Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy | Robin Waterfield

I mean I was first attracted to the ethical side of philosophy, how to live, how to become a better person. Modern philosophers approach that question largely from a theoretical perspective but what I really liked about the ancient philosophers was they were addressing real life questions. Even stuffy old Aristotle says at the beginning of his most important ethical treatise, we are studying this not to know what goodness is but so that we can become good people. There are many people, cynical people, who would say there is no such thing. So when Socrates or Plato would ask the question what is truth, they weren't asking it the way Pontius Pilate asked it. Why do you suppose they had some innate sense that there was such a thing as truth or goodness or virtue? Oh, big question. Because there is. Please join me in giving a Socrates in the City welcome to my guest for the evening, Robin Waterfield. We started Socrates in the City because Socrates of course famously said the unexamined life is not worth living. And I thought what a wonderful, wonderful idea to think more deeply about the big questions. I have this crazy idea that if we think more deeply and honestly about the big questions of life, our lives will be better. It will lead us to truth. And I believe as a Christian, it will lead us to God. And so we've been doing it in various ways for 25 years now. But we really, as I've said, have never done one here in Athens. And it's sometimes good to be on the nose. And speaking about Socrates and about Plato, that's on the nose. So Robin, we discovered you. Very happy to find you. I'm very happy that you're willing to drive up here from Laconia. And you lived in, I didn't say this, you've lived in Greece for a couple of decades. And that's intentional. Yeah. Well, originally it was just because I wanted to see if I could make it as just a writer. When I lived in London, I was teaching and editing and doing some writing. But I wanted to just be a writer. And here I am, 22 years later, I'm here, it works. Well, so I have to start with the most, you know, open-ended question, really. What led you to spend most of your life thinking about thinking and thinking about people who thought about thinking? Hmm. That's a very thoughtful question. It's also too general. I mean, I was attracted to ancient philosophy much more than I was attracted to modern philosophy. By which I mean, I think that the chief difference that struck me then still strikes me now is that, I mean, I was first attracted to the ethical side of philosophy, how to live, how to become a better person. And modern philosophers approach that question largely from a theoretical perspective. But what I really liked about the ancient philosophers was they were addressing real-life questions. I mean, even, you know, how do I become a better person? Even stuffy old Aristotle says at the beginning of his most important ethical treatise, he says, we are studying this not to know what goodness is, but so that we can become good people. And it was that sort of living urgency of ancient Greek philosophy, I think, which grabbed me from the start. Well, I mean, that's a big reason that we have called this Socrates in the city and not, I don't know, Kierkegaard in the city, or we can think of many more people, much more depressing philosophers than Kierkegaard. But the idea, that struck me in reading your book. And I thought it's so foreign to us moderns that it's really novel. The idea that one could think seriously and deeply about what does it mean to be a good person or could I be a better person? And that, I think, I guess I wonder if more modern philosophers or people who study modern philosophy, if they maybe are a little bit cynical about that project, that they wouldn't take that so seriously? I think that's probably right. It's, I mean, modern philosophy is done in seminars and in classrooms. It's not done on the street and in the household. And that's the kind of difference I was getting at. These were urgent, real questions for these people. Well, in the book, you talk about, well, actually, let's go a little bit backwards before we go forward. For people who really know nothing of the biography of Socrates or Plato, because your book purports to be, of course, a biography, just tell us a little bit about who they were, the milieu in which they came to be who they were. Both Socrates and Plato, just generally. Well, you'll know that they're related somehow. So, yeah. So if you don't mind, comment on that relationship. Yeah, OK. Well, there's not a lot we can safely say about it. I mean, we know that Socrates had a group of largely young men, as you all know, women weren't really allowed much of an education in those days, so young men. And Plato joins that circle at some point, maybe, you know, when he was 16 or 17 or so, in other words, around about the early 400s, 407, 408. We don't know what went on, though, at these. I think they were group meetings, and I think people compared their experiences or discussed a philosophical text they'd been reading or something like that. But clearly, Socrates thought more highly of Plato than of many others in his group. We know that because at one point, Xenophon has Socrates say, because, you know, Xenophon also wrote works about Socrates. So Xenophon has Socrates say at one point, the reason I'm interested in this is because of Plato and Chalmides. Those were his two favorite students in his group. So I think