for example, stayed largely at home and aimed to be ‘least talked about among men’ (Thuc. 2.45.2); exposure of infants was a morally acceptable practice; there was an obligation to play one’s part in political life; a man showed courage in battle. But, as Plato argues time and time again, this presumption that morality (goodness, idealism, civic duty, or whatever one wants to call it) can be defined in terms of existing particular practices and beliefs won’t do. The question is what is it about these examples that makes them moral; what do they have in common, what are the criteria whereby we judge them to be moral? And for the educated person, it is not enough simply to be morally good; it is necessary to understand the Good, to be able to answer the question of why good practices are good and to understand the defining characteristics of goodness. The question of whether virtue can be taught is explored in several of the Platonic dialogues (e.g. Meno, Protagoras, Gorgias). This seemed problematic to Plato, because he presumed that if virtue can be taught there must be someone who can teach it, some recognized authorities on the subject, just as those who want to learn medicine go to recognized medical experts. But he could not discern any such experts: the great and the good themselves, whom one might expect to have the knowledge to pass on to their children, conspicuously failed to do so, as Pericles, ‘a great and a wise man’ who successfully taught his two sons ‘riding, music and athletics’ and who without doubt ‘would have liked to . . . make them good men too’, failed (Meno 94b). ‘I could cite many others too, excellent men themselves, who nonetheless failed to make any of their family, or anyone else for that matter, any better’ (Prt. 320b). The sophists, many of whom of course did claim to teach virtue, were, in Plato’s view, charlatans, teaching at best the business of

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acquiring a good reputation, fame, or success, rather than genuine virtue. If they are not actually charlatans, they are still claiming the impossible, because none of them can demonstrate the understanding and knowledge of virtue that is necessary for teaching it, even if sometimes they can show themselves to be moral. Being able to demonstrate one’s horse-riding ability is insufficient to show that one can teach others to ride. To show that, you need to demonstrate that you understand the nature and principles of horse riding. So, on the one hand, there does not appear to be anybody who is in a position to teach virtue or morality, but, on the other, Plato believes that virtue is a species of knowledge (that there is moral truth and the possibility of moral knowledge), and therefore can in principle be taught. In the early dialogues, such as the Meno, the result of the debate is a kind of impasse: virtue is knowledge and so it can be taught, but there are no teachers and so it cannot be taught. One might have thought that Plato would have drawn the conclusion that, even if there are no visible teachers of virtue, that doesn’t prove that there couldn’t be, but at this stage he doesn’t (though he could certainly see the point, because in the Republic he is going to posit the philosopher-kings as teachers of virtue). Instead, at the end of the Meno, he makes a distinction which is reasonable as far as it goes: for some purposes, and moral teaching can be one of them, correct opinion may serve as well as knowledge. For example, ‘if someone knows the way to a particular place such as Larissa then his knowledge will enable him to act as a reliable guide to others. But . . . if a man were to opine correctly which road to take, even though he does not in fact know that it is, he would also prove a capable guide’ (Meno 97b). So, although correct opinion or true belief is not the same as knowledge, it can be as good a guide for the purpose of acting rightly. This is in fact rather a curious, not to say faulty, argument, since according to Plato’s own testimony good people fail even to lead their own children into goodness, which suggests that the correct opinion that they undoubtedly have doesn’t serve as a guide. But Plato seems to see good parents not so much as potential guides for their children through correct opinion as people who have acquired their own goodness through correct opinion. His argument is thus that one can hit upon the truth about good conduct, and thereby become good, but if that is the origin of one’s goodness one won’t be able to teach this virtue to others. That leaves open the question of how one ‘hits upon the moral truth’ (to which Plato replies, ‘by some kind of divine dispensation’), but it also leaves open the possibility that somebody might come to be virtuous through developing their understanding and hence be able to pass it on or to teach others. The philosopher-kings are such people.

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Some of the sophists clearly adopted a relativist or subjectivist stance to morality. That is to say, in one form or another, they believed that morality was relative to time and place or even to individual opinion and not therefore a matter of knowledge in the strict sense of consisting of truths the evidence for which can be discerned and which remain truths whatever the shifts in people’s opinions, as the world just is round, regardless of whether people believe it or not. Plato (and almost certainly the historical Socrates) rejected this view entirely. In saying that there was an Idea of Good (and that it stood at the apex of knowledge), he was plainly arguing that there are moral propositions that obtain for all people at all times, even if sometimes they are not recognized. Furthermore, he put forward this view in full awareness of the kinds of criticism and counter-theory that have been put forward throughout history and happen to be quite fashionable today. There is nothing new in contemporary claims (often but not necessarily associated with postmodernism) to the effect that ‘morality’ is just the name we give to our society’s customs, to our personal preferences, or to what here and now is thought to help make things run smoothly. Thrasymachus explicitly, though ambiguously, puts forward either the thesis that ‘might is right’, meaning the law of the jungle prevails, in which the strong dominate the weak and, being ‘victorious’, are called ‘right’, because superiority, strength and power are virtues or moral goods; or the thesis that ‘right is might’, meaning that what is called ‘morally right’ and has connotations of goodness and objective desirability is actually just a trick played on the gullible by the strong: the latter impose rules that suit them and persuade the majority, quite falsely, that these rules have some kind of innate validity. Other characters in the dialogue, such as Polemarchus, Cephalus, Glaucon and Adeimantus, put forward similar but variant theses. It should be appreciated, therefore, that Plato’s view is not put forward in ignorance of subsequent, more sophisticated thought. Nor was he unaware of certain indisputable facts that probably led some people to adopt relativistic positions, such as that different times and places did indeed give rise to different rules of conduct.9 In claiming that ‘virtue is knowledge’, that ‘no one willingly does wrong’, and that there is an Idea of the Good which can be known, Plato must be understood to be arguing that there are certain high-level, abstract principles that go to define what we or anyone else can mean by morality. Granted, for instance, that in some societies adultery is frowned upon and in others not, or that in one place it is thought right to bury the dead and in another to cremate them, there are abstract and higher principles, from which such particular rules are ultimately derived, and it is these higher principles, such as that the ‘dead should be honored’ or that ‘sexual relations should be conducted honestly’, that have universal and absolute truth. How they

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are to be interpreted will and may legitimately vary from place to place and time to time, as circumstances change. ‘One should not take another’s life’ might be a valid absolute principle, but nonetheless the taking of a specific life may be justified by the fact that the person in question would otherwise kill several more people or by the fact that one is acting in self-defence. Making the latter arguments stick will not always be easy, but that is a different point. The immediate point is that it is quite coherent to argue that, while there may sometimes be great difficulty in deciding what a particular person should do in a specific situation, and while there may be varying particular standards of moral conduct, all such particular cases have to be judged in the light of certain broad principles, and those first-order principles are universal and absolute: it is always in itself wrong to betray or to be disloyal, though sometimes a disloyal act may be justified by circumstance.10 Plato does not demonstrate any of the above; indeed, he does not explicitly spell out such an argument, and says very little about what the Idea of the Good actually consists in. But he must intend some such thesis, and this interpretation of his position has the merit of being a plausible stance to take. For, whatever our differing moral views, it is surely clear to all of us that morality is by definition a certain particular kind of business or activity – it is about some things and not about others. We are not, for instance, providing a moral justification, if we talk in terms of self-interest, whim, or gratification; and we all agree on that. If I claim that I acted for moral reasons, no one will accept it if I go on to say that in this case my ‘moral’ reason was that I made a profit. It would be absurd the world over to call a person ‘moral’ on the grounds that he is handsome and entertaining. Morality on anybody’s definition simply isn’t about things like amusement, wealth, or self-interest. What it is about is too complex a matter to be gone into here: what it is about is the question that moral philosophers debate and that Plato expected his philosopher-kings to spend many years studying. But it may plausibly be suggested, in summary fashion, that any account of morality, if it is indeed an account of morality, and not an account of custom, powerpolitics, habit, etc., must at least have some reference to the following principles: there must be a principle of freedom, since what we understand by moral acts are, by definition, freely chosen acts: I deserve and get no moral credit for acting under coercion, out of fear of being shot, or following a bribe, even if my action is thought to be the right one. Here again, we see at once that interpreting the claims of the principle of freedom may be extremely difficult. What happens if it clashes with another principle? Granted moral acts have to be freely engaged in: does that mean that morally we should be free to do anything, and if not how do we determine the limits? But these and other complex questions, which are the real stuff of moral

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philosophy, don’t alter the fact that anything that is to count as a moral theory has to have a principle of freedom, an a priori commitment to the value of individual freedom of choice. Similarly, a moral theory that did not involve a principle of fairness, or of all people counting equally in themselves, would be unintelligible. How then did the Greeks justify slavery? Either by not recognizing foreigners as persons, or by arguing that circumstances, such as defeat in war, justified a particular broaching of the principle.11 These may not be very convincing arguments, but the point here is to establish that one way or another all cultures formally accept that moral treatment involves fairness to all. If morality is about anything it is about not discriminating between people except when there are relevant reasons for so doing. Again, the problem, and it is a real one, is how and when one establishes ‘relevant reasons’ for differential treatment, but neither I nor Plato are trying to solve all the problems of moral philosophy, but rather to make it clear that there are certain defining characteristics of morality, in any time or place, of which treating people fairly is one. Thirdly, a truly moral theory should not only treat you and me fairly, it should also treat us as ends in ourselves rather than as means. Thus, any action that involves simply ignoring the interests of another and using them, as one might use a plank of wood for crossing a stream, is in itself, for that reason alone, immoral. Fourthly, a truly moral theory presupposes a commitment to truth: if truth is irrelevant and unimportant, then the very notion of morality, of what is incumbent on one, of what one ought to do, cannot get off the ground. Finally, though philosophers continue to argue about what precisely it means to say this, morality is by its nature about people’s well-being or felicity. The notion of ‘what one ought to do’ arises because it is presumed that to do right is in some way beneficial, whether in terms of doing God’s will, of gaining personal happiness, or contributing to the greater good of society as a whole. There is no difficulty then in defending Plato’s thesis that there is moral knowledge. It is, however, questionable, as Aristotle noted, whether Plato’s conviction that no one willingly does wrong is sustainable. Even if we accept that there is a moral truth, and that in principle some may come to know it, it surely does not follow that people only do wrong out of ignorance. It is true that part of what we do when we describe an action as morally right is show recognition of some kind of obligation to perform such an act. It would be logically odd to assert that a certain action was right but that one could see no reason for doing it. But there is also such a thing as weakness of will: cases where we know what we ought to do, but fail to do it. Surely this would be an example of willingly doing wrong? On this topic Plato is not particularly useful; by contrast Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics

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provides a careful and valuable analysis of the related concepts of akolasia (intemperance) and akrasia (want of self-control). Plato’s view of moral education is to be contrasted with much modern theory on the subject, because the latter is dominated by a psychological developmental theory approach that he did not recognize. Much research (e.g. Piaget, Kohlberg) has been concerned to trace the stages of intellectual development through which children proceed as they grow up, and, generalizing, to suggest that there are certain kinds of perception and understanding that are to be associated with particular ages. Such theory, except presumably in the broadest sense that children don’t engage in rational thought initially, was unknown to Plato, and it is questionable whether it would have been of much interest to him had it been known to him. For while there may well be, in general, limits set by age upon what one can perceive and understand, the stages mapped out by various researchers are invariably tentative and arguably as much to do with logic as physical development. (For example, the later stages of Kohlberg’s pattern of moral development logically presuppose some of the former stages, and therefore follow them out of necessity rather than because of increased maturity.)12 In any case, as is clear from the analogies of the sun, line and cave, Plato (correctly) believed that there was a hierarchy of understanding: one’s age has less to do with what one can comprehend than one’s prior accumulated knowledge. It is merely a contingent fact that, by and large, being brought up in similar surroundings and taught in the same way, children show readiness for a given kind of thinking at roughly the same age. So for Plato, apart from very broad divisions such as between the young, the teenager and the adult, the question is more ‘What is the logical order in which to proceed with moral education?’ than ‘What is the appropriate age at which to proceed?’ First, Plato proposes that all children shall be subjected to a uniform moral message from birth. There is no issue of multiculturalism in his Republic, and it is clear that he does not think there should be: part of the definition of a society is that it has common values and rules. So, in the early years, Plato recommends that a consistent example of moral behavior be set by the demands of parents and teachers, by the roles they model, by the stories that are told, by the entertainment and ritual provided by society, and by the rules and values invoked. It will be recalled that the myth of the metals symbolically summarizes the inculcation of a shared ideology, and that material (primarily epic poetry) used in schools is to be censored. In Plato’s terms, the young are inculcated with ‘right opinion’. The Guardians, it is true, go on to develop abstract conceptual understanding and those who are to be philosopher-kings ultimately come to study and understand the moral truth. But for the majority ‘moral education’ consists only in

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the uniform cultivation of ‘right opinion’. Such a program raises awkward questions in today’s terms, even if we modify it and presume that all students should be treated as philosopher-kings and ultimately led from ‘right opinion’ to knowledge. Among these are: Is the demand for uniformity justifiable? Is the censorship justifiable? Is there a hint (or more than a hint) of indoctrination going on here? The multicultural nature of most societies today poses a problem for Plato’s view, but it does for us too, though often we are reluctant to acknowledge it. For example, while I am very opposed to ‘nationalism’ and to the idea of a society based on race, I confess that I have never seen much logic in the so-called ‘cultural mosaic’ idea, wherein separate groups are encouraged to preserve and emphasize their cultural identity, while purporting to be part of a common whole. Of course, in theory, distinct groups of Welsh, Jews, French, Italians, Irishmen, Arabs, and Englishmen can live together sharing a common culture, while as groups maintaining their own identity. But when it happens, as in the world at large, it seems difficult to sustain peace and common understanding. It is not entirely clear why what doesn’t work very well in the world at large should be supposed to work within the smaller confines of a country. To the point that it does work to some extent in countries such as Canada the cynic might retort: ‘Just wait until there is a clash between cultural values, until resources run short, until militancy or extremism take a hold.’ But I am more concerned to argue in agreement with Plato that a nation should be based not on common blood or history but upon a willingness to share a set of common values. Thus the view that the immigrant should assimilate is not based on the principle that you have chosen to join this club and it has certain rules, so much as on the principle that this club’s existence is defined in terms of those rules: you cannot by definition be a member of this club if you are not abiding by these rules. Plato does not appear to have been particularly interested in Athens or any other city-state: he is proposing a form of society that is not based on any particular blood, geographical or political group, but rather on a set of values and principles. The necessary and sufficient condition of being a member of this society is recognition of the values and principles in question. Of course, we have to deal with reality rather than an ideal. Nonetheless, I conclude the all too brief consideration of this particular issue with the tentative conclusion that Plato is on balance proposing the sensible course of action: in so far as a given number of people want to consider themselves a community (such as a state should presume to be, because there is no rhyme, reason or practical good in defining it in terms of geography alone), then they should agree to a set of common principles (beliefs,

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values, practices, etc.) that override the interests or claims of any particular group. But, even if we accept the appropriateness of passing on common values to our children, can we justify censorship, especially when freedom is a defining moral principle, and, as it happens, many of us live in societies that specifically value freedom of expression? As to the last point, it should be recognized that, despite our formal values, a great deal of censorship of educational and other material takes place. The mechanisms hardly matter: what is important is that various interest groups do appreciably censor material, whether because they are truly powerful as in the case of large corporations or because they are an irritant that nobody wants to deal with as in the case of many small local groups exercised over some particular issue. As Diane Ravitch (2003) has shown, what gets published in the United States, therefore what is actually available for schools, is largely determined by three large States (because they each have central control of school book-buying and what they want is what publishers can be sure of selling). Through a system of voluntary censorship the publishers make sure that nothing that could cause offence to any potentially noisy activist group gets published. Censorship such as this should be distinguished from the inevitable selection of material by educationalists. Teachers have to choose their materials (or someone has to choose them for them). In a free society, the important points are that the criteria used for selecting school materials should be educational and related to common values, and that selection of material for teaching should not be confused with other issues such as, for example, what is published or stocked in libraries. Plato’s discussion of censorship really has more to do with his theory of the nature and role of the arts (see below) than it does with education. Nonetheless, he makes it clear that he thinks we should not present the young with stories of the gods looking foolish or behaving immorally. In a largely secular age, in which such religious feeling as there is is fundamentally different to that of the Greeks, it is not really possible to apply his views in a straightforward way, but in so far as his recommendation is simply that what we present to young children should reflect our common values and beliefs it seems fairly unexceptionable. Whether this amounts to indoctrination depends partly upon what we mean by indoctrination, as Plato would be the first to say. Some define indoctrination simply as the imparting of doctrines such as Christianity or Marxism (although one problem with this definition is that it raises the perhaps more difficult question of what constitutes a doctrine). But simply to impart a doctrine, as in the sense of conveying to someone what

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Christianity entails, hardly seem objectionable, and the presumption is that indoctrination is a bad thing, to be contrasted with education, and to be avoided. Some have argued that the imparting of any non-provable proposition constitutes indoctrination, but again it is hard to see what is necessarily objectionable in claiming that Picasso was the greatest painter who ever lived or that God exists, both of which might be classified as non-provable (as distinct from false). Some people therefore add that non-rational means of causing belief are the (or a) crucial factor, but, if a proposition is nonprovable it is hard to see how there could be other than non-rational grounds to support it: how can I rationally support my contention that God exists, if it is not rationally (or in any other way) demonstrable? And we surely don’t want to condemn all use of non-rational discourse and persuasion. Consequently, some have favored the criterion of a closed mind, arguing that if one’s students have closed minds on doctrinal or non-provable propositions (on one view) or anything (on another) one has been indoctrinating them. However, few of us are likely to accept that we are indoctrinators just because our students have closed minds, which might after all be due to their ineffable stupidity, and that leads some to emphasize the intention to close the mind of another as being the important consideration. I would define indoctrination as the intent to close the mind of another in relation to non-provable propositions once and for all. (The ‘once and for all’ is added because I am assuming that ‘indoctrination’ is to be avoided, and I do not see an overwhelming argument for a teacher or parent to avoid temporarily closing the mind of a young child on an issue involving a non-provable proposition such as that Father Christmas exists.) And I do not see that indoctrination in any other sense than this is necessarily objectionable.13 On Plato’s own terms he is not guilty of indoctrination in any case, since he believes that moral knowledge is possible and what he is advocating is not a closed mind on non-provable propositions, but an understanding of the ‘proof’, which in this case takes the form of reasoning (rather than empirical demonstration). Given my argument above concerning the nature of morality, I would share Plato’s view. It is entirely acceptable that we introduce the young to the common moral values of our culture, which should derive rationally from applying universal principles to our particular situation; but we should then proceed to develop understanding of moral philosophy, so that they understand both the reasoning that establishes the fundamental principles and the complexities involved in various moral concepts, and in particular in interpreting the principles correctly in our specific circumstances.

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Chapter 13

The Humanities

I have argued that Plato’s major contributions to educational thought lie in his view of knowledge, in particular his theory of Forms, his view of education as being substantially about intellectual development, his assumptions about human nature and the power of the environment, and his emphasis on moral education. These, though they may superficially seem rather abstract and distant from practical educational proposals, particularly his epistemological interests, are in fact of extreme importance. He also gives rise to and contributes directly to debate on perennial topics such as indoctrination, censorship and differential schooling. He does contribute to the topic of teaching methodology, but in a less direct, and probably less dogmatic way than is sometimes assumed: the Meno is not an argument for any particular mode of teaching, but it does seem reasonable to conclude from the nature of the dialogue form he uses, from the picture of Socrates as a teacher that he presents, and from other isolated remarks, that, while he is not averse to direct instruction and conceives of the teacher as one who has knowledge that is to be imparted to the student, he recognizes the value of such techniques as questioning, using illustrative models and other material, and making use of the student’s interests as a starting point. Despite his conviction that the soul has a prior existence in which it comes face to face with the Forms, so that ‘learning’ may be said to be a ‘species of recollection’, he does not hold the view that the teacher merely facilitates, creating a suitable environment in which ‘recollection’ can occur. He believes that there is a curriculum, a course of study, that should be followed in a certain order, and that teachers should know both what is worth studying and the order in which to study it. Beyond this, it is a mistake to try and draw too many specific lessons from Plato. Socrates is described metaphorically as a midwife, helping to bring ideas to birth from the soul of the student, but this is not a prescription, still less an exclusive prescription, for teaching. The Republic presents a system of education, but it is a mistake to see it as a literal recommendation, even for Plato’s own times; the Republic is explicitly said to be a theoretical example,

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an ideal pattern, and should not be taken as a practical proposal (472d), nor, I think should the Laws, though it must be admitted that the tone of the latter is much more prosaic – more bureaucratic than philosophical. Nonetheless, when Plato points out, for example, that there are no relevant reasons for denying women access to higher education, though he is sincere in this (and the Academy is thought to have had some female students), one’s sense is that his concern is to make the logical point that access to educational provision should be based on the criteria of intellect and aptitude and that there is no a priori reason to think women lack these, rather than to persuade his contemporaries to start educating women. Again, more specifically, the curriculum he advocates, while presumably he intended it seriously, is not one that it makes sense for us to treat as a practical proposal, because our view of the divisions within and hierarchy of knowledge differs from Plato’s; but we should take note of the spirit of his specific proposals, which is that there should be a progression from contemplation of particular instances, through mastery of abstract bodies of thought, to the culminating phase of philosophical thought, contemplating the Ideas, or, as one might put it today, grappling with the basic organizing concepts in the humanities. Depending on how we define science, we can say either that Plato had no particular interest in it or the reverse. In common with the general tendency of his predecessors and the spirit of the times, he did not have a great deal of interest in experiment and empirical research or in systematic and controlled attempts to understand the physical world, and the evidence suggests that he followed Socrates in turning his back on speculative questions about the material world in favor of focusing on questions about how one ought to live. His curriculum does not suggest anything resembling what we have come to recognize as chemistry and physics (nor does it refer, except in passing, to sciences with which he was familiar, such as medicine). On the other hand, he maintains a strong interest in astrology, mathematics, and harmony, which might be regarded by some as sciences. (‘Harmony’ is not to be confused with ‘music appreciation’, ‘musical composition’, ‘band’, ‘piano lessons’, or anything of the sort that we tend to associate with music education; ‘harmony’ is not a cultural or aesthetic matter, so much as a cousin of mathematics and astrology. Plato’s interest probably owes something to Pythagoras, whose interest in the significance of musical intervals has been referred to above.) At any rate, there is not a lot of point in trying to use Plato as witness to contemporary arguments about the nature and place of science in the curriculum, nor really those of mathematics and astronomy, which, to repeat, the only reason he gives for including is as a means towards preparing for the even more elusive task of grappling with the Ideas. But there is one

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curriculum area that he does, directly and indirectly, have quite a lot to say about, and that is what I have called the humanities, but what he would probably have called the arts or, more specifically, the study of literature. K.R. Popper (1966) has said: ‘it is difficult to see how lovers of Greek literature can find encouragement in Plato who launched a most violent attack against all poets and tragedians’. He is referring primarily to Plato’s attack on poets in the Republic, but criticism of literature is also to be found in the Phaedrus and the poets are mildly rebuked in the Apology. However, it is important to understand the nature of these critical passages. Once they are properly understood it becomes clear that Plato is not hostile to literature as such. In the Apology the criticism of the tragedians and poets is that they think too much of themselves: they think of themselves as wise and knowledgeable in all matters, and yet they are not even able to talk intelligently about the matters on which they write, let alone anything else. In saying this, Plato is saying no more about artists or writers than he does about politicians, craftsmen, tradesmen, or anyone else: it is a crucial theme of the Apology that Socrates is wiser than anyone else only in that he knows the limits of his knowledge; he knows what he doesn’t know, he does not have the pretensions that everybody else seems to have, seeing themselves as wise and intelligent in all respects. (There may be an added edge here in that Socrates is made to express the view that to some extent he is on trial because of the damage done to his reputation by the poets, most particularly Aristophanes in his comedy the Clouds, although relations between the poet and Socrates are shown as friendly and close in the Symposium.) In the Phaedrus Plato is worried by the more general consideration that written texts ‘cannot explain themselves or answer questions’ and that reliance on them tends to weaken one’s power of memory. He argues that discussion between individuals is a much better way of seeking after knowledge. In the Republic, the point made in the Apology, that the poets do not know very much about the things they write, is taken up and elaborated. (Samuel Butler (1922) argued, plausibly but with a twinkle in his eye no doubt, that the author of the Odyssey must have been a woman, to be precise Nausicaa herself, because such things as the details about ships and the likely consequences of Polyphemus’ hurling rocks into the sea in a blind rage, both literally and metaphorically, were inaccurate, implausible and didn’t make sense: in short, based on ignorance.) In addition Plato objects to some of the content of Greek poetry, particularly some of the moral values represented in Homer, and fears the great influence that poetry may have on the individual. He also takes exception to the idea of enacting the parts of evil characters (e.g. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra) on the stage, roughly speaking as some today criticize the portrayal of violence (or sex, or

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materialism, etc.) in the media generally though we should note that there is a distinction between Plato’s criticism of enacting and of contamplating the bad. For these reasons he first proposes to censor Homer ruthlessly, but by the end goes further and proposes to expel all poets and tragedians from the Ideal State. (But, notwithstanding the discussion below, how seriously should we take this in terms of practical politics? Did Plato actually want to ban literature from Athens? Did he really hope to bring an end to the drama and comedy at the various festivals? Or should this be seen as an idealistic argument from which rather more limited practical conclusions might be derived?) It has to be remembered that the Homeric poems and Greek tragedy were a great deal more to the Greeks than, say, Shakespeare is to us. They represented both something of the mass appeal of contemporary television and film and yet had the kind of authority and significance that the Bible and certain moralizing fairy and folk tales had for many people in Christian communities a century or so ago. They constituted a powerful formative influence on the young and a repository of received wisdom and values for adults. Whatever one’s view of Plato’s proposals in the Republic, they should be seen as political proposals; his censorship plans have nothing to do with literary or aesthetic quality. At no stage does Plato suggest that the poets and tragedians produce poor literature. On the contrary, his argument is based on the opposite assumption that he is dealing with good literature. Good literature he sees as the product of divine inspiration, and his worry is that such literature is, by virtue of its inspired quality, appealing and hence influential in forming opinions and attitudes. At no stage of his ‘attack’ does Plato’s literary sensibility desert him. (The ‘encouragement’ that lovers of Greek literature find in Plato derives from his own literary ability – from admiration of the dialogues themselves as literary masterpieces. Plato is said to have written tragedies in his youth, which he burnt on meeting Socrates and becoming captivated by philosophy. Other stories, such as that he rewrote the first few words of the Republic several times in an attempt to get them ‘just right’, confirm the picture of Plato as always being partly a poet, partly a philosopher.) Plato does have a theory of beauty, but it is a slightly unusual one. In the Laws (667b) he suggests that a work of art has three aspects: its charm or tendency to give pleasure, its technical merit and its propensity for producing good or bad effects. The technical merit consists in the internal harmony of its various parts, and Plato is referring to such things as harmony in music and proportion in building, sculpture and painting (see, for example, Symp. 187a, where Eryximachus says that ‘it is the height of absurdity to say that harmony is discord . . . harmony is attained through the art of music by the reconciliation of differing notes . . . For harmony is a symphony, and symphony is

