Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Plato's Times & Life (Part 8)

Let's begin our class today with a word of prayer again. Father, we come into your holy presence praying that you'd receive us through the mediation of your Son and our Savior Jesus Christ. We do come before you to praise you, to honor you as the one who made heaven and earth, the one who is sovereign over all things, who works all things after the counsel of his own will. We thank you for the security of knowing you and knowing you in a saving relationship because of the mercy and grace of our Savior Jesus Christ. We thank you for the way in which you take care of us and watch over us. We do pray that you would bless our time together as we study the history of philosophy, that we might appreciate all the more the riches that we have in your own self revelation. We thank you that we are able to understand this world and understand human life and what our place is in the universe. We thank you that we can understand the orderliness of this world and that everything can make sense because of who you are and what you have done. We do ask, as we study again today, that we would appreciate the antithesis, the conflict, the difference that exists between that thinking which stems from your word and that which stems from the unaided human reason. We ask, Lord, that you would forgive us for those areas in our own thinking which remain autonomous and unpleasing to you, those areas of our lives which are not disciplined by your word. We ask that you help us to know the truth, but also to walk in that truth and to bring glory to your name. For we pray in Jesus name, Amen. We come to Roman numeral 9 in our series on the history of Western philosophy, dealing with ancient and medieval philosophy. And we come to the first grand systematic philosopher of the ancient world, and that is Plato. The next series of lectures that we have will be on Plato's best student, and that was Aristotle. Aristotle revolutionized philosophy, made a major contribution in his own way, in fact, so much so that after Plato and Aristotle, to a large extent, the history of philosophy is the playing out of the differences between them and the attempt to deal with the conflict between Plato and Aristotle and their two different systematic approaches, approaches to reality, knowledge and living. Now, the study of knowledge, how we know, is called what. Okay. And the study of how we should live our lives is called what? And the study of the nature of reality is called metaphysics. Very good. So if we have a systematic philosophy, it is going to say something about all three of those areas. The nature of reality, how we know what we know, and how we should live our Lives a philosophy is better as a philosophy to the degree that these three distinctive areas harmonize with one another. There's a relationship of support or application between these three areas in a way that previous philosophers had not achieved. Plato and Aristotle bring us a systematic network of convictions about reality, knowledge and human life which all fit together. First thing I want to talk about regarding a on your outline will be Plato's troubled context. I think it helps us to understand the greatness of Plato's contribution to the history of pagan thought. It's still pagan thought, but among the pagans he's one of the greats. It will help us to understand why he was able to make that kind of contribution and what the true character of it is if we look at the troubled context in which he lived. And so I'm going to put up on the board a short portion of the timeline with some names that hopefully you'll recognize. I'll start way up here at the top at roughly 500 B.C. so we're talking about 75 years roughly before Plato was born, about 500 B.C. this is the time of Aeschylus, the poet. Also the general time of flourishing for Heraclitus, philosopher who said that everything was in flux. 475 moving within 50 years of the birth of Plato. The time of Sophocles, the optimistic Greek poet. There's a rhyme and reason in the universe. And Empedocles, the first of the major pluralists, Symphedocles felt that the natural world was made up of four earth, air, fire and water, and two kinds of motion, love and strife, that combined and separated these 450 Euripides flourishing as a Greek poet. But remember, Euripides is the poet of despair. Though he started out supporting the war, the Peloponnesian War, he ended up in great turmoil over it. And he thought man was mastered by fate. There was very little hope for us to learn the lessons of morality. Anaxagoras was teaching that reality was made up of an infinite number of seeds, but they were all qualitatively different seeds and they were controlled by mind, by nous. This is also the general time of flourishing for Protagoras, this office, who held that things were subjective and relative. We can't know anything for sure. 425. Which brings us to the time of Plato's birth. He was born in 427 actually, but around 425. You've given us a day of flourishing for Democritus. As well as Gorgias, the Sophist if we just look at what we have on the board so far, we can see that the Greek tragedians have run their course from the more or less