The legendary British philosopher Lord Whitehead once said that all of philosophy was just a series of footnotes to Plato. Indeed, much of Western civilization stands on his broad shoulders. (By the way, the Greek word platon means “broad-backed one,” which the handsome and aristocratic Plato was alleged to have been as a youth.)
If Western civilization is standing on Plato's shoulders, it might be fair to say that Plato is, in turn, standing—and straddling— on Socrates and Pythagoras's deltoids (can't get away from Pythagoras and those triangles!), as he was greatly influenced by each of their distinct philosophies. That's a very important point to make regarding Plato, who seems to have two phases in his life. In fact, it can be said that there was Plato, the early years, when he paid tribute to Socrates and his concerns about the human condition, and Plato, the sunset years, when we see a more metaphysical, cosmologically interested Plato. Georgetown professor Daniel Robinson has described this evolution in Plato's orientation as a shift from “anthropos to cosmos.” According to some accounts, this shift is alleged to have occurred as a result of Plato spending time with a community of Pythagoreans in western Greece after the death of his beloved teacher, Socrates.
To many, Plato is Greek philosophy. As the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, he shaped ancient Greek philosophy and, subsequently, all of Western thought like no other human being who has ever lived.
Plato would go on to develop his theory of Forms, which built upon not only Socrates' ideas of absolute and abstract properties, but also upon Pythagoras's theories of pure and transcendent numbers, as well as Parmenides' notion of an eternal and unchanging reality (more about that later). And it was Plato's notion of an eternal soul that would create the framework for a theological revolution that would shape early Christianity, change biblical Judaism into rabbinic Judaism, and greatly impact Islam as well.
Plato's radical and unheard of notion of an immaterial soul that was separate from the physical body (in fact, not only was it considered separate, but Plato saw it as being trapped by the physical body, as a bird is trapped in a cage) would necessitate that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam create a place to put this pesky, eternal soul. Voila! Enter a belief in “the world to come” (olam ha'bah in Hebrew), which Christians and Muslims conceptualize as heaven (or, for the sinners in the room, a not-very-pleasant hell).
Plato himself never spoke of heaven and hell. What we know of his view of the soul's afterlife is described in the myth of Er, found in Plato's Republic. Here, Plato tells the story of a soldier, Er, who dies in battle, but is revived on his funeral pyre and then is able to describe what happens after check-out time. Er describes a rather karmic-inspired conception of a reincarnation-driven afterlife, a place where the good are rewarded with the choice of their next life and the truly despicable (whom he describes as murderers and tyrants) are permanently stuck down under. Once a new life is assigned, the soul travels to the Plain of Oblivion and has to drink from the River Lethe (the River of Forgetfulness), which makes the soul unable to remember anything from the prior incarnation.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam weren't really that interested in Plato's view (or Pythagoras's for that matter) of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls; rather, it was Plato's notion that the soul and body were not one and the same that the religiously inclined picked up on.
This Greek metaphysical conception of matter and spirit— of body as separate from soul—was first introduced to the Judaic Pharisees (later called rabbis) in 331 BCE by Alexander the Great, who was himself a student of Aristotle. Before that time, the Hebrew Bible never mentions any type of life after death or form of soul survival; the closest thing it comes to is in describing a Hades-like place of the dead, called Sheol. Pre–Alexander the Great, the belief in Judaism had been that when life (nefesh) ended, that was it. It wasn't until the infusion of Greek philosophy and the platonic notion of a separate soul that Judaism distinguished what came to be called rabbinic Judaism from biblical Judaism.
For the Christians, it was first St. Augustine, during the fourth century, and later Thomas Aquinas, during the medieval period, that helped to infuse platonism as essential doctrine in Christianity.
After Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were exposed to Plato's concept of a transcendent realm beyond the physical—and that the human soul was a card-carrying member of this realm—well then, happy day! The soul was born and, with it, the notion of spiritual immortality. Thank you, Plato, for eternal life! Yet these were all much-later theological interpretations of a greater platonic notion that attempted to explain the relationship between the physical world with a transcendent, non-corporal realm that Plato had called the Realm of Forms or Realm of Ideas.
