Summary of Plato’s Philosophy

• Plato’s political outlook was greatly influenced by the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war and the death sentence on Socrates. His views became anti- democratic.

• Plato regards the external world, as given in senses, as only an appearance.

• The real world is an abstract realm of eternal and unchanging Ideas or Forms.

• Plato calls the Forms as archetypes and the objects of the material world as their copies or adumbrations.

• For Plato the good has unconditional worth and is the source of worth in various things.

• Plato rejectshedonismbecausepleasures areindeterminate andrelative.

• Plato makes a fourfold division of morals, and associates them with different parts of the soul. The four virtues are wisdom or prudence, valour, temperance and justice.

• Platodividessoulintothreeparts as rational,spiritedandappetitive. He associatesdifferent virtues with each part of the soul. He injects an air of mysticism into moral discussions.

• Justice refers to the harmonious functioning of the related elements of the soul– the appetitive, thespiritedand the rational.

• Plato’s dialogue, The Republic, is a vision of an ideal political society or commonwealth; it is the earliest political utopia.

• Plato proposes a constitution in which philosophers will be the kings or rulers.

• Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus gave a glowing, romantic and fictional account of the Spartan State and created the myth of Sparta which impressed Plato. Sparta was a military dictatorship.

• The citizens of the Republic are to be divided into three classes: the common people, the soldiers, and the guardians. Only the guardians are to exercise political power.

• The Republic will have neither private property nor family system.

• Guardians will be hereditary and will be educated with rigid discipline for instilling in them military skills and culture.

• Plato proposes strict censorship of literature, drama and music.

• His republic is a hereditary military oligarchy. It smacks of totalitarian and autocratic rule. In it, the individual will be submerged in the State.

• In modern times, political thinkers have attacked Plato’s ideas. They are seen as offensive to the modern democratic temper. Bertrand Russell traces the ancestry of fascism to Plato.

Karl Popper includes Plato among the three great intellectual enemies of open society – the other two being Hegel and Marx.

• The ideology of the guardians will have no relation to popular desires or hopes; at best guardians will implement Plato’s ideals.

• The individual is submerged in the State.