optimistic days of Aeschylus and Sophocles to the despairing writing of Euripides. We've seen the debate over everything being in flux in this world. Heraclitus and the development of pluralistic thinking down to the most sophisticated expression of it in Democritus. We also now, by the time of Plato's birth, the Sophists are on the scene teaching people, you can't count on anything. No one knows anything for sure. And then around 400 later, when I was a young man, around 400, the war ends. Actually, the Peloponnesian War ends in 404, but we're just trying to round things off here. And the end of the war, of course, brings the real civil and political trouble to Athens, because Athens lost the war. And there's a tension between the oligarchy and democracy. Oligarchy makes another effort to establish itself, but is finally brutally put down by the democracy. It's a time of cynicism, and I mean that in the formal sense. Antipathenes has begun to write return to nature, throw off civilization and its restraints. It's a time of hedonism. Aristippus of Cyrene is writing that men ought to live for sensual pleasure and as much of it as they can get. This is the time Plato lived. You see all around him we have social and intellectual trouble, turmoil because of the end of the war. Despair is being put out by the greatest writer of the day, Euripides. The Greeks don't know who understands the natural world. Heraclitus says everything is an flux. Empedocles and Axagoras, Democritus try to account for change. They have their atomistic theories, but then there are problems with them that we're going to see in just a minute. We have the sophist saying everything subjective. Man's the measure of all things, people calling for hedonistic pleasure or a cynical return to nature and a rejection of civilization. I mean, Plato's world was coming down around his ears and people didn't have answers. You begin to see what he was working against, and also then the greatness of his contribution. Plato figured that he had to provide a philosophy that holds to the objectivity of reality, the usefulness of man's reason in knowing it, and an absolute good by which men should live. Plato was born in a day of despair, materialism and subjectivism. As a young man, he saw the war lost and the resultant political insecurity, the advocacy of hedonistic pleasure and a cynical return to nature with a rejection of civilization. I want to look at this picture again that I kind of diagrammed with a timeline and be a little more specific about the philosophical milieu in which he was living. Just so you understand, we're at a day which is really a watershed because Greek philosophy could not answer the basic questions. Is there an absolute morality? Is there a regularity in nature? Can we use reason to know this world? These issues were up for grabs. Plato did not want to see Greek civilization continue to slide. He didn't want to see the destruction of Greek civilization politically or the undermining of absolute moral values as with the Sophists. He did want to salvage a rational knowledge of the world which the atomist hadn't been able to provide. Let's back up to, well, 525 BC. It's not up on the timeline, but let's remember the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans said that the cosmos was pervaded by a mathematical order. I want to remind you of that because that's something Plato is going to pick up on. There is a kind of mathematical orderliness to the cosmos. It's not going to be a matter of numbers and shapes, geometric shapes for Plato, but that obviously is influencing. There's something to be picked up on here, this notion that through all the changes and all the differences we see in our experience, there is a non sensible, by which I mean non physical or materially touchable, an intangible order to things that has a kind of mathematical character. But of course for the Pythagoreans this turned rather esoteric and mystical. They said that everything in this universe is made up of numbers and shapes, speculatively. And so you get just wild things. Pythagoras would say, well, you know, water is made up of the following geometric forms and fire is made up of these geometric forms. And it's all just so arbitrary and esoteric. And it leads the Pythagoreans not so much to understand the world and to use it, but to contemplate the eternal truths, the truths of mathematics that come to expression in the physical world. Scientific knowledge for the Pythagoreans was not for the sake of understanding the world and controlling it to the betterment of man, but rather was a means to spiritual redemption, at least led to very weird religious rituals, ascetic ethical practices and so forth. So the Pythagoreans had something there, and I think that that influenced Plato as a young man began to think, after all, it's only about 100 years ago that these ideas started being promulgated. I've already indicated that the war, the Peloponnesian War, brought political disunity, a loss of personal confidence and hope among Plato's contemporaries. But perhaps the biggest threat on the ideological horizon for Plato was the Sophist. Plato was very concerned about the adverse influence of the sophist. The sophist represented