PART I
I am going to start with the dumpster fire part, which, as we covered in class, is pretty immediately palpable. Plato is self-aggrandizing to the extreme: so much so that the very nature of reality, as he sees it, positions him, amongst his equals, as the best humanity is capable of. His notion of "T" absolute truth, conflated with divinity and consequently rendering all other forms of truth, whether it be socially constructed or constructed through subjective experience, as lesser and trivial, is incredibly conducive to elitism, xenophobia, authoritarianism (philosopher-king style), misogyny, and the justification of slavery (amongst other things I'm sure).
I don't mind his critiques of poetry, the other "imitative" arts, and rhetoric, drawing from what I remember in Republic and Phaedrus, being that I think there is some truth in his arguments, but, again, his inability to find merit in anything that doesn't share an identical nature with philosophy, as he understands it, undercuts any sense of objectivity. Poetics, for example, imitate how the world is experienced subjectively, and, in doing so, necessarily appeal to emotion, which is an intrinsic part of how we experience the world. Plato seems to fear poetry's use of emotion because of its persuasiveness, likened to intoxication or entrancement, and because its purpose isn't to treat absolute "T" truth as as something that transcends experience: "But I told you so, I am speaking in verse, and therefore I had better make an end; enough...Do you not perceive that I am already overtaken by the Nymphs to whom you have exposed me?" (Phaedrus, 46). Plato is more explicit in Republic, but I think this quote from Phaedrus definitely hints at Plato's insecurity when it comes poetry and/or the strong feelings and setting (which I think is exemplified in the Nymphs) that inspires it.
I think rhetoric is treated in a very similar manner by Plato. Rhetoric, like poetry, doesn't reach towards Plato's vision of absolute truth, but instead considers the way in which truth can be, and often is, socially constructed, and is therefore dangerous/problematic according to Plato (as far as I can understand his critiques). Also, conveniently, learning rhetoric was a way in which the underprivileged, in Greek society, could gain power, which would have likely given Plato another reason to dismiss and/or fear it. Ultimately, I find that his arguments against rhetoric, much like his arguments against poetry, are incredibly weak because there foundation is the assumption the "T" objective truth is the only form of truth that has any value. For example, when Plato writes "In good speaking should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is going to speak?" (61), he is appealing to the "good," which take a lot of unpacking, and, if this is true, knowing Plato's conception of Truth's nature, isn't all speaking bad speaking? For somebody who claims to know nothing, Socrates, as Plato has characterized him, seems to expect a lot from his compatriots.
He, and I think many greeks, had a bit of a superman complex (Nietzsche's ubermensch maybe?). This gets talked about in ethics, when you get to Nietzsche, but I think the idea of master and slave morality can also be applied here, in the sense that the good according to master morality (greek) relates to bettering the self, while the good according to slave morality (christian) relates to humbling the self. The latter is less relevant in this situation, but I can definitely see Nietzsche's master morality exemplified in Plato.
So, yes...
PART II
To address the more contentious word in my title, "beautiful," I do have to say that, despite all the clear problems with Plato, I do thoroughly enjoy reading his works and entertaining his ideas regarding truth, divinity, and the forms. The idea that the nature of a thing, as it exists in our minds, is closer to reality than the perceived world is absolutely fascinating to me. Also, intuitively, and maybe resulting from my indoctrination into the world of literary theory, which, in a problematic manner, owes a lot to Plato, the notion that all mediators of knowledge are inherently flawed and that truth, in its full glory, is always out of reach makes a lot of sense to me.
I also think that the irony of Plato's choice to write all this down, speak entirely through characters, and to often speak in parables is incredibly interesting and oddly beautiful. Despite his aversion to the imitative arts, he created a series of dialogues that imitate the way in which Socrates taught and argued, and, despite his hatred of the Sophists and rhetoric, he used these dialogues to either assert Socrates' belief in the Gods, or to cover his own ass for fear of being accused, as Socrates was, for disbelief, and therefore these dialogues are rhetorical.
Lastly, rather surprisingly, the most enjoyable part of Phaedrus for me was Socrates' longwinded soliloquy about the nature of love, madness, and the soul, which was probably the least important, for our purposes, part of this text. The way he talked of love, and love's madness (which seems like an incredibly extreme understanding of love) made me think of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I think Plato weirdly conflates how a lover looks at there beloved with how a philosopher ought to look at the world; the lover sees the divine embodied in the beloved and the philosopher looks to the world and sees both the divine (albeit an imperfect imitation of the divine). As far as I could understand it, the lover sees there loved as an ideal, and in worshipping them they worship the ideal their lover embodies, and are consequently worshipping "heaven" and "truth" through their lover. How I am explaining it is kind of weird, and maybe off base, but it seems like the lover becomes a nearly perfect imitation of beauty's heavenly form, and, consequently, they become a sort of alter to that form: "But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too...then looking upon the face of his beloved as of a god he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god" (53-54). The line I was thinking of from Keats was "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (l. 49), and I thought of this because I think, in Plato's discussion of love, beauty and truth are conflated to some extent. It is kind of hard to articulate, but I think Plato's sense of reality, being "visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul" (Plato, 51) and of a perfect and entirely conceptual (or internalized) nature, lends itself to this conflation. I think, according to my understanding of each, both beauty and the forms share a similar nature. Also, Plato's line "The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like" (50) is very similar to Keats' line, if we conflate the divine and truth as Plato does (Oh no! Keats is being imitative!).
Welp, this went long. To conclude, Plato is incredibly problematic (a bit of a dick) but the ideas he engages with are interesting, so I can see why he continues to be revered. Plato, assuming that Socrates is just a mouthpiece for Plato and not entirely a character, is a hypocrite, but that also makes him more engaging and perplexing. In other, more concise, words, I have ambivalent feelings about Plato and his contributions to western philosophy: hence the beautiful dumpster fire.
Works Cited
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Digireads.com Publishing, 2019.
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