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a kind of agreement’). As Crombie (1962: 189) puts it : ‘regular curves, rhythmical repetitions, symmetrical figures are all instances of harmony.’ This, of course, is contentious to a degree: who judges the symmetry, the regularity, or the reconciliation? Is atonal music an instance where judgments may differ or a counter-example – that is to say do its proponents see it as harmonious or challenge the criterion of harmony as being a necessary condition of art? It is also possible that Plato meant slightly more than this, for he says: The Muses . . . would never commit the grave mistake of setting masculine language to an effeminate scale, or tune, or wedding melody, or postures worthy of free men with rhythms only fit for slaves . . . But not only do we see confusion of this kind [in our poets], they go still further. They divorce rhythm and movement from melody, by giving metrical form to bare discourse, and melody and rhythm from words, by their employment of cithern and flute without vocal accompaniment. (Laws 669c) In the Republic, this view leads him specifically to reject plaintive styles of music (the Mixolydian and Syntonolydian) and effeminate ones (Ionian and Lydian), which leaves only the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies, which represent or express courage and sobriety (see above, Part 2, Chapter 7). The details of this probably should not detain us further. It is a complex, technical matter and we are not in full possession of the facts (particularly pertaining to Greek music); interpreting this claim in modern terms is not really possible: would Plato have thought that the music of John Cage was harmonious or that Carl Andre’s arrangement of 120 fire bricks had internal harmony? I doubt whether the question can be answered with authority. We can merely note that he believed that art should meet a criterion of technical merit, which centers on harmony, and that this quality in itself may have a permanent effect on character. And though, to me at any rate, this sounds close to those who think that listening to rock music, rap, or whatever, will lead to moral corruption, Plato was not alone in his opinion: Aristotle, for one, held a similar view. The property of charm or giving pleasure is not peculiar to art. But there is reason to believe that Plato was working towards a theory of aesthetic beauty that would define the concept in terms of a combination of the pleasure factor and the technical merit in a work, such that the beauty of a work would be dependant on the pleasure afforded by the harmonious arrangement of its constituent parts. The notion that beauty is some kind of pleasure is first introduced in the Hippias Major , although all the specific proposals, such as that beauty is what gives pleasure through sight and hearing or that it is harmless pleasure, are rejected. But in the Philebus, which again takes up the idea that due proportion and seemliness are essential to the technical merit

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of a work, the connection between beauty and pleasure is reintroduced with an important modification. The discussion centers on true pleasures, which for Plato means pleasures that are pleasant in themselves, rather than, for instance, in that they involve relief from pain. A sweet taste is pleasant in itself, but a drink of water may only give pleasure because one is suffering from thirst. Socrates also cites ‘those which are given by beauty of color or form’ as examples of true pleasures (Phlb. 51b), and he goes on to stress that he is not referring to such things as the beauty of a face as it appears in a painting, but to the beauty of the composition itself, which is to say the beauty inherent in the arrangement of the lines, the circles, and the color. This seems to suggest that for Plato beauty in art may be defined as ‘the propensity to produce pleasure by means of harmonious composition’. Thus we may say that aesthetic appreciation consists in appreciating the beauty of such things as tonal shape, linear form, or color pattern, which appreciation is evidenced by the pleasure one feels in contemplating them. This is a formal definition, since appreciation of what is genuinely beautiful will depend upon a true awareness of which tonal, linear, or color arrangements are to be regarded as harmonious. But how to acquire or recognize that ‘true awareness’ – in other words the question of what the criteria for harmony may be – remains something about which Plato was elusive. The only point that emerges very clearly from the discussion in the Republic (esp. 399–402) is that Plato sees a tight correspondence between the ability to discern true beauty and having a virtuous soul. The good or just man is one whose soul is harmoniously attuned, whose passions willingly and resolutely accept the control of reason. This internal harmony in the good man is the guarantee of his awareness of the need for and the nature of harmony generally; hence it is his judgment of aesthetic beauty, and not that of some character whose soul is in turmoil, that counts. But, conversely, to surround the young with beauty is to make a contribution to cultivating the good person. But, according to Plato, it is the third aspect of a work of art that is crucial, perhaps in aesthetic, but certainly in educational terms. Form in itself may have an impact, but content combined with seductive form is a crucial factor in the upbringing of the young. So far he has been considering what beauty is (or pursuing the Idea of beauty) and in what a well-wrought work of art would consist. But when it comes to appraising the value of a work of art the aesthetic criterion is insufficient; we must look to its propensity for promoting good or ill. (By identifying true beauty with beauty as perceived by good men Plato has run the aesthetic and the moral criteria together. But he does seem to allow the possibility of works of art that have aesthetic merit yet are morally neutral (see Laws 667e, 653d); and his whole treatment

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of Homer in the Republic implies strongly that the poems, though morally suspect, are great works of art.) Plato is arguing that the question of the moral influence of a work takes priority over the question of its aesthetic merit (Republic 401b). Any notion of art for art’s sake is rejected out of hand. It is conceded that, if a work is morally neutral but has charm, it may serve a useful purpose in that it provides relaxation and pleasure (Laws 653d). But if there is any chance of it being morally corruptive its charm is irrelevant. Therefore, various passages in Homer that are acknowledged to be ‘poetic and charming’ to most people, are nonetheless to be struck out (Republic 387b). Another passage is to be deleted, although it is granted that it may give ‘pleasure’ (Republic 390a). We may be moved by or respond to the poet of ‘subtlety and charm’, but we must reject him in favor of the less charming poet ‘who imitates [or represents] the language of the good man’ and who teaches the moral lessons we approve (Republic 398a). And the better the poet technically, the greater the danger of his influence. In regarding literature as an educational medium Plato was very much a man of his time. Greek literature was, and was felt to be, primarily didactic (from the Greek word didaskein meaning ‘to teach’), and with few exceptions from the time of Homer, through the corpus of lyric and elegiac poets in the seventh and sixth centuries, to the Attic tragedians and historians, it concerned itself with pointing moral lessons or making moral judgments. Not only was it didactic, it was taken in some measure as authoritative on such matters. But besides writing in a world in which such figures as Homer, Sophocles and Euripides were taken seriously as moral authorities, Plato’s tendency to evaluate works of art ultimately by reference to their moral content is also typically Greek. For example, the ‘literary contest’ between Euripides and Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ comedy the Frogs to see which of them is a better poet, is not really about literature, at least from an aesthetic perspective, at all. It is presented as a contest to see which is the most praiseworthy or admirable didactic writer – to see which of the poets is best in the specific sense of likely to offer the most beneficial guidance and advice to the Athenians. Aristophanes himself more than once tells us that the poet’s job is to teach.15 Thucydides, though less of an advocate than most, hopes that future generations will learn from his history. Even that classic of literary criticism, Aristotle’s Poetics, is remarkable (to us) in that its evaluation of Greek tragedy is virtually unconnected with purely poetic or aesthetic considerations. Aristotle categorizes six constituent parts of a tragedy – its plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle and song. It is in discussing diction that he comes closest to what we might regard as purely aesthetic considerations. But diction, by which term Aristotle refers to such tricks of the trade as the use of vivid metaphor and unfamiliar words, is

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ranked as being of least importance in the constituent parts of a good tragedy. What really matters to Aristotle are the plot, the character and the thought. A good tragedy is essentially one that has an edifying story to tell and tells it effectively (the thought), the character and the plot being important in that it is necessary that they should be convincing in order to convey the edifying moral contained in the thought. This typically Greek view of literature as primarily a vehicle for moral improvement (not so different from some Victorian attitudes to art, particularly the novel), does not imply that Plato was a philistine. Apart from evidence about his own artistic and creative impulses, already referred to, and the evidence of the dialogues as literature themselves, Plato is clearly pensive, not to say sad, about the direction in which the argument leads him. It is true that, in the end, he expressly expels all poets from the Republic, but there is an unmistakable wistfulness in his stress on the proviso that if someone can plead their case successfully against him (in prose) so much the better. His admiration for artists (divinely inspired) as artists is not in doubt, nor is his interest in questions in pure aesthetics, as abundantly witnessed by such dialogues as the Ion, the Philebus and the Hippias Major . His fundamental objection to artists is that they pose as, and are taken to be, what they are not. It is the fact that they are revered as sages and taken as teachers, when their message is confused, ill thought-out, and sometimes plain wrong, that troubles him. The poet writes about things about which he does not have first-hand knowledge and is taken to be an authority on matters about which he is basically ignorant. True knowledge can only be acquired through study of the Ideas. Only the Ideas are real. The everyday world of sense-experience is one remove from reality, but the artist dealing with representations of the sensible world, which are themselves merely representations of the Ideas (which are necessarily ideal), is two removes from reality. He is trafficking in imitations of imitations. And yet this is the man, one can hear Plato exclaim, to whom we are supposed to listen and whose opinions subtly infiltrate and mould our own. The philosopher understands the idea of integrity; the man in the street makes an imperfect attempt to live a life of integrity; but the poet is merely providing a depiction of a person of integrity, without any credentials that qualify him to understand integrity. The literary artist deals in form and content. The form, if it is well handled, may constitute a most seductive influence upon the reader: the charm and the technical literary expertise of Homer, regardless of what precisely they involve, draw the reader to take him seriously. But what does Homer write about? About the gods, about warfare, about human relationships, about human conduct and other similarly complex, intricate and momentous questions. But what does Homer, as a poet – one who is master of the

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telling – know about these things? Qua artist he knows nothing other than how to tell a tale. To make informed comment on such matters, it is necessary to have considerable ability in abstract thought generally and conceptual scrutiny in particular. To know about friendship requires, besides, possibly, practical experience of it, reflection on the concept itself: what is to count as friendship? Can one say categorically that certain acts are incompatible with friendship? Is friendship to be defined in terms of acts, feelings, expressions, commitments or what? Similarly, to talk with understanding about the gods presupposes some philosophical reflection on the nature of the gods, the plausibility of claiming they exist, and so on. Above all there is the ethical content, which cannot be avoided for long, which, if it is to derive from knowledge rather than the mere opinion of the author, presupposes contemplation of the Idea of goodness – more exaltedly, as Plato tends to phrase it, the Idea of the Good; more prosaically, as one might incline to express it today, the study of moral philosophy.16 Of course Homer, or any other author, may as a matter of fact be more than an artist. If this is the case, if he happens also to be a philosopher and to have thought in the appropriate way about such issues, then these strictures would not apply. But even then Plato would oppose the notion of the artist’s work being an entirely desirable medium for communicating his knowledge to others. For the manner of his presentation is not conducive to enhancing the understanding of the reader, since it does not involve straightforward rational argument or discussion. It is worth remembering here that the use of prose in writing is very new in Plato’s time. Regardless of stories suggesting his own interest in composition per se, and although he does not explicitly say this, surely part of what he means is that poetry, which is replete with aesthetic and technical rules and which almost by definition seeks to move, influence, and persuade by other than purely rational means, is not a good vehicle for getting to grips with understanding complex concepts; still less are painting, music, dance, or theatre. What plain prose focused on getting genuine understanding lacks in impact and attraction, it gains in dispassionate and appropriate means. In a modern context, the argument is something like this. Our ultimate aim is to bring about true understanding of the world and its various aspects, particularly of the moral sphere. Thus, for example, we should like people to have a true understanding of courage rather than that they should have some hazy notion of courage as ‘being tough’, never showing fear, never backing down, being aggressive, etc. It is extremely important, given that we admire and praise courage and want the young to grow up being courageous, that they do not come to identify it in some facile way with physical brutality or dominance. This means that we have to be careful about books,

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television and films that glorify, say, violence, stubbornness, rashness, fearlessness, and endurance of pain and that confuse these with courage. A film might well present an accurate image of courage, but in fact it seldom does, and whether it does can only be determined in the light of an independent understanding of what courage actually is. Given the enormous variety and complexity of art forms today, compared with the situation with which Plato was familiar, given that we may not share some of his substantive moral and religious beliefs, given that there is no book that is to us quite what Homer was to the Greeks, given that his account of proportion or harmony is largely formal and insufficiently expounded, so that in the case of the plastic arts and pure music at least it is impossible to state with any pretensions to accuracy what examples today he would have approved or disapproved – given all this, it would be unrealistic to claim that we can say what Plato today would have felt about specific works of art. But we can risk some general observations and suggestions. It is a reasonable inference that an artistic creed such as Malcolm Cowley attributes to the Harvard Aesthetes would have been repugnant to Plato: ‘The cultivation and expression of his own sensibility are the only justifiable aims for a poet. Originality is his principle virtue. Society is stupid, hostile and unmanageable . . . from which it is the poet’s duty to remain aloof. The poet should deliberately make himself misunderstandable’ (quoted in Williams, 1971: 64). As against this sort of creed, which incidentally he would probably have interpreted as a symptom of alienation and anomie in society, Plato is laying an obligation and a responsibility on the artist to inspire towards an ideal; artistic skill is not, for him, enough; art for art’s sake is to be resisted. It is difficult to imagine that he would be sympathetic in any way to modern art ranging from Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal) to Tracy Emin’s underwear or to John Cage’s piano composition in which the piano remains closed and silent. But this kind of speculation, though fun, is not in the end particularly important compared to the issue of education and the arts. Plato would clearly be on the side of those who fear that the media, particularly the medium of film, need to be monitored and controlled in relation to the young. First, such is the achievement and quality of film technique these days that film may be said to represent a worst-case scenario for Plato: here, if ever, we really may be victims or subjects of incredibly sophisticated manipulation. Secondly, he would certainly take the view that the influence of such cleverly and attractively packaged messages as films convey is enormously powerful. Thirdly, it seems likely that he would have objected to the content of many of these messages. I find it hard to totally disagree with any of these points, and do not, in any case, have any difficulty with the conclusion that wise parents will monitor and control their children’s

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viewing. However, while I am certain that we are influenced by what we watch, particularly as children, I do not think that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that films should be censored any more than they rather weakly are at the moment or that they (or some of them) should be banned. This is simply to side with those who argue that freedom to make and show films of whatever kind is important, and it is wiser to rely on the mechanism of parental control, imperfect as that may be, than to suppress that freedom with state-wide control. It is also a reasonable inference that Plato would at least question the widespread study of literature, in the sense of items from a corpus of generally accredited ‘good books’, in our schools. Why do we demand such study? Of course many answers, some of them good ones, which unfortunately cannot all be reviewed here, might be given. But Plato’s argument would seem likely to lead him to reject any claim that involved either the suggestion that literature might be an important vehicle for moral education or the suggestion that it might contribute to increasing our knowledge. In so far as literature presents us with characters exhibiting moral characteristics, or facing moral dilemmas, or with insights into people’s motivation and behavior, which, of course, it frequently does, it puts forward moral viewpoints (however tentative, or even negative) and claims about what people are, or at least may be, like. Plato’s argument is that familiarity with moral viewpoints (which the author may have) does not constitute understanding the sphere of morality, and the author cannot in fact be in a position to write knowledgeably of moral matters, if he has not studied moral philosophy. Similarly, the author, qua author, does not know anything about human nature. What he is offering us, unless he happens also to be a philosopher and a student of human nature, is merely a picture of how the world appears to him. While the argument that ultimately, if we are to understand morality, we need to understand moral philosophy, is defensible, this extreme fear of and objection to any study that is not directed towards philosophical understanding, particularly literary study, is not. Granted there are books written by poor, ignorant, and even vicious authors, and granted that to some extent we become what we read, Plato’s objection to the artist, and literature in particular, is one of his least convincing claims. Good literature might even be defined (ironically in a Platonic manner) as that which convincingly and pleasingly illuminates correctly some aspect of the human condition. This is to concede that a good author needs to have understanding, but Plato is wrong that one can only acquire it through philosophy – or rather he has forgotten his own point that one can have ‘right opinion’. We need positively to encourage our young (and old) to read those authors who have ‘right opinion’, precisely because with their literary skill and by focusing

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on the particular they may illuminate and enhance our understanding of the general or the Idea. In practice any decision as to how to act rightly involves not only a grasp of some general principle(s), but also awareness of particulars, and of likely consequences of different actions, and that is the kind of thing that novels often explore with great deftness. Moral maturity also demands sensitivity to others as well as intellectual ability, and literature might well contribute to developing one’s awareness of others and of the infinite variety of human individuals. At the other end of the spectrum from reading literature there is the question of creating it. One feels fairly confident that Plato would have scorned much so-called creative activity in schools in the sphere of arts. In the first place, of course, he would want to know, as many philosophers of education who tread in his footsteps have wanted to know, precisely what is meant by this vague term. But assuming it to mean something like self-expression, as it appears to do to those who say that ‘we cannot deny the epithet “creative” to the five-year-old child’s picture of square cows and neckless mums and dads’ (Lytton, 1971: 3), he would argue that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about self-expression in whatever medium, but rather that what matters is to tutor the individual so that his or her ‘expression’ becomes valuable by virtue of the fact that it measures up to standards of competence and, where appropriate, truth and moral rectitude. Furthermore, given his general attitude to the arts, it is probable that Plato would have questioned any underlying assumption that what the world needs now is creative artists. Such an attitude would not, of course, be incompatible with the view that creative activity, in the sense in question, has a place in education for therapeutic, psychological or motivational reasons. But Plato sees the essence of education as being the development of understanding rather than creative achievement.

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Chapter 14

The Soul

To a contemporary reader reference to the soul may seem a little anachronistic, especially in the context of a discussion of education. Some religious people (and, no doubt, a few non-religious people) do think and talk in terms of ‘souls’, but the majority of people probably do not, and certainly very few prescriptions, proposals, presentations or programs relating to education today include the word. However, to Richard Nettleship, in The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic (1880) (one of the first and a by no means outdated essay explicitly concerned with Plato’s educational views), consideration of the soul was an essential priority. Arguing that ‘it will be well’ to begin an examination of Plato’s system by considering his ‘conception of education in general’, he goes on to suggest that the essence of that conception lies in the idea of nurturing the soul. ‘To [Plato] the human soul is emphatically and before all else something living, something which in the strict sense we can neither create nor destroy, but which we can feed or starve, nourish or poison.’ This observation leads Nettleship to say that it is because Plato recognizes this need for nurture, ‘the assimilative power of the soul’, that he attaches ‘such immense importance to the circumstances and environment of life, and [it] makes him on the whole more disposed to attribute moral evil to bad nurture than inherent vice’ (1935: 5–6). One might dispute the last remark, arguing that Plato saw external circumstance and innate quality as more evenly balanced, but there is no quarreling with the gist of Nettleship’s position: one can quite reasonably say that Plato’s educational plans are predicated on the assumption that the object of education is to provide the appropriate nurture for the soul, and that, that being so, it is important to understand his view of the soul. Two small problems need to be dealt with at the outset. First, we must acknowledge but pass beyond the difficulties of the vocabulary. The Greek word in question is psyche (from which such English words as ‘psychology’ are derived), one conventional and often acceptable translation of which is ‘soul’. But psyche may also mean, and often is more correctly translated as,‘life’, ‘departed spirit’, ‘ghost’, ‘life force’ or ‘spirit’, and a number of

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other things. Similarly, of course, the word ‘soul’ may have different meanings, or at least connotations, for different people depending upon their beliefs about human nature generally and religion in particular. A traditional Christian view of what it is to have a soul may not coincide with the view of an atheist, a behavioral psychologist, or an enthusiast for soul music. Plato’s audience would be familiar with Homer’s use of psyche to mean an immaterial wraith – the bloodless ghost of the dead. The dead in Homer might be characterized as pale shadows of the living; they retain their identity, but nothing that makes existence meaningful, and there is certainly no hint of anything like the Christian notion of the soul being the essence, the best or truest part of the person. The ghost of Achilles, for instance, explicitly complains that he would rather be the lowliest of beings among mortals than king among the dead. It is not necessarily wrong to translate psyche as ‘soul’, since for many of us the term is free of many specific, particularly Christian, connotations. But it is important to recognize that Plato is developing a specific concept: if we are to refer to the ‘soul’ we need to understand it in terms of Plato’s specific idea of the soul. Those who find it hard to escape their own preconceptions of soul might prefer to think in terms of something like the individual’s character, nature, or even personality, but the advantage of retaining the word ‘soul’, is that, if we do not have our particular conceptions, we can understand it in terms of Plato’s view. The second preliminary point is that Plato’s account of the soul seems to have developed as time went by. What he has to say about the soul in relatively early dialogues such as the Charmides, Laches and Gorgias, is different from, simpler than, what he says in the Republic, Phaedo and Phaedrus. In the Charmides, the emphasis is on the view, attributed by Socrates to a Thracian doctor, that ‘just as one should not attempt to treat the eyes without treating the head, nor the head without the rest of the body, so one should not minister to the body apart from the soul’ (156b). In other words, physical health goes hand in hand with mental or ‘psychic’ health, and there is a clear implication that the latter is somehow superior; the latter point is made more explicitly in the Gorgias which also introduces a parallel between the way in which the body’s health is developed by physical training and its imperfections cured by medicine, and the way in which the soul’s health is developed by good laws (a good environment) and its imperfections or flaws cured by the administration of justice. These points all remain consistently part of Plato’s view, but it is not until the Republic that he enunciates what one might call his theory of the soul (and some commentators feel that within the Republic there are signs of a development of his view between the early and later books). In keeping with my general approach, I shall not attempt to trace the development of Plato’s thought on this topic, but

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instead will summarize what I take to be his mature view, particularly as expressed in the Republic. However, we surely should begin with reference to a famous passage concerning the soul, justly renowned for its imagery, from the Phaedrus, in which the central tenet that the soul consists of three parts is illustrated by the picture of a team of two horses and a charioteer. In order to fully understand this passage, it is necessary to know the context. The discussion is centered not on the three-part soul, but on the madness of love – madness not in the sense of absurdity or wrongness but in the sense of divinely inspired and disconcertingly overpowering. The madness of sexual love and the philosopher’s passion for truth are not so different to Plato. Let the soul be compared to a pair of winged horses and charioteer joined in natural union. Now the horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed. First, you must know that the human charioteer drives a pair; and next, that one of his horses is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; so that the management of the human chariot cannot but be a difficult and anxious task. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms – when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground – there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of acceptably to him. And now let us ask the question why the soul loses her wings. (246a ff) The answer in brief is that, while the gods spend their time contemplating the Ideas, the human souls, doing their best to emulate them, are lifted upwards by the love of beauty, which causes their wings to grow. But as they lose sight of the Ideas, they lose their wings and fall towards earth; but the sight of beautiful things on earth awakens a memory of the Idea of beauty which, in turn, causes their wings to grow again and thus enables them to ascend once more. But Plato, we should remember, is primarily talking about how humans are confused and consumed by their love or passion. He depicts the turmoil in the soul as it is driven this way and that.