a kind of enlightened opposition to conservative and traditional values and certainly opposition to superstition. They had no respect for ancient Greek religion, that which we read of in Homer and the other poets. Plato would agree with the Sophists in their opposition to superstition, but not in their alleged enlightened opposition to conservative traditional values. The Sophists recognized that with the gods being rejected as nothing more but the outcome of human imagination, that this left things up for grabs morally. As Aristophanes put it, with Zeus, uncrowned chaos and whirlwind rules, we no longer have a moral order because of the superstitious, anthropomorphic, mythical gods of the Greeks. And so now whirlwind rules. This office looked upon moral codes as culturally changing and relative. Some would say, since they are culturally relative, the best way to get along is to learn the ways of your own culture and to fit in. Others would say, since they're culturally relative, no one's bound to them, there's no obligatory force to them. This office represented skepticism and relativism and subjectivism about a knowledge of this world. They would tell their students, look at all these philosophers of Phusis, all the physical philosophers trying to explain the world around you. There's so much conflict between them. And you look at the rational philosophers like Parmenides and the paradoxes that come up over motion and don't trust your senses. And so they were led to very skeptical conclusions. They held that the sensations that we have of the world are only private subjective states. I look at this book and I see it as brown. You look at the book and who knows what you're. Your private subjective state is about it. You touch something and consider it warm. I touch it, I consider it cold. There is no universal or objective knowledge of the world available to us. And since objective knowledge of reality is impossible, man becomes the measure of everything, to put it very simply. For the softest was no objective reality that is discoverable by human intelligence, that's what Plato felt needed to be reversed, the idea that there is no objective reality that's discoverable by human intelligence. For the Sophist, truth was simply common human opinion. Common sense we might call. But of course, common sense is relative. What's common to one group of people is not common to another group of people in terms of convictions about the world and how we should live. Particularly, the sophist looked upon moral law, and thus civil law, as merely conventional, just a matter of human convention. There's no higher law that we are responding to when we act morally. We're simply fitting into the relative conventions of our culture. And in that case, the later sophist said, only power matters in this world, being able to get your way. And that comes about through rhetoric that uses tricks, rhetorical sophisms, as we put them, debate techniques to manipulate people. Or it comes through a more raw power, military or physical strength. Thrasymachus, the Sophist argued that justice is just a word that we paste over whatever is in the interest of the stronger party. In any culture. Whoever gets its way calls its ways justice. Justice is simply what's in the interest of the stronger. They're pretty cynical. I don't mean in the formal school of cynicism sense, but pretty cynical, subjective, relativistic philosophy. Well, then maybe there's hope in the atomist. Look at this. Democritus is flourishing about the time of Plato's birth. Maybe their attempt to understand the figure physical world will bring some stability, some kind of rationality to philosophy. But the atomist, because of their materialism, proved to be an utter failure. They made some advances, but they also set philosophy back in terms of giving a coherent worldview. So did the atomist provide a rational account of objective reality? Did they salvage philosophy? Well, they did show how change was possible. The atoms can be credited with this. Much from a pagan standpoint, they did allow for a world of experience. That is, they accounted for what we see in our experience. The change takes place. So for them, there could be a philosophy of science. We don't have to give up a knowledge of the natural world. However, Democritus had to agree with the sophist about the subjectivity of perceptual knowledge. The things that we experience in our natural sensations are subjective. There's not a community of knowledge or a public nature to the things that I internally sense. How is it that we know about an objective world existing? Well, we discover that by reason, not with perception. So here you have a philosophy of science, but it's not a philosophy of empirical science because perceptual knowledge, as the sophisticated pointed out, proves to be relative and subjective. What we get in Democritus, and this is very important for understanding Plato, is an epistemological dualism. We learn about one kind of realm or reality. We have one perspective through our senses. We get another view of reality through the use of reason. Do you all follow that? To remember now, the Pythagoreans had said there's a kind of mathematical order out there in this world. It's