In Plato's view of reality, what we perceived as the “real,” or material, world might, in fact, just be smoke and mirrors; indeed, the physical world accessible to our senses may just be shadows of this higher Ideal Realm. The only things that Plato believed to be real were, by definition, eternal. Since the physical world was strictly ephemeral—as fleeting as the grains of sand spilling through the hourglass—and had no permanence, it couldn't be real.
But what was real were the Eternal Forms—those transcendent and pure Ideas that existed on a plane beyond space and time. What our senses were able to perceive here on our earthly plane were just the aforementioned shadows the imperfect copies or illusions of the real, Eternal Forms.
A quick example: a basketball is a scuffed and imperfect physical copy of the pure and Ideal Form of a sphere, which is eternal and perfect and exists independent of human thought and perception; the NBA just happens to make crude and imperfect rubber knock-offs of that perfect Form.
Similarly, even the Ideal Form for something a little more abstract—like, say, beauty or courage—was not a subjective, culturally specific definition of the word. Rather, it was a universal truth that actually existed in a beyond-corporeal realm and that could become imperfectly manifest in the physical realm (like the scuffed basketball).
Plato shared the Pythagorean view that the intellect could unlock the door of this transcendent realm. Like Pythagoras, he believed that contemplation, as a meditative practice in which the objects of contemplation are mathematics, cosmology, ethics, logic riddles, and the nature of life and death, could expand a person's consciousness and level of awareness. Indeed, written over the door of Plato's famous Academy, considered by many to be the first college, was the inscription, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of mathematics.” Mathematics for Plato, as for Pythagoras, was a very powerful tool to elevate a person's consciousness.
Consciousness expansion was the name of the game for the metaphysically inclined mystic philosophers. But in order for that expansion to happen, one had to get past the illusion of the senses; this overreliance on the senses could be a mystical deal-breaker when it came to experiencing the beyond-sensory Ideal Realm. Plato even discussed this sensory trap in his most famous allegory, the “Myth of the Cave” (see “Plato's Funky Cave”). And it wasn't just our senses that were a potential trap; for the Greek mystics, an overreliance on reason and logic could also trip up people as they attempted to experience mystical union. While the ancient Greeks believed that a reasoning mind can indeed be a key to help unlock the door of our transcendent awareness, they also felt that that same key could also close that door by tricking our minds into believing that the illusion of our sensory world—the illusion that Plato warned against in his “Myth of the Cave”—is all that there is to reality.
As noted earlier, in Hinduism there's the analogous concept of Maya, which is confusing the sensory world with Ultimate Reality. In jnana yoga, there's a very close parallel to the Greek concept of using reason as a key to unlock the door of our higher mind in order to transcend sensory illusion.
Plato's most famous passage in all of his writings occurs in the Republic and has come to be known as “the Myth of the Cave.” This story symbolically conveys Plato's view on reality, knowledge, and human perception.
In this allegory, Plato describes a large cave cut off from the outside world by a long passage that prevents any sunlight from entering the cave. And in this deep, dark place we find a row of prisoners, who are chained by their limbs and necks so that they can't move. They can't even turn their heads to the left or right and see the prisoners next to them. All that they can see is the wall of the cave directly facing them.
To make matters worse for our poor misbegotten inmates, they have always been chained up like that; they have never known anything else. (Hey, that's why it's called a myth!) The only source of light is a bright fire in the cave behind them. And unknown to them, there's also a rampart behind them, on which people are perpetually passing back and forth, carrying things on the prisoners' heads. Our cave-dwelling prisoners can't see these people, nor can the prisoners directly hear them. All that they can see are the people's shadows produced by the light of the fire in the wall facing the prisoners, and all they can hear is the echo of the people's voices bouncing off of that same wall. So all the poor buggers have ever experienced in their entire lives are those shadows and echoes; to them, that's reality, because that all that their senses have ever revealed to them.
Plato writes that if one of the prisoners were to attempt to break free and escape, Shawshank Redemption style, he would initially be confused and disoriented. When he turns around and sees the fire, the flames would at first dazzle his eyes. He might even be inclined to want to forget the whole thing, sit up straight, and just go back to the safety and comfort of looking straight ahead at the shadows. And if our rebel were to break out of the cave entirely, the blazing sunlight would temporarily blind and confuse him even more than the fire did, and it might be a long time before he understood anything.
Eventually, he'd acclimate.