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At the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into three parts – two having the form of horses and the third being like a charioteer; the division may remain. I have said that one horse was good, the other bad, but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will now proceed. The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is one who loves honor with modesty and temperance, and the follower of true opinion; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked, lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short, thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark color, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. (255c ff) This is Plato at his most mystical and poetic. He paints a splendid picture in allegorical terms of the different parts of the soul, but, as noted, his interest here was more in the question of what love or passion may do to us than in the soul. To understand the latter, we may focus largely on the Republic where the charioteer and his two horses are more prosaically presented as nous, epithumia and thumos, which may be translated conventionally as ‘reason’, ‘desire’ and ‘spirit’. (The question of whether Plato consistently or finally believed in a three-part soul as distinct from a unitary soul comprising nous alone will not be pursued here. There is, incidentally, debate even as to whether the Phaedrus should be dated before or after the Republic, let alone as to whether Plato ultimately came to see the soul as unitary, and, if he did, whether that was his final view of the soul as embodied in life or of the soul freed from its entanglement with a physical and all too human body. In what follows, I shall describe what I take to be Plato’s considered account of the soul of the living person.) In depicting his ideal state Plato envisaged three distinct types of person: the rulers, defined in terms of wisdom or knowledge, the auxiliaries or defenders of the state, defined in terms of courage and steadfastness, and the remaining citizens, defined in terms of their economic contribution by way of their skills (farming, trade, etc.). While this is not a particularly strange or perverse analysis of society, no argument is given for then proceeding to

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depict the human soul in an analogous way. All one can say is that Plato did see the individual ‘writ large’ in the state. But perhaps an argument isn’t needed. It is reasonable enough to see the tripartite distinction between trade and industry, the executive arm of government, and policy-making as basic and important; and it is reasonable enough to see the individual soul or character as comprising desires, spirit and reason. But a little more needs to be said about each of these parts of the soul and their interrelationship. Epithumiai (plural) are desires, yearnings, impulses or appetites. In this case the particular word chosen as a translation is probably not too important. What is important is to know that Plato uses the term in a broad and general way and alerts us to the fact that there are various kinds of appetite; in particular there are desires for immediate bodily satisfaction, such as the desire for sexual gratification, and desires inspired by an acquisition or ‘gain-loving element’. This reminds us that the pursuit of wealth, fame, or security can be driven by desire as readily as the search for food, drink or shelter. Plato also distinguishes between necessary or unavoidable desires and unnecessary desires, the former being either desires such as the desire for food which we cannot just choose to get rid of or those the satisfaction of which does us good, as satisfaction of the desire for water does the thirsty good. Unnecessary desires include those which we are not bound to have, such as a desire to gamble, and which harm us, such as a desire for drugs, and Plato further distinguishes between those unnecessary desires that can in some way be regulated and controlled and those that cannot. There is room for argument about Plato’s attempt to classify desires, about some of his particular claims about individual desires, and about his view of the way that desires function and can (or cannot) be controlled. But the mere recognition that there are different types of desire and that they are one significant factor in motivating us and making us who we are is the crucial contribution. As he himself says (580d), he uses a general term in this case because of the great variety of appetites. The second element in the soul, the other horse pulling the chariot (the embodied person), is the spirited part (thumos). Here we have to be careful not to confuse ‘spirit’ in a religious or ghostly sense (as in the Holy Spirit or believing in spirits) and ‘spirit’ as the noun associated with a spirited, determined or dogged person. It is the latter that Plato is concerned with, as the analogy with the auxiliary group clearly indicates. Plato recognizes the ambivalence of spiritedness: the determined can also prove stubborn; the fearless can be both courageous and cruel. This is central to his point, which is that there is in each of us, besides various desires, a will or determination. What kind of person we actually are is partly dependent on the use to which we put our will or spirit, as well as the degree of spirit. So there are two things to consider from an educational point of view: the nurturing of an

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appropriate degree of spirit and the nurturing of a capacity to employ one’s spirit in an appropriate manner. The third element is nous, the ‘mind’, ‘intellect’ or, perhaps best, ‘reason’, which is represented by the charioteer in the Phaedrus fable. The duly ordered soul is one in which the mind or reason as charioteer regulates or ‘drives’ the appetites and the spirit, the two horses, in harmony. Plato does not argue for either an ascetic or a purely intellectual life; his point is not that all desires and emotions are bad. Rather it is that some desires and emotions are bad and that the excessive domination of desire and emotion is bad. (One could argue that effectively, though not explicitly, Plato anticipates Aristotle’s ethical views. The latter’s celebrated claim that virtue lies in the mean between correspondingly unwelcome excesses, as, for example, courage lies between cowardice and rashness, could be seen as anticipated by Plato’s discursive treatment of acceptable and unacceptable instances of such things as boldness, anger and sexual desire.) Recognizing the myriad forms of desire and emotion, Plato’s concern is that the manner in, and the extent to which, we allow ourselves to act on our appetites should be decided by a detached rational appraisal, and that our commitment and determination, the spirited part of the soul, should likewise be directed by reason and then enlisted on the side of reason, so that we will ourselves to regulate and to act in the light of regulated appetites. There is one further step to be noted: the reasoning part of the soul, the nous or mind, is not, as we know, conceived of by Plato in terms of a merely calculative ability. Nous must ultimately and ideally be shaped by knowledge of the Ideas or Forms, in particular the Idea of the Good, the Beautiful, the True. Thus, we are not talking simply of a detached computation or figuring of the efficiency and likely consequences of indulging this desire or that, or of the immediate advantages or disadvantages of sticking to one or another course of action with energy and determination. The claim is that the mind, itself the product of understanding the Ideas and a passionate lover of truth and reality, shall consider and respond to appetites in the light of that understanding and commitment, and by its passionate commitment raise up the spirited part of the soul to maintain the individual’s will and eagerness. The significance of Plato’s theory of the three-part soul is partly that it is the first clear philosophical recognition of the conflict in motivation that is the common lot of humans. One might say that the poets, particularly the tragedians, were clearly familiar with the phenomenon, but Plato is the first to put down an extended analysis and descriptive study of it. When he tells us the story of Leontius (439e), who both wanted to look at the corpses of the executed and at the same time felt ashamed at or angry with himself, he gives us the dramatic example. But most of the discussion in the Republic

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is an attempt to dissect and explain such an example, versions of which we are all familiar with. Plato, as noted previously, believed in the immortality of the soul and sustained arguments are presented to support this belief, particularly in the Phaedo. One argument is the not very convincing one that anything that changes must ultimately cease to exist unless there is a possibility of change in both directions; based on the notion of rebirth, we can therefore say that there must be a journey from death to life as well as from life to death. The other arguments are inextricably bound up with the theory of Forms, but that theory does not satisfactorily establish the immortality of the soul any more than the latter proves the theory of Forms. All one can say is that the two beliefs or sets of belief are compatible and obviously regarded by Plato as being inextricably entwined. From the point of view of his educational theory, the question of the immortality of the soul is not particularly important. By contrast his notion of the three-part soul is, because, as Nettleship rightly saw, it can be regarded as the focal point or ultimate target of his educational theory, and it is a reasonable psychological model that might still offer guidance for contemporary educational thought and practice. The Platonic view of the soul is not something that it makes sense to think of proving or disproving. It is a model that can be used to explain indisputable features of human conduct, and it seems fair to say that, though no doubt it could be refined and improved on, as a basic psychological model it is as good as any other. We do have reason, spirit and appetites (whether or not those are the ideal words to use), they do seem basic to our motivation and conduct in a way that other things do not, and there is no doubt that they can be in conflict, in fact generally are likely to be so if no concern is shown about the matter. The sensible educator today, as in Plato’s day, will take account of these different aspects of the soul; and surely it is sensible to aim to cultivate the understanding and seek to develop commitment to both the value of truth or ‘getting it right’ itself and the particular judgments of sound reasoning, so that we teach the young both the value of and the ultimate satisfaction in indulging one’s desires and emotions in ways that are shown to be reasonable or that make sense. Be that as it may, as far as Plato was concerned, the business of education was indeed a process of nurturing the soul, in the sense of developing the mind so as to achieve the ideal balance between the soul’s three constituent parts.

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Chapter 15

Dialectic

Dialectic is said to be the ‘coping stone’ of the Guardians’ education in the Republic (543e). Yet Socrates also says that Glaucon would not be able to follow his account of it, even if he were to give one! (533a). As with the Idea of the Good, in the case of dialectic we are presented with a crucial aspect of Plato’s thought that, for whatever reason, he fails to fully explain. Nonetheless, it is necessary to explore the notion, for to fail to do so would be to ignore something of the essence of his educational theory. James Adam, in his edition of The Republic of Plato (1902), in an appendix to Book 7 ‘on Plato’s dialectic’, distinguishes between discussion of the objects of dialectical study and of its method. Its objects are uncontentiously the Ideas or Forms, particularly and ultimately the Idea of the Good. It is worth noting here that Adam’s interpretation of the theory of Ideas is one that implicitly repudiates my interpretation. He explicitly rejects any view that seeks to play down the, to him, plain message of the Republic, that ‘each Idea . . . is a single, independent, separate, self-existing, perfect and eternal essence, forming the objective correlate of our general notion . . . which may or may not, and usually does not, reproduce it with accuracy and completeness’. He asserts that ‘any milder interpretation cannot be reconciled either with Plato’s language or with the evidence of Aristotle’ and that ‘the Republic . . . nowhere indicates that the Ideas are only thoughts, whether of the divine or human mind, and lends no support whatever to any of the ‘mildere Auslegungen’ by means of which certain modern philosophers try to reconcile their own doctrines with those of Plato’ (Adam, 1965: 169). And he reiterates the last point when he writes: ‘It is perhaps the highest tribute which can be offered to the strength and vitality of Plato’s influence that successive generations of idealists rejoice to discover themselves anew in him: but only by employing the methods of Procrustes can we force Plato into the habiliments of modern philosophy’ (Adam, 1965: 170). As to the theory of Ideas itself I will say no more, other than to acknowledge that in my case there is a conscious attempt to interpret Plato in a way that is accessible to contemporary thought, while insisting that it is

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not incompatible with anything that Plato wrote. I need hardly say that in disagreeing with so distinguished a commentator as Adam I am not in any serious way disputing his classical scholarship: Adam knew the Republic better than most. The disagreement is in the realm of philosophy and revolves around interpreting the significance of what may be agreed to have been written, rather than around what was written. Nobody, for instance, disputes that Plato claims that the Ideas ‘exist’ or that he nowhere says that they are only thoughts. But that leaves open the questions of what he meant by saying they exist and whether they cannot be interpreted as essentially ideal conceptions. I raise the point because standard accounts of dialectic, considered as a method, are often disappointing and inadequate, not because they are inaccurate or implausible, but because what is said is of little or no philosophical or educational significance. Even Robinson’s Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (1953), which is still considered by many to be authoritative, while it cannot be faulted for its meticulous and subtle understanding, is unable in the end to convey any clear idea of what dialectic is and why we should care. This is partly because, as he himself says, to some extent ‘dialectic’ is an ‘honorific title’ used by Plato to mean ‘the ideal method, whatever that may be’, and it is indisputably the case that Plato doesn’t provide a straightforward exposition of the concept. It may also be because as Annas (1981) points out, in a disciplined and useful treatment of the topic, to some extent dialectic, which on almost any view might be construed as philosophy, is one of those things which to fully understand you ultimately have to do: books telling you what philosophy is won’t succeed until you actually engage in it. There is certainly some truth in this, and also some irony in that a subject that is preeminently concerned with explaining or giving an account of things, no matter how abstract, is not itself fully explicable in this way. At any rate, whatever the difficulties, I shall attempt to provide an account of dialectic that gives some indication of what it involves and of its importance in educational terms, though in doing so I shall again, as I did in the case of the theory of Ideas, run the risk of being thought to interpret Plato’s dialectic too much in terms of a contemporary conception of philosophy.17 Dialektik¯e literally translated means ‘discussion by question and answer’, and according to Diogenes Laertius (9.25) was said by Aristotle to have been invented by Zeno. Robinson and Denniston (1970) rejects Aristotle’s claim, saying that Zeno merely explored the consequences of hypotheses, Socrates sought truth by means of question and answer alone, but dialectic is more than simply a combination of these two activities and was the invention of Plato. So what was it? Here we run into the fundamental problem that Plato does not directly say: he says things about dialectic, he illustrates it by analogy and allegory, he makes claims for it, but he does not analyze it.

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It is, we are told, the highest of the arts (or sciences in some translations; the Greek word is mathema which might more literally be translated ‘study’ (Republic 534e). ‘Dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle and is the only science which does away with hypothesis in order to make her own ground secure’ (533c). It proceeds by means of question and answer and is therefore a species of conversation. It is ‘synoptic’, meaning that it strives to bring things together and to see the one in the many. It is concerned with the Ideas or Forms. But what does this add up to? As Crombie (1962: 129) remarks, ‘dialectic’ in Plato ‘connotes many things. It connotes the courteous and cooperative pursuit of truth through dialogue, the attempt to produce an “account” of something which shall hold water and survive the “friendly refutations” of one’s fellow seekers. It connotes also discrimination, distinguishing . . . It seems sometimes to connote the broad synoptic view of one who sees things in their interrelations.’ This is an astute summary, but it leaves us wondering, for, as Crombie concludes: ‘it has been said, not untruly, that doing dialectic, for Plato, is doing philosophy as it should be done, in whatever manner this may be.’ One thing we do know is that dialectic is supposed to follow on the study of mathematics. The metaphor of the line introduced four modes of perception, the final two of which are dianoia (thinking) focused on mathematical objects (for Plato primarily geometrical problems), and noesis (true intellect) or episteme (knowledge) focused on the Forms. Mathematical thinking is inferior to dialectic in two respects: it makes use of models, diagrams and so forth and it takes its own concepts for granted or does not question its own hypotheses. There is some dispute as to whether Plato, who refers rather casually to such things as ‘the odd’, ‘the even’, ‘the square’ and ‘the diagonal’, is assuming that the hypotheses which mathematicians fail to either confirm or refute are propositions or concepts, as well as considerable difficulty in making sense of some of his remarks about mathematics (see, e.g., Gosling, 1973). But Crombie’s suggestion that, for example, the dialectician might ask ‘What is an odd number?’ and thereby come to raise the broader question ‘What is number?’, and thereby ‘What are unity and plurality?’, and so on, coming to grips with ever broader concepts until face to face with something like ‘What is conformity to reason?’ and finally ‘What is goodness?’, is not unconvincing. But still, to really make anything of such attempts to summarize Plato’s remarks and interpret them, to get nearer to some grasp of what he is saying (assuming that despite the obscurity, he is saying something significant), we have to go beyond textual exegesis. We have to posit a possible theory that is at any rate compatible with the little that is said explicitly on the topic by Plato and with what we know of his thought more generally. There is of course a risk that Plato is confused, in a way that many contemporary educational theorists appear to be, between thinking that he is

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introducing a distinctive method(s) and thinking that he is introducing a distinctive concept. In contemporary terms, for example, there has been an enormous amount of attention devoted to the notion of critical thinking. But there is a distinction, or logically may be, between the concept of critical thinking, which may be a normative notion that merely sets the criteria for what kind of thinking counts as critical, and the notion that there is some specific process or set of processes that constitute thinking critically. In this case, I would argue that there is no such thing as a specific skill or process of thinking critically: thinking critically is a matter of thinking in any way that respects certain criteria of quality, the precise nature of which will be peculiar to the subject in question. On this view, it makes no sense to try to teach somebody to be a critical thinker without qualification, because it is not like teaching somebody to ride a bike; one can only teach them to study history or art, politics or science, engineering or photography in a critical manner, which involves not the development or training of skills, but conveyance of an idea of what history, politics, etc., are, and hence what good politics and history are. My own view is that Plato himself was not confused on this issue; dialectic was not for him defined in terms of a set of techniques or procedures, and it is important that today we do not try to find a method or set of methods that embody dialectic. Dialectic is to be defined rather in terms of the criteria that in Plato’s view constitute sound philosophy. Looked at in this way, the concern that Plato might simply mean by dialectic ‘doing philosophy as it should be done’ needn’t actually be a concern. On the contrary, that is the right way to approach the topic, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with Plato arguing that there is a certain conception of philosophy (dialectic) which is the supreme type of study, and to which he is committed. In his case, the significance of this would be far greater than today, since he is for the most part pioneering the idea of philosophy, whereas a similar debate today smacks more of competition between different views of philosophy. I am suggesting that dialectic for Plato is indeed what we may term philosophy. The essence of philosophy for him was the contemplation and study of the Forms, which, pace Adams, I am inclined to understand as essentially, if not exclusively, conceptual analysis. ‘Conceptual analysis’, however, should not be presumed to be bound up with any particular doctrine either on the ontology of concepts or on method. It is not, for example, to be confused with linguistic analysis or tied to any specific view of the relationship between language and ideas. It is not to be tied to a particular method, because there are many ways to engage in conceptual analysis. What matters is recognition that ultimately the only way to make full sense of our world, the only way to approach full understanding, is to understand the underpinnings of any other valid modes of inquiry and to acquire a full understanding of the fundamental concepts that govern our lives. Paul Hirst’s (1974) paper ‘Liberal

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Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, while it refers back to the Greeks in general rather than Plato explicitly, captures one part of Plato’s position precisely: science, history, morality, religion, and so on are distinctive forms of human inquiry, and one thing we need to understand is not simply what history or science tell us, but what exactly the nature (and therefore the limits, problems, etc.) of history and science are. A point that is well brought out by Annas (1981) needs to be made here. There is a common tendency to assume that Plato’s claim is that dialectic will somehow not merely reveal but give us demonstration or proof of ultimate truths. But this assumption is unwarranted and for practical purposes unnecessary. The reason that the Forms can be directly known is not because we have infallible intuition but because they alone are in principle completely intelligible. We can in principle grasp the concept of love (or a concept of love, if you prefer); we cannot in principle or practice gain a complete understanding of the act or fact of love. Plato was less interested in proof than in acquiring proper understanding, and the talk of dialectic’s unmediated view of reality or truth implies accurate perception rather than demonstration. The wisdom that we strive to acquire or ascend to through education is the product of both rigorous analytic reasoning and insight. Virtue is an aspect of the educated person because, according to Plato (and this is surely the most enigmatic of his claims), moral goodness is a requisite for true and full understanding. (This is not only enigmatic, but also, superficially at least, contradictory, since we seem also to have been told that virtue is developed by ascending to dialectic.) The main point is that, to use Annas’s image, the vision or perception of the Form of the Good is not like a prize; it is rather (to use Crombie’s analogy) akin to the pianist who having learned to play a piece comes to recognize it as music: the dialectician comes to see the Good for what it is, having mastered and engaged in dialectics. In short, the fulfillment of education comes when, if ever, one’s conceptual and logical study leads one to see the nature of the world. This view need not presuppose a view of immutable Forms. What Plato may be said to be concerned with is that, in addition to clear and internally coherent concepts, we should be in command of a set of conceptions that are mutually compatible. Whether one believes that there is and always was only one true concept of love, war, peace, justice, etc., or alternatively that there are several possible conceptions (though not any, since some are selfcontradictory, incoherent, etc.), it remains true that to claim to understand the world there needs to be compatibility between one’s concepts.

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Chapter 16

Eros

‘Is there a more quintessential pedagogic model in the history of Western civilization than Socrates and his pupils? The erotic and intellectual attractions between them fed, informed and contended with each other.’ So writes Cristina Nehring in ‘The higher yearning’ (2001: 71). Nehring is concerned (quite rightly) to counter the futility and abhorrence of much sexual harassment legislation (e.g. its tendency to disempower women, its stereotyping, its disregard of natural justice), but especially the damage that it has done to pedagogy in the University, where she feels that natural human attraction and interaction provided an ‘edge’ that should be considered a plus. She cites H´elo¨ıse and Abelard, a teenager and her 38-year-old tutor whose mutual passion inspired his letters of philosophical argument to his death at 68 and her ‘theological meditation of an order unrivalled by any female cleric of the period’. She cites Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whose ‘shy and repressed’ passion was ‘the source of the greatest creativity’. Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. ‘Teacher–student chemistry is what sparks much of the best work that goes on at universities, today as always’, she continues. ‘The university campus on which the erotic impulse between teacher and student is criminalized is the campus on which pedagogy is gutted and gored.’ She points out the absurdity of the basic claim that ‘under no circumstances . . . may we countenance a “power differential” in intimate relationships’. Where, she asks rhetorically, ‘are the symmetrical relationships?’ Her reservations about clamoring for ‘ “free-for-all” faculty–student sex’ at the other extreme are based not on any intrinsic objection to open sexual behavior but on the grounds that ‘it would very quickly become dull and sap away too much energy. When a student has a crush on a teacher, it is a powerful and productive thing . . . when a teacher has a weakness for even one student in a lecture hall, the whole class benefits’. Nothing could be further from the truth than the conventional wisdom that ‘classroom erotics’ constitute a distraction from teaching, learning and

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research. This is like saying that ‘colors distract from seeing. It does not distract: it enlivens, enhances, intensifies: it fixes the gaze. It gives teeth to the eyes, a digestive tract to the brain.’ The imagery is somewhat startling, but this is an interesting viewpoint; now she turns to Socrates. ‘Socrates’ students loved him ardently and regularly tried to seduce him.’ ‘Regularly’ may be going a bit far, but sometimes they certainly did, as witness the tale told by a drunken Alcibiades when he burst in on a dinner party attended by Socrates (the summary and translation are Nehring’s from the Symposium 215d ff): ‘My eyes rain tears when I hear Socrates’ teachings,’ he confesses to us. ‘I have known in my soul, or in my heart, or in some other part, that worst of pangs . . . the pang of philosophy.’ Luckily for him, he fancies that his instructor already returns his affections. Indeed, he predicts ‘a grand opportunity . . . for I had a wonderful opinion of the attractions of my youth.’ Accordingly, ‘I sent away [my] attendant,’ and ‘thought that when there was nobody with us, I should hear him speak the language which lovers use . . . ’ No luck. That day Socrates merely ‘conversed as usual,’ forcing his admirer to invite him into a more conducive setting: the gym. ‘I challenged him to the palaestra; and he wrestled and closed with me . . . I fancied that I might succeed in this manner. Not a bit . . . I thought that I must take stronger measures . . . So I invited him to sup with me . . . and when he wanted to go away I pretended that the hour was late and that he had much better remain. So he lay down on the couch . . . I got up and . . . crept under his threadbare cloak . . . and there I lay the whole night . . . And yet, nothing more happened, but in the morning . . . I arose as from the couch of a father.’ It is not that Socrates was averse to relations with students; it was merely that he was no cheat: at the time he was already sleeping with another one, Agathon. (Nehring, 2001: 64–72) (This last claim of Nehring’s is questionable, and Plato, if not Socrates, would certainly prefer to see the rejection of Alcibiades’ advances as caused by the ability of Socrates to sublimate sexual desire rather than a commitment to fidelity. But this is immaterial to Nehring’s argument.) Nehring’s wider thesis is not our immediate concern; but she reminds us of something seldom stressed: one aspect of Socratic teaching was some kind of chemistry, including what may plausibly be seen as an erotic element. This element has not been much referred to in Platonic scholarship, particularly with reference to education: the emotional was largely ignored for a long period, along with the sexual, in particular the homosexual (really until

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Dover’s ground-breaking Greek Homosexuality, 1978), despite the evident fact that the gods engaged in indiscriminate sexual acts, both heterosexual and homosexual, the poets from the earliest days sang of passion in love and emotion and affection in the relationships between youths and older mentors, and artists frequently depicted frankly sexual scenes. It is, however, difficult to gauge to what extent Theognis’ poems to the youthful Cyrnus, for example, imply an erotic as distinct from some other kind of loving or friendly relationship; similarly it is questionable what exactly to make of the depiction of sex on vases: did the Greeks regard this as arousing, pornographic, amusing, symbolic of something deeper, or what? It is similarly difficult to determine what kind of feeling and what kind of strength of feeling we are to suppose existed between, say, the young Achilles and his mentor Phoenix. Alcibiades’ remarks in the Symposium are among the most outspoken on the broad subject and it is possible that they should not be taken entirely at face value. The current consensus on the subject of homosexuality is broadly this: the Greeks did not think in terms of heterosexual versus homosexual relations as we tend to do, so much as in terms of the nature of the relationship between two people of whatever sex. The primary distinction was between the active and the passive partner, which was most graphically expressed in terms of the penetrator and the penetrated. For an adult free male citizen the conventional, or one might say proper thing, was to be the active penetrator; for such a person to be penetrated was potentially shaming, though it can be argued that the issue was less what was actually happening than what was thought to be happening. For slaves and women, for different reasons perhaps, being the passive or penetrated person was of no great social consequence. The question of immediate concern is what did the typical relationship between a young man such as Cyrnus or Alcibiades and his mentor such as Theognis or Socrates involve, and more particularly did it involve physical intercourse? The answer appears to be that generally speaking the older man was presumed to be motivated by a sexual desire which the young adolescent did not experience. The young men might be motivated by anything from affection to a hope of gain or benefit, but they would seek to gratify the sexual desire of their lovers either in ways that did not involve penetration or at any rate in such a way that they were not thought to have been penetrated. The real issue for the free young man is that he should not be thought to have subordinated himself to his lover. There is, in short, no denying that the significant social phenomenon of relationships between adolescents and older men involved sexual relations. Pederasty (yet another word we take from the Greeks) in this sense was

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socially acceptable.18 (It is a curiosity in this discussion, given the popular connotations of the phrase ‘platonic love’, given an argument such as Nehring’s and given his own writing in the Symposium, that in the Laws Plato provides the only explicit criticism of pederasty as unnatural of which we know (636c; 838a–841).) But, despite the difficulties of interpretation of some of the evidence, despite Plato’s explicit reference to pederasty as unnatural, and despite the fact that the nature of Greek pederasty is confined in ways that Nehring’s understanding of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades perhaps fails to recognize, it nonetheless seems clear that part of the attraction and success of Socrates’ teaching was a fairly intimate rapport with his students. There is something plausible, even if much idealized, in Oscar Wilde’s defence of ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’ during his first trial: it is ‘such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy . . . It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him’ (Hyde, 1956: 236). But while there is justification for seeing affection, attraction and even eroticism as part of Plato’s educational landscape they clearly are not regarded by Plato as necessary conditions of good teaching; there is no suggestion, for example, of anything other than a somewhat impersonal relationship between Socrates and the slave boy in the Meno. And, interesting as Nehring’s view is, there is not the evidence to conclude that at any age or stage Plato advocated a sexual element to teaching. On the other hand, words such as ‘attraction’, ‘rapport’ and ‘passion’, do seem to be relevant to his ideal picture of teaching: attraction and rapport between student and teacher, and passion for knowledge and truth. To the Greeks, eros (‘love’) was a power as well as a god. In Homer he manifests himself as a strong physical desire. In the lyric and elegiac poets the force is sometimes depicted as mental as well as physical. But, while it is therefore natural and correct to think of eros as meaning either simply ‘love’ or ‘the god of love’, it is worth noting that, according to Aristotle, Parmenides was one of those ‘who put love or desire among things as a cause’ (Metaph. 984b). Eros was certainly a cause or principle of motivation for Plato. G.C. Field (1949) remarked that to readers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the most important part of Plato’s teaching was his theory of love; this was no longer so in Field’s time, but Field may have gone too far in suggesting that Plato himself did not intend to commit himself too seriously to the views that he expresses. There is no obvious reason

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for assuming that Plato did not mean what he said about sex or about love. His attitude to sex is not particularly difficult to interpret or problematic. He is obviously not a licentious or libidinous man, but he is equally obviously not hostile to sex. He seems to regard sexual relations between men and women as natural and in themselves neither good nor bad, but on a par with other natural appetites and desires. In this he was very likely a typical Athenian of his time. He certainly understands physical attraction between males, as innumerable passages, such as Socrates’ remark that Charmides must be a marvelous man if his soul is as fine as his body (Chrm 154d) testify, and Alcibiades’ story of how he tried and failed to seduce Socrates makes no sense unless the assumption is that there was some degree of mutual desire: the point is not that Socrates wasn’t interested, but that he controlled his desires. Likewise the laws governing sexual relations between men and women in the Republic (and the Laws, slightly different though they are), though in no way Athenian, are not incompatible with basic Athenian assumptions: sex between men and women was seen, to use a vulgar phrase, primarily as a form of scratching an itch and as a necessary means to procreation. This does not mean that relations between husband and wife could not be, variously, tender, friendly, warm, involved or pleasant, but it does mean that they were seldom those between soul-mates or based on passion. Plato’s views on love are expressed in the Lysis, Symposium and Phaedrus, of which the Symposium, which depicts a dining party at which the guests, suffering from excess the night before, decide to take turns to speak about love rather than drink, is perhaps the most important. The Lysis follows the pattern of Plato’s early dialogues and presents Socrates and his companions exploring possible definitions of love. (Incidentally, Plato frequently uses the word philia in place of eros despite the fact that the prefix ‘phil’, as in ‘philosopher’, implies ‘love’ of, the word philos is usually translated ‘friend’ rather than ‘lover’. This merely reminds us of the many problems of meaning and translation.) The Symposium, however, deserves to be briefly summarized. The first speaker is Phaedrus who introduces the idea that love inspires us to noble deeds or heroic action. Pausanias then distinguishes between a lower, carnal, type of love and a higher spiritual or mental type. Erixymachus then widens the scope of love, referring not only to the love between humans, but to love amongst all things, referring to a power to attract or to respond to appropriate objects. Aristophanes (the comic playwright) then introduces a mock-mythological story according to which the gods cut the original human beings who had two faces, four legs and arms, etc., into two, thus giving us the form we are familiar with. But it left us yearning for our

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other half and thus love is to be understood as the ‘desire and pursuit of the whole’.19 (Incidentally, Aristophanes depicts the original ‘whole’ persons as belonging to one of three groups, male, female, or androgynous, with the result that after the splitting there are some seeking a corresponding male half, some a corresponding female half, and some (the androgynous) a corresponding half of the opposite sex. This is therefore an early explicit reference to both male homosexuals and lesbians.) Agathon then provides a lyrical encomium to eros. What all these speakers agree on is Agathon’s point that love resides in our soul: it is inescapable and it is concerned with beauty or what is fine (kalon). The final contribution is Socrates’, though most of what he says he claims to have learnt from Diotima, a Mantinean priestess. (Alcibiades’ contribution, referred to above, is an interruption after the speech of Socrates.) Love is in itself neither good nor bad; love is neither mortal nor immortal. Rather, eros is a go-between, a force, a conduit or, more or less a cause or motivation (perhaps as envisaged by Parmenides). Eros loves wisdom, beauty, eudaimonia (happiness), the good, and, importantly, immortality. Eros is thus the passion, the drive within us. Just as some want children to perpetuate themselves, so others seek to perpetuate themselves through their achievements, the success of their aspirations, and these may be for the noblest of ideals. Eros, then, in this highly poetic and dramatic account is the emotional motivation towards study of the Ideas, and Diotima’s final words depict, in image, the ascent to the Idea of Beauty: one loves first a particular beautiful body, then proceeds to recognize beauty in another; this leads to an awareness of physical beauty generally, in natural objects, traditions, phenomena, whether man-made or not, and that leads to an awareness or recognition of beautiful pursuits or studies, which culminate in the study of beauty itself. Although it is not presented as an argument, and its tone is very different from that of, say, the Republic, the Symposium fairly clearly adumbrates the fundamental Platonic belief that eros, the power of love, lies within us to drive us both towards love of particular people and things and to love of the reality that resides in the Ideas. The Phaedrus confirms this, presenting and rejecting a selfish, possessive, jealous, earthly conception of love in favor of a conception of love as the power to action in the soul. The depiction of the tripartite soul as a charioteer driving two horses, referred to above, is illustrative of the latter. The souls of the dead rise to the rim or edge of heaven and there catch a glimpse of the eternal Ideas. But because the souls are crowded and jostling one another their wings are damaged and they fall back to earth. Those souls that had the clearest view of the Ideas, prompted by their memory or recollection, are most prone to be lovers of wisdom and hence to rise again in a new body to philosophic heights.