a non sensible, non material order. And Democritus, the atomistic philosopher, realized that what we learn through our senses is of a different order or a different kind of realm or a different kind of truth than what we learn about reality through the use of reason. So this dualism, very significant because Plato, of course, is going to pick up on that. He's going to have a Pythagorean order out there separate from the world that is reflected in the world. And a Democratian, I don't know if that's the right word, but similar to Democritus, a view that says our senses tell us one thing, our reason tells us another kind of dualism that develops. Well, of course, the atomists, to get back to them, thought that the course of nature was completely regular without the intervention of the gods. Irregularity had been removed. So they had a basis for natural philosophy, a regularity found in the natural world. But there was problems with their view of the natural world, not the least of which is if the course of nature is completely regular and man is part of nature after all, they ruled out gods in the divine as a supernatural force and said that everything is matter, everything is atoms in motion in empty space. They have now a regular view. Nature is seen as completely regular. But if man is part of nature, then man is completely regular and predictable. And there goes free will, there goes what is unique to man. Democritus was willing to buy into that. Later, Epicurus introduces the notion of the swerve, you know, to try to get around that problem. So the materialistic view of the world offered some philosophical hope, but then it was set back and then it eliminated human reality, eliminated what is unique to man. Moreover, the atomistic view of natural regularity was somewhat arbitrary. There was no proof of natural regularity. It was just taken for granted. It was asserted, it was just put out there. Everything is atoms falling through empty space. Well, it's one thing to say that, it's another thing to prove it. They Offered no proof. They just said, that's the only thing that will make sense out of our experience and our ability to learn about the world. Obviously, Democritus had no knowledge of the future. You can only know what you experience. How did he know that in the future the atoms would keep falling regularly through empty space? He had no way of knowing that. So you have natural regularity, but it's arbitrary. It's not proven. For the atomist, the material world was eternal. The material world cannot be destroyable. It's not destructible. Because since there is an infinite amount of time in the past and in the future, if the world could be destroyed over time and there's been an infinite amount of time in the past, it would now be nothing. But since there is something that we experience, then the world which has been here eternally must be indestructible. You see any arbitrariness in that? I mean, aren't there other conclusions one could draw? Like maybe the world's not eternal. But since they wanted to be materialist, matter is the basic reality, then matter is eternal. Plato is going to assert the same kind of view, the eternality of the material world. The atomists had other problems. Philosophically, they thought of atoms as bodies, the kinds of bodies not with all the same characteristics, but the kind of bodies that we perceive in our common experience. So the world is made up of little small bodies, little atoms. And yet the world of atoms was known not through common experience, but through the use of the mind. They were mental constructs. They were theoretical constructs. They were not something that anybody had experienced. Are new in an empirical way. That then raises the question, how do you validate your reasoning process? Why do you trust your mind as a means for knowing objective reality, especially when the objective reality of what you're speaking seems to run contrary to our natural experience of the world. The atomist that said these atoms were falling through infinite space. Now stop and think about that. If space is infinite, then it has no boundaries. If it has no boundaries, there's no sense to directional adjectives like up or down. Up or down makes sense in a box where there are boundaries, even a very big box. But up and down have boundaries, no sense in an infinite universe. In which case this idea that the atoms just naturally fall, I mean, we know that apples fall off trees, and when you let go of the scissors, they fall to the floor. The idea that there's just this natural tendency in things to fall no longer makes sense. If the universe is infinite and its dimensions, you can't take for granted falling. Then what then causes things to fall? I was going to say, if it's infinite, how can you have emotion? Because, relatively speaking, there's nothing to make it safe going from one location to another. Well, they said as a rational kind of construct, that there's motion there, but the only way you perceive motion, of course you can't see the atoms, they're too small. But the only way we would perceive motion is relative to other things that are in motion. So if everything's falling through space, but then I run the track and I increase my