he did probably see Plato as carrying on his work, and Plato definitely saw himself as carrying on Socrates' work. And to go back to your first question, I think when I was first attracted to ancient philosophy, it was more to Socrates than to Plato. So it was still Socrates in the city, not Plato in the city. Because he was more, I don't know, that urgency seemed to be more present in Socrates than it does in Plato, I think something like that. I mean, it's fascinating, and having just read your book, it's fresher in my mind. It was, for each of them, a life's calling. Where did Socrates come from that he suddenly would be doing what he did? He wasn't out of the blue. There was an intellectual environment. There were the pre-Socratics who you've mentioned. The kind of work they were doing was more proto-scientific rather than what we think of as philosophy. There was a group of people, again, lumped awkwardly together. We call them the Sophists. They were doing a lot of interesting work in fields that we would now call psychology and sociology and political science and things like that. There was an intellectual environment, and Athens was the place to be, because Athens was the largest, wealthiest, and most important city in Greece at the time. Rivaled in certain ways by Sparta, of course, but not in cultural ways. Sparta had turned its back deliberately on culture at a certain point in its history. A lot of intellectuals spent time in Athens, either permanently… I mean, Socrates is one of the actual… Socrates and Plato are two of the very few native Athenian philosophers. Everybody else you can think of came from outside of Athens, but they spent time in Athens. Aristotle spent 20 years in Plato's school, the Academy, but he came from Macedon. He came from Stagira. There was a good environment. In his day, Socrates would undoubtedly have been thought of as a Sophist, that is, as a professional teacher, because that's what the Sophists were doing. Sophistry didn't have the pejorative connotation that it has for us today. It has it for us today because of Plato in the first place and because of Aristotle after him. Plato wanted to distinguish Socrates, his teacher, his mentor, from the Sophists. He did that in two ways, chiefly. One was to point out that Socrates wasn't a professional in the sense that he didn't take money for his teaching. He saw his job as arousing curiosity and interest in people, rather than putting information in which they then had to pay for like a commodity. Plato was always against the commodification of wisdom. I think the other distinction that Plato was trying to draw was simply that Socrates was a good man. He cared about the people he was teaching and he wanted to see them become better people, whereas the Sophists just wanted them to… I think the easiest way to put the distinction is that the Sophists were trying to teach worldly success. They were teaching subjects like rhetoric, things that you needed to get ahead in the political climate of Athens or other Greek cities at the time. But Socrates wasn't interested in worldly success. He was just interested in turning out better people and people who could… This was a particular project of Socrates, people who could rule Athens, the next generation of people who would steer Athens politically. He wanted to make sure they were the right kind of people, rather than people who were, well, as Plato himself puts it in the Republic, the last person you want to have in power is a person who wants power. So Socrates was trying to train people who would be in power, but wouldn't be abusing it, wouldn't be doing it for selfish reasons and so on. He said Socrates killed himself. I knew when I said that someone might pick up on that. It is exactly right. I mean, it's easier to say he was condemned to death and executed by the Athenian state, because in a sense he was. But the Athenian state at the time used this poison hemlock, and the point about giving prisoners who were going to die hemlock was, well, first, it wasn't too bad a way to go. There are other sorts of hemlock which are, but this particular kind of hemlock wasn't. But secondly, because it was self-administered, and so that absolved the state of any blood guilt. So they deliberately got Socrates and others at the time to kill themselves like that. Insight into Athenian society. Yeah, yeah. What's the line about a cock for Asclepius? Only since we're talking about Socrates killing himself. In an article I wrote some years ago, I said I've read 23 interpretations of that, and somebody emailed me and said, Robin, there are 35. Can you give us the top two? I can't remember what I said in the book I wrote about this idea. Just give the context. As his last words were, he said to a friend, a cock to Asclepius. In other words, they needed to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, who was the god of healing. So I think one of the most plausible interpretations is that he was being healed of life. There's a very plausible interpretation of the last days of Socrates. Socrates delivered defense speeches at his trial. We have two versions of those defense speeches, one by Xenophon and one by Plato. They're both very different, that's the point. But what Xenophon says is that Socrates didn't make much of an effort to defend himself in a way that the jurors would have accepted because he was already 70 years old and he didn't want to get into old age and lose his mind and his marbles and things like that. And it's kind of plausible, I think. I