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All three dialogues contribute to a consistent picture, the main feature of which is the view that we can be driven by passion or love (eros). That passion can cause us to pursue immediate gratification of basic desires, or it can be moderated and controlled so that we indulge our desires in an orderly manner, or it can be the power or force that drives us towards understanding the Good and the Beautiful. Some (e.g. Grube, 1980) have been somewhat exercised by the question of whether and to what extent the philosopher has sublimated and is beyond all worldly physical desires. This seems to me an unnecessary worry. There is no real warrant for interpreting Plato as preaching celibacy. He undoubtedly believes that the pleasures of the mind are superior to those of the body, but that is not to say that the philosopher cannot also be a more worldly lover. What matters to Plato is surely that we should embrace the higher pleasures, and that we should moderate and manage the lower pleasure in a rational manner – in his terms, in light of our knowledge of the Ideas. It is a distinction between the pursuit of pleasure through the indiscriminate and direct gratification of desires, which is to be rejected, and the true pursuit of pleasure through the ordering of the appetites, which is to be the goal. Too much emphasis on the higher pleasures obscures the educational significance of Plato’s view of eros from which we started. As Crombie (1963: 184) writes: ‘true “platonic love” begins in the physical passion of one man for another, and proceeds through sublimation to the release of the generous and hence the philosophic element in each.’ Some may be born to be philosopher-kings, but for most of us the prosaic fact of love in the sense of a sentimental or emotional attachment can be of pedagogic relevance. There are three clear and distinct points here: first, love between teacher and student may be a valuable and useful means of enabling learning; secondly, love of some object may constitute a valuable motive towards study; and, thirdly, the business of teaching should involve the attempt to cultivate passion for knowledge and truth. It may be acknowledged that relations between Socrates and his students sometimes had an erotic dimension; but these were effectively adults. Nehring’s argument for the impropriety and absurdity of legislating against love affairs (including physical relations) was directed at universities. I doubt whether she would propose an identical argument for schoolchildren, at any rate below the legal age of consent. Nor would I. But I would agree with Plato and Nehring that, within appropriate limits, which would be determined separately and on other grounds, eros is important in teaching: teachers should love the young; they should love knowledge; and they should passionately desire to cultivate the love of knowledge in the young.

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Chapter 17

Summary: An Educational Theory

‘Theory’ is another English word derived etymologically from the Greek (theoria). Theoria, when used of the mind, means ‘contemplation’ or ‘consideration’ (it is also used with reference to being a spectator at the games and, more broadly, to mean ‘viewing’ or ‘beholding’ with the eyes). It is easy enough to connect this with our understanding of a theory as an abstract explanatory account of some activity or phenomenon, but there are also some brief remarks of Aristotle on the subject to be noted. In his work On the Heavens, Aristotle points to the difference between ‘seeking for theories and causes to account for phenomena [and] forcing the phenomena and trying to accommodate them to certain theories’ (293a) already held, which he accuses the Pythagoreans of doing in respect of their view of the position of the earth. In the Movement of Animals, he refers to the need to confirm a general theory by reference to instances in the physical world, ‘for with these in view we seek general theories, and with these we believe that general theories ought to harmonize’ (698a); this point is supported by a passage in the Generation of Animals where, talking of bees, he observes that his account squares with theory and ‘what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped: if ever they are, the credit must be given rather to observation than theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts’ (760b). Then, in an important passage at the beginning of the Metaphysics, he compares experience or practical knowledge with art or theoretical knowledge, arguing that the latter has, as we might put it today, more explanatory power: ‘With a view to action experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and we even see men of experience succeeding more than those who have theory without experience. The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals . . . If, then, a man has theory without experience, and knows the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure.’ In other words, the doctor needs more than simply medical theory, because he has to recognize what is wrong with

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his patient before he can apply that theory. Nonetheless, he continues, we regard theoretical knowledge as superior: ‘We think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience . . . and this is because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others [the artists, the theoreticians] know the “why” and the cause.’ Hence, says Aristotle, we regard masterworkers in any craft as more knowledgeable and wiser than mere craftsmen: each may be able to perform or act equally well, but the former understands more of what he is doing and why, and consequently he can explain to others (which is why he is a ‘master’ craftsman). We view them [the masters] as being wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes. And in general it is a sign of the man who knows, that he can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of experience cannot. Again, we do not regard any of the senses as wisdom, yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything – e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot . . . the point of our present discussion is this, that all men suppose what is called wisdom to deal with the first causes and principles of things. That is why . . . the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the master-worker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of wisdom than the productive. (981a) Many ‘practically minded’ people profess to disdain theory, seeing it as idle and impractical, to the extent that phrases such as ‘in theory’ and ‘theoretical’ are sometimes used in a straightforward pejorative sense to mean ‘useless’ or ‘impractical’, as in ‘that’s all very well in theory, but it won’t work in practice’. This facile rejection of or resistance to theory is one of the curses of our age. For Aristotle is quite correct: knowing the reason why of things, being able to give a general account of phenomena, is the essence of useful knowledge and the source of control over our world – what he would call ‘wisdom’. This is merely an extension of Plato’s point that true knowledge is knowledge of the Ideas rather than of particulars: one can ‘know’ a particular individual in the sense of be familiar with them and even know how to interact with them or treat them, but that won’t help one know how to approach other individuals. By contrast, the person who has some understanding not simply of this person, but of personhood or the general characteristics of people is thereby enabled to respond

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appropriately to different people and thereby takes control of his life. It is theory that lies behind our command of life and events; lack of theory or poor theory everywhere account for our failures. Theory, abstract and sometimes divorced from the real world as it may seem, is the most practical and useful tool humankind has. A theory of education, then, comparable to a theory of science or a theory of history is a most necessary thing. But two preliminary cautions are worth drawing attention to. First, there is a distinction between, say, a theory of science, meaning an account of the nature of scientific inquiry, and a scientific theory in the sense of a theory within or generated by science. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a scientific theory in the latter sense, but it is not a theory of science, just as an account and explanation of the causes of the Second World War is a historical theory (i.e. a theoretical explanation of a historical matter) and not a theory of history in the sense of an account of the nature and business of history. This distinction is in itself pretty straightforward, but sometimes it becomes blurred when a particular theory is so all-embracing and dogmatic as to make it impossible to disentangle good theory from ‘correct’ answers. Aristotle claimed that the Pythagoreans interpreted their observations about the earth to fit their theory. The same charge can be made, for example, against certain forms of Marxist theory. A view is taken of the way in which the world works: the Marxist says everything that happens is to be explained in terms of the economic structure of society. Given this uncompromising and dogmatic principle any other type of explanation of phenomena is simply dismissed. Not only are all social phenomena explained in this way, but soon art, history and even science are similarly explained. But now the distinction between the two senses of theory has disappeared: two historians can share a theory of history and disagree about the theoretical explanation of the causes of the Second World War; in principle two Marxists cannot: their shared commitment to a Marxist theory of history more or less determines their interpretation of particular historical events (not that in practice this ever prevented Marxists from disagreeing). A theory of education, then, should, by its nature, provide a general and universal account of the nature of education. It should tell us, first and foremost, what education is. Just as a theory of science distinguishes science from related but distinct activities and seeks to establish what is necessary and sufficient to characterize an activity as scientific, so an educational theory must clarify what education is, as distinct from, say, training, indoctrination, or preparing for the world of work. What the theory should then go on to tell us is dependent on the answer to that first question. Again, just as what the appropriate criteria for engaging in historical inquiry, what in detail constitutes good or bad history, derive from an understanding of history as something sui generis and distinct from, say, myth, folklore or

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fable, so what else an educational theory should tell us depends on what precisely we understand education to be. If, for example, we take the view that education is to do with imparting knowledge then we need to say something further about knowledge, and if we think it involves learning then we should consider what can be said about that. In the light of these considerations, it seems fair to say that Plato provides us with the first known theory of education: not simply a prescription for practice, although there is a bit of that, but an account of what should be done and why. It is also, despite the fact that much of what he writes is ‘foreign’ to readers today, of abiding significance. The details of his proposals may be irrelevant or, in some cases, antithetical to our interests. But the theory – the principles, the understanding and the argument – remain potentially relevant and, at least much of the time, practically relevant or relevant in fact. The logical starting point of Plato’s theory of education is his assumption that human beings are a unique species and that they are so by virtue of the divine spark of rationality or a capacity to reason. This assumption was widespread among the Greeks and will be accepted without much thought by many today. But it is not an unchallengeable assumption, and it is in fact challenged, at any rate implicitly, by those who believe that the human is merely a more sophisticated animal than others, but nonetheless essentially an animal with an animal brain, even if a large one; by those who believe that there is no such thing as mind distinct from the physical brain; and by those, more specifically, who believe that the brain is strictly analogous to a computer. Nobody, incidentally, disputes that we are animals, that we have brains that are necessary to mental activity and that are themselves material objects for scientific study, or that some reasonable parallels can be drawn between computers and brains. The argument is between those who say that that (or part of it) is all there is to be said, and those who insist that the human mind clearly amounts to a great deal more than the sum of those parts or aspects. Plato works on the premise that human beings are uniquely endowed with a certain particular kind of reasoning capacity (for nobody disputes that some other animals have some kind of reasoning capacity). But he recognizes that we are not simply thinking-machines. As Nettleship (1880) long ago recognized, if it is the education of human beings we are concerned with, a theory of education must provide some account of the ‘psychology’ or nature of human beings, such as Plato provides in his account of the tripartite soul. Psychological theory has become unrecognizable compared to Plato’s day, both in terms of theories of the nature of psychology and specific theories generated within psychology. In North America, particularly, it is hard to raise a critical voice against psychology and there are those who would claim that it is the major part (or should be) of educational theory.

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I reject this view. I do not see that there is any clear consensus on psychological theory itself in the way that there is on what constitutes science or even history, and a large number of specific theories within psychology, and particularly psychology of education, seem highly dubious, quite apart from the fact that many of the specific theories are incompatible with each other, if not actually contradictory. One reason for this state of affairs, I would argue, is that many parts of psychological theory are based upon an untenable behavioristic notion of human beings (though the term ‘behavioral’ is not particularly fashionable today, the mind-set remains powerful, the legacy of the explicit behaviorists undeniable). But whatever the truth of the matter, ‘advances’ in psychology certainly don’t involve repudiation or rejection of Plato’s basic insight. Plato emphasized another surely undeniable fact: humans do have minds, but they are also driven or motivated by desires or appetites, and they also have spirit, will, or determination, the last sometimes seemingly a motivator in itself (as, for example, when we are fired by indignation), but in any case a potential ally to either reason or appetite. He pinpointed the ever-present danger of conflict within the soul. Thus, the basis of his theory of education is the belief that the capacity for a certain kind of understanding is unique to humans, and that in developing that capacity, which is fundamental to education, we have to take account of the possible conflicts in the soul. The final premise of this theory is that man’s capacity for understanding includes the capacity to understand the good and to be virtuous. The aim of education may therefore be said to be to develop understanding and virtue in the individual. With that in mind, we turn to the necessary implications. Two issues obviously arise immediately: broadly speaking, how are we to manage the potential conflict in the soul, how guide the individual towards the right ordering of the appetites, will and reason, and what is there to be said about the knowledge or understanding to which we should aspire? Plato’s answer to the first question is that we must begin from an early age to habituate the child to the good and the true; we must provide an environment that is conducive to appropriate values. Any theory of education must take a stand on the broad issue of the balance between the power of the environment and innate characteristics. Plato clearly sees both factors at work, and argues for an attempt from the beginning to provide a suitable environment; he recognizes that this will not always be successful; there are people whose natural characteristics seem beyond social influence. But generally speaking, judicious control of social influences (in our terms, television, textbooks, expectations of conduct, etc.) is to be approved. Plato’s answer to the second question is provided by the Theory of Forms or Ideas. The educational message is clear: the kind of understanding that

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we need to develop is ultimately an understanding of concepts or abstract and ideal general notions and a synoptic view of knowledge as a whole. Since Plato did not think in terms of the basic forms of inquiry or study that some today regard as the most economic and powerful way of characterizing and developing knowledge, we cannot claim that his theory proclaims an education in the basic disciplines. However, we can claim that today that is a legitimate extension of his view. And we can say that his explicit point is that education should be concerned with theoretical understanding of all kinds – with grasping the reason why of things and appreciating connections and distinctions between different areas of understanding. The theory now has an ultimate aim or set of aims and a broad account of how to achieve the aim: by a mixture of example and control of the social environment (not incidentally by encouragement or hortatory interference; Plato seems to regard the use of praise and blame as not particularly efficacious, preferring that we model the required values and standards). The aim also requires a gradual ascent from study of particulars, via study of organized bodies of thought, in particular relatively abstract ones such as mathematics, to philosophical study. Tyler (1949) proposed four fundamental questions that any curriculum (or, as we may say, educational) theory needs to answer, and his view remains persuasive. They are (in my words): what educational aims should we have? What needs to be studied to achieve these aims? What are the best ways to engage in that study? And how can we best judge our success in the enterprise? Haroutunian-Gordon (1994) similarly suggests that a ‘philosophy of education’ (or, in my terms, a theory of education) should address four topics: the aims of education, the nature of knowledge and how people learn, the relationship between school and society, and ‘the role of the teacher in helping students to learn’. If such views are broadly reasonable as characterizations of what a theory of education should contain, the only elements that remains to be covered in this summary of Plato’s theory are the role of the teacher and how best to judge success. As we have seen, there are those who believe that Plato advocates a very particular role for the teacher as a facilitator rather than instructor. The evidence as a whole seems to suggest that he took a much more eclectic view. The teacher may instruct, may model, may describe, may elicit, may question and so on and so forth. But there is a case for saying that he saw particular value in a close rapport between student and teacher and questioning in a conversational setting. He undoubtedly believed in the importance of dialectic, but here it is difficult to disentangle ‘dialectic’ as a general commendatory term referring to a broad activity without any specification (as one might approve ‘philosophy’ without it being very clear what one meant by the term and without endorsing any particular school of thought, still less

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mode of engaging in it), ‘dialectic’ specifically as the name for the business of contemplating the Ideas, and ‘dialectic’ as some particular techniques or set of techniques for so doing. Here again, I believe that those who look to Plato for specific prescriptions for teaching will be disappointed and, further, that Plato was right to keep a fairly open mind on this particular subject and to see it as going beyond the remit of a theory of education as such. Similarly, there is nothing of direct relevance in Plato to the question of judging success or what is now commonly branded as evaluation. On the face of it, this lack of any contribution to either the science of pedagogy or the science of curriculum evaluation and teacher assessment is a shortcoming in Plato’s educational theory. One may be confident, however, that Plato’s response would be to the effect that these are sham sciences and quite insignificant compared with the task of establishing the aims, content and organization of education. Only when we have a clear idea of what we are doing, only when we have grasped the Idea or Form of education can we begin to judge the efficacy of various methods; by the same token, no way of evaluating can itself be evaluated except in the light of the Idea of education.

Notes 1. The Laws (esp. 641–655) depicts education as primarily a matter of preparing the young, through practice, for the pursuits of adult life. But while Plato draws an analogy with the trades and crafts (‘the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play’), he does not equate education with job or career preparation. On the contrary, whether positively disdainful of the technical or not, Plato’s concern is with training the young in the forms of goodness or virtue they will require as adults. There is an interesting passage (645d) on the drinking party as a medium of education, more specifically as a means of strengthening self-control. As Stalley remarks (1983: 124), ‘one does not encourage a person to develop genuine self-control by protecting him from all temptations’. Contemporary nanny-states and do-gooders, please note. 2. Stalley (1983: 127) argues that ‘changes of musical style [are] symptoms rather than causes of changes in society’. This may be correct, but Plato fairly clearly endorses Damon’s view that they are causes (424c). 3. Having, I hope, shown suitable humility in the body of the text, I may add that I still think my original position was correct. 423c seems to me clearly and explicitly to state that transference between the classes is

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possible; it refers to ‘the duty . . . of degrading offspring of the Guardians when inferior, and of elevating into the rank of Guardians the offspring of the lower classes, when naturally superior’. Nor is this in any way contradicted, as has been supposed, by 434b, where, in referring to ‘a cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader’ who ‘attempts to force his way into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislation and Guardians’, Socrates concludes that such ‘interchanges and . . . meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State’. This simply means, as it plainly says, that when an individual who is occupying the role suited to his nature, nonetheless changes his role to one to which he is not suited, there will be trouble. That is both by definition true on any view (a person who is not suited to the role he takes on is, ipso facto, not suited to it), and entirely compatible with the previous observation that some people are born into a group or role to which they are not suited, and when that is the case, they should be moved to a position to which they are suited. 4. Though I suggest that many of Plato’s contemporaries will have found his proposals concerning women and sexual relations ‘radical if not revolutionary’, it is worth noting that Herodotus (4.104) had already recorded that the Agathyrsi ‘have their women in common, so that they may all be brothers and, as members of a single family, be able to live together without jealousy or hatred’. Aristophanes’ comedies Lysistrata (411) and Ecclesiazusae (392) had also portrayed women in a way that to some extent anticipates Plato’s more serious views. The contrast between the presumed actual role of women in fifth-century Athens and many representations of them in drama and myth (e.g. Medea) has often been remarked; indeed some have been tempted to see in the apparent contrast an argument to suggest that the standard view of a woman’s role may be mistaken. 5. I have cited Cratylus (388a), but the dialogue as a whole is not entirely straightforward; see Chapter 26 for further brief comment on the dialogue. 6. The alert reader will note that I tend to refer always to ‘vocational or technical’. Neither word is quite right, since neither Plato nor I are primarily focusing on a true vocational preparation (e.g. for the priesthood) or a technical education in the sense of a training in, e.g., automechanics. The distinction of importance, which I hope is brought out in the text, is between an upbringing concerned with the general development of mind and character (education), and an upbringing focused on a limited set of skills and information deemed useful for some particular role in life.

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7. The saying is Bishop Joseph Butler’s (1692–1752); it was attached as an epigraph to G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). 8. It should be acknowledged that the Alcibiades is generally regarded as spurious, and indeed is not listed in Appendix 2 (q.v.). 9. The most obvious literary source for such information was Herodotus’ Histories, but drama could be equally revealing. In addition, of course, the fact that Athens was the center of a vast naval empire and that her citizen-sailors visited many far-distant and varied lands and societies will have awakened consciousness on this issue. 10. I have tried to articulate this vital point in greater detail in Barrow (1991). 11. Plato, in fact, explicitly denounces enslaving other Greeks (Republic, 469b ff). 471b ‘our citizens should deal . . . with barbarians as the Hellenes now deal with one another’ may be interpreted to endorse enslavement of foreigners. The question of whether the Republic itself envisages slavery is debatable. There is no overt mention of it and it is mistaken to regard the craftsmen and traders (‘the workers’) as slaves. 12. See, e.g., Kohlberg (1970). For critical evaluation, see Peters (1974) and Barrow (1984). 13. For a more detailed examination of the concept of indoctrination, see Barrow and Woods (2006). 14. That is to say he held a similar view on the potential effects of music on character (e.g. Pol.1339a). His view of drama as a primarily cathartic experience, expressed in the Poetics, is a different matter. 15. E.g. Frogs, 1009, 1030 ff, 1420. 16. At Republic 607b, Socrates refers to the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’, thinking perhaps of Heraclitus’ view that ‘Homer deserved to be expelled from the contest and flogged, and Archilochus likewise’ (Fr 42); he is equally critical of Hesiod (Fr. 57). 17. ‘Dialectic’ is to be contrasted with ‘eristic’, which refers to the attempt to secure victory by any means (echoes of Aristophanes’ ‘making the worse cause appear better’). ‘Eristic’ does not refer to any particular technique(s), it is not concerned with truth, and it is a condemnatory term for Plato. Antilogike is perhaps a technique, being a species of eristic consisting in pursuing purely verbal oppositions and, as such, contrasted with dialectic and condemned by Plato (454a). Elenchus, ‘cross-examination’, is a broader term covering attempts to refute a position by leading its proponent to assent to incompatible implications. This seems to have been accepted by Plato as part of dialectic, but a part that could be abused (Phaedo, 85c; Republic, 534b).

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18. Literally ‘paederasty’ refers to the sexual pursuit of boys (paides). It is important to recognize that for the Greeks the term ‘boy’ designates an adolescent rather than a child. 19. The phrase was used, not accidentally, as the title of a novel by the enigmatic, not to say irascible, homosexual would-be priest Frederick William Rolfe, aka Fr. Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo (1860–1913).