speed of falling relative to your sitting in the stands watching me, then it looks like that I'm moving away from you, and I am. But nevertheless, even the person who is a spectator sitting in the stands is atoms falling through space. I've already mentioned how Epicurus came up with the embarrassing doctrine, the arbitrary doctrine of the uncaused swerve, so that we now have human beings making choices. But I mean, that just is so embarrassing. We're supposed to have a causal account of the natural world, but here we have an uncaused event so that we can make sense out of man choosing things is we have a mechanistic explanation, mechanistic account of the cosmos, and it is simply incomplete. There seems to be some advantages, but this is not a complete account. It leaves too many questions unanswered or answered very poorly. But the problems with atomism are even greater than the piddly ones that I've been mentioning along the way. These may seem like big problems. After all, they have arbitrariness and an incomplete account. But their account of the universe makes no sense. Also, it makes no sense, sense to hold that one set of atoms that you call a man. Here's Dr. Bonson. Remember, I'm just matter in motion. I'm a set of atoms. I'm falling through space. It really makes no sense to hold that one set of atoms called man, experiences another set of atoms, the perceived object as having certain qualities. I'm looking at this brown book, and as I touch it, it feels pliable. It's a soft bound book. It has a certain texture and so forth. But now, on the atomistic account of reality, I am one set of atoms. This book is one set of atoms. What does it mean for one set of atoms to experience another set of atoms as brown, as soft, as pliable? What is this experiencing as atoms are atoms are atoms the rocks that line the flower bed don't experience the flowers. You get the point. Rocks are Made up of atoms, Flowers. Flowers are made up of atoms. Rocks don't experience flowers. What does it mean that man, atoms falling through space, experiences something else falling through space as brown, pliable, bookish. You see, this doesn't make sense of human perception or self consciousness. Moreover, what is my thinking when I think through a problem? Let's say I think all men are mortal. Pete is a man, therefore Pete is mortal. Now, what has happened in that thought process? Well, for a materialist that can be nothing more but a sophisticated, complicated set of atoms falling through space, the thought process is not an inference as we have understood it. Reasoning is not an inference. It's just another kind of motion, like billiard balls. And that just seems preposterous. Especially when these fallen atoms, which are my thinking process, start working out a theory about themselves. How do atoms start working out a theory about atoms? You see, the atoms cannot make sense of human experience. That is, experiencing something as brown and pliable or textured. They cannot make sense of the reasoning process. Billiard balls on a table. Motion like that is not what we're getting at when we think about the process of reasoning from one premise through another premise to a conclusion. Moreover, how do we focus our thoughts? If you're an atomist, you know, if I'm nothing more but atoms falling through space, then my thought process should be totally passive. I'm acted upon by things. I just have this flurry of random images that impinge upon me, right? How am I able, if I'm nothing more but atoms falling through, how am I able to focus on one image and exclude the others, all of which are impinging on me right now? How is it that I can focus on Pete and avoid looking at the door and J and other sorts of things? How do I have that ability to focus my thoughts? But worse, how do I have the ability to think about something that's not part of my experience right now at all? I can think about Hawaii and lying on the beach. How do atoms falling through space focus their thoughts? And what are the abstract ideas that we think about? Abstract ideas like logic or love, whatever, are not material objects. How is it that mechanical thought, billiard balls falling through space, have any thought of abstract objects? Now, I've tried to make this a pretty devastating critique because I want you to see, materialism is philosophical, philosophically preposterous. It cannot make sense of human reality, human experience, human reasoning, abstract objects. But it can't make sense of ethical values either. How could ethical values ever be objective? On this theory, all values would have to be subjective. Some atoms believe that murder is good and cannibalism is acceptable. And other, you know, conglomerates of atoms think that cannibalism is ugly and horrible. But who's right, who's wrong? We're all atoms falling through space. But it's worse than that. It's not just that we can't settle on an objective value if there are only atoms that are real. What am I as a personal evaluator? This is parallel to the question, how does one set of atoms experience another set of atoms as red, round, sweet, hard? How do we have any experiences if it's just atoms dealing with atoms? And what is the person who is doing the moral evaluation? He's