was not only not planning to bring it up, but I was thinking I shouldn't bring it up. But the way you've just put that, there are often many parallels drawn between Socrates and Jesus because either of them could have gotten out of dying if they had wanted to fairly easily. And there's something obviously noble about not getting out of one's death, something courageous about it. And so when you're talking about Socrates, because without Socrates, I don't know, that we would have Plato, he really was, there was an authenticity. In other words, I think that what's interesting to me, particularly about Socrates and of course there's something about Plato, is that they took the whole thing seriously, that there was such a truth that might be sought, there was such a thing as the good. Where do you think that idea came from? Because of course there are many cynical people who would say there is no such thing. So when Socrates or Plato would ask the question, what is truth? They weren't asking it the way Pontius Pilate asked it. Why do you suppose they had some innate sense that there was such a thing as truth or goodness or virtue? Oh, big question. Because there is? That's a very good answer. No, it is. It's a great answer. But the other half of your question is why do people ignore it? Yes. I'm not sure I can answer that. Are you familiar with the doctrine of the fall? Rings a bell. It's theological doctrine, it's obviously true. But I mean, they were fallen as well, Plato and Socrates. They were well past the fall. That's right. So there's the mystery, right? It can make Calvinists of us all. If you didn't get that, see me later. I have a question written down and I did want to ask this. When I first looked at your book, I thought to myself, my goodness, what firsthand sources are there for writing a biography of Plato? What is out there? So how were you able to untangle the theory from the fiction, from the facts? Is that something that you've been doing for a very long time? Or is it something you set your mind to do recently when you wrote this book? Particularly for this book. One of the main sources is some letters that are written under Plato's name, and I hadn't really studied them as closely as I needed to for this book. But it's a good question. The sources are difficult, and that's why Plato is a household name. Everybody's heard of Plato. This is the first book-length biography ever. I think the reason for that must be the difficulty of the sources. There are three types of source. We've got Plato's works themselves, his dialogues, as we call them, even though some of them aren't dialogues. But they're a very poor source for his life. As you know, if any of you have read, as you know well, Plato never writes in his own name. He writes like a playwright. So is it right to attribute what Falstaff says to Shakespeare, what Othello says to Shakespeare? So Plato writes like that. He never writes in his own name. He mentions himself on three occasions, but on two issues in the dialogues, but both of them are trivial. One is that he was present at Socrates's trial, and the other is that he was absent on the day of Socrates's death in prison when he drank the head of the hemlock. Those are the only two things he mentions, which are obviously of trivial use to a biographer. The other two sources are, well, first, ancient biographies of Plato. He was famous, and he attracted a lot of biographical attention in ancient times. And we have surviving four and a half of the biographies. The half is very fragmentary. But the earliest of those was written about 350 years after Plato's death, and the later of them about a thousand years after Plato's death. And they also belong to this extremely peculiar genre of writing, which was ancient biography, which isn't biography as you and I understand it at all. It was very soon after Plato's death, people were eulogizing him. They were calling him the son of Apollo, not the son of a human parent. So all these very positive and affirmative adjectives being used to describe him, that generated a response. And there were a lot of hostile writers shortly after Plato's death also coming up with saying he was a plagiarist and a sodomite and whatever else. And the biographies basically are all at that level. Plato attracted a lot of attention in comic poets. The comic poets, the comedies being written in his time were sort of very light situation comedies, not like the ribald stuff of Aristophanes or something like that, but much more like easygoing. He and his ideas come up in quite a lot of the fragments of those comedies. And some of the things that the comedians were saying seeped into the biographical tradition as well. So that is really unreliable and almost totally useless for me as a biographer. They get the general trajectory of his life correct, but most of the stories they tell are rubbish. They tell stories like Plato died of embarrassment when he couldn't answer a riddle, or students in the academy blinded themselves so that they could attend to philosophy more, or things like that. It's rubbish. So you have to discard all the rubbish, try to find out if there's any element of truth in that. For instance, that last one, Plato's students in the academy blinded themselves so they could focus on philosophy. Immediately implies that philosophy is internal work, not external work. So there may be a little nugget in there. So the biographer has to sift out the nuggets. And the third source are these letters. By the first century AD, there