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Chapter 18

The Academy and an Outline of Plato’s Philosophical Legacy

I have to say at the outset that this is going to be a rather strange section. For, writing about the reception and influence of the thought of one of the most renowned thinkers in history, I am going to be forced to conclude that the impact of his educational theory on subsequent educational thinking has been, overall, slight and largely indirect. The history of educational thought is not in any formal systematic way much affected, still less influenced or dominated by Plato. This, as I shall argue in Part 4, has no bearing on the question of the actual significance and relevance of his educational theory, and I hope it does not make a brief consideration of the ways in which his work has been received over the centuries any less interesting. But it is a nice paradox that a man who is mightily admired and much cited, not only as a philosopher but specifically as an educational thinker of the first rank, is nonetheless not in any obvious sense greatly influential. As in dealing with his precursors, considering the reception and influence that Plato’s work has had must take a rather particular form, because he is in a more or less unique position, being the first philosopher in history to leave a substantial written corpus. Without any question his impact on the subsequent history of thought has been massive. It was no mere figure of speech for A.N. Whitehead to say that all subsequent philosophy has been ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’.1 But there are different ways of influencing one’s successors: in some cases a disciple simply continues the master’s work; in another, as with Hegel’s influence on Marx, the debt of the successor is explicit and clear but it involves turning the original theory on its head or otherwise significantly developing it; different again is, say, Karl Popper’s ‘debt’ to the Viennese Circle, since he was motivated to challenge and deny the premise of logical positivism to the effect that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the method by which it is verified. In Plato’s case, because he effectively stands at the beginning of history, his influence sometimes takes each of these or many other forms, and it is sometimes

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direct and sometimes indirectly mediated through the work of others who have themselves been directly influenced by Plato. The spread of his influence is comparable to a family tree, with the inheritance generally getting ever wider and more diluted, but with the occasional throwback who seems to have almost the very blood and genes of the founding father. It would be rather pointless, in these circumstances, to try and trace a definitive line of development for Plato’s thought, and also rather beyond our focus on his educational thought. However, an outline of the pattern of survival of some of his main contributions to philosophy should be given. In considering this it is useful to keep in mind the distinction between the history of Plato’s actual successors as teachers, notably the history of the Academy, and the history of his ideas; these two traditions do not work in tandem, and there are times when his formal successors in the Academy move quite far away from him and, conversely, when individuals who have no formal relationship to him echo him closely. The Academy founded by Plato was not a professional school devoted to passing on the master’s system, whether of thought or teaching; and it was not an ideological training ground designed to immerse all in the one true faith, the one true creed, or the one true theory. From the beginning, there were those with views that differed to a greater or lesser extent. Even in his own circle Plato’s reception was not entirely uncritical, though on balance it must have been admiring. Eudoxus, a mathematician, is said in one story to have annoyed Plato by trying to solve a problem using mechanical aids, rather than relying on reason alone (Plut. Quaest. conv. 718e). More significantly, along with others, including of course Aristotle, Eudoxus is said to have been puzzled about the relationship between the Forms and particulars posited by Plato, and suggested that they were wholly immanent (which would mean that they lacked the independence, imperishability, and immobility that Plato attributed to them). Even more at a variance with Plato’s views was Eudoxus’ belief that the Good was pleasure (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1172b; see Republic 505c, 504c for Plato’s contrary opinion). (Whether Eudoxus was a member of the Academy itself is debateable, but he was certainly acquainted with Plato.) Speusippus was Plato’s nephew and his successor as head of the Academy. He too is said to have rejected the Forms, in his case replacing them with numbers though he did not identify the One with the Good, as Plato did. Xenocrates, another subsequent head of the Academy, identified ideal and mathematical numbers (unlike Plato), modified Plato’s theological views, elaborating in particular on the role and nature of daemons (briefly mentioned by Plato in the Symposium), and layered over the Platonic view of the soul with Pythagorean theory, so that he defined soul as a self-moving number. Heraclides Ponticus challenged Plato’s view that the cosmos was created

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unique, finite and spherical (Ti. 33b) (saying that it was infinite) and the view that the soul was immaterial. These brief references are made simply to indicate that from the beginning, even among ‘Platonists’, individuals working together alongside Plato, there was critical dissent. Plato’s Academy did not exhibit the rigorous control and monolithic body of thought that characterize many another ‘school of thought’. This is most apparent in the case of Aristotle, where, thanks to the survival of many of his works, we are on more secure ground and have a much clearer idea of what is going on. Aristotle too had problems with Plato’s theory of Forms (indeed, it seems clear that this was considered the central tenet of Platonism and one much debated by his colleagues and students). He was not happy with the idea that they exist in their own right, and regarded the view that they are both universals and perfect instances of themselves as problematic. He also formally rejects the Form of the Good (Eth. Nic.: 1096a). But again, despite these philosophically serious criticisms, Aristotle should not be seen as a rival figure as he is sometimes presented. For many years he was a member of the Academy alongside Plato, and he did not dissent from such fundamental beliefs as that knowledge involves a grasp of the Forms and that the superior life is the contemplative life. Over the years, particularly following the death of all who had actually known Plato, the predominant tone of the Academy did change, becoming, in general terms, associated with Scepticism between the third and first centuries BC. But there is a continuity here, since the thrust of Sceptical thought was particularly hostile to the Stoic philosophy which, being materialistic, was antithetical to Plato’s thought. However, during the first century BC the various schools of thought (e.g. Epicurean, Stoic, Cynic) begin to lose their identity and merge in a more eclectic way. Posidonius (130– 46 BC), for example, though a Stoic, drew on Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul, Antiochus (d.c. 68 BC) explicitly aimed to reconcile the Platonic and Stoic traditions, and Cicero in transferring Greek philosophy to Rome and the Latin language, fuses many schools of thought, including Platonism, together. This synthetic blend of Platonism and other schools of thought, with an emphasis on the mystical, characterizes the period now referred to as Middle Platonism (first two centuries AD), the spirit of which is well conveyed by Plutarch’s moral essays.2 What is known as the school of Neoplatonism was founded by Plotinus (AD 205–270): it owes a great deal to Plato, but attempts to be more schematic and didactic. Where Plato seemed to be exploring ideas, Plotinus seems rather to be establishing a credo or ideology, central to which is a trinity of sorts consisting in the One, Intellect and Soul. The One is a transcendent godliness attainable through what we might call religious faith rather than reason. The realm of the Intellect is the realm of Being, while

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the Soul derives from the Intellect, and gives rise to the world of nature. Without pursuing the intricacies, it is evident that this is to weld together Platonic theory and contemporary religious attitudes and beliefs. Other known Neoplatonists include Porphyry and Proclus, the latter being head of the Academy when it was closed down by order of the Roman Emperor Justinian in AD 529.3 Parallel to the development of Plato’s thought within the Academy, both Jewish and Christian thinkers had made some use of it. Philo, (d.c. AD 40), for example appropriated aspects of the theory of Forms in bringing together Hebrew theology and Greek philosophy, while Christian thinkers such as Origen (c. AD 185–254) imported various Platonic ideas into their own theorizing, including in his case, rather unexpectedly, belief in the preexistence of the soul. St Augustine (AD 354–430) is the most famous and, probably, significant Christian thinker to mine the work of Plato, which he does both directly (e.g. in portraying the Forms as eternal truths in the mind of God), and indirectly by drawing on Plotinus and Porphyry. But one has to say that, while this sketch indicates that Plato remained throughout these centuries a dominant and influential thinker it would be stretching things too far to suggest, for instance, that in St Augustine we have a straightforward descendant or extension, intellectually speaking, of Plato. The great libraries at Alexandria and Ephesus, in particular, had preserved the works of Plato and other Greek authors, despite fire, war and other disasters. But from about AD 800 they began to be translated into Arabic and given a new lease of life as scholars attempted to harmonize Neoplatonism and other Greek philosophy with Islam. Partly in the Arab world and partly through Latin translations of some of the dialogues (e.g. Timaeus and Phaedo), and partly through St Augustine’s adaptations, Plato’s theories continued to be studied through the Middle Ages, though by the end of that period Aristotle was far more widely known and respected. With the Rennaissance, Plato, along with other things Greek and Roman, naturally comes to the fore again. New Latin translations were made of his works, and in the Florence of the Medici he was particularly admired. In England, Thomas More (1478–1533) wrote his Utopia in the obvious light of the Republic and the poet Edmund Spenser (1552–99) was also influenced by Plato. In the seventeenth century the so-called Cambridge Platonists deliberately invoked his name in their resistance to the materialism of contemporary philosophers such as, most notably, Hobbes. By the nineteenth century German scholarship consciously revived Platonic study (Hegel in particular was greatly affected by him), while in England his influence is very marked on such diverse individuals as the religious thinker Dean Inge of St Paul’s (1860–1954), the Romantic poets (somewhat paradoxically perhaps given Plato’s strictures on poetry), John Ruskin (1819–1900) (mainly

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on his educational and social thinking) and the great Balliol scholar, Jowett (1817–93). In the twentieth century, among many who could be said to draw directly on Plato, A.N. Whitehead in the realm of metaphysics and G.E. Moore in ethics should particularly be noted; but allowing for the point made initially about the many varied ways in which a person’s work may make an impact on others, we might equally note that two such disparate figures as Wittgenstein and Popper are in many respects reacting to, challenging, drawing on, modifying, and developing Plato – in both their cases in reference to ontological and methodological questions, and in Popper’s case in the area of political thought too – while many distinguished philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, without necessarily being Platonists in any sense worth stressing, nonetheless continued to teach and write extensively about him. The preceding summary survey should confirm the basic soundness of Whitehead’s famous observation: throughout history some religious, philosophical and political thinkers, as well as certain artists, have drawn directly on and kept alive Plato’s thought, with varying amounts of modification and development; during most of the time his work has continued to be studied directly; but, perhaps in the end more significantly, many dimensions of his thinking, ranging from the relatively insubstantial to the most demanding, continue more or less constantly to permeate our thought: all arguments about philosophic method and purpose or nature have to take account of the theory of Forms, even if not by name, and even if it is rejected; all arguments about the nature of being and reality must deal with the Platonic positions: basic topics in philosophy such as consideration of universals, nominalism, essentialism, and realism implicitly invoke Plato. His political thought cannot be ignored when it comes to debates about democracy, totalitarianism and other forms of government, just as his uncompromising championship of the idea of objective truth in general, moral truth in particular and the possibility of knowledge is, whether acknowledged or not, embedded in the warp and woof of any adequate discussion of relativism, subjectivism or postmodernism today. Platonic love, the three-part soul, the concept of harmony are all notions that are in common currency (even if interpreted in different ways).

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Chapter 19

Plato’s Legacy in Pre-Twentieth-Century Educational Philosophy

Focusing specifically on Plato’s educational influence, we need to make a distinction between the more general philosophical views that have educational implications and his specific educational principles and proposals. As I have argued throughout, some of Plato’s most important contributions to educational thought, such as his epistemology (including the theory of Forms), his views on the nature/nurture issue, and his view of the aims of education, are intrinsic aspects of his general philosophy, and enough has been said about them and their continuing influence for the time being. But his more specifically educational thinking has continued to have an impact too, particularly in the last few hundred years. Rousseau (1712–78), for example, whose educational proposals are in many respects antithetical to Plato’s (and very likely to some extent a reaction to him), nonetheless seems to take from him the fundamental idea that the state should be a moral educator of its citizens (an idea that in turn Plato owes partly to the society in which he lived). Rousseau, incidentally, praised the Republic as the finest educational treatise ever written. Ruskin’s particular debt to Plato in respect of practical educational matters has already been mentioned, but the main testimony to Plato’s powerful influence on education at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth is to be found in the educational practice of countries such as England in respect of the well-to-do upper classes. Whether the English public (i.e. private) schools, as they evolved in this period, did so in conscious or unconscious imitation of Plato or ancient Sparta hardly matters compared with the fact that the great boys’ boarding schools in both their arrangements and their curriculum ape the Platonic prescription with great faithfulness. This is the period too when scholars such as Nettleship and Bosanquet write about Plato’s educational proposals by straightforwardly summarizing the Republic and Laws as if they were more or less blueprints for a new foundation.

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In Part 4 I shall argue that Plato has great relevance for education today. It is the case, however, that compared to his palpable permeation of philosophy generally throughout its history, he has not been explicitly invoked or studied within the (admittedly meager) tradition of philosophy of education until the re-emergence of that subject with some autonomy and authority after the Second World War, in the work of such people as R.S. Peters, Paul Hirst and Israel Scheffler. After Plato, the history of the philosophy or theory of education is essentially marked by the contributions of St Augustine, John Comenius (1592–1670), John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), Johann Herbart (1776–1841), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and John Dewey (1859–1952). Of course other names could be added and it could be argued that not all of those names are equally important, but they are among those most generally cited as the major contributors to educational thought over the centuries. Assuming that it is reasonable to see the thinking of these individuals as representing the mainstream development of educational thought, then Plato does not play an obvious direct part in it. He is seldom mentioned and the emphasis of these other writers is by and large not his. But they do in some ways reflect or encompass Plato. For example, many of them prior to Spencer are imbued heavily with some kind of religious belief which, as in the case of St Augustine, could be said to be a Christianizing of Plato’s mystical but real belief in one supreme noumenal entity. Comenius’ belief in the potential for the soul to acquire perfect knowledge, virtue and piety, and his more prosaic commitment to the idea of universal state-provided education could be said to echo Plato. Locke, despite the fact that his empiricist philosophy categorizes him as a materialist in total contrast to Plato’s realism (or idealism), believes in a thoroughly Platonic manner that education should help to maintain a good society, which he sees as one in which people find happiness in doing their duty. Froebel’s belief in an Absolute is broadly compatible with Plato’s belief in the One. But having said that, it must be admitted that Plato is not consciously to the fore in these people’s thinking, and, for the most part, after St Augustine, there is an increasing interest in fairly specific claims about teaching methodology, often leading to advocacy of particular techniques of instruction, discovery learning, student-centered teaching, or following the inclinations and expressed interests of the child, which I have suggested had little interest for Plato. Indeed one might say that philosophy gradually gives way to psychology with these theorists. By the time we get to Herbart, whose interest was primarily in the earlier stages of education and who emphasized the sensible world, to Spencer who failed to see any value in the humanities and thought that science more or less exhausted what was worth knowing, and to Dewey, whose view of knowledge took a different but

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similarly extremely pragmatic turn, it is hard to see where Plato comes into it. It is not so much that anyone specifically wishes to refute him, as that, in a very changed world, these thinkers see no need to refer to him or draw on him. In Part 4 I shall argue that this is a very misguided viewpoint. But let me conclude this chapter by considering the claim of Haroutunian-Gordon (1994) that Phillips’ (1985) application of Whitehead’s view that philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato to the more specific area of educational philosophy needs some explanation, not to say justification. In one sense, of course, I agree with her, for, as my brief outline indicates, Plato hardly comes into the picture; but Haroutunian-Gordon seems to be going much further than this, and to be suggesting that Plato doesn’t actually have much of value to tell us about education, regardless of the attention that has or hasn’t been paid to him over the years. Her case is based on the claim that on important questions Plato gives contradictory answers, and her conclusion is that the respect for Plato that she acknowledges the thinkers mentioned (in addition to such disparate educators as A.S. Neill, Paulo Freire, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky) have, is inspired not by Plato’s philosophy but by his portrait of Socrates as the endearing, utterly human, teacher. But her argument for seeing contradictions is based on seeing simplistic and unrealistic oppositions where there is in fact subtlety and complexity. We are told that there is a contradiction between seeing education as a means to recognizing one’s ignorance and as a means to acquiring knowledge. ‘Does Socrates,’ she asks, ‘guide others so as to teach them how to conduct investigations; to show them that their views are in error; to have an opportunity to present his own positions; [or] to discover solutions to problems he wishes to resolve?’ The answer is obviously ‘a bit of each’; the problem here lies not with Plato, who recognizes the complexity of teaching, but with much contemporary educational theory and research which is based upon the highly questionable notion that teaching is a matter of utilizing various discrete behaviors which cause learning to take place, regardless of context. Plato does not think in terms of generic teaching skills. He does not believe that the major task is to classify teaching techniques. His ‘aim of education’, to use Haroutunian-Gordon’s terminology, is to generate knowledge and awareness of what one doesn’t know, often proceeding to the former by way of the latter, but often using various other approaches. No contradiction or fearful ambiguity here. Her next concern is with the nature of knowledge and learning and the question ‘Does Plato believe in eternal truth?’ The answer is quite clearly ‘yes’, though certainly we may not always be able to attain it, and there may possibly be some areas where it is not attainable. Again HaroutunianGordon attempts to make her case by presenting an incompatible and

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contrasting pair of learning as a process of ‘receiving’ from others and learning as ‘recalling’ or drawing it out of oneself. So, ‘is learning, according to Plato, the acquisition of understanding or knowledge from others or the recollection of it from within oneself?’ Again it is both and more. It is (to be more formal and literal to the text than we need be) the acquisition of understanding, which one had in a previous life and therefore is latent in the soul, as a result of any number of things including instruction or guidance from others or one’s own self-directed activity. Again no contradiction, merely a recognition of the multifaceted nature of teaching and learning. Finally, turning to teaching, she contrasts teaching as filling up ‘the empty container’ and teaching as ‘turning the soul so that it looks where it should’. The reader hardly needs me to say, again, that this is not an ‘ambiguity’ (still less a contradiction) in Plato’s thought but a recognition of an obvious truth: teaching is a complex business of imparting knowledge to people at least partly by getting them to look for and see for themselves the answers to important questions (see above, Part 2, Chapter 11). I have focused on Haroutunian-Gordon’s article because it comes from the presumably authoritative International Encyclopedia of Education and yet, besides being self-evidently wrong in claiming that in these respects Plato was contradictory, it represents just the way in which it is not sensible or useful to try to assess Plato’s value and relevance to us today. Plato will be of little or no use to us today or tomorrow, if we simply isolate quotations and specific passages involving words like ‘education’, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, and interpret them literally. It is necessary to glean his educational views from an understanding of his whole philosophy, and the most important part of what he has to say, even in respect of education, is to be found in his wider philosophical position.

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Chapter 20

Plato’s Legacy in Educational Thought

I have distinguished for convenience, but somewhat artificially, between Plato’s direct formal successors, particularly Heads of the Academy, and his more general impact on subsequent thought, between his broad philosophical legacy and his contribution to philosophy of education per se, and between a focus on specific practical proposals that he may seem to suggest and a focus on the wider and more theoretical questions that he raised. At least two further points need to be made in respect of the reception and influence of his work. First, who knows precisely what influence his thought has had, given that he has been studied widely by educated people (though sometimes that was a very small number) more or less continuously for over 2000 years, and that during the last two centuries his work was a staple part of the school (not simply university) curriculum for many in the Western world? When Macaulay ‘defined an educated gentleman as a man who read Plato with his feet on the fender’ (Ogilvie, 1964) he expressed no more than the accepted view of his time. From about 1800 until a generation ago millions of people studied Plato at least briefly and shared a common knowledge of such things as the notion of Platonic love, Plato’s three-part soul, Socrates’ life and trial, and the basics of the need for definition and the theory of Forms. Through the educational system, particularly, in Britain, the public and grammar schools and the older universities, the study of Plato was kept alive. This is a somewhat vague point, true – one cannot really estimate its significance, still less quantify it; but it is worth making, if only because there is probably no other philosopher in history of whom it could be said (not even Aristotle). Indeed, there are few people of whom it could be said, the others being also classical authors, such as Horace or Julius Caesar, but not philosophers. (I should emphasize that I am referring to the Western tradition. Perhaps, for example, Confucius may be said to have permeated Chinese thought through formal education in much the same way as Plato.) Secondly, Plato has held his own as a reference point fairly consistently in what may be called the field of the history of ideas and in particular the

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history of educational ideas, as distinct from the more specialized philosophy of education. Adams (1976) has argued that it was Petrarch who, despite never mastering Greek himself, first recognized the central importance of Plato to the classical tradition and that it was the German scholar J.J. Winckelmann (1717–68) who was most influential in promoting the study of Plato. (Werner Jaeger in his classic study Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 1944, puts emphasis on the younger F. Schleiermacher.) But Adams goes on, surely correctly, to endorse Ogilvie’s (1964) argument that the influence of Platonism on educational theory in England really comes into its own at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and suggests that this resurgence of interest owes something to the poet Coleridge in particular. What is certain is that with the appointment of Samuel Butler as headmaster at Shrewsbury School, Dr Arnold as headmaster of Rugby and the establishment of ‘Greats’ (the study of ancient history and philosophy) at Oxford in 1850, Plato’s influence on educational thought and practice was assured for the next 100 years.4 In briefly summarizing the nature of this influence, it may be helpful to make another slightly artificial set of distinctions between classical scholars generally, writers specifically concerned with education in classical times, philosophers, and historians of educational ideas. Clearly in reality these categories overlap: many of the best commentators on Plato’s philosophy are classicists, for example. But what the distinctions do help to bring out is the slightly different way in which Plato is introduced, depending upon the sphere of interest. Among classicists as such, interest in Plato’s educational philosophy has generally not been particularly strong or particularly illuminating. The 1906 edition of A Companion to Greek Studies, for example, published by Cambridge University Press, has a ten-page entry on education. Plato is cited a very few times, usually as a source for a factual remark about Greek education, as when the Crito is referred to as evidence that the law required parents to ‘train’ their children in music and gymnastics. Reference is also made to the boldness of Plato’s proposal to give women the same ‘training’ as men. (It is interesting from the point of view of contemporary philosophy of education to note that throughout the section on ‘education’ the word most commonly used is ‘training’.) All in all, there is nothing distinctly Platonic here – the account of music education does not even refer to Plato’s lengthy discussions of the matter – and nothing at all about Plato’s philosophy or theory of education. The chapter on philosophy has a brief section on dialectic (under the heading ‘Socrates’ Theory of Education’), but the slightly lengthier section on Plato’s philosophy makes no mention of his educational theory. The 1970 edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, though it has a brief summary of Plato’s thought as a ‘great educator’ is likewise

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shy of exploring his distinctive ideas about the nature and point of education. The third revised edition (2003), though it has entries under, e.g., ‘dialectic’, ‘rhetoric’, and ‘music’, in addition to those on ‘Plato’, ‘Socrates’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘education’, adds little if anything concerning Plato’s educational theory specifically. The Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992) has 18 references to ‘education’ in the index. Some of these are merely passing references, for instance to Herodotus’ observation that different societies have different perceptions of education or to Isocrates’ view that moral education can be provided through the study of rhetoric. In one chapter (Irwin, 1992) it is argued that there is no evidence for the view that Plato is hostile to sophistic thought, but this is contradicted in another (Penner, 1992: 137) where it is said that ‘for Socrates, as for Plato, there is no doubt that the main philosophical enemy is the sophists and rhetoricians’. There are of course references to Socratic and Platonic method, to the Forms, to care of the soul and to poetry, as well as a chapter devoted to Platonic love and the Symposium. But there is no chapter on education and no discussion of Plato’s educational theory as such. In the chapter on ‘Plato’s later political thought’, Saunders (1992: 471) writes: ‘it is hardly necessary to give a r´esum´e of all Plato’s education measures, for good accounts exist elsewhere’. But he cites only Morrow’s Plato’s Cretan City (1960) and Stalley’s Introduction to Plato’s Laws (1983), which itself has only a 14-page chapter on ‘education and the arts’. (The extensive bibliography in the Companion has no reference to anything on education, and, a fortiori, misses virtually all the references in this section.) I refer to these sources not to criticize and indict, but to suggest the general point that many of those who are most interested in and familiar with Plato’s work do not have a corresponding interest in education or educational thought. This may be because they do not think that thinking about education has any intellectual or philosophical worth. This, at any rate, appears to be the case with Cross and Woozley (1964: v) who remark in the preface to their (otherwise) useful commentary on the Republic: ‘because we . . . think that some parts of the Republic . . . have no philosophical interest, we have said nothing about them; for example, there is no discussion of Plato’s views on school education.’ (One might compare Honderich and Burnyeat’s enigmatic comment in the introduction to Philosophy As It Is (1979: 5): ‘we have also omitted philosophy of education, which has not since John Dewey been in touch with the mainstream of philosophy’.) If there is a certain amount of disdain in some quarters, it is only barely compensated for by the attentions of those who have had a specific interest in education in the ancient world in general and those who have considered Plato’s educational views in particular. Among the earliest works on Greek education in English are J.P. Mahaffy’s Old Greek Education (1883), which I

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mention only because the author was Oscar Wilde’s tutor at Trinity, Dublin, and Kenneth J. Freeman’s still serviceable Schools of Hellas (1907). Freeman interprets Plato’s view in the Laws as being that gymnastics is of no value unless ‘strictly conducive to military efficiency’, and he is one of the first to challenge Plato’s implication that some at least of the sophists were ‘hunters after young men of wealth and position, with sham education as their bait, and a fee for their object, making money by a scientific use of quibbles in private conversation, while quite aware that what they were teaching was wrong’, by remarking icily that such figures ‘do not appear in extant literature’ – a claim subsequently made in different ways by scholars as diverse as Popper, Kerferd and Schiappa. Freeman also discusses the evidence about teaching at the Academy and Plato’s arguments about censorship of art and setting examples for the young. J.F. Dobson’s Ancient Education and its Meaning to Us (1932) has a chapter on Greek theory, to set alongside descriptions of Athenian and Spartan practice; the section on Plato summarizes the Republic with an emphasis on the Spartan and communal nature of the proposals. There is no analysis or evaluation of the proposals and no consideration of the arguments behind them. William A. Smith’s Ancient Education (1955) includes material on Greece as part of a survey of various ancient cultures: the few pages devoted to Socrates and Plato allow for little more than a standard descriptive contrast between the sophists, Isocrates’ vocationalism, and Plato/Socrates’ interest in abstract truth. H.I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity (1956) is an altogether more substantial work than its predecessors (with the possible exception, in its own way, of Freeman): Plato receives a solid 25 or so pages which stress his commitment to truth and rational knowledge, while giving brief descriptions of his life, the Academy and the Republic and Laws. Of course my references have been selective. There have been other books on Greek or Greek and Roman education, including Davidson (1894), Dreyer (1912), Graves (1914), Boyd (1947), and even a slim volume by myself (Barrow, 1976). But, wherever we look, the general picture doesn’t change much: in studies of Greek education, reference to Plato is slight and barely describes his thinking, let alone analyzes or critically evaluates it. The situation is slightly, but not greatly, improved if we focus on books concerned with the history of education or the history of educational ideas. Thomas Davidson’s A History of Education (1907) is divided into Book One ‘Savage, Barbarian and Civic Education’, and Book Two ‘Human Education’. The latter takes us from Hellenistic to modern times (i.e. nineteenth century), which interestingly means that Greek education, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are considered under the heading of ‘Savage, Barbarian and Civic Education’. Plato is barely mentioned beyond a reference to his

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interest in harmony in a footnote and a brief reference to the theory of Ideas. Barnard (1947) notes that at about this time (c. 1900) early teacher training programs were creating a curriculum that included a study ‘of a philosophical work – passages from Plato’s Republic for choice’; and here we see the slightly depressing contrast between the nominal importance of Plato and the lack of any rigorous consideration of his arguments and views. Even fairly substantial volumes such as Curtis and Boultwood’s A Short History of Educational Ideas (1953) (which despite its title runs to more than 600 closely printed pages), do little more than offer another summary description of the provisions of the Republic and the Laws. James Bowen’s three-volume A History of Western Education is more critical and philosophical in its treatment of Plato in Volume One (1972) but still remarkably brief (about 12 pages). There has, then, been a fair amount of lip-service to the importance of Plato’s educational ideas which has not been supported by any obvious argument or explanation for that importance. Fortunately, a more positive picture is presented by certain specialist Platonic scholars and more recent philosophy of education. Richard Nettleship’s The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic ([1880] 1935) may reasonably be accounted one of the first essays to present Plato’s educational thought, at least as presented in that one substantial work, in such a way as to extract its logic, the reasoning behind the practical proposals, and to evaluate it (though in the somewhat idolizing manner fairly typical of classical scholarship of the time). Nettleship was a contemporary of other notable classicists involved in an informal Platonic renaissance, most particularly Benjamin Jowett (the Master of Balliol College, Oxford and translator of Plato’s complete works). Jowett (1908) himself wrote: ‘The Republic of Plato is . . . the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau . . . and Goethe are the legitimate descendants’, and, in turn, there is no reason to dissent from Leeson’s (1935) judgment that Nettleship’s study is the first in English ‘which treats Plato’s views on education as a single whole’, nor from his recognition that Plato ‘calls us back to first questions and first principles’ in his search for ‘the ultimate objective’, ‘the supreme purpose, or ‘the architectonic end’ of the enterprise; following Nettleship, this purpose is seen to be ‘to foster the growth of the human soul towards the good’. Nettleship’s pioneering work was followed by Bosanquet’s The Education of the Young in the Republic of Plato (1904). G.M.A. Grube’s Plato’s Thought (1980; originally published in 1935) was, as its title suggests, a general introduction to Plato’s thought, but it had two notable features. First, it was more questioning and interpretive, less purely expository, than many of its predecessors, and, secondly, it had a separate chapter on education, which

