#38 PLATO (427? – 347? BC): 'I AM MERELY A COMMENTATOR AND REPORTER OF OTHER MEN'S IDEAS'
“… the European philosophical tradition … consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” [Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929]
Plato was one of the world’s most influential thinkers and philosophers; a man who was taught by Socrates and who, in turn, taught Aristotle. As an educator, he would found the outdoor academy of Athens, in a park, to educate future leaders. Plato would inspire St Augustine of Hippo, Philo of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon and invent the dynamic of philosophical argument in Western thought.
Born into a noble Athenian family around 427BC, Plato was destined for a political life. Among his relatives were Critias and Charmides, infamous members of the ratbag government of the Thirty Tyrants in 404BC. His mother was descended from Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and his father from Codrus, a legendary king of Athens. Under Socrates’ influence and disillusioned with the tyranny of his relatives and devastated by the irrational execution of Socrates, Plato painfully concluded that the education of future leaders had to be remodelled on the study of philosophy and ethics in order to prepare them for their roles.
But before bringing his school to fruition, Plato left Athens in 399BC for twelve years of travel and study.
At Plato’s Academy he taught philosophy and mathematics to families of Athens.
Most of Plato’s writing is in the form of a dialogue and much of it is dialogue or dialectic with Plato’s former teacher, the brilliant Socrates. A student would pose a question: what is justice? And would be subjected to a searching cross-examination by Socrates. In this way he will devise precise definitions and reach answers to his questions. Ultimately the student reaches the truth in answer to his own question.
In The Republic, the dialogue answers the question: ’What is an ideal state?’ followed by ‘Who is an ideal ruler’? The well-known answer to that question is “the philosopher king.” Plato was invited to Syracuse in Sicily to train a young Dionysius as a philosopher king. It was an experiment which didn’t work out.
Plato developed a theory that everything has an unchanging reality which describes the form of an object; a chair has four legs, a seat and a back. Take the door back away and its reality changes and it becomes a stool.
Plato taught the philosopher Aristotle for twenty years but Plato’s influence was greater than that of his teacher Socrates or his pupil Aristotle.
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“It’s time to discuss the incomparable Plato.”
“One of the brightest ornaments of all civilization!”
“I hope he stays that after you’ve finished with him! Let’s begin with his biographical background. Where was he born? Who were his parents? Where did his strange name come from?
“Plato, whose real name was Aristocles, was born, like Homer, in Boeotia, on his parents’ estate. ‘Plato’ was his nickname. It came from an infamous adventure of his youth when he was captured by pirates in Asia Minor, sold by a Persian satrap into slavery. He escaped disguised as a woman, found a Greek ship in the harbour at Antioch which happened to belong to a smuggler, a man who did deals. Plato promised him a reward from his father. This event, plus his natural inclination to homosexuality, meant he was given the slang name ‘Plato’ which meant ‘tart’ or ‘a girl of loose morals’.
“Gatekeeper, here we have Plato kidnapped in a similar way to the young Julius Caesar, later still to the young St Patrick and finally Cervantes endures a similar episode with pirates. Why is St Germain choosing these experiences as preludes for some of his most important lives?”
“How else, he tells me, can he learn about being helpless and helplessness when he is born with such a prodigious intellect? He has to learn what it is like to be helpless so he can learn from his experience. The greater his intellect, the more all-powerful the figure, the greater the need to be balanced by a humbling experience. He does not want to wield power without compassion, he can’t lead men without understanding what it is to experience unquestioning submission to another’s orders, and, most important for Plato, you can’t teach about freedom without knowing about its loss.”
“Thank you, St Germain. Gatekeeper, we have a bust of Plato. Is it a good likeness? We also have a statue of a man titled ‘The philosopher’ from Delphi – is it also a statue of Plato?”
“Yes to both questions, the bust is a good likeness. Plato was a handsome man with a fairly slight build and developed his broad shoulders from wrestling. He was well muscled and a good runner throughout his life. He kept his hair unfashionably short for a Greek… there was a streak of asceticism in him – and he didn’t want to look like a girl with his nickname!”
“How would you describe his relationship with Socrates?”
“Plato, in his early twenties, became a student of Socrates and loved him. He loved him physically, he loved him emotionally, and he loved him intellectually – he loved him completely. Socrates, who was incredibly ugly, was liberal with his sexual favours; in fact, quite promiscuous … he may have been trying to prove something.”
“How did Socrates’ death affect him?”
“Plato was devastated by his death. He didn’t attend the suicide execution, he couldn’t bear it. He got drunk instead. His devastation impelled him to immortalise Socrates: both his thinking and his method of teaching. As a death it was remarkably fruitful in ensuring the preservation of a unique body of knowledge.”
“Was Plato’s view of Socrates accurate or embellished?”