were a lot of letters in existence claiming to have been written, signed Plato at the bottom, yours sincerely. And you think that these are genuine? Almost all of them are rubbish and certainly not genuine. But there are 13 which you find in the corpus of Plato's works as they were established by the end of the third century BC. There was his corpus. It contains some spurious dialogues. It also contains these 13 letters. Now, some scholars think all the letters are spurious. Some scholars think a few of them are genuine. And that's the camp in which I fall. I think you can use stylometric, mean stylometry as a way of assessing development in a person's style by unconscious features of his writing. You can only use unconscious features, obviously, because as you know as a writer, everything deliberate is deliberate. But we all have little quirks. So by tracing Plato's quirks, you can trace a kind of a sequence. And by stylometric testing, I think three of these letters pass the test. Letters 3, 7, and 8. And of those, letter 7 is incredibly important. More than important, read as written by Plato, it's thrilling. You're actually reading something directly from Plato's hand, some of his personal thoughts. It's wonderful. I do think it's genuine. It's also important because it's very long. It's longer than 11 of Plato's shorter dialogues. It's a long letter. It's very complex. It's very intelligent. It's very well written. And it tells us an awful lot about certain aspects of Plato's life. His youth, and particularly what he was trying to do in Syracuse, which I'm sure will come to some point. Well, because I have myself written biographies, it's fascinating to find things that everyone says about someone that are not true. And the subjects of my three biographies are, of course, very recent compared to what you're writing about. But you read something that everybody says it, and then you find out as you trace it back, it's absolutely not true. The tracing back is important. And they're very sloppy about moving it along. And it thrills me when I can put an end to something like that. With regard to Plato and Socrates, there are these things. There's a mythic quality to them, because they're so far removed from us chronologically that, as you've been saying, much of what we know of them is hagiography, or it's commentary on them. And one of those things, I encountered it literally yesterday. Somebody said to me that, oh, yes, Plato was named Plato because it means this. It means to be stout or wide or something like that. And I had just read in your book, that's not true. And so Plato was a common name then. But that idea, I mean, is there anything to that idea of his name? I don't know. Well, I can only guess as to why the idea originally arose. One of the reasons might have been that they wanted Plato to be his mother's firstborn, because his grandfather was called Aristocles. And same system in modern Greece nowadays, as you know. The grandfather's name becomes the grandson's name. And that was the same in ancient Greece as well. Not 100%, but let's say 85%. Because they wanted Plato, I'm guessing, as I say, to be the firstborn, they gave him the grandfather's name. But yeah, Plato was not a common name, but certainly a familiar name. And there's a nice story about Plato later in life, which kind of illustrates this. Once he was, where was he? I think he was at the Olympic Games, attending the Olympic Games in Olympia. And he was chatting with some foreigners from Sicily or somewhere. And introduced himself as Plato, and they got on, blah, blah, blah. And then later, when the Sicilians came to Athens, they met Plato again. They said, oh, but we want to meet Plato, the philosopher. He's really famous. So I have to ask, so you debunk a number of things. And one of them is, I thought, what's the most shallow question I could possibly ask you? And that has to do, of course, with the existence of Atlantis. Because we know of Atlantis from Plato, and there have been many, many theories. You destroy our hopes. Talk a bit about that. Just because I'm fascinated about what we can know and what we can't know. And you make it pretty clear. There's no trace of the Atlantis story before Plato. So that implies that he made it up. Secondly, as I understand it, Atlantis to the people who believe in its existence, or however one wants to say it, is a place of enlightened beings doing good and, I don't know, controlling the world through, who knows, laser beams from space or something. Anything's possible. But that's not Plato's story at all. In Plato, in the Timaeus and the Critias, the two dialogues where he develops this myth, the Atlanteans are the baddies. They're corrupt, and they're invading Europe. And it takes the stout, primordial Athenians to defeat them and keep them off. So where the idea came from that Atlantis was a place of enlightened beings doing whatever work, I don't have. Well, whatever it might have been, but you make it clear in your book that he wasn't writing about a real place, that it's clear from the context that it was fiction. Absolutely. And Plato wrote a lot of myths. If anybody's read Plato, I mean, you know that he ends the Gorgias, the Phaedo, the Republic. There are two myths in the Statesman, and so on. You know, myth-making was one of the ways that he got his ideas across, and the Atlantis myth is certainly one of those. I'm fascinated about the idea, again, that Socrates and Plato both thought that the real work of philosophy, it wasn't mere intellectual