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explored primarily the view that virtue is knowledge, the system of education proposed by Plato, and the ascent to knowledge of the Ideas (referred to as ‘the knowledge that is virtue’). Given that Grube has separate chapters on Eros, the Soul, and Art, among others, the chapter on education gives recognition to the fact that, besides various particular practical policies he may advocate, Plato has a concept of education that needs consideration in its own right. But the most comprehensive and illuminating exploration of Greek thought about education, including Plato’s, at the time it was published was Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, published in three volumes (1939, 1944, 1945). Jaeger’s work might reasonably be described as an exhaustive study of the Form of paideia, and, though inevitably subsequent scholars have sometimes dissented from or corrected this or that detail, as a whole it has not yet been matched as a study of Greek educational ideas in the broadest sense. It is also an extensive study of Plato’s thought in particular, the whole of the second and much of the third volume being devoted to him. A number of Platonic scholars following the publication of Grube and Jaeger’s work, whether directly influenced by either of them or not, began to pay more analytic and critical attention to the theoretical argument and implications of Plato’s work. G.C. Field’s The Philosophy of Plato (1949: 130) has a brief section on education, recognizing that ‘a great part of his writings might be described . . . as a treatise on education’. Measured treatment is given here to questions such as Plato’s attitude to vocational or professional education and what he meant by comparing putting knowledge into the soul to putting sight into blind eyes. Field also discusses Plato’s theory of art which he recognizes as being in reality ‘a discussion of the use of the arts . . . in education’ (124); but the most significant point about his work is that it is divided into sections on the Theory of Forms, Moral and Political Theory and the Theory of the Soul (in addition to the Final Metaphysics, Theology and Religion, and Other Problems), each of which is treated in a critical manner and with explicit understanding of its educational significance. I.M. Crombie’s two-volume An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines (1962, 1963) is another example of the burgeoning analytic interest in Plato’s educational thought. Though he remarks at one point that ‘we have good reason to believe that Plato was wrong about politics, wrong about art, wrong about education’, Crombie is in fact a very sympathetic as well as a perceptive critic. His concern, in each case, is the legitimate one that planning for education (or anything else) in an ideal state is not the same as planning for it in the real world, and that focusing on the former can be very dangerous in practice – a reasonable enough concern in the wake of Hitler and Stalin, and a more moderate and reasonable statement of the problem than, for instance, that of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), important as the

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latter work undoubtedly is as a critical corrective to too admiring an approach to Plato’s political or educational thought. Crombie’s section on education itself is, like Field’s, brief, but includes the somewhat puzzling claim that only a ‘small part [is] played in [Plato’s] conception of further education by the notion of developing the mental faculties of the pupil’ (1962: 200). He acknowledges that it is explicitly said, for instance, that arithmetic sharpens the mind, ‘but, as against that, there is the doctrine . . . that the power of thought . . . is always there and that all the educator can do is to turn it in the right direction’. I have already argued that the notion of turning the mind in the right direction is not incompatible in any way with the notion of acquiring understanding and that a belief in truth and knowledge is in no way at a variance with a belief in autonomy: on the contrary the idea of knowledge is predicated on the idea of their being, so to speak, a right direction in which to turn the mind, and the idea of autonomy is predicated on the idea of knowledge: ignorance and false belief are not conducive to personal autonomy. Either Crombie is plainly in error here or I have failed to understand him. By contrast his observation that, if there is a methodological point in the Meno, it is not so much a point about self-directed learning or the like as a point about the pedagogical value of questioning, is astute. ‘The function of the educator . . . is to ask questions, and to ask them in the right order, that is to say in the order which enables the pupil to piece together the answers to them in such a way that he is left in the end with a coherent account of the subject under discussion’ (p. 201). But, as with Field, the real value of Crombie for educational philosophy lies not so much in the section on education as in his detailed treatment of the relevant parts of Plato’s philosophy (e.g. the theory of Ideas, the discussion of art, the overall interpretation of the Republic) which is carried out with an awareness of the potential significance of the discussion for our views on education. Between 1962 and 1981 W.R.C. Guthrie brought out his magisterial A History of Greek Philosophy in six volumes. Suffice it to say here that, while his scope is Greek thinking from the early Ionians to Aristotle on all matters that interested them, the entire work, including the three volumes on Socrates and Plato, displays the two features of exegesis that, as this survey has tried to convey, have only gradually and recently come to the fore in reference to Plato’s educational thought: a critical or analytic evaluation of his thoughts considered specifically in relation to a theory of or view about education. Of course, a great deal of Guthrie’s work is not concerned with education at all, but a surprising amount is; and when it is, Guthrie discusses it accordingly. While the nature of the consideration given to Plato’s educational thought was changing among Platonic scholars so it was among educationalists. R.C. Lodge’s Plato’s Theory of Education (1947) had a somewhat psychological

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focus and a tendency to mine Plato primarily for methodological or practical tips for teachers. R.R. Rusk’s Doctrines of the Great Educators (1954) naturally enough included a chapter on Plato; it is straightforward enough, but not particularly illuminating or thought-provoking. But Ivor Morrish’s Disciplines of Education (1967) took a quite different tack. Divided into sections on philosophy, psychology and sociology of education, that on philosophy contained chapters on Plato, Rousseau and John Dewey. Plato’s thought is here summarized explicitly in terms of an educational theory and critically examined. In 1961 E.B. Castle, in Ancient Education and Today, while not concerned with detailed exposition of particular authors such as Plato, had nonetheless emphasized an approach that seeks to evaluate classical views for their coherence and worth in our times. His final chapter presents a series of contemporary educational claims such as that education begins in the home, that education is growth, that education influences character, that teachers should be educated people, and that we must be clear what we are educating for, and then considers what we have learnt from the past on these issues. Needless to say, Plato is often cited, especially on the need to know what we are educating for. Adams in his survey of ‘Platonism and Education’ (1976) refers to ‘signs of a revival of interest in Plato among writers on education in Britain’, citing R.S. Peters’ ‘Was Plato nearly right about education?’ (1975) and Barrow’s Plato, Utilitarianism and Education (1975) and Plato and Education (1976). The former volume by Barrow was also mentioned by J.B. Skemp in his bibliographical survey of Plato (1976), though in the chapter on ‘Plato and Politics’, there being no chapter on ‘Plato and Education’. (Skemp was charitable enough to refer to Barrow as ‘a notable newcomer’ and to attribute the fact that he had been ‘rather savagely reviewed’ partly to ‘the novelty of his approach’!) There have of course continued to be contributions to the topic of Plato and education to the present day. But, apart from the fact that concern for more or less contemporary references shades into the question of the relevance of Plato’s thought today, to be considered in Part 4 there is not much to add to the picture. It is interesting that when, in 1980, Donald J. Zeyl contributed a bibliographical essay to a new edition of Grube’s Plato’s Thought (1935), in his section relating to the chapter on education he missed all the references made above pertaining to the period 1935–80. He confined his attention entirely to papers on the abstract questions of the view that virtue is knowledge, the unity of the virtues and elenchus and dialectic. These, of course, do have relevance to the topic. But this approach reminds us yet again that while Plato is one of the most referred to thinkers in history, and while Platonic scholars are still very much in business, there is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that Plato’s thought is in any systematic

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and serious way directly impinging on contemporary educational thought or, thereby, practice. I would conclude, somewhat ruefully, that the honest answer to the question ‘What has been the influence of Plato’s philosophy on educational thought today?’ is: not much; and its influence on practice, though slightly greater, has been largely indirect. However, for those of us who think this a concern, all is not lost: there remains the question of whether, regardless of the overall rather nominal interest in his educational thought, his work does in fact have relevance, and to that we shall respond with a resounding affirmative. Plato’s educational arguments and views may not be much studied in a sustained and critical way, but they certainly ought to be.

Notes 1. In Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1978. New York: Free Press). Richard Kraut (1992: 32) writes (in a footnote) that ‘since footnotes are mere supplements and are not intended to contradict the body of the text, Whitehead’s statement misleadingly suggests not only that subsequent philosophers were less significant than Plato, but also that Plato’s work was the universally accepted starting point for all later philosophy’. I doubt whether many people on first hearing Whitehead’s oft-quoted comment made that inference. Rather, as Kraut goes on to acknowledge, Whitehead clearly meant that Plato introduced most of the key ideas and issues that still ultimately constitute the subject matter of philosophy. 2. For a study of Middle Platonism, see, e.g., Dillon (1977). For a study of Plato through the lens of Middle Platonism see Annas (1999). 3. See, further, Lloyd (1990) and Wallis (1972). 4. See Brian Gardner (1973), The Public Schools, London: Hamish Hamilton, and David Newsome (1961), Godliness and Good Learning , London: Cassell.

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Chapter 21

The Question of Relevance

‘Relevance’ is often confused with ‘perceived relevance’; it is also frequently treated as if it were a property of ideas (actions, etc.) akin to their truth, wit, or complexity. But whether an idea or proposal is relevant is not a function of the idea or proposal itself but of the context: whether something is relevant depends upon the situation, what we are trying to achieve and what our aims are; and a contribution is not necessarily relevant just because people making the judgment feel that it is or perceive it to be: a child studying ancient Greece may think it relevant to visit a local Greek restaurant; he may be right, he may be wrong, but certainly his thinking, feeling or perceiving don’t make it one or the other. So the question of the extent to which Plato’s educational thought is relevant today is not a question of how he is perceived, but of how he should be perceived. He is relevant not in so far as educationalists happen to take an interest in his work, but in so far as what he has to say has a significant relationship to, or makes an important contribution to, issues that are recognized as important today – in so far as his thought does in fact pertain to our aims and concerns. As a matter of fact, he is not widely perceived as relevant today, but that surely has more to do with the general tenor of our times than any rational demonstration of his lack of relevance. Looking to the past, believing in objective truth, believing in the possibility of knowledge, focusing on the nature and purpose of education as opposed to the mechanics of teaching, and philosophy itself, are all somewhat unfashionable. The very notion that studying Plato might be of more practical value for education than engaging in empirical studies of teaching is out of step with contemporary attitudes and assumptions. Nonetheless, he is as relevant to our educational concerns as ever, whether we see it or not, because the ideas and arguments that he introduces are directly related to most of the major issues that we acknowledge in the field, and they still have force. Though the style and language, even in translation, may sometimes strike us as quaint, his contributions still speak to the substance of the debate.

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What are some of the major educational questions facing us? First, and most obviously, the question of truth. Education and teaching are predicated (or were) on the idea that we wish children to grow up distinguishing truth from falsehood and error in various fields. Can this belief in truth be sustained? Secondly, the question of knowledge. Again, an implicit assumption of educationalists throughout history has been that knowledge can be attained, but even if we believe in truth, is it in fact the case that we can gain knowledge of it and distinguish it from mere opinion? Thirdly, whatever status we accord to truth and knowledge, we have to face some version of the question ‘What is worth knowing?’ In other words, there are important decisions to be made about what bodies of knowledge should be studied. Fourthly, there is the question of whether, and if so to what extent, by what criteria, and in what manner, we should differentiate between students: should we provide different kinds of schooling for different pupils? Should we classify and organize them in reference to intellectual ability, specific talents, progress within a subject, age, race, or gender? Fifthly, the issue of moral education looms large: is it important, is it appropriate for the school to develop moral character, and, if so, what is the appropriate thing to do in the name of moral education? Sixth, a major question is what should we be doing to come to grips with and arrive at authoritative answers to these and similar questions. What should we be doing in the name of educational theory and research? From reading newspapers and watching television one might think that the burning issues in education are such things as bullying, drug-taking, falling scores in international literacy or mathematics tests, smacking students, truancy, and racial tension; but these examples of particular problems, if they are problems at all and not the product of media manipulation, are derivative on the major issues I have identified. They stem, generally speaking, from a crisis in confidence. In so far as we face a problem with bullying, for example, it is not so much because we cannot think of ways in which to curb it, as because we are not sure what we can and should legitimately do. This lack of confidence arises directly from our uncertainty about what we can claim to know and where we may speak with authority. It arises from lack of a clear answer to the questions raised above. And to all of these major questions Plato makes a direct contribution. One can’t get much more relevant than that, especially if it can be shown that the contribution is not only to the point, but also of a high order.

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Chapter 22

Some Psychological Questions

Educators have to have some idea of the nature of the people they are trying to educate. Good teachers perceive and respond to the individual characteristics of different students, and wise theorists are therefore cautious about assuming that all students are alike. Nonetheless, while recognizing the importance of individual character, a view of education relating to humans presupposes some notion of what humans in general are like; it presupposes a psychology. Plato’s account of the three parts of the soul provides a psychology that still rings true today: people are subject to various appetites and desires; they have a rational element that may exercise more or less sway; and they have determination or will-power to a greater or lesser degree. These three elements in our make-up or soul are independent and often in conflict: we can be more or less enslaved to our passions, rational in our ordering of them, and dutiful in maintaining the rule of reason. Whether this account of the soul is sufficiently complex may be debated. On the face of it, psychology today has advanced considerably and can provide altogether more subtle and intricate accounts than Plato who, from this point of view, may seem rather simplistic and naive. But there is a price to be paid for the more specific and wide-ranging psychological theories with which we are familiar today. First, different theories are sometimes at odds, not to say incompatible, with others. Secondly, they are not necessarily convincing and certainly not demonstrably true, however fashionable. Freud, for example, may be said to offer a more interesting and penetrating psychology than Plato, but it is also more contentious and it is at a variance with Adlerian or Jungian psychology in some respects. This is not to deny that generally speaking our knowledge of psychology is considerably greater than Plato’s. But it is to suggest that Plato provides a basic and fairly uncontentious view of the human psyche that remains useful for education in particular. The business of education has to come to grips with the three different aspects of human nature cited by Plato, and find appropriate means to develop a harmonious whole involving a reliable and determined

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management of desires and appetites by reason. Educators also have to recognize that students at different ages, times and places may respond in different ways as a consequence of the state of their soul, or, to put it less portentously, as a consequence of whether their desires, their will, or their thinking are predominantly in control. Plato’s view of education is inextricably tied up with his political views, as most commentators recognize. This is to some extent as it should be and further evidence of Plato’s insight. Education is necessarily a political business in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons. However, so close is the connection in the Republic that it has always proved a little difficult to distinguish between proposals that really have little interest outside the context of the dialogue and those that can be considered as of broader significance. One obvious example of the problem is provided by the split between those who insist that it is part of the essence of Plato’s position that only a few people at any time or place are capable of becoming fully or properly educated (in the manner of the philosopher-kings), and those who maintain that all the contemporary Platonist needs to do is extend the educational provisions proposed for the Guardians to everybody.1 In my view, Plato believed that only some were capable by nature of successfully completing the education of the philosopher-kings, and that other people should pursue a different kind of education or training. In contemporary terms, if such extrapolation is possible, he would therefore argue for some kind of differentiated educational system, involving more intellectual study for some and more practical pursuits for others. Whether that is a reasonable interpretation or not, and whether, if it is, the Platonic position is defensible or not, the questions involved are of extreme contemporary relevance. Consideration of Plato’s thoughts on this matter would surely be of great practical value, even if ultimately we reject them. There is an in-built conundrum in Plato’s position, as a result of his belief that absolute and certain knowledge is possible. Hostile critics particularly dislike what they see as the totalitarian nature of Plato’s society and the attempt to make all citizens conform. Friendly critics emphasize the point that, following early conditioning or moulding of character, the whole point of Plato’s educational provisions is to bring people to arrive at their own understanding – to see things for themselves. The conundrum arises because, for Plato, all those who arrive at understanding are presumed to arrive at the same understanding. By contrast, most educationalists who emphasize the development of understanding today do not presuppose absolute uniformity of thought, and can therefore argue for their concept of education partly by appealing to autonomy: the more educated you are (the more you understand), the more you will be in control of your own destiny, and the more self-governing (autonomous) you will be.

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One can perhaps settle the issue of autonomy without too much difficulty: people who act as they do in the light of their own understanding are by definition autonomous, regardless of whether they do or do not share the same understanding and hence act in the same way as others. Autonomy is not the same thing as individuality.2 In practice, in any case, whatever Plato’s views, the pursuit of knowledge even on his terms does not necessarily lead to identical behavior since different people have different desires and willpower; and on most contemporary views the pursuit of knowledge will not necessarily lead to identical understanding. The contrast that matters is between the autonomous, who are directed by internalized reason, and the unautonomous, who are at the mercy of their desires, the opinion of others, or other external circumstance. But for a man as influenced by Socrates as Plato was there remains an oddity. For Socrates is clearly depicted by Plato himself as a man who was lovable in his eccentricity. Despite the passages where he explicitly scorns democratic Athens’ preoccupation with variety and its lack of consistency, it is hard to believe that Plato did not appreciate difference and individuality. Yet the Republic overall does not seem to value it and the ideal state is clearly designed to produce a homogeneity of outlook. I don’t think that this seeming contradiction can be resolved. One may simply note that the relevance of a thinker does not only reside in his providing what we regard as the correct answer to a question. On the broad question of the extent to which education should seek to promote autonomy, individuality and homogeneity, Plato’s relevance lies partly in provoking us to consider it. Something similar may be said of Plato’s view on eros or love in an educational context. As we have seen, quite apart from questions of interpretation, there is the question of whether we share what we take to be Plato’s view. But it is certainly a topic of contemporary relevance: to what extent and in what ways should the relationship between teacher and taught (at various different ages) be one that involves various dimensions of love, affection, warmth, or friendliness? Annas (1981) makes a distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ and points out that, while the education of the Guardians may be seen as intellectual, there is a sense in which there is a ‘total absence of any reference to academic achievement . . . [There is no] reference to exams or grading; the children are tested for strength of character (413 c–d), but education is not thought of as a process of absorbing information or skills which can be periodically tested’. She goes on to say that ‘Plato is the first thinker systematically to defend the notion that education is a training of character rather than an acquisition of information or skills’, and she argues that American education is and has for a long time been run on Platonic lines. This allows her to conclude both that ‘Plato’s ideas about education actually

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do work, can be put into practice’, and that since that has been done in America and not the Soviet Union which ‘has remained rigidly academic’, it follows that there is ‘no necessary connection between Platonic theories of education as a training of character and totalitarianism’. It is certainly correct to say that Plato is concerned with the training of character (though not only that, given his commitment to knowledge and the intellect) and that his educational proposals can be detached from his political proposals. The equation of ‘academic’ with ‘exams and grading’ strikes me as odd and it seems rather ahistorical to refer to Plato’s lack of interest in a phenomenon that simply didn’t exist in his time, namely what is now an industry of examinations and grading. (He certainly believed in testing understanding, as the Meno illustrates.) However, a more important point is that there is one respect in which Annas’ view of American education is incorrect: for American education, particularly in recent years, has become obsessed with the acquisition of information and skills, particularly in the early years of schooling and in the case of the less intellectual. But Plato’s view of knowledge and understanding is such that the contemporary tendency to equate them with the acquisition of various alleged thinking skills, and the ability to recognize references (‘cultural literacy’ in Hirsch’s (1987) phrase) and regurgitate facts would be anathema to him. Plato’s thought on this topic is particularly relevant. For in introducing ‘dialectic’ and explaining it, however incompletely, by analogy and the illustrative example of the dialogues themselves, and, more broadly in his depiction of philosophy and the theory of Ideas, Plato presents the first extended argument for seeing intellectual development not primarily as an aspect of psychological or biological development and not as a matter of mastering techniques of thinking, but as the business of coming to grips with fundamental concepts. The popular side of educational theory today (particularly in America), as seen in self-help books, guidance and support groups, new-age thinking classified as philosophy, ten-step programs, and television gurus, puts forward a picture of the mind that essentially mirrors the body. If you want to run you exercise and practice; if you want to be wise you engage in mental exercise. But this view is commonplace at a more serious level in ‘academic’ educational theory too. I believe it is wholly erroneous: wisdom or intellect are the outcome of understanding important bodies of thought, modes of inquiry and concepts – not the outcome of doing critical thinking exercises.3 But whether that is correct or not, it is clearly a matter for urgent consideration and few people have argued as strongly against contemporary presumptions on this matter as Plato.

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Chapter 23

Truth and Knowledge

Today, relativism and subjectivism are once more alive and active. The broad and vague label ‘postmodernism’ is not in itself very useful, but there can be no doubt that so-called postmodern thought is a force to be reckoned with at least in parts of academia, particularly the social sciences and humanities, including education. Among the tenets generally regarded as postmodern are the claims that there is no such thing as truth, that everything is how you see it, and that there is no distinction between truth and perception. This is not the place to argue about such claims to the bitter end. But I shall record my own view that the claims are highly insidious and woefully mistaken. They are dangerous because once we abandon the idea of truth (and it should be stressed that we are here talking about the idea of there being a truth, and not about the difficulty of knowing it), so that there is no distinction to be made between how something appears to one and how it is, we lose the possibility of making any judgments, whether about good and bad, effective and ineffective, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, beautiful and ugly, sharp and blunt, sweet and sour, etc., etc. It all becomes, as the theory says, a matter of how one sees it. Now, of course, if that is the way it is, there is no use complaining about it: we just have to live with the chaos it will inevitably lead to. But, in fact, such a thesis, pertaining to truth as a whole, is so implausible as to leave one shuddering with amazement that it could ever be taken seriously. The thesis itself cannot be said to be true, since according to itself there is no question of truth or falsity; so in practical terms all we need to do is point out that fortunately this perception is very rare (only to be found among lesser academics), and continue to act on the common-sense assumption that we should distinguish between the correct perception that one is unpopular with some individual(s) and the delusion that the world is out to get one. Certainly, in order to live our lives, we need to recognize the distinction between the breakfast cereal that is truly there and the sustenance that we incorrectly imagine we are receiving. But I would go further and suggest that for most of us it is simply insincere

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to claim that we truly (?) believe such tenets: whatever they may choose to say in their philosophy classes, nobody really believes in the claim that there is no truth. Some will say that the preceding paragraph caricatures and exaggerates the postmodern position.4 If that is so, postmodernists have only themselves to blame for their obscure and extravagant-seeming claims. But it makes very little difference, for the slightly more plausible and less extreme claims that might be made are equally untenable, and, more to the immediate point, are ones that Plato recognized and argued against. Whether one believes, as I do, that he effectively trounced such viewpoints is less important than recognizing that the contemporary debate around truth, reality and appearance is a continuation of a debate that Plato played a part in initiating, and that his arguments are still to be reckoned with. It will be recalled that Plato did not simply dismiss the ideas of relativism and subjectivism. On the contrary, probably influenced by the Presocratics and certainly by some of the sophists, his starting point is precisely to recognize that our view of things, our beliefs, our assumptions regarding what is true and false, are affected by such things as perspective, context and, overall, ourselves. He was as aware as anybody that things are not always what they seem and that who you are may play a substantial part in determining what you see. But, he argued, it makes no sense to deny the very idea of truth. As to the question of whether his theory of Forms is a useful contribution to this debate, I think it depends largely on what interpretation we give to the theory. If we persist in taking everything Plato says literally and conclude that he believes there is a transcendental other world, containing Forms that have existence in a more or less conventional sense, then not many people are likely to be convinced. But if we see him rather as developing the view that no temporal, spatial instance is perfect or perceptible in entirety as itself, and that, therefore, if we want to understand and become clear about such things as love, justice, friendship and, indeed, truth and knowledge themselves, we should not be studying particular putative instances of friendship, just acts or knowledge claims, but rather the ideas themselves, in an attempt to clarify what is to count as friendship, love, etc. – if that is what we see him as doing, or if that is what we emphasize, it is surely a most reasonable and plausible thesis. We do not have to accept the assumptions (closely tied to the literalist interpretation of the Forms as existing) that a Form of friendship is already a given and that humans have to recognize it for what it is: if we adapt the thesis (or interpret it) to say that the parameters of friendship are not altogether given in nature, so that grasping the Form is partly a case of being faithful to an actual phenomenon (of friendship) and partly a case of determining or deciding what are to count as necessary

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and sufficient conditions, we shall not do any major disservice to Plato. There is also a need to address the question of whether all concepts should be categorized together, and, in my view, to conclude that they should not: what Plato has to say about Forms is important in relation to, e.g., friendship and justice, in a way that it is not in relation to mud and cereal. In short Plato is right to argue that there is a distinction between truth and falsehood and that we must live by seeking the truth. And he is right that you cannot understand certain key concepts in life by studying only instances that embody or reflect them: you have to work out the contours, the defining criteria, of the idea, concept or Form intellectually. The question of whether knowledge is attainable is distinct. It might be the case that there are truths, but that we can never know them, or, more plausibly, that we can never know that we know them. Of this Plato was well aware, so what is his argument here? Overall, it might be said that while he clearly thinks knowledge can be attained, he is not entirely convinced that we can ultimately know that we know, as distinct from having faith that we know. But, on a more prosaic level, one important implication of his argument, which has great relevance to contemporary debates about the manner in which educational research should be conceived and conducted, is that knowledge is the object of the intellect rather than the senses. This, of course, has given rise to an ongoing debate throughout history between materialists and realists, just as his theory of Forms gave rise to the ongoing debate between nominalists and essentialists. But we do not have to polarize these matters; even Plato does not have to be interpreted as saying, for example, that no empirical study should be trusted, since it relies on the senses. What he is saying is that one supremely important kind of attainable knowledge (defined more or less in traditional terms as true belief backed by reasoning) is of the Forms: whatever the difficulties of knowing whether on balance and in sum any particular act or state of affair is just, we can have an absolutely clear concept of justice, and in having that, in grasping the Form, we have knowledge. Plato’s thinking on truth and knowledge, then, is important because it involves strong arguments and plausible conclusions for the crucial contemporary preoccupation with these matters. It is important in reference to education partly because any thinking about anything has to take a prior stand on these issues, and partly because education is specifically bound up with the ideas of knowledge and truth: a professor of education needs to know whether he thinks that there is a possibility of rational discussion leading to correct answers or not, before he enters the debate, and if a meaningful debate is to take place about education it needs to take account of the presumption that its aims include developing knowledge and understanding, and distinguishing truth from falsehood.