But then if he were to once again return to that dark cave, he'd be temporarily blinded once again, only this time by the darkness. And if he'd tried to describe what he'd seen to his former fellow prisoners, who were still shackled and chained and still only knowing the shadows, they'd think he was crazy. “Brothers, I've seen the light—literally! What you think is real isn't! It's just bloody shadows on the wall!” he'd scream. But they wouldn't know what he was talking about; they'd think he was nuts.
It's a pretty powerful allegory. Clearly Plato's view was that human beings were shackled inside the prison of their bodies and that knowledge was mediated by the limitations of our senses. In his view, the true essence of reality goes way beyond the sensible (as in the five senses), which can detect only the illusory shadows of a deeper reality.
Most people tend to think of yoga as a physical practice; indeed, yoga studios of all shapes and flavors have exploded on the American workout scene. But yoga was—and is—really more than just about burning calories or developing muscle tone.
The word yoga is derived from the Sanskrit and literally means “to yoke.” The idea is that the individual soul is yoked to the Hindu notion of Brahman, otherwise known as the Ultimate or Eternal Reality, which is analogous to Plato's Ideal Realm or Pythagoras's Informational Realm. (Pythagoras's ideas that a noncorporeal realm of Pure Number—Informational Realm—was thought to have inspired Plato's Ideal Realm of Eternal Forms.) For the yoga practitioner, the adherence to one of the five major yoga paths can lead to Moksha, which is a release from the earthly bonds of illusion; like Plato's allegorical cave dweller, those who achieve Moksha escape from Maya, the belief that the cave of illusion and shadows is all there is to reality.
The five yoga paths are bhakti yoga, the path of devotion or selfless love; karma yoga, the path of action, deeds, and service; hatha yoga, the way of bodily or physical development; raja yoga, also known as contemplative yoga, which uses meditation to achieve liberation; and finally, jnana yoga, the way of the intellect or knowledge. While jnana literally translates to “knowledge” in Sanskrit, it's generally believed to mean knowledge of the true self, because, as Hindus believe, to merge and yoke with Brahman is jnana—knowledge of the true self.
Plato outlived his teacher, Socrates, by fifty years. During that time, he wrote approximately twenty-four dialogues wherein the protagonist was always Socrates. And although he would be best known for his theory of Eternal Forms, he never presents a systematic explication of this theory in his writings. Instead, expositions, discussions, and critical examinations occur in a number of his dialogues, giving the reader a sense of the flavor of what Plato came to believe regarding the Forms.
What is quite clear about Plato is that he took the death of his beloved teacher very hard. Socrates was a short, pug-nosed, yet charismatic philosopher who had developed a question-and-answer approach known as elenchus, which was meant to stimulate a reexamination of one's beliefs towards a deeper and fuller understanding of what one thinks that they know. This technique came to be known as the Socratic Method and eventually gave rise to the dialectic. Socrates believed that it was critically important to question everything. But when Socrates would ask a question like “What is justice?” he was looking for people to examine the common and abstract property called justice.
Socrates' deep and enduring interest was in human affairs, where he valued personal and moral integrity above everything else—even his own life. At the time of Socrates' death (while his student Plato was still a relatively young man), there had been much political upheaval and unrest in Athens, which was at war with neighboring Sparta. When a new regime—a regime that was partly comprised of Plato's influential family—took power in Athens, Socrates was charged with not worshiping the gods of the state, introducing unfamiliar religious practices, and corrupting the young Athenians with what were labeled his rather subversive ideas. If he were found guilty of those charges, the penalty would be death.
Here's where Socrates demonstrated that his personal integrity meant more to him than his own life. It was assumed that he would simply exile himself, as was the prevailing custom, and thus avoid the trial and his potential date with the Grim Reaper. But Socrates insisted that to exile himself would go against his sense of duty and his principle of abiding by whatever Athens decreed. He chose to stand trial and conducted his own defense. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Even then, he did not take an opportunity to avoid death. During the month that elapsed between his sentencing and his expected execution, his friends arranged for him to escape and thus save himself. But he refused.
He spent the last day of his life discussing philosophy, having a very timely discussion with his two close friends, Cebes and Timias, about the immortality of the soul before drinking his hemlock.