rumination. It was about living life. Yes. And that idea has been lost, basically. Well, it's been lost from philosophy, but it's not been lost from religion. And I think this is something we've already almost touched on, so I should talk about that a little bit. Religion in ancient Greece was largely ritualistic. It was the performance of the proper rites, taking part with the rest of your community in certain festivals, or the rest of your tribe, or the rest of your group of soldiers in certain festivals, and doing stuff at home, maybe tossing some grain onto the fire as a sacrifice in the morning and stuff like that. I mean, that obviously was based on a kind of a bedrock of belief. You had to believe that the gods exist, that they have the power to intervene in the world for better or for worse, and so on and so forth. There's a bedrock of beliefs, but it wasn't really belief. There was no creed that you had to believe in in order to be orthodox. There was no church to say what was and wasn't orthodox, and so on and so forth. So, there was really no place in ancient Greek religion for, if anybody wanted to become a better person, wanted to develop his or her potential. There were some mystical sects which perhaps went somewhere along those paths, but we know so little about them that it's really quite hard to be certain. But it was the philosophers who stepped in and filled that lack. They were the ones who were trying to provide the tools for people to become better people. This is perhaps, I mean, it's pretty obvious in Plato, but it's even more obvious when you think about people like the Stoics. People like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, the later Stoics, were very clearly using philosophy as a framework to guide others towards a better way of life. But even that idea, I mean, it's a very sophisticated idea. You don't think of a primitive culture. I don't think of Neolithic people thinking about how can I be a better Neolithic man. It's an idea that suddenly seems to appear among the Greeks. Yes. I mean, as far as I know, I don't know enough about it. I mean, there's tons of work being done at the moment on Mesopotamian literature, which is earlier and things like that, and I don't know enough about it to be absolutely certain. But yeah, it does appear, as far as I know, among the Greeks, pre-Socratics first, again. Who didn't know they were pre-Socratic? Who didn't know? Think of the irony. Not all of them were. Some of them are contemporaneous with Socrates. Some of the pre-Socratics were not pre-Socratics. You write about Plato's disillusionment after the death of Socrates. Can you just touch on that? Okay. Plato came from a well-born family, rich, landed estates, generations of wealth. The natural course for him would have been for him to enter public life, was the way the Greeks put it. We would say become a politician, which is from the age of 20, he could address the Athenian assembly. From the age of 30, he could become a counselor and so on, and maybe even progress and become as important a politician as somebody like Pericles, the statesman. And that was a natural thing for him to do. Indeed, letter seven, that important long letter that I mentioned earlier, starts off by saying, yes, that's what I was going to do. I was going to become a politician. Now, it's not just Socrates' death. I need to go back a little bit. When Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, you know this, they lost it to Sparta. When Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans imposed on them a narrow oligarchy of 30 men who quite rapidly, because of their brutality, became known as the 30 tyrants. Now, the most prominent member of the 30 was a cousin of Plato's, a cousin of another generation, you know how it goes. And another very prominent member was his uncle, his mother's brother. And several others of the 30 had been in the Socratic circle and were certainly known to Plato. He says in letter seven that, you know, he was attracted to joining, to doing some work for the 30 because they were friends and relatives. But he got put off by their savagery. And so he decided he wouldn't work for the 30. The 30 tyrants didn't last very long. Their regime lasted only, I don't know, 11 months or something. And then the democracy was restored. So Plato then thought, maybe I can work within the renewed democracy. But before very long, the renewed democracy had taken Socrates to court. And to tie things together, almost certainly the main reason they took him to court was precisely because members of his circle had been among the 30. And Socrates himself was, under the 30, was in a privileged position. The 30 disarmed all Athenian citizens and threw them out of the city. But Socrates was allowed to stay. There were 3,000 people who were allowed to stay. So he was kind of in a slightly ambiguous position as regards the 30. I'm sure he didn't like them. And there's a famous story that they asked him to do a particular job to arrest somebody and he refused, for which he could, of course, have got into a lot of trouble. But nevertheless, there was this slight ambiguity, was he or wasn't he? So I think what happened at the trial, we don't have the prosecutor's speeches, but I'm pretty sure in the trial, they made Socrates out to be the kind of éminence grise of the 30, the sort of a shadowy figure in the background. Now, being very ignorant of all these things, I can say that it's surprising to me that he would have been thought of as close to power in that