just atoms falling through space. What are the values that he experiences? Can he experience any value, any moral value? I mean, the atomist can't make sense of ethics at all. So here you have the atomist of Plato's data. Get back to the reason why we're going through this. The Sophists have run everything into subjectivism and skepticism, and that's going to undermine ethics and civilization. The war has brought a destruction of Greek society and the atomists are no help to us at all. They seem to begin well, but they end up not being able to give an account of the world that we know, or of the knower, or of the values by which we should be living. You see, atomism refused to appeal to faith or authority. Plato likes that. But they ended up being materialistic and therefore could not account for rationality, the world, or ethics. The atomists hold that nature is regular. Now we don't have the gods interfering and so forth, but their view of the regularity of nature was arbitrary and speculative. And given their explanation of the regularity of nature, it destroyed reasoning, it destroyed moral value, and it destroyed free will. And atomism finally was completely inadequate as a philosophy of man. Life has no significance given a materialistic, atomistic view of the world. Religion, ethics, civilized politics are left completely unfounded and completely subjective. Now that's what I'm getting at. When in my outline I spoke of the troubled context in which Plato developed his philosophy. How can we have objectivity? How can we have rationality? How can we have moral value? How can we save Greek society given everything that surrounds him ideologically and socio politically, we turn to B. Then in our outline on Plato and I want to talk for a few minutes about his life and his relationship to Socrates. The life of Plato and his relation to Socrates. Plato was born in 427 B.C. in the city of Athens. And that would have made him old enough to participate in the end of the Peloponnesian War. Only the last four or five years. But the important thing is that whether he participated in the war or not, he grew up during those years of defeat that the Athenians had to endure and the social and economic upheavals that came with the loss of the war. He was born into a noble family. In fact, he can hardly have had had it better. His family was part of the oligarchical faction in Athens on his mother's side. He was descended from one of the greatest Athenian statesmen of all, Solon or Solon S O l O n. And when the war was over, you might have thought that Plato would have gone along with the oligarchy. However, he not only had seen the destructive potential that comes from democracy, he saw the excesses of the oligarchy, the party of the 30 as they were called in Athens. And so he knew that different social order was called for than either one of the options that were pushed in his own day. What really impressed Plato more than anything else was the example of a man called Socrates. Socrates would have been over 40 years old when Plato was born. Socrates had fought in the Peloponnesian War. Bravely he had made a name for himself, but not because he was a leader, certainly not because he was a politician. What seems to have set Socrates apart was his intelligence and humility. Socrates didn't think that he was any better than his fellow Athenians. The only thing he had over them is that he knew that he was ignorant. They too were ignorant, but they didn't know that he was at least aware of his own ignorance. Socrates did believe that there was a reality to moral goodness, that there were objective standards which by which men should live. He was a man of common sense. And though he was skeptical about common opinions and cross examined them in a way that often embarrassed the people who held those views, he also had a deep moral sense and even a religious consciousness about him. What got Socrates into trouble with the general public, the reason why he was inevitably disliked in Athens, is that he didn't take public opinion seriously. And he would cross examine it to show that people didn't know what they thought they knew that they didn't have reliable convictions. Well, since he was challenging common notions, since he was challenging, if you will, widespread public opinion, it would appear then that he was also challenging the values of the democracy. But of course, the democracy, the political order, had a religious sanction in ancient Athens. To challenge the state was to challenge the gods. And for that reason, when Socrates was brought up on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens, leading them to think in an enlightened and critical way, he was simultaneously guilty of atheism because he was undermining the cherished democratic values or the authority of the state round about him. And so Socrates was brought before the assembly to defend himself, and he refused to do it. Well, he did defend himself, but he didn't defend himself in the way that he's supposed to. You see, when you get into trouble in a democracy, what you're supposed to do is appeal to emotion. Socrates should have paraded his wife and his children out and pled for mercy. And just look at the hardship you're