“When we love someone we will always exaggerate slightly their attributes but Plato is quite accurate with only minor embellishment. He was meticulous about Socrates’ teaching; Plato kept notes and collated them all after his suicide. It was a huge task of aligning the time sequence and supplementing his notes with his memory. Where he doubted his memory he didn’t use that fragment until he had consulted other students. He was about thirty when Socrates died and he wanted to travel, but he wasn’t leaving before he had copies made by a professional copyist of every note and of every dialogue. He left the originals safely at the house of the scribe before he went on his travels with the copies. His prior experience of being kidnapped meant he did not trust travel.”
“But he continued to travel quite widely for his time.”
“He did. Plato travelled over to Egypt and through the Berber kingdoms of North Africa before he went to Marseilles and the city-states of Catalonia and Cartagena in Spain then to Syracuse and today’s Naples, all Greek colonies where people spoke Greek. He was a bit of a xenophobe our Plato and liked to be with other Greeks.”
“When he returned to Athens, he would found the Academy. On what principles did he found it?”
“The structure of its governance was loose and not as you would know a school or a university. It was a gathering of students around a master teacher; a centre of learning. If they didn’t learn, they would drift away. There were no exams, no papers to write or to mark. There was one guiding principle which reverberated through St Germain’s lives. Investigation! Why is it so? Why is the most important word in his language. The Academy fostered a genuine spirit of inquiry.
Plato was also the first teacher of zoology but you have lost that connection with him. He would dissect animals – like a father carving up the Sunday roast – identifying each part. His students would practice taxidermy on his family’s considerable estates where he would house his records of Socratic dialogues, his collection of skeletons and his stuffed and preserved animals.”
“Was the phrase ‘let no men ignorant of geometry enter’ carved above the doorway of the Academy as tradition suggests?”
“Over the lintel of the doorway, an archway of a building of the Academy.”
“I thought it was outdoors like an agora university?”
“It was a private estate in Athens belonging to Plato left to him by a wealthy follower. It had an ordered garden, wooded glens or glades with both plantation trees and indigenous ones. There were several buildings used to house collections of scrolls and specimens of a zoological and botanical nature. Think of the Academy as a cross between a small Kew gardens and a small collegiate university. It never exceeded eight buildings, some very much enlarged during its course of existence.
Plato accumulated presents from ambassadors, Egyptian scrolls, specimens, Hebrew scrolls, and clay tablets which he kept in an enclosed building.
There was an amphitheatre acoustically perfect for choral singing and music … ”
“And theatre?”
“No drama. He tended to despise it.”
“Was Plato its chief administrator?”
“He was more like its teaching head. There were thirty to one hundred students under his care. The maximum it ever achieved was one hundred and forty-six students, the minimum was thirty. It was the fashionable thing to send a son there but it was not open entry. Plato decided who got in and he had to be very bright. There were no girls. There was no medicine or surgery because Plato considered these professions impious. At the Academy Plato laid the foundation for the study of zoology and botany.”
“Who started the Academy?”
“Plato with his friends, Achilles and another nicknamed Pyrogenous – meaning short-tempered or fiery, and Simeon the Canaanite a linguist invited to teach at the Academy today you’d call him a Palestinian.
“What subjects did Plato actually teach?”
“Rhetoric, logic and philosophy were taught by the oral tradition and botany and zoology by demonstration.”
“In Plato’s Idea of Forms, he describes an invisible blueprint which pre-exists every pattern, object or living being before it materialises into its actual form. Was he right?”
“Of course in that he described the pattern of the universe. He was drawn to this theory by the processes he followed as a scientist. He was a great naturalist who couldn’t study nature without seeing the coincidence of patterns, the synergy of life. He developed his theory to explain it.”
“What qualities of St Germain did Plato bring in?”
“He has his curiosity, ability to think outside the square; ability to start up and then co-ordinate things; a brilliant organiser; incredibly shrewd as an assessor of people and their capabilities, together with intelligence, clarity and brevity of expression. He had the Germainic charm but, for St Germain, a very low libido.”
“What was his life purpose?”
“To be a teacher and to refine and disseminate knowledge… a purpose he achieved perfectly.”
“What was his spiritual challenge?”
“Love. Plato suffered from something he brought in with him [from a previous life]. He was an emotional paralytic. He found it difficult to experience emotions because fundamentally he was frightened of them. His father was extremely cold, distant and austere and he died when Plato was young.His mother abandoned him to an uncle. She claimed she wasn’t sure how to bring him up and couldn’t know how to be part of the Dionysian mysteries. She thought he needed a male role model. His uncle was manipulative, cruel and there was marked proof of sadism. He not only beat Plato, he even tortured the boy and this included sexual abuse. From the age of four he was penetrated by his uncle and forced to perform oral sex on him and his cronies.
“Two of the participants in his Dialogues are his uncles Charmides and Critias. Were either of them his abusers?”