Plato took his death very hard. As a still-young man of thirty, he decided to leave Athens and traveled with several other followers of Socrates to Egypt and then Sicily, where it's believed that he encountered the Pythagoreans. Upon returning to Athens, he formed his legendary school, the Academy, where he continued to teach and write his dialogues until his death at the age of eighty-four. The Academy would remain a beacon of philosophical learning for several hundred years after Plato's death, until it was finally closed in 524 CE by Justinian I of Byzantium, who had feared that it was a threat to the propagation of Christianity.
While Plato is much better known than his predecessor Pythagoras, he's not deified or imbued with superhuman abilities as Pythagoras is. Perhaps this is a result of his prolific writing; since Pythagoras and Socrates themselves never wrote anything, it would seem that that vacuum was filled by mythic exaggeration. Or, perhaps, Pythagoras was more the supranormal mystic than Plato was. Indeed, some have viewed Plato's approach as more intellectual than experiential because it meant acquiring an intellectual grasp of the eternal realm of Ideal Forms, while Pythagoras and the other, more hard-core mystics strove for mystical union—the trippy merging of the Self with the infinite.
It is true that Plato seemed comfortable with philosophical discourse, and, indeed, all of his written works were written in the form of dialogues (always between Socrates and a variety of other characters). But Plato himself did come to regard the Ideal Forms as divine, and he did have a theological conception of a deimurge(“creator”), or what Aristotle later called the “Unmoved Mover” (the animating cause of motion that is itself beyond movement, beyond space, and beyond time).
Although the bulk of Plato's philosophical influence has been on thinkers who are irreligious and decline to ascribe any divine interpretation to his philosophy, their view does not see the man and his beliefs for what they were and seems to project on Plato a secularism that contradicts his theistic orientation.
A topic that obsessed Pythagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, and Parmenides was the question of change. This question was actually a larger philosophical exploration into the nature of being versus becoming. And part of that philosophical journey centered around the notion of physical death or what Plato had indicated was the goal of philosophical purification: freeing the soul from the shackles of the body. Plato even said that the ultimate goal of philosophy was “death before dying.”
Huh? Dying? What's dying got to do with this?
But before you start thinking that I'm advocating speed dialing Dr. Kevorkian and his magic deep-sleep machine, let me explain.
Pythagoras, Plato, Parmenides, Plotinus—they all embraced life. But they also realized that to truly experience Ultimate Reality, the road there would have to lead through self-annihilation. But physical death is a pretty final gambit; there's no coming back if you're wrong. I keep thinking of those Nike-wearing Heaven's Gate cultists in the 1990s who killed themselves so they could ride in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. It's a pretty ballsy move. But perhaps there's some other way to “die before dying,” so that a person doesn't have to do it the old-school flat-lining way, like I did, or by drinking the Jim Jones Kool-Aid.
Sure enough, the Greeks did discover a way to die before dying. It involved going underground—deep, deep, underground, into the cold darkness of a cave.
This contemplative exercise deals with the Plato's Ideal Forms.
The British mathematician and physicist Sir James Jeans remarked that, as a result of the new discoveries in science, “The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” In this chapter about Plato, we see that he too felt that an immaterial, thoughtlike Ideal Realm was primary in our universe over an imperfect physical world, which he viewed as a shadow of that Ideal Realm.
But before we begin, take a few minutes to do some sort of physical exercise, being sure to only do as much as your physical health allows. This could include walking, jogging, or bicycling. After fifteen to thirty minutes (depending on your health) of exercise, find a body of water to sit facing in quiet contemplation. This can be a pond, a river, a lake, or a pool. If there are no appropriate bodies of water, light a candle and meditate while focusing on the flickering flame.
As you begin your contemplation, ponder the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity, which says matter (the physical) is just dense, compact energy (thought). What if the universe is indeed a great thought (as Sir Jeans speculated) and the material world is just a manifestation of those thoughts from the Ideal Realm? Take several minutes to contemplate these ideas.
Finally, contemplate the Ideal Form of a sphere. Has that Form always existed? Can a basketball come into existence if that Form did not exist? Take a few more minutes to contemplate this question.
When you're done, sit for several more moments and become aware of how you feel. Now look around you; do you experience things any differently? Feel free to write down any of these initial thoughts and feelings, as writing these down will help you to process this experience.