going to cause, cause if you kill me and stuff like that. In which case he probably would have been told, shut up and go your way and take care of your family. And Socrates would have none of it. Instead, he argued that he had done a great service to Athens. He had performed an educational service for which he ought to be thanked. He argued that he had not done anything wrong. Well, he was convicted and sentenced to die. In that day and age, a teacher who was convicted of charges similar to Socrates would often be given the opportunity, though he was under the judgment of death, given the opportunity just to flee. And so Socrates friends made arrangements for him to do that. And to their surprise, when they came and said, socrates, you can get out, you can save your life. Good, teach elsewhere. Socrates. No, he argued, it would be wrong to do that. He appealed to a moral absolute, a right and wrong that all men are subject to, that all men can know, and once they know it, all men will perform. He said that in a sense, he had a contract with the state, and if he were to break his word for his own advantage, he'd be no better than other men. That would be the undermining of morality. And so, though he doesn't agree with the judgment of the state, it's more important that he submit to the state than that he have his own needs met and for his own convenience, his living convenience, that he take off and violate the judgment against him. You have to understand that Plato would have been a fairly young man when he experienced Socrates and saw these events. He would not have been one of the older and leading students of the master at this time. But Socrates made such an impression on Plato's life that instead of going into politics, which he could have done very easily given his, his family's background, he decided to make A career out of philosophy, being a teacher. Now this leads us to a problem that has sometimes been called the Socrates or Socratic problem. When we read Plato's dialogues, the spokesman for Plato is called Socrates. Now are we to believe that the Socrates of the dialogues is the Socrates of history? Or is this Socrates a literary Persona used for convenience to be Plato's substitute? You understand what I'm saying? Since what we know about Socrates, apart from a couple of phrases fragments in other writers, since what we know of Socrates is dependent so much on Plato's dialogues, then the question is how much of this is really the historical Socrates that develops these ideas and how much of this is Plato simply using Socrates as a guise, as a spokesman? And I agree with majority of scholars today who say it would be impossible for us to separate the two out. And it's not really all that important for us to separate the two out. We may know nothing of the historical Socrates. It is possible that everything we have read, apart from maybe the historical details of his trial and death, that everything we read in the mouth of Socrates has nothing to do with what the older wise teacher that influenced Plato actually said. Maybe be all Plato. It may be that Socrates said these sorts of things to a large degree and Plato just refined them. It may be that early dialogues reflect the historical Socrates, later dialogues reflect Plato's own innovations and so forth. We can't say. But it's not important. We'll simply take it for granted that Socrates, Plato is one character in the history of philosophy. The death of Socrates certainly confirmed Plato's opposition to aristocratic prejudice. Plato was convinced when he saw his teacher executed that a bad state cannot produce good men. And when a state is ruled by the many, by the democracy, it is inevitably a bad state. Because the many are ignorant people, they are self centered people, they are not morally noble, nor are they stable. And so Plato knew that he had to find a basis for a good state. If you're going to have a good state, you must have good men, and that means you have to have intelligence. Intelligent men rule the state and above all you have to have men who are intelligent because they understand the objective reality of the world and they know for certain what they know. They don't just simply follow convention or opinion. To put it very simply, the state would never be a good state until it was ruled by the philosophers. And that is a theme that you will see played out throughout Western history. Over and over and again we'll see recurring the notion that if you don't have the intellects the intellectuals of society governing society. It'll always be making the mistakes of the hoi polloi. The common people can't be trusted to run the state. They're uneducated, unstable, emotional. They don't understand what's going on. However, Plato, who obviously considered himself a philosopher, didn't have great aspirations himself to rule the state. He thought that a more indirect influence would be helpful. Plato looked upon himself as an educator so that he could prepare the culture and society for choosing a. A better state and choosing better rulers. Another thing about the life and teaching of Socrates. Excuse me. Well, Socrates, Plato of Plato is the way in which he taught. Not many philosophers that you read in the history