way. Well, remember what I said earlier, the main project of both Socrates and Plato was political, was to create a generation of responsible, competent, principled statesmen who would run Athens and have an effect in the wider world as well. So I think from that point of view, it falls a bit more into place that Plato would have been interested. Talk a little bit about Plato's Academy. Right. This is after the death of Socrates. Yes, quite a bit after. Socrates died in 399. Plato founded the Academy in 383. Right. First of all, I think I should say that the term philosophy meant something quite different then from what it does now. Actually, what it meant then was what it meant up until about 200 years ago, where philosophy was a kind of a blanket term for everything. If you did mathematics, you were a philosopher. If you did what we now call psychology, you were a philosopher. If you did geography, you were a philosopher. And it was like that in ancient Greece as well. Philosophy covered a lot of different disciplines that we would now separate. So there were some people who took philosophy seriously, people like Plato and Socrates, but there were many, many others who would go to attend a philosopher's lectures to kind of round off their higher education. They'd perhaps been studying under a rhetorician and then they would go and attend a few lectures by Plato or Antisthenes or some other philosopher. So a great deal of the teaching that went on in the Academy, the school that Plato started in 383, was of that fairly superficial level. These were kids aged 17, 18, 19 walking, commuting out from Athens to the Academy, which was just a couple of kilometers out to the northwest, and attending a lecture because they felt that was the way to hone their minds a bit. They weren't going there to be professional philosophers or to take this thing seriously at all. That kind of teaching went on in the Academy Gymnasium. However, Plato also bought a plot of land near the Academy Park and built a house in it. What went on there was really more the heart of the Academy than this rather superficial teaching in the Gymnasium, because there was where the researchers, the senior Academy members, met and did their research. It was the research that was going on in the Academy that was more interesting than its teaching. The Academy is more the ancestor of All Souls College Oxford than it is a teaching university. Another contemporary school by a man called Isocrates was really the ancestor of our universities. But the Academy did research in a huge range of fields. Aristotle was in the Academy for 20 years. If anybody's even glanced at Aristotle's titles, and that's only about a third of his books, then he covers pretty much every subject under the sun, as it was then. That's representative of the kind of research that was going on in the Academy. There was a lot of high-level mathematics going on, but there was everything else. They were doing history and geography and even early science, biology. There's a fascinating fragment of a comic poet called Epicrates, which has some people from the Academy, he names some of them, standing around wondering what the genus of a certain plant is, until Plato comes. They all get it muddled up, and it's supposed to be, I suppose, vaguely comic, until Plato comes along and says, start again, have another go. But there we see them actually doing some taxonomy, doing some primitive science or some early science, let's say. Great deal of research was going on in the Academy. The first solid geometry was probably being done there, the first quasi-plausible models of how the universe works were developed there, and a great deal of other work. And also, interestingly, political work. The Academy, because it had the reputation of having the sort of cream of the intellectuals of Greek society, if a state was in trouble, a state anywhere in the Greek world, I'm thinking of two at least in Asia Minor straight away, would approach the Academy and say, look, can you help out? And so Plato would send one of the academicians to that place to perhaps revise its constitution, but sometimes to do more drastic things. That's so rational that it's almost funny. It is funny to me that they would reach out to the Academy. Can you send us a political consultant to help us think this through? Are you going to Delos on your tour? Are we going to Delos? Yeah. Not if I can help it. Man, I hate that place. No, I'm kidding. I've never, I don't know anything about Delos. Why would we go to Delos? I don't know. No, I was only going to trigger off that too, because the Delians approached the Academy. They said, look, they had offended Apollo in some way, and Apollo had sent a drought or something, except the oracle of Apollo said, the drought will go away if you double the size of my altar, and the altar was a perfect cube. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I'm told that doubling a cube is really tricky, and so the Delians approached the Academy and said, look, can you help us solve this problem? We want to get rid of our drought, and so some of the academicians found ways to double the cube. And after all that work, turns out Apollo doesn't even exist. How sad. I have to ask you about, I mean, whenever anybody talks about Plato or thinks about the forms, the Platonic idea, it's fascinating to me that Plato was, well, you talk about it, but expand on it a little bit. I mean, you talk about it in the book, about the idea that he was anti-materialist, in a sense. In other words, that he was always trying to drive, and that's kind of a Gnostic or dualistic idea that what's here is not as good as what is, I don't know what you'd call it, more ethereal or the divine somehow. There's another realm, and this realm is not what that realm is, and that the whole idea of philosophy is to get there. And of course, there's truth in that, but it was interesting to me that he was, that they were enemies of materialism, or at least talk about what that means. In other words, what was it when he's talking about the forms versus actual things? The type of materialism, I imagine there are different types of materialism. The type of materialism that bothered him was the pre-Socratic type. There were, as you know, pre-Socratics who were claiming that everything, everything in the world, every piece of furniture of the world is actually a different manifestation of an underlying material substrate. So a chap called Anaximenes said that in the beginning there was air, and that everything in the world is a result of either the thinning or the thickening of air. So Plato didn't like that. He didn't like the idea. Not because it wasn't true, but he didn't like the theory of it. He didn't like it being based just entirely on a material thing. And by the same token, he didn't like, you know, because materialist has also to rely entirely on mechanical causation. One thing, like that, and he didn't like that either. So yeah, he was opposed to materialism. He was opposed to skepticism. He believed the truth was there to be found. Well, that's what I mean. It's fascinating that he believed there's such a thing as truth. Yeah. And that he believed there was something beyond this world. Let's put it in more contemporary terms. Yeah. He believed that there was something beyond this world. Yeah. He calls it the plane of truth. Yeah. We might call it what? Eternity or the world beyond this world, the supernatural or something like that. But he was convinced that that's where the forms... Yeah, but we're touching on a very controversial area of Platonic studies here. It's very easy to read him and say he had a two-world theory, this world, the world of forms. But at the same time, it's also clear from his writing that you never get to know or even to glimpse the world of forms except through this world. So, in fact, we only ever see. He says that in some pre-incarnate existence, we have glimpsed the plane of truth. Our souls have glimpsed the plane of truth. But as incarnate beings, we can only know this world and we only glimpse the forms through this world. The easiest and most accessible form is the form of beauty. So every time you see someone or something as beautiful, you are seeing the form of beauty because otherwise, how would you identify that as beautiful? That's Plato's theory. You have no way of identifying something except through these forms, these attributes which are what they are, whereas nothing else is what it is perfectly. Anything that I call beautiful in this world is not going to remain beautiful or it's not going to be beautiful to another person or so on and so forth. But the forms are just beauty itself. But every time we see somebody as beautiful, we are seeing a form or an instantiation of the form, a reflection of the form. So I don't know whether he had a completely, as it were, divisive two-world theory because the worlds have actually come together as they, I guess, must. Well, obviously, he was in his project for us to become more virtuous that the whole idea is that we would get closer to the divine. Yes. But that we wouldn't leave this world entirely, at least not yet. No, you get reincarnated. Now, that's the weirdest thing that I read in the book, the idea that he believed. I can understand the idea of somebody positing the existence of something we would call the soul, but to suddenly get so specific and to say, oh, and yes, you know, we're going to be reincarnated. He seems to pull that out of thin air. Well, yeah, I think he was influenced by the Pythagoreans who believed in reincarnation. He went and stayed with them and studied with them for some time in the 390s and 380s. I don't, I don't pull it out of thin air. I mean, it was an important plank to some of his theories. Okay, so we can't see forms here. We see reflections of forms. So how do we get to know a form? One of Plato's theories is the theory of recollection, as it's commonly called, which is that you don't actually, you know, the way we would think about something is that I get an idea of bookness because as a child and then as growing up, I saw lots of books. So I know, oh, I can recognize that. That's a book. But Plato said that you don't build up an image, a concept that way. You are actually remembering something that you knew not so much in a past life as in a prior existence of the soul, a pre-incarnate existence of the soul. So having, having given the soul a pre-incarnate existence, it kind of makes sense to give it a reincarnate existence. I guess by talking about the pre-existence of the soul, whether there is such a thing or isn't, he was still groping toward the idea. I guess you could also, you know, you could call it divine revelation. How do you know something that maybe you shouldn't know by human experience? Where did that come from? There's a realm from which we're drawing and whether we were once there or can access from here. That's where he's coming from. Yeah. Do you think that Plato at the end of his life would have thought of himself as a virtuous man? No, I