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This gives rise to two further questions: how is knowledge structured and what knowledge is most important. Here Plato is less directly helpful. Although he is aware of the question of the structure of knowledge, and has a view on the matter which is expressed in his curriculum proposals involving a gradual ascendancy to the study of the Forms, most people will feel that our current thinking on possible ways of categorizing knowledge is greatly in advance of his; partly because of that, his contribution to the question of what is most worth knowing, apart from the crucial element of philosophical thinking, is neither particularly full nor convincing. One suspects that Paul Hirst (1974) in introducing his extremely influential thesis about forms of knowledge felt indebted to Plato, though he refers only to the Greeks in general, but it is not the case that we owe much directly to Plato when it comes to questions such as whether social science is a meaningful discipline and whether it has educational importance. All we can say is that Plato does constantly remind us that two unavoidable and fundamental educational questions are: what can be known and what is it most important to learn? By contrast, there are those who effectively ignore these questions, sometimes deliberately, thinking that it is sufficient to focus on other questions such as ‘How do we motivate students?’, ‘What interests them?’, ‘What do they need?’, ‘What is it most useful to know for future job prospects?’ Plato implicitly and occasionally explicitly reminds us that these questions cannot coherently be addressed except in the light of a clear concept of education and a good grasp of the nature of knowledge. He also provides supporting argument for those who hold that the most important questions about schooling and education revolve around this question of content, rather than methodology or organization, and that knowledge, far from being a cultural veneer as some have suggested, is, besides being an end in itself, power. It should not be forgotten that in the Republic the discussion of education arises out of an inquiry into justice; the appropriate intellectual education will give people the means to order their lives in a just and truly profitable way.

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Chapter 24

Educational Distribution

A question that needs consideration, and is constantly under review among educational thinkers, and which occasionally comes dramatically to the fore in political terms, is that of distribution or provision; the broad question of where we should be on a continuum between a comprehensive educational system providing the same classes for all and a differential system providing quite distinct experiences to different students. It used to be said, whether truthfully or not, that at a given time on a given day all children of a given age in French schools would be doing the same thing. But the possibilities for differential treatment are more or less endless, including different schools, different classes, different sets, different syllabi, different materials, different teaching styles, different class size, etc., etc. The debate about whether or not to pursue this or that difference, or to take account of this or that difference, is almost always tied up with views about people’s aptitudes, needs and interests, and those views are in turn affected by conflicting views on the importance of native ability or innate qualities and the environment, particularly, but not exclusively, the social environment. This, which used to be familiarly referred to as a debate about nature vs nurture, may superficially be assumed to have taken a new turn recently: in the 1960s and 70s, such was the impact of sociology in particular, that there was a strong and widespread conviction that the circumstances into which one was born and in which one grew up were the key factor in determining one’s development.5 On the face of it, recent advances in our knowledge of genetics, in establishing both that genetic inheritance is fairly extreme and that there is a genetic factor in most of what we are, suggest that, on the contrary, it is the nature we are born with that matters rather than the environment we find ourselves in or the experiences we go through. However, on close scrutiny that is not the conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. Rather, the conclusion that has emerged is that, while we are indeed born with inherited genetic tendencies, such is the possible range of different conjunctions of genes and such is the capacity of genes themselves to become modified by experience that our individuality is not threatened,

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and who we actually become can only fairly be said to be a combination of our unique genetic inheritance and our unique experience. This is to say that, notwithstanding the important scientific advances made in genetics and the less secure but nonetheless thought-provoking claims of sociology, the most reasonable presumption is the one that Plato implicitly argued for. That understanding, in turn, must inform our discussions about how to distribute education, and, again, Plato’s argument to the effect that, on the one hand, we must try to understand and take note of individual proclivities, but, on the other, we must recognize that both the possibility of and sometimes the need for developing, moulding or otherwise more specifically shaping those basic proclivities remains valid. Thinking back to Haroutunian-Gordon’s oversimplistic reduction of Plato’s complexity to a series of alleged contradictions, one might say that one of Plato’s greatest attributes was his recognition of complexity and ambiguity in human affairs, while still maintaining that understanding was in principle possible. Too often in the subsequent history of educational thought Plato’s awareness has been replaced by a naive and unrealistic emphasis on one aspect of a complex whole. In this case, there have been those who see everything as being essentially the product of circumstance, as many Marxists did, and others, including Rousseau in some moods and some educational psychologists, who see everything as dependant on innate factors (whether called character, psychology or genes, and whether presumed to be inherited or not). One of the most powerful arguments for studying a thinker such as Plato is that so much of the history of educational thought is marred by these false polarities and implausibly one-sided views. No educationalist who thinks that the environment, however broadly conceived, is all that matters, and no educationalist who thinks that we are born to be whoever we become should be taken seriously, even when they happen to have acquired the reputation of a B.F. Skinner or an A.S. Neill. If we recognize that, while we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, what we do in terms of educational provision will nonetheless play a part in shaping the development of the individual, then we have to face the questions of what we think are desirable and undesirable directions in which to develop people and what steps we may legitimately take to achieve the ends, to both of which Plato has much to contribute. There is also the empirical question of what techniques are likely to prove effective. On the latter issue Plato has something to say, as we have seen, both in utilizing the dialogue form himself, which, broadly speaking, suggests a style of teaching that helps the student to see and understand, step by step, a chain of reasoning as it unfolds, and in advocating an approach that would eschew any hard and fast technique, or even set of techniques, in favor of an eclecticism that may at different times make use of anything from the

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child’s play to the teacher’s demonstration or instruction. It cannot be said that Plato offers very much in the way of argument to support this broad approach, but the fact that he firmly advances it has its importance at a time at which the prevalent academic orthodoxy, particularly in North America, is that there is a set of generic teaching skills which once mastered are appropriate to all situations or, worse still, that one style fits all.6

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Chapter 25

Value Questions

The questions of what sort of people we should aim to develop through education and what means are legitimate obviously presuppose a view on the status of moral and other value judgments. This is a subspecies of the broader issue of objectivity and truth in general. Plato’s contribution here is enormous, since he is the first to articulate a reasoned defence of the notion of truth and objectivity in the moral sphere specifically and to argue that moral knowledge (and aesthetic, and other kinds of value knowledge) is possible. There is much that one may disagree with him about: for example, I am not personally persuaded, as Socrates was, that having lived in a state I am as a consequence morally obligated to obey its laws even unto death. I think that the question of whether one can willingly do wrong is at best unclearly and at worst wrongly dealt with by Plato. But the question of his importance or otherwise for today is not affected by points like these (on which others may in any case take a different position). What matters is Plato’s thoroughgoing exploration and examination of all the still familiar arguments for relativism and subjectivism in respect of value judgments, moral in particular. And in this respect I would argue not only that he speaks to the point, but that once again he is largely convincing. Certainly one often feels when reading contemporary attempts to establish a moral relativism that the authors simply haven’t read or haven’t understood their Plato. We have already considered the issues of censorship and indoctrination. These remain very real and sometimes urgent topics, and, while here many do not want to follow Plato, once again he nonetheless helps us to frame the debate in a serious and meaningful way. My sense is that Plato advocated a degree of control and influence that is not justified, is not in itself desirable, and is not likely in practice to be particularly efficacious. But the questions have to be take seriously: children today can access practically anything on the internet, including torture and other brutality, sexual behavior of bizarre and some would say deplorable types, and ludicrous nonsense presented persuasively as truth. We have to face up to this and give

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serious consideration to the very issue Plato explores: are there some things from which because of their falsity, depravity, or absurdity we should protect young children? And, if there are, is it better that the censorship be done deliberately by the state or randomly by powerful lobby and interest groups? And should the criteria for censorship be located in people’s attitudes to beliefs or in something more objective: for example, is the fact that some group is upset by something sufficient to censor it or must they produce some reasoning to establish its objective undesirability? Similarly, is it wrong, is it something like indoctrination, to implant faith and belief in unprovable propositions in the young, or does Plato have a point when he says that one should foster things like love of fellow humans and love of country even by non-rational means? In an era that involves a clash between two great faiths (even though the clash is not wanted by the majority of either faith), in an era that evokes once again the patriotic flag-waving nationalism of earlier times, these are very real and relevant questions. Plato’s conclusions may be wrong but they have not unequivocally been shown to be wrong, and his arguments certainly have to be faced.

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Chapter 26

Philosophy and Educational Theory

I have left until last, although in a way it takes us full circle back to the beginning, what I regard as Plato’s single most important contribution to education, and that is his view of the nature and role of philosophy itself and what that means for a coherent and viable understanding of educational theory and research – an understanding which, as things stand, we do not have, with the result that a great deal of educational writing is seriously misconceived and irrelevant. Every academic involved with the study of education is familiar with the objection that the theory is irrelevant to the practice. I think that this is largely true, but only because the theory is so misconceived. It does not have to be. To appreciate the abiding relevance of Plato’s thought here, it is necessary to return to the Presocratics and the beginning of systematic philosophical inquiry. The mystery that faced the first Ionian thinkers is still a mystery today. Regardless of our religious views or lack of them, and regardless of whether the latest scientific theory about the origin of the world is the Big Bang theory or something else, we still face the question: how can something (the universe) appear from nothing? How can there be an uncaused event, as the first event must have been? To posit God as the ‘unmoved mover’, as the philosophers say, or as a being who, being eternal, immortal and insubstantial does not need to come into existence himself, but can create the world, ignores rather than solves the problem. If we can make sense of and live with the idea of God as a creator who never came into existence because he was always there, then we can make sense of a universe that did not come into existence because it was always there. But in fact we can’t make sense of this notion: we can’t conceive of nothingness, we can’t conceive of the notion of something always having been in existence (though we can obviously formulate the words), and we can’t conceive of the notion of the universe coming out of ‘nowhere’ to take its place ‘somewhere’. Whether there is any hope of an answer to this question (which is not a scientific question, since the problem remains whatever the current state of our scientific knowledge) or not, it was the question the first thinkers were

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exercised by. It was framed as an ontological question, a question about Being: how can there be Being? How can there be both permanence and change? The early Ionians give quasi-scientific responses: for example, the basic material of the universe, or cosmos, was water according to Thales. The observable phenomenon of condensation and rarefaction shows that water can alter its form and presence, and hence the hypothesis that the common constituent to all aspects of the world is water, transmogrified here into a mountain, there into a person, here an ice cap, there an ocean. However, neither this nor any other answer explains where this fundamental constituent of being is located; we can hardly say that it is to be found in a watery universe, but if it isn’t then something else needs to be added. In any case the proposal that water is the essence of the universe did not find acceptance for long. In its place was suggested air and the unlimited or limitless, which, being the most mysterious and obscure suggestion so far is probably the most plausible. Subsequent thinkers rejected the assumption that there was only one basic substance and suggested, for example, that the universe might derive from earth, air, fire, and water. But the most important moment in the history of this line of thought came when Parmenides demonstrated to most people’s satisfaction that one can only say that what is, is. Hence everything is (there cannot be that which is not) and the true nature of reality must be that of an undivided, homogeneous, single entity; furthermore, there cannot be change or coming into being and passing away, and therefore change, the world as it appears to us resplendent in growth and decay, must be illusory. There is no need for us to be persuaded by Parmenides’ argument, which is very difficult to interpret given its fragmentary nature and poetic style. It was not long, in any case, before Leucippus and Democritus put forward the first statement of an atomic theory which did (and in a more developed form does even today) manage to present a coherent and plausible account of how there is both an unchanging substance and yet a varying appearance in physical phenomena: the desk I am writing on is constituted of atoms, and they will survive though the desk will ultimately perish. Part of the importance of Parmenides lies in the fact that at the time people with quite different viewpoints were convinced by his line of reasoning. This led more or less directly to two opposing camps: those who believed that the world of appearances was untrustworthy and deceitful, and those who believed that appearance was all: what you see is all you get. When we add that what had begun as interest in ontology and natural science now expanded and developed to be more appropriately classified as an interest in epistemology and moral and political philosophy, a development very much associated with Socrates, the stage is set for Plato and the birth of philosophy as we know it. Plato is still right there in the vanguard

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of the argument over what is and what is not, but the focus for him is on whether knowledge can be accurately distinguished from opinion, belief and ignorance, whether it is possible to acquire it, and, if so, in particular whether it is possible in the area of morality. Combine this with the specific theory he puts forward concerning Ideas or Forms and the questioning techniques that Socrates is portrayed as using, and we have a large part of the explanation of why Whitehead thought philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato. Under one name or another, in one way or another, two of the major issues in philosophy have always been the problem of knowledge in general (and the problem of moral knowledge in particular), and the question of philosophic method. And they still are today. Is there truth in all matters? Is there truth in any matter? If there is, can we know it? If we can, can we communicate it, can we establish that we know it? Plato’s answer to each of these questions was an emphatic and impassioned ‘yes’, as against the views of those such as Gorgias, who wrote a treatise to establish that there is no truth, if there were we couldn’t know it, and if we knew it we couldn’t communicate it. The question of philosophic method is equally alive; argument about universals, realism, nominalism, linguistic analysis, conceptual analysis, and whether there are genuine philosophical problems or only linguistic puzzles, are all essentially developments of the debate begun with Socratic practice and the theory of Ideas in Plato’s dialogues. The Cratylus, for example, explicitly canvasses two opposing views: that words apply to the objects or phenomena they describe necessarily or through some divine ordinance, on the one hand, and, on the other that what things are called is merely a matter of convention. Socrates seems to side with the former view, although by the end of the dialogue it might be fairer to say that nobody claims to be very sure of or committed to either position. Indeed, they should not be, for though the former view is implausible (at any rate as it is stated), the latter misses the point. The point is that it is debatable what exactly philosophers think they are doing when, to use one of the commoner phrases, they analyze a concept. Whether Plato really thought that justice somehow had to be called ‘justice’ (or actually dike in Greek, iustitia in Latin, etc.), seems to me unimportant (in fact I cannot really get my head around what it would mean to say this), and I do not believe that this was really what he was interested in. He was interested in expounding and defending the notion that there is such a thing as justice to be reckoned with whether people recognize it or not; that what is just is not at the highest, most abstract level negotiable; and that you cannot arbitrarily define the term in any way you choose. And the argument on this issue is well and truly alive today, when, for example, Wittgensteinians appear to believe that the fact that nothing can be red and yellow all over is

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merely a convention of our language – merely something which, given the meaning we have allotted to the words ‘not’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’, ‘all over’, etc., we cannot coherently say, so that in another world, with different language rules, it might be possible to say it. I have to say, residual Platonist that I am, that I find this absurd. Of course one can conceive of somebody devising a language in which the words ‘red’, ‘yellow’, etc., were so defined that it would make sense to remark that something can be red and yellow all over. But this doesn’t alter the fact, indeed it has absolutely no bearing on the fact, that the sentence we utter in the form ‘nothing can be red and yellow all over’ gives us a proposition that is true. We can no more conceive of something being red all over and yellow all over than we can conceive of a square circle. We can utter the words, we can realize that we are referring to the idea of something with the formal properties of a square and the formal properties of a circle, we can even find ways to square a circle in some sense (as, for instance, when a magician either succeeds in making you think you saw him square a circle or, when he actually does turn a metal square into a circle without you understanding how), but there cannot actually be a square circle. If we change the meaning of the words that will not entail that what we used to mean by a ‘square circle’ could exist. As has been said, it is a pity that argument on the issue of philosophical method is often couched in terms of polar opposites, as when we debate whether Plato was a nominalist or a realist. It is a common enough phenomenon in the history of thought that two opposed notions in time yield one or more modified notions (this being the basis of Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis formulation, but the process does not have to be so systematic), and the reason that Plato remains so important today is that while he certainly says things that we would not say and might even find difficult to comprehend, he also puts forward a view that is eminently defensible and is still widely adopted, at the same time providing arguments for the view and against a wide variety of alternative views which are still current often without proponents apparently being aware of their long history and the arguments against them. Plato may or may not have believed in the corporeal or physical existence of an Idea such as justice (whatever that would mean), and he probably did believe that our souls have encountered the Idea of justice before reincarnation in our bodies. But that need be of no concern to us compared to the manifest fact that he argued for the view that, given that we have in common parlance the word ‘justice’, it must be presumed that it means the same or refers to the same thing (Plato would say ‘object’) for each of us. Of course it may not do so in particular cases for a variety of reasons: some people are ignorant; some people are lazy; some people deliberately massage meaning for a variety of further reasons. But the presumption must be

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that, coming from a common culture using a common language, you and I mean the same thing. So the first important thing is to attempt to get that meaning nailed down in a way that is clear and fully articulated. From here on the real import of all that Plato says about ‘eternal’, ‘real’, ‘indivisible’, and so on, is that he is arguing that ‘justice’ cannot just mean anything, that there must be something common to all instances of justice and that that is what we should seek out, and that therefore what is just is not simply a matter of arbitrary opinion. I have never personally found it particularly difficult, even in contemporary terms, to take on board the further view that in so far as we successfully articulate an idea of justice, marriage, or anything else, then it exists. I think it reasonable to say that anything that is conceivable has existence, while the inconceivable does not, regardless of whether anybody actually holds the concept at a given time. Thus the Idea of the unicorn exists, but the Idea of a squared circle does not. But this is a relatively unimportant detail compared to the fundamental contention that all our understanding depends ultimately on grasping the Forms or Ideas – or, at the very least, recognizing the necessary and sufficient criteria that constitute a true instance of a particular Form. The argument, as alive today as ever, is between that view and the contention of contemporary sophistic thought that the very notions of conceptual truth, objectively defensible value judgments and the like are mere Platonic idealism and, as such, to be rejected. One of the major debating points within Plato’s philosophy, as has already been noted, is whether he thinks that for every universal there is a Form (whether there is a Form for everything), and, if not, what is the class or what are the classes of Forms. I cannot pursue this question here, but it is, I believe, certain that Plato would have posited a Form of education. That being so, the emphatic burden of his philosophy is that we cannot sensibly ask any further specific questions about education – what the curriculum should be, whether different students should study different things, whether this style of teaching works, etc. – until we have grasped the Form. On the interpretation of the theory of Forms that I have offered (which explicitly downplays the metaphysical side and emphasizes a common-sense and immediately comprehensible aspect), this is to say that we have to come to a common understanding of the criteria that we take to define education. This doesn’t sound very difficult and it may indeed prove not to be, but it has not yet been done. There is no clear, universally, or even broadly accepted account of the concept. The nearest we have come to that is in the work of R.S. Peters (e.g. 1966), surely consciously or unconsciously thinking in Platonic terms, and that of some of his colleagues and followers in the philosophy of education. Even among this small group a lot of time has been spent focusing on detailed points of difference, though one might

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argue that a consensus has been established among the majority of educational philosophers on a conception firmly tied to knowledge, and one which is very Platonic. But since this conception is not accepted, or in many cases even known, by the vast army of non-philosophical educators – psychologists, curriculum designers, researchers into teaching methodology, sociologists, etc. – the agreement of the philosophers serves no practical purpose. For where Plato is absolutely right is that none of the rest of the activity of educational researchers makes sense or can be assessed or evaluated in the absence of agreement on the concept of education. How can one conclude that a teaching strategy works without a clear idea of what counts as educational success? How can one hope to determine that this feature of the environment is conducive to education, without a clear idea of what counts as educational success? How can one argue for the coherence of a particular research methodology in education, without a clear idea of what counts as educational success? How can one have a clear idea of educational success without a clear idea of education? And how can one have a clear idea of education without joining in the philosophical task? Of course in fact everybody’s work in education presupposes a notion of educational success: when the empirical researcher says that this ‘works’, we can infer, indeed must infer, that his definition of educational success is one and the same thing as doing well in respect of the tests or instruments involved in his research. In that sense he has a concept. But whether he is explicitly conscious of this conception, whether it is a coherent conception, whether it is a plausible conception, and whether it bears any resemblance to any one else’s conception (in particular that of the philosophers whose research has been devoted to this very matter) are further questions. This is to say that Plato not only has something to contribute to educational study, but that his way of approaching it should stand as the model. In pouring money and time into empirical studies while ignoring the philosophical dimension, we are wasting both the time and the money. There is a perfectly straightforward sense in which we don’t know any more today than Plato did about education, whereas we certainly know more science and have more medical knowledge. Whether our psychological knowledge is greater, depends on what we think psychology has unequivocally and usefully established: there are not a few who think the answer is very little indeed. One area where we do know more, or have evolved a greater understanding, is in categorizing knowledge generally, but that is a specifically philosophical achievement. It is far from clear that, for all the research, all the contradictory pronouncements, and all the policy changes, we know any more than Plato did about what we ought to try to do when educating the young or how to set about doing it.

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But nothing could be more important than facing up to the fact that the prime necessity in educational study, theory, research and practice is to establish first a clear concept of education itself, and then of all the subsidiary related concepts such as knowledge, humanity, integrity, courage, interest, need, etc. That is one lesson that Plato first and above all taught us, and he also made a contribution to our understanding of the concepts in question. The question is not ‘Is Plato still relevant to educational theory?’ but ‘Has there ever been a thinker who contributed more to establishing the ideal Form of Educational Theory?’ I think the answer is probably ‘no’.

Notes 1. The latter was very much the view of, e.g., Levinson (1953). 2. ‘Autonomy’ is yet another word from the Greek: autos (‘self’) and nomos (‘norm’, ‘convention’ or ‘law’). For more detailed consideration of autonomy and other concepts considered in the body of the text in the context of contemporary educational philosophy and theory, see Barrow and Milburn (1990). 3. On critical thinking, see McPeck (1981). 4. For a more detailed consideration of postmodernism, see Barrow (1999). 5. At its most extreme so-called ‘sociology of knowledge’ preached a neoMarxist doctrine that in many ways was the precursor for postmodernism in educational theory, at least in its negative aspect. See, for example, M.F.D. Young (ed.) (1971) and the trenchant rebuttal of Antony Flew (1976). 6. For a detailed argument against the idea of generic teaching skills, see Barrow (1984).

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Bruce Thornton (2000) has recently offered a cogent and powerful reiteration of the argument that the Greeks created Western civilization and that we lose touch with them at our peril. As he rightly says, it is irrelevant to snipe away at them for having slaves, for their treatment of women, for their exposure of infants, and so forth, and absurd to attempt to deflate admiration for them on such grounds. Every other civilization or nation known to us from the past did such things and worse. What made the Greeks different was that they (some of them) had the imagination, courage and intellect to challenge their own conduct and beliefs. They questioned while others merely acted. In so doing they gave us certain particular ideals, they gave us arguments for those ideals and they gave us idealism itself. And of no Greek is this more true than Plato. I suggested in passing (Part 2, Chapter 9) that his theory of Forms itself might be called the theory of Ideals, and so it might: for his Ideas are essentially embodiments of the ideally conceived. His interest, to use his kind of terminology, may be in Justice, Beauty, Education or Love as ‘they are’, but we might just as reasonably refer to it as an interest in how Justice, Beauty, Education and Love would be, if we could only attain to our ideals by utilizing our minds to the full and arriving at a more complete and thorough understanding. As a young man H.G. Wells found, on first coming across the Republic: ‘here was the amazing and heartening suggestion that the whole fabric of law, custom and worship, which seemed so invincibly established, might be cast into the melting pot and made anew’ (1984: 138). ‘Here was a man wearing the likeness of an Olympian God, to whom every scholarly mind and clerical back bowed down in real or imposed respect, who had written things of a revolutionary destructiveness beyond my darkest mutterings’ (p. 178). Of course, in Wells’ time Plato was a household name among the educated. Oscar Wilde, as we have seen (Part 2, Chapter 16), quoted him at his trial. Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo) entitled one of his books The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, in direct reference to the Symposium.

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The novelist George Gissing records in his Diary reading various dialogues (mainly for pleasure, but the Phaedo to calm himself!) in the years 1889, 1890, 1891 and 1900, and unselfconsciously refers to him in his letters, for instance advising his sister to read him. Relatively low-brow audiences at a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience are expected to appreciate the reference to ‘an attachment a` la Plato for a bashful young potato or a not too French French bean’. (But then this was a decade during which a popular song entitled ‘Philosophy’ could be published!) These references, by the way, could be multiplied again and again; I have merely drawn on some of my favorite Victorians. One hundred years on from the Victorians, Plato is still a reference point, but not for the majority, and very few indeed have read or studied him. But whether it is recognized or not, Plato has given us a set of keys to a possible better future. He has given us the questioning critical spirit. He has given us the most thorough statement of the fundamental problem, that the so-called ‘real’ world is actually a world of appearance and that ultimate truth is not to be found there. He has given us philosophy (or at least one crucial form of it), through his Ideas, dialectic and the dialogues, to enable us to pursue the truth. And he has given us the notion of education as the cultivation of our humanity: the cultivation of our moral character and intellect. He has given us our ideal.

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Appendix 1: A Note on the Question of a Sophistic Movement

There is an important distinction to be drawn between arguing that the sophists were believed by Plato, and in at least some respects rightly believed, to be poor guides to true understanding and virtuous living, and simply dismissing them as of no historical significance. There can be no doubt that the sophists were, collectively, a powerful factor in both the intellectual and political life of Greece, and Athens in particular; despite the fragmentary nature of the textual evidence of their writings and despite Plato’s agenda, which naturally involved stressing what he regarded as their shortcomings in developing his own positive theory, it seems clear, even from some of the evidence provided by Plato himself, that many individual sophists made major contributions to thought. This has in fact been recognized to one degree or another for many years. The historian George Grote, in his History Of Greece (1846–56; 6th edition, 1888) long ago argued against the view that they could be dismissed as immoral charlatans. Kenneth Freeman wrote in 1907: ‘No doubt there were black sheep among the lesser Sophists, to whom Plato’s bitter definitions in the Sophist were quite applicable, who were ‘hunters after young men of wealth and position, with sham education as their bait, and a fee for their object, making money by a scientific use of quibbles in private conversation, while quite aware that what they were teaching was wrong. But they do not appear in extant literature . . . of the hundreds of Sophists that there must have been in the Socratic age’ (School of Hellas 1932: 174). And he adds in a footnote that ‘it is not fair to condemn Polos and Thrasumachos on the score of the opinions which Plato puts into their mouths’. In 1945, Popper laced his attack on Plato with arguments for the insight and moral quality of many particular sophists such as Antiphon and Antisthenes (The Open Society and its Enemies. 5th edition, 1966). In 1981 G.B. Kerferd provided, in The Sophistic Movement, a particularly lucid and plausible account of the sophists, their achievements and their impact.