of philosophy used Plato's method of communication. And that was the dialogue, the literary, somewhat artificial philosopher form of the dialogue. You have Socrates dialoguing with another individual. Now, we could let that remark go simply at the literary uniqueness of Plato presenting his views in dialogical form. But I think there's more to it than his literary genius, like wanting to make the presentation of his philosophy a little bit more entertaining when you read it. That isn't it? The reason why Plato, I think, presented his views by means of dialogue is because these conversations were not meant to be conclusive. In many cases, in the dialogues that Plato sets before us, the conclusions reached are only negative. We know what is not true, but we don't have a positive theory put in the place of what we've now seen to be untrue. And very importantly, after Plato sets forth his theory of the forms, which will be our next point in the outline, we will find that in his dialogues, especially the dialogue entitled Parmenides, he uses the name of Parmenides for his dialogue. Plato ruthlessly criticizes his own doctrine of the forms and gives some of the most devastating criticisms that have been held up throughout the history of Western philosophy. You see, that fits into Plato's understanding of what's going on. We struggle, we have to dialogue, we have to go back and forth. We have to ruthlessly cross examine even our own opinions as we move closer and closer toward the truth. There was a sense then in which Plato, the rationalist, in the end, is a mystic. Even the rationalist cannot give us a suitcase with all of the rough edges cut off. Everything fits perfectly. There are problems with his best theories, and yet he does think that there's progress that is made in the dialogue back and forth. Now, in the collection of letters we have by Plato, letter number 7. 7 is labeled number 7. In this letter, Plato says something which some people think is an exaggeration, maybe tongue in cheek, other people take a little more seriously. In letter seven, Plato claims that he never attempted to put down in writing his views about the subjects which I seriously study. He goes on, there does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mind dealing therewith. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith it is brought to birth in the soul on as sudden as light that is kindled by a leaping spark and therewith nourishes itself. In this quotation he seems to be saying, my dialogues you can't put in writing the final perception of the truth, so don't think that you'll ever find in a treatise of mine the full answer about the subjects that I'm studying, because the full answer doesn't admit of verbal expression. The dialogue, the rational conversation, the use of human language helps to make things explicit and to work out problems. But we can only work them out so far at a lower level, as it were. Nevertheless, Plato did believe that the working out of philosophical problems in human language at this lower level, trying to be rational would be a necessary preparation for that final this vision of the truth that could not be put into words. This is very important for us as Christians as we look at the development. Plato is perhaps the greatest rationalist of all time, and yet the greatest rationalist of all has to admit I can't put everything into rational expression. Ultimately the truth comes in a vision like a flash of light. That doesn't mean he rejects rationality and dialogue and the use of human language. He just finds them at the last step, inadequate. Plato founded one of the greatest educational institutions in the history of Athens. It was called the Academy, Plato's academy. And that school went on to be a training ground for a number of bright fellows and future statesmen in Athens. One final remark about Plato's life. In the year 368 BC, the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius was his name, died. And he left his brother in law, Dion, to raise his son Dionysius II and prepare him to rule Syracuse. Now Dion. Dion was enamored of Plato's thought and knew of Plato's reputation. And so he asked Plato to come and to help educate Dionysius II philosophically so that he could become the philosopher king. However, Plato had only been there four months educating the young king, when rival groups in Syracuse forced Dion and his nephew out of the city. And so we never really saw any practical use of Plato's philosophy there in ancient Greece. In the year 366, Plato finally returned to Athens. And in 347, when he was 80 years old, he died. Okay. This first lecture has been an attempt to set the stage for Plato's philosophy and for his place in Greek history and culture. We know his troubled context with. We know something about his life and his relationship to Socrates. After we take a short break, we're going to ask ourselves, how did he try to solve these problems and show that there is an object of reality that is knowable by reason and which makes a place for human ethics and can give a stable foundation for civilization? It's a big task, and I don't agree with Plato's answer, but it's one of the most marvelous attempts in the history of pagan thought.