think he was very humble. There's, I mean, it's a story that occurs in the biographies. So I'm picking and choosing which bits of the biographies I agree. But there's a story that one of his common sayings was not to criticize people, but to ask himself, am I not like that? So I think, and it's very much, as you know, it's very much the sort of the flavor of Platonic Socratic work, that it's an unending quest. You don't come up with an answer, say, oh, that's it. Sorted that problem out. You maybe adopt that as a temporary answer, but then you carry on looking. So he was too humble to have thought of himself that way. But do you think the people around him would have thought of him as virtuous? They certainly did. To go back to something we were talking about before, the hagiographies arose straight after his death. Yeah. And of Socrates also, similar. Yes, but not quite so hagiographic, at least the ones we have. We have Plato and we have Xenophon and we have a few fragments of a few other of Socrates' followers, but they're not quite as hagiographic as the ones that were written about Plato. But you see, partly that's because you can't distinguish between Plato and Socrates. Well, we have to touch on that before we end. It's fascinating to me that we know of Socrates principally as this sort of fictional character. I say sort of fictional because not quite, but technically fictional character that Plato gives us. But we know that this fictional character is, of course, based on someone who was a real person, nonfiction. And that is at least confusing because you have to try to figure out what… When Plato was writing about Socrates, was this exclusively after the death of Socrates? I believe so, yes. Yeah. I don't see any reason why. I mean, a lot of the Socratics, as I've just said, were writing about Socrates. Why would they do so while he was still alive? Why create mythology about a person who… Well, I guess you could ask the larger question, why would Plato create a character called Socrates, especially when he knew Socrates? Why would he put words in the mouth of Socrates that he knew Socrates had never spoken? That's an essential question. Because he knew he was carrying on Socrates' work, even if he wasn't exactly mimicking Socrates' words. And I believe this to be true of all the Socratics who wrote about Socrates afterwards. They were all using the figure of Socrates to generate and perpetuate their own philosophical ideas. And this is why I say we can't actually know what Socrates himself did or said or thought. We can project back. But I mean, OK, we have the complete Socratic works of Plato and we have the complete Socratic works of Xenophon. Completely different portraits. It can't both be right. Within Plato, we have two different portraits of Socrates. We have the early dialogues where you've got this questioning Socrates who's always trying to prick people's bubbles of conceit and point out that they don't actually know what they think they know and that they shouldn't be basing their lives on something which isn't actually true, or at least something they can't be convinced of, can't be sure of. And then in the middle and later dialogues, you've got a Socrates who's affirming positive doctrine. He's not just questioning. He's more overtly steering the course of the conversations. Totally different Socrates. So we've got three different pictures of Socrates and two authors. They're incompatible. So I believe that the historical Socrates is effectively invisible and that all the Socratics, as I said, were using this figure for their own purposes. But Socrates' goal and the goal of Plato and others was, it seems to me, if I'm understanding your book correctly, to get people to be better people. Yeah, that was his primary goal. Transformation of character and then building on that to be better at politics or whatever chose in the field. Yeah. But so in some way, there's a certain, there's a, I guess, a purity and an innocence to Socrates and Plato that is startling in a way. They were not, they were realists, but they were not cynics at all. You don't get that. Well, I think it's a nice way to put it. Yeah. And so in some ways they were, I guess, a contemporary term for them. It's not quite right, but in some ways they were holy men. They cared about the soul. They cared about goodness. And it's very, it's disarming to think of these geniuses as caring about these things. No, I think that's absolutely right. You were brought up in the Orthodox Church. Yeah. You find icons of Plato in some Orthodox churches. There's a famous one in Romania. There's a couple of others, but I can't remember where they are. You can walk into an Orthodox church and find an icon of Plato. You won't find that in a Presbyterian church. I'll tell you that right now. Not keen on icons. In fact, you won't find icons of John Knox or anybody in a Presbyterian church. I do. I'm very sad to say that we're out of time, but I'm very happy to say that it's been a joy to scratch the surface of this endless topic with you, Robin. So folks, join me in thanking Robin Waterfield. If you think these conversations are valuable, would you do us a favor and please like this video and subscribe to this channel? When you do that, you help us get these conversations out to a wider audience by telling YouTube that people are interested in this. Also, you can go to SocratesInTheCity.com, sign up for our newsletter, and you can check back every week. There's new stuff here every week. Thank you for tuning in.