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I do not think, however, despite his title, that Kerferd makes his case for a ‘movement’ (although, to be fair, it is not clear how important this issue is to him, notwithstanding the title). There is no obvious warrant for the claim that Protagoras was ‘in so many ways . . . acting as a leader for the sophistic movement as a whole’ (1981: 104), and I remain unpersuaded by the notion of some kind of official Athenian policy to attract sophists with Pericles acting as a patron to the movement (while not disputing his interest in and contacts with individual sophists). It depends, obviously, to some extent on what we mean by a ‘movement’. There is certainly no evidence that it was a movement in the way that later, through the Academy, a school of Platonism could be said to have developed, or as neo-Platonism could subsequently be said to have been a movement. Similarly, there is no clear reason for regarding it as a movement in the way that Marxism, despite its ever-present schisms and rivalries, could be said to have been at one time. This is merely to say that while the sophists were clearly interested in many common themes and had some common tendencies of thought, there is no evidence of organization or even conscious identification, and no common policy or program. It would seem more appropriate simply to say that the sophists as individuals all played a part in philosophy (and were, therefore, though it sounds rather strained, part of the philosophical movement of the time); for Kerferd is surely correct to answer his own question: ‘but were they philosophers?’ (1981: 174) in the affirmative, despite the fact that Plato, in seeking to emphasize their shortcomings, chooses to contrast ‘sophists’ with ‘philosophers’, rather than simply claiming that their philosophy was inadequate in various ways. An appropriate parallel might be drawn with the field of critical thinking in educational theory today. There are many individuals interested in this broad topic and various particular aspects thereof, just as many thinkers in Athens were interested in the broad question of human knowledge and particular questions about the nature of language, the distinction between appearance and reality, and the possibility of moral knowledge. But among those interested in critical thinking there are not only differences but sometimes contrary positions, and sometimes theoretical differences lead to judgments relating to practical educational dangers, and hence to the equivalent of accusations of corrupting the young or leading them astray. Thus, at one extreme, there are those whose main interest appears to be in marketing stratagems for improving critical thinking; of these some tend to pursue profit and seem more intent on fame than truth; but there are also those who see the business of critical thinking as a matter of training skills, and therefore think it appropriate to ‘sell’ techniques and stratagems. At the other extreme are those, who see the ‘skills’ approach as based on

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conceptual error – a failure to understand the true nature of critical thinking and, in particular, the fact that it is necessarily context bound and based not upon reasoning skills but upon a corpus of disciplined understanding; and who also disdain those whose primary interest is in profit or fame. In such a situation, what could be more natural than for the latter to argue that they are the true philosophers, the others being, variously, intellectually confused, self-serving, or charlatans? The question, then, is not whether there was a sophistic movement, but whether and to what extent individual sophists had something to say that was important, true and influential. The suggestion that Socrates himself should be accounted part of the sophistic movement, incidentally, may be conceded, provided that we understand that this is to say that he was involved in the debates and intellectual concerns that it is widely agreed characterized thinking in fifth-century Athens. But at the end of the day the Platonic Socrates and of course Plato himself stand to ‘sophism’ rather as Marx stood to philosophy in his time: taking a viewpoint so different and subversive as to redefine the activity, even while being partly a product of it. As a student of philosophy Marx came to a position which went beyond philosophy, for good or ill, and thus becomes known as sociology or, more specifically, Marxism. In the same way, Plato and Socrates, while wrestling with the problems and arguments of the sophists, emerge with such a distinctive take on it all that they can no longer be satisfactorily described as distinctive among sophists – rather they are philosophers as distinct from sophists. We know that Plato’s intention was to establish just this distinction, but that doesn’t make it an unreasonable or questionable one, even while we may acknowledge the intellectual quality of many sophists. In positing the theory of Ideas, Plato put a qualitative gap between his views and those of all other known thinkers of his time. The important thing is that Plato, while he certainly took the argument of men such as Protagoras and Gorgias seriously, and presumably gave them some respect, sincerely believed that the overall impact of the predominant thinking of his age was both inadequate and leading people dangerously astray. That of course is the verdict that superficially history has recorded, essentially as a result of the survival of Plato’s work (though that is to ignore the question of the various reasons for that survival). But while Kerferd and others have every right to question that verdict and, while in my view they have successfully argued that the sophists as a whole had some strong arguments and are not lightly to be dismissed, it may still be argued that Plato’s thought is of overwhelming significance. Not only is he right to object to showmanship, self-advertisement, the profit motive, and the pursuit of fame in the context of philosophy (or, as one might say today, academia),

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regardless of whether any particular individual is rightly or wrongly accused of such, so is he correct on the fundamental issue: that truth is not relative and knowledge can be distinguished from opinions. Kerferd (1981: 2) makes a distinction between relativism and subjectivism, but does not really pursue it. There are various ways of drawing such a distinction, a fairly basic one being between the view that what the individual believes makes it so (subjectivism) and the view that what a society believes makes it so (relativism). But, while the latter has more superficial plausibility, because we can see both that societies do have different beliefs and that in many cases there are good reasons for them to do so, neither position is ultimately tenable as a theory of knowledge, and that is Plato’s position. Few people today dispute the sociological and anthropological data relating to different societal customs and beliefs, such as was being collected by Herodotus in Socrates’ time. But, while we acknowledge the fact, we recognize a distinction between the sociological questions of what beliefs societies have and why they may be motivated to hold them, and the philosophical or epistemological question of whether a given belief is rationally justified. Plato brought this distinction to the fore, and, for many, even if they do not accept his entire theory, established that there is the possibility of objectivity, truth and knowledge. I should add that despite the preceding paragraphs there is not a great deal of difference between Kerferd’s views and mine. He points out (1981: 67) that Plato agrees with the sophists on phenomena. ‘The only fundamental point on which Plato is going to take issue with them is their failure to understand that the flux of the phenomena is not the end of the story . . . The real basis of Plato’s enmity towards the sophists was not that they were wholly wrong . . . but that they elevated half the truth to the whole truth by mixing up the source from which things come with its consequences.’ Again, I would compare the current situation with regard to critical thinking: the philosopher agrees with those who say that critical thinking matters and, generally speaking, supports initiatives to develop critical thinking in schools, but thinks that is only half the story: if ‘developing critical thinking’ is not linked to introducing students to a critical understanding of substantial bodies of disciplined thought, then it may cause more damage in practice (by generating false assumptions, unwarranted pride, etc.) than ignoring the idea would have done. Kerferd is correct to say that the sophists are not of ‘limited importance’, merely paving the way for Plato. He is right too in concluding that they made a ‘sustained attempt to apply reason to achieve an understanding of both rational and irrational processes’. I have suggested that it is not helpful to say that this was a ‘characteristic of the movement as a whole’ (1981: 174), but it was indeed characteristic of most sophists about whom we know

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something, and, more broadly, of the times in which they lived. And ‘in all probability the sophists were a no less distinguished and important [sc. than the tragedians, Thucydides, etc.] part of the achievement of Periclean Athens’ (1981: 175). But Plato was the one who synthesized their various contributions, took the whole to a higher plane, and whose work survived to influence and indeed dominate Western thought. And it is by determining whether sophistic relativism or Platonic objectivism has more plausibility that the question of who was the ‘truer’ philosopher must be decided. On a more particular note, I suggested in the body of the text (Part 1, Chapter 1) that Hippias, for example, was perhaps ‘an altogether lesser figure (sc. than some other sophists)’. Kerferd, however, takes him to be a very serious figure, notwithstanding the fact that the evidence is slight, to say the least. I am not sure how the claim that he ‘developed some kind of general philosophical position of his own’ (1981: 47) can be justified, except by reference to equally vague and late sources, nor how it can be properly evaluated. Kerferd does not produce or cite the ‘evidence of an exceptional scholarly interest in the study of subjects as such, including their history’, although he says that it ‘can hardly be challenged’. To be sure, Hippias himself claims to be interested in everything and Socrates calls him a polymath, but I read the portrait in Plato to be heavily ironic, if not plain ridicule. Protagoras, for example, is explicitly made to contrast himself with other sophists to their disadvantage, and to look at Hippias as he does so. It is very difficult to read this passage as other than a put-down of Hippias (Prt. 318e). (Besides, it would be odd to use Plato as evidence for the defence, given that the charge is that he is the one who propagates the false image.) But, in any case, Plato’s main objection is to the shortcomings and potentially and dangerously misleading nature of the teaching of such people as Hippias. It is perfectly possible to respect a thinker while believing him dangerously wrong overall, as many have felt about Marx, Freud and Foucault, for example.

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Appendix 2: A Note on the Authenticity and Grouping of Plato’s Works

It is generally considered that Plato wrote 27 dialogues (including the Apology, Socrates’ defence speech at his trial, which is not truly a dialogue) over a period of more than fifty years, all of which have survived. In addition, some have survived that are attributed to him by ancient commentators but regarded as spurious today. As explained in the main text, dating these dialogues is not entirely straightforward, whether one attempts to trace stylistic or philosophical development or external evidence. But Guthrie (1975: 50) regards Cornford’s grouping ‘as representative of the generally accepted conclusions’. On Cornford’s view the Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor and Major , Protagoras, Gorgias, and Ion belong to the early period; they are broadly characterized as searches for the definitions of moral terms and tend to be inconclusive. The middle-period dialogues are the Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Euthydemus, Menexenus, and Cratylus; characteristics of these include less attempt to portray true dialogue (rather, in places, a monologue from Socrates garnished with guileless assent from his companions), and explicit reference to the theory of Forms or Ideas. The later-period dialogues, regarded by many commentators as more technical than their predecessors, are: the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, Critias, Philebus, and Laws, though Ryle (1967) for one argued that the Timaeus and Philebus belong in the middle period, which, if true, might be taken to suggest that Plato effectively abandoned the theory of Forms towards the end of his life. There is also extant a collection of 13 letters attributed to Plato. There is some doubt about their authenticity, but Shorey’s (1933) view that, if Plato did not write them, they were composed by somebody who knew both him and the facts well, is widely accepted (see e.g. Field, 1967, and Finley, 1968: 80: ‘if Plato did not write them himself, then they were written not long after his death by one of his disciples’). Thus, the Seventh and Eighth letters in

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particular may be treated as sound historical source material. The Seventh letter tells us about Plato’s involvement with practical politics at the court of Dionysius of Syracuse. Overall, the experience was not a happy one, and in this and other respects Plato’s pessimism at the state of politics in the ‘real’ world is evident – his very deep sense that there is no hope for the world unless philosophers rule, combined with the fear that that will never happen. The Seventh letter also contains a famous attack on those (notably Dionysius II) who claim to be able to set his (Plato’s) philosophy down in writing, maintaining that ‘there is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be’ (341c). This passage naturally invites the questions: what matters precisely is he referring to? (The Idea of the Good, perhaps?), and what does he mean by claiming that there are no writings of his on the subject, since there obviously are writings on most of his philosophical views? For a full discussion of Plato’s practical political and philosophical activities, see G.C. Field, Plato and his Contemporaries (1967). Finally, Annas’ (1999) argument that we may be led astray by presuming too much on the notion of a development in Plato’s thought should be noted.

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Appendix 3: A Note on Reality

The question is: in what sense might the idea of, say, friendship be said to be real. (I deliberately write ‘idea’ rather than ‘Idea’ here, because it is with the notion of friendship with which we are all somewhat acquainted that I am concerned, in order to explore what sense we can make of a Platonic Idea.) There are so many different kinds of unreality. Plastic flowers are not real flowers (though, of course, they are real plastic flowers); cultured pearls are not real pearls, but they are nonetheless pearls, whereas plastic flowers are not flowers; unicorns are not real, since, unlike both plastic flowers and cultured pearls, they do not have physical existence; my politeness, on the other hand, may be recognized by others and yet be fake; similarly, but in a different way, the crooked stick that I see may in fact be a straight stick, half immersed in water; the unfortunate amputee may even feel a pain in a limb that is not there. What, then, is the argument about whether Platonic Ideas are real about? Presumably it is not about whether they have bodies and can walk around nor about whether they can be picked up and examined. Obviously they do not have a physical reality; but, equally obviously one would have thought, both the idea and the actuality of friendship, love, kindness, and so forth are in some not very baffling sense real; the idea of friendship exists and the phenomenon exists. The question that needs some kind of an answer, I think, is to what extent the idea may be said to be real or to exist other than as an arbitrary construct of human devising. That is to say: is friendship something that is essentially given in nature or something that we invented? An analogy with the classification system of a public library might be useful. A library has to house and organize a vast number of books. It might in principle adopt one of a large number of classificatory schemes, including sorting by size, by color, by weight, by date of acquisition, by number of pages, by alphabetical listing of authors or titles, by the librarian’s order of preference, by this set of genres, or that set of genres. On the face of it, therefore, the idea of a particular classificatory system being ‘given’ or

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‘correct’ is a mistake – there is, it might be said, no Idea of such a system, merely myriad competing ideas. But, on reflection, that is clearly not right: if the books are just shelved randomly, to take the extreme example, then we cannot allow that there is a classification system at all: randomness and system are contradictories. But, more than that, there are limits set upon what can count as a plausible classificatory system both by our purposes and by contingent facts. Some systems of classification, such as sorting by color or size (which might conceivably serve some purpose in the different context of a private home) don’t make sense in the context of a public library, where the object is to provide some kind of ease of access to readers. The reality is that the classificatory systems that make sense are at best very few and can be shown by objective reasoning to make sense. There is room for some variation between libraries as a response to different local situations. For example, a community of mystery-story lovers may benefit from a separate section for mysteries, while another community might be happy to see them shelved with other light fiction. But categories such as biography, fiction, poetry, history and art seem fundamental and ‘given’, even as we argue over whether to distinguish between biography and autobiography or to have a separate sociology section. Whether new-age theosophy should count as philosophy, or whether we need a separate section on classical culture may be debatable (and to some extent dependent on the stock and the readership). But a library that will not differentiate between fiction and history, biography and poetry and suchlike does not answer to our purposes. Does this make categories such as biography, poetry and fiction ‘real’? Is the classification ‘history’ more than an accidental cultural preference? I suggest that the answer is ‘yes’. We do not have to have public libraries and we do not have to play the classification game, but, if we do, given our objective of ease of access, we have to recognize these distinctions as given. There might well, in theory, be a culture that did not care to note the distinction between biography and fiction, but in failing to make it (for whatever reason) it is ignoring a reality and not, as some would have it, merely adopting a different cultural norm. (We should distinguish between ‘not caring to note the distinction’ in the sense of not seeing a need to use it and the sense of failing to see it or not understanding it. My point is that not seeing a need to use it may sometimes make sense, but that failing to see it involves a mistake, for it is a distinction to be made.) In the same way, the idea of friendship is real and what it consists in is to some considerable degree given and non-negotiable. Again we do not have to value or even to have friendships, and the precise manner in which we express our friendship may vary for a number of good reasons. But the idea of friendship is not something that we simply made up and might

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not have done. Whether we have it or think of it or not, friendship is and always was something that we could have. And while the detailed rituals of friendship may legitimately differ, it has some essential characteristics without which it is not friendship. The idea of friendship, no less than the idea of fiction, is given, not devised, and just as fictional stories were always there to be told, even before any human told one, so friendship was always there as an idea waiting to be conceived and acted upon, even before it manifested itself among humans. In other words, what is left to our devising is only whether we choose to pursue friendship and the details of what rituals we will construe as ‘friendly’, ‘neutral’ or ‘unfriendly’. But the idea of friendship remains real, whether we have friendships or not and whether we choose to think about it or not. Plastic flowers, cultured pearls, simulated politeness, visual distortions, sensory mistakes and unicorns are not real in the way that the Idea of friendship is real, as they are all, variously, unreal in ways in which the Idea of friendship is not.

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General Index

Academy 7, 8, 31, 43, 86, 129–31, 138, 174 Analogy, use of 67, 70, 73, 105, 122, 154 Appearance and reality, distinction between 14, 15, 16, 18, 26, 27–8, 51–2, 55, 59–60, 68, 165, 172, 174 Aptitude 42, 64, 66, 86 Arts (see also Humanities, Literature) 11, 17, 39, 53, 89, 92, 93–6, 143 Athens 3–7, 37, 59, 61 Athletics 38–40 Autonomy 144, 152–3, 170 Beauty 6, 48, 49, 53, 54, 88–90, 114 Censorship 18, 26, 40, 47, 83, 87–8, 91–3, 95, 161–2 Character (see also Education, contrasted with Training) 10, 31, 40, 43, 70, 153–4 Communism 10, 43, 47, 48 Cosmology 14, 16, 18–9, 20, 27, 45, 48, 179, 224 Creativity 96 Critical Thinking 64, 107, 154, 170, 174, 176 Curriculum 43, 45, 47, 60, 63, 65, 76, 85–6, 121, 138, 158, 168 Definition 20, 50, 59 Democracy 10, 27

Democracy, Athenian 3, 5, 6–8, 10, 11, 22, 25, 31, 153 Desires (Appetites) 46, 100–1, 113, 120, 151, 153 Developmental Theory 81, 154 Dialectic 32, 104–8, 121, 124, 154, 172 Education, concept of 37, 45, 61–6, 75–6, 84, 97, 103, 108, 119, 122, 123, 136, 142–4, 149–50, 157–8, 168–70, 172 Education, contrasted with Training 24, 32, 47, 62–4, 75, 122, 123, 139 Education, differential provision of 41–2, 63–5, 69–70, 150, 152, 159–61 Education, elementary (primary) 37–40, 61–2, 69, 75 Education, secondary 41–47 Educational Theory, See Theory Environment, social (see also Nature/Nurture) 22, 38, 40, 41, 42, 68, 97, 120, 159–60, 169 Eros, See Love Forms, Theory of, See Ideas, Theory of God(s) 18, 25, 55, 62, 83–4, 93, 111, 132, 135, 164

195

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General Index

Good, Idea of the 6, 28, 44, 47, 48, 50, 53, 54, 57, 75–9, 93, 104, 108, 130, 131, 142 Harmony 19, 20, 41, 86, 88–90 Homosexuality 9, 110–13, 125 Humanities (see also, Arts, Literature) 11, 48, 85–96, 155 Ideas, Theory of 4, 15, 16, 18, 20, 31, 43–6, 48–60, 61, 66, 85–6, 92, 102–3, 104, 108, 114, 117, 120–1, 130–3, 156–7, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175, 180–2 Indoctrination 47, 83–4, 124, 161–2 Justice 28, 37–8, 46, 57, 158 Knowledge, importance of 7, 11, 24, 75, 157–8 Knowledge, nature of 15, 17, 18, 24–9, 44, 53, 58–9, 68, 73, 77–8, 86, 92, 95, 117, 136, 144, 149–50, 152–3, 154, 155–8, 166, 176 Language 25, 39, 40, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 166–8 Learning 72, 85, 136 Literature (see also Arts, Humanities) 11, 87–8, 91–6 Love 109–15, 138, 153 Marriage, at Sparta 9, 10 Mathematics 19, 45, 47, 54, 65, 86, 106 Mind 15–16, 47, 50, 62, 65–6, 70, 73, 75, 100, 102, 119–20 Moral Education 17, 29, 72, 75–84, 95, 140, 150 Morality 17, 25, 27, 39, 47, 78–80, 162

Multiculturalism 30, 81, 82 Music 19, 20, 38–40, 45, 62, 65, 88–9, 122 Myth of Metals 38–40, 42, 67, 81 Nature/Nurture (see also Environment) 23, 37, 67–74, 159–60 Opinion, compared to knowledge 26, 27, 28, 77, 81, 95, 150, 166, 176 Philosophy 43, 45, 48, 58, 60, 66, 86, 105, 107, 115, 133, 135, 164–70, 172, 174–7 Plato, Educational Theory 35–125, 129 Plato, Historical Background 3–7 Plato, Influences on his thought 3–33 Plato, Legacy 127–46 Plato, Relevance Today 129, 146, 147–72 Plato, Syracusan Visits 7, 179 Pleasure 88–91, 115, 130 Polarisation of Argument 67–8, 71, 167 Postmodernism 58, 78, 155–6, 170 Presocratics 3, 13–21, 27, 45, 48, 62, 156, 164 Psychology 81, 119–20, 151–4, 169 Reality 55–60, 92, 108, 114, 168, 172, 180–2 Reincarnation 19, 48 Relativism 18, 24–28, 37, 58, 78–9, 155, 156, 162, 176, 177 Relevance 129, 146, 149–50 Religion, See God(s)

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General Index Rhetoric 5, 25, 28, 32, 33, 45, 140 Science 86, 118, 122 Sexual Relations (see also Love) 9, 10, 43 Skills 5, 7, 11, 24, 31, 33, 40, 45, 61, 64, 66, 69, 73, 107, 123, 136, 154, 161, 170, 174 Socrates, Historical Figure of 3, 4, 23, 32, 136 Sophists 3, 4–6, 17, 24–6, 28, 29, 31, 37, 43, 45, 62, 77, 140, 141, 156, 168, 173–7 Soul 20, 27, 33, 38, 46, 47, 50, 72, 73, 85, 97–103, 114, 119–20, 131, 135, 138, 142, 151, 167 Soul, Transmigration of 19, 50, 58, 68, 72 Sparta 3, 6, 8–12, 23, 27, 30, 37, 42, 43, 45, 59, 62, 134 Specialisation, Principle of 10, 11, 137 Subjectivism, See Relativism Sun, Line, Cave Analogies 43–5, 81, 106

197

Teaching Methodology (see also Love) 29, 33, 40, 67–74, 85, 107, 121–2, 135, 136–7, 144, 145, 149, 158, 160–1, 169 Theory 7, 13, 27, 29, 116–22, 129, 138–46, 150, 164–70 Third Man Argument 55 Thirty, rule of 3, 6, 22, 23, 32 Training, See Education, contrasted with Training Transcendentalism 55–60 Truth 6, 15, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 58–60, 68, 80, 108, 136, 149–50, 155–8, 162, 172, 176 Tyrant 6, 47 Understanding 60, 64, 65–6, 75, 81, 84, 93, 107, 108, 120–1, 144, 152, 160 Value Judgments 162–3 Will 101–2, 120, 151, 153 Will, Weakness of 80 Women, role of 30, 43, 61, 76, 86, 123, 139, 171

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Index of Greek Names

Academus 7 Adeimantus 37, 78 Aeschylus 22, 91 Alcibiades 22, 110, 111, 112 Anaxagoras 15 Anaximander 14, 16 Anaximenes 14, 15 Antiochus 131 Antisthenes 43 Archelaus 15, 28 Archytas 19 Aristophanes 4, 8, 18, 22, 25, 28, 39, 73, 87, 91, 123, 124 Aristotle 4, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 30, 31, 33, 39, 49, 54, 55, 80, 89, 91, 92, 102, 104, 105, 112, 116–8 Callicles 28 Cephalus 78 Charmides 3, 6 Cleon 22 Critias 3, 6 Damon 39 Democritus 16, 17, 165 Dionysius 6, 19, 179 Empedocles 14, 15 Epicurus 16 Eudoxus 130 Euripides 22, 28, 91

Glaucon 37, 78, 104 Gorgias 5, 14, 19, 25, 28, 166, 175 Heraclides Ponticus 130 Heraclitus 15, 17, 25, 124 Herodotus 5, 18, 33, 62, 123, 124, 140, 176 Hesiod 18, 124 Hippias 5, 177 Homer 13, 18, 29, 39, 40, 47, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 112, 124 Isocrates 7, 31, 32, 45, 140 Leucippus 16, 165 Lycurgus 9 Nicias 22 Old Oligarch 8 Parmenides 14, 15, 55, 62, 112, 114, 165 Peisistratus 6,13 Pericles 3, 8, 22, 76, 174 Philo 132 Plotinus 131 Plutarch 131 Polemarchus 78

198

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Index of Greek Names Polus 173 Porphyry 132 Posidonius 131 Proclus 132 Prodicus 5 Protagoras 4, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 28, 39, 174, 175, 177 Pythagoras (and Pythagoreanism) 15, 16, 19, 20, 27, 43, 86, 118, 130

Sophocles 22, 91 Speusippus 130 Thales 14, 15, 165 Theodorus 19 Thrasymachus 37, 78, 173 Thucydides 3, 8, 28, 91 Xenocrates 130 Xenophanes 17, 18, 25, 62

199

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Index of Greek Terms

Agoge (Spartan) 11, 37 Agora 4, 7 Akolasia 81 Akrasia 81 Apeiron 14 Arche 14 Arete 29, 30 Atomos 16

Idea 49

Cosmos 16

Noesis 44, 106 Nomos 28, 34 Nous 15, 44, 50, 100, 102

Dialektike 105 Dianoia 44, 106 Didaskaloi 73 Didaskein 91 Dike 166 Doxa 44 Eidos 49 Eikasia 44 Einai 53, 56 Ephoroi (ephors) 10 Episteme 106 Epithumia 100, 101 Eros 109–15 Eudaimonia 41, 114

Kalos 53, 114 Kaloskagathos 28, 31, 65, 76 Kitharistes 62 Mousike 39

Paidagogos 62 Paideia 143 Paidonomos 11 Paidotribes 62 Panta rhei 17 Perioeci 9, 42 Philia 113 Philos 113 Phusis 28 Pistis 44 Polis 30, 31 Psyche 97, 98, 151

Gerousia 10 Gnothi seauton 48 Grammatistes 62

Sophistai 4 Sophos 4 Sophrosune 20 Syssition 9

Heilotai (helots) 9, 42, 43 Homoioi 9, 32, 42 Hubris 22, 33

Techne 5, 31 Theoria 116 Thumos 100, 101

200