“No, neither of them but they were the brothers of his abuser. His name is crossed out, erased by Plato. I cannot access it.
Plato was never able to liberate himself from the prison he built to protect himself as a child. He couldn’t allow himself to be loved or to show love to anyone. So his spiritual challenge was to get over his own self-disgust and be able to express any emotion or affection for others. Plato never had any love demonstrated to him as a child; he didn’t know what it was. Socrates said, to talk to Plato about love was like talking to a blind man about sunlight.”
“Although Plato wrote Symposium in which Socrates, Alcibiades and Aristophanes discuss the nature of love. Did this dialogue occur as Plato described?”
“It did occur as an after-dinner conversation. Plato, the only non-drinker among them, wrote it up the next day.”
“This history of child abuse triggering an inability to express love gives a cruelly ironic twist to the expression ‘Platonic relationship’ doesn’t it?”
“It does. To hang on to reason as a child was the only way Plato could hang on to his sanity and to his god, his faith. He clung to it. The terrible, terrible thing about being abused by a family member is that usually they are loved by the child who has been captivated by treats and trinkets… it is the ultimate betrayal.”
“It gives a fresh understanding of why he argued the supremacy of reason over emotion!”
“Plato had an innate distrust of love. His friends in Symposium did not know as he did that love leads to betrayal.”
“What do you think is his greatest work and would Plato agree with your assessment?”
“The Republic… flawed though it is. Plato was very disillusioned with it. Plato thought the Dialogues were his greatest work. They contain more speculative philosophy and are more productive of discussion instead of holding an Utopian vision. The Republic, for all its faults, contains the elements or the building blocks of an ideal society. Something we haven’t managed to achieve so far.”
“Which of the Dialogues are truly Socratic and which are truly Platonic?”
“The simple truth is the whole philosophy developed from the dialogues between their two towering intellects. When Plato rewrote them he digressed occasionally, but mainly Plato regurgitated them back exactly as spoken while some others made input. Socrates was not afraid of change. He would say a year ago I thought this was so and so, but I got it wrong. Plato asked questions, Socrates asked questions. As a great teacher, Socrates, learned as much from his student, Plato, as his student learned from him. Just as later Aristotle would learn from Plato and Plato would learn from Aristotle.”
“Why did St Germain incarnate as Plato?”
“To improve or perfect the philosophical facet of his nature. There’s a point, you know, where the dramatist and the trickster with the smooth tongue can interfere with an ability to define issues and he wished to strengthen his ability to define issues.”
“What do you think was Plato’s greatest achievement?”
“I suppose it was the Platonic influence on Western philosophy, theology and government and the imposition of an inquisitorial style which demanded the setting of standards and boundaries.”
“What were the key influences in Plato’s thinking?”
“Plato trained with the Pythagoreans in mathematics. Socrates saw mathematics as a distraction. You may think that is unusual considering Kuthumi was Pythagoras, and also Socrates, so be it for they were exploring different ideas in these different lives but for Plato the Pythagoreans were a major influence on his left brain and in subsequent lives this aspect of St Germain would develop as both as philosophers as Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre and as a mathematician as George Boole, but I like his zoological talents as well and we see those in his life as the Kenyan anthropologist and palaeontologist Dr Leakey.”
“Finally, can you ask Plato a question for me? As he reviewed his life, did he have any regrets?”
“Plato says he regretted not running away from his uncle and taking his chances. He thought it was a lack of courage. His regrets are all personal ones. He did regret not knowing about love to share with on an uninhibited basis with somebody, he didn’t know how to go about it. Sometimes he regretted not taking up the offer of a comfortable young widow called Lydia who said to him “Plato I will teach you about love. You will learn love from me”. But he didn’t believe her because he didn’t think he was capable.”
“Plato is most unlike Aeschylus isn’t he?”
“They are opposites. Plato was like a Spartan, an ascetic. He didn’t drink; he didn’t pursue the Dionysian mysteries. Drunkenness and sexual licence were, in his view, an abasement of the nobility of man.”
“Legend says Plato died at a wedding.”
“Legend is right… it was a wedding feast of a distant friend of a friend. It was a heart attack at eighty-three, but Plato didn’t know how old he was until he died, when his Gatekeeper told him his age. He only knew within a year or so. He died sitting quietly; it was time for him to go.”
“Tell him there is Plato and then daylight to the next philosopher or as Whitehead said, every other philosopher is merely a footnote to Plato!”
“And Plato would like to reply: ‘I am merely a commentator and reporter of other men’s ideas.’ However he is pleased you share many of his ideas including that the rational soul is immortal and that reason and education create order which is good and disorder or chaos is evil.”
“I also accept his idea of forms. Where do we go next Gatekeeper?”
“To the employer of Plato’s student, Aristotle… to Phillip of Macedon, an aspect of Mary. Phillip employed Aristotle to teach his son Alexander and his friend Hephaistion.”
