Statue of Plato at the Academy in Athens
The philosopher and mathematician known as Plato lived in Classical Greece and was an influential figure of the Classical Greek period.
Primary sources available from the period are rare, and thus our understanding of Plato’s life is based on constructions by historians and scholars from scant sources that are available. It is estimated that Plato was born sometime between 427 and 424 BC. His parents came from the Greek aristocracy and his father, Ariston, was a descendent of the kings of Athens and Messenia, while his mother, Perictione, was likely related to the Greek statesman Solon. Plato’s father died when he was young. The second marriage of Plato’s mother was to her uncle, Pyrilampes, a Greek politician and ambassador to Persia.
Similar to children of his social class, Plato was likely taught by Athens’ best educators. The curriculum would have featured the doctrines of metaphysics (the study of nature) and epistemology (the study of knowledge).
Plato experienced two major events that significantly influenced his life: One was meeting the great Greek philosopher Socrates, and the other the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, in which Plato served for a brief time between 409 and 404 BC. Meeting Socrates impressed Plato to such an extent that he became a close associate and dedicated his life to the question of virtue. The defeat of Athens, the associated loss of individual freedoms, and the subsequent restoration of democracy resulted in Plato briefly considering a career in politics. However, when Socrates was executed in 399 BC Plato dedicated his life to study and philosophy.
After Socrates’s death, Plato traveled for several years throughout the Mediterranean region, studying mathematics, geometry, geology, astronomy, and religion and began his extensive writings. Plato’s writings include central ideals of justice, courage, wisdom, and moderation of the individual and society. He wrote “The Republic” which explored just government ruled by philosopher kings. Plato also deliberated on metaphysical ideas and the role of art, architecture, ethics, and morality in society. In the Theory of Forms, Plato proposes that ideas are constant while perceptions through senses are deceptive and changeable. He began a unique perspective on abstract objects, which led to a school of thought known as Platonism. Sometime around 385 BC, Plato founded a school of learning, known as the Academy, with curricula that included astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory, and philosophy. The Academy in Athens was the first institution of higher learning in the Western world and helped shape the Western philosophy and science. One of Plato’s most well-known students was Aristotle who is considered to be one of the pillars of science in the Western civilization. The circumstances surrounding Plato’s death are somewhat clouded, though it is fairly certain that he died in Athens around 348 BC, when he was approximately 82 years old.
2.1 Plato’s Chronicles on Color
Color in the Classical Greek period was of philosophical interest since it raised metaphysical issues, concerning the nature both of physical reality and of the mind. In the Classical Greece, direct consideration of human vision was used to describe color. The subject of colors appears more or less directly in three dialogs between Socrates and other philosophers as reported by Plato. In the dialog “Parmenides,” Plato describes a discussion between Parmenides of Elea (born approximately 510 BCE) and a much younger Socrates about forms. Parmenides used the terms “light” and “night” to explain the fundamental dichotomy of the world that others interpreted as “light and dark,” with all colors being derived from them.
Socrates: You and he believe in Empedocles’ theory of effluences, do you not?
Meno: Wholeheartedly.
Socrates: And the passages to which and through which the effluences make their way?
Meno: Yes.
Socrates: Some of the effluences fit into some of the passages whereas others are too coarse or too fine.
Meno: That is right.
We ought to term white that which dilates the visual ray, and the opposition of this black … In the eye the fire, mingling with the ray of the moisture, produces a color like blood, to which we give the name red. A bright hue [τὸ λαμπρόν] mingled with red and white gives the color auburn [xandon]. The law of proportion, however, according to which the several colors are formed, even if a man knew he would be foolish in telling, for he could not give any necessary reason, nor indeed any tolerable or probable explanation of them. Again, red when mingled with black and white, becomes purple, but it becomes umber [orphninon] when the colors are burned as well as mingled and the black is more thoroughly mixed with them. Flame color [pyrron] is produced by a union of auburn and dun [phaion], dun by an admixture of black and white, and pale yellow [ochron] by an admixture of white and auburn. White and bright meeting and falling upon a full black, become dark blue [kyanoyn] and when the dark blue mingles with white a light blue [glaykon] color is formed as flame color with black makes leek green [prasion]. There will be no difficulty in seeing how and by what mixtures the colors derived from these are made according to the rules of probability.
A schematic representation of elemental colors and their admixture according to Timaeus [2]
It is not known to what extent Plato agreed (or disagreed) with the claims of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Timaeus as no texts in which he expressed his own views are known. It appears that the philosophers of the time considered colors not objects on an artist’s palette but energy forms of the objects themselves. In fact, according to this tenet the artists’ colors are not objects. Colors are not pigmentary mixtures but theoretical conceptions, and the color bright is a symbol of idealism: the lifting of the human being above his level. The prevailing view pertaining to perception at the time was that objects’ rays meet and mingle with the pure fire (rays) placed in all human eyes by the gods. Thus, the very act of seeing (or not seeing) is dependent on the size, strength, and speed of the rays originating from the objects. A scale represents the interaction between the energy forms and the eye, which starts from lambron, and extends from erython (red), to leukon (white), and ends with melan (black). Black represents a reaction weaker than that of white that fails to reach the eye. A system of fire (light) reactions was used to produce colors, whereby the most potent of these, lambron, overwhelmed the fire of the eye and expelled it. Therefore, some have argued that color intensity was more important than hue.
One may argue that the prevailing philosophical view on color at the time, including that of Plato, was that perception did not just result in colorful sensations but also created the qualitative character of our perceived world.