Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

The son of a wealthy and noble family, Plato (427-347 B.C.) was preparing for a career in politics when the trial and eventual execution of Socrates (399 B.C.) changed the course of his life. He abandoned his political career and turned to philosophy, opening a school on the outskirts of Athens dedicated to the Socratic search for wisdom. Plato's school, then known as the Academy, was the first university in western history and operated from 387 B.C. until A.D. 529, when it was closed by Justinian. Unlike his mentor Socrates, Plato was both a writer and a teacher. His writings are in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the principal speaker. In theAllegory of the Cave, Plato described symbolically the predicament in which mankind finds itself and proposes a way of salvation. The Allegorypresents, in brief form, most of Plato's major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; his idea that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to student, but rather that education consists in directing student's minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves; his faith that the universe ultimately is good; his conviction that enlightened individuals have an obligation to the rest of society, and that a good society must be one in which the truly wise (the PhilosopherKing) are the rulers. The Allegory of the Cave can be found in Book VII of Plato's best-known work, The Republic, a lengthy dialogue on the nature of justice. Often regarded as a utopian blueprint, The Republic is dedicated toward a discussion of the education required of a Philosopher-King. The following selection is taken from the Benjamin Jowett translation (Vintage, 1991), pp. 253261. As you read the Allegory, try to make a mental picture of the cave Plato describes. Better yet, why not draw a picture of it and refer to it as you read the selection. In many ways, understanding Plato'sAllegory of the Cave will make your foray into the world of philosophical thought much less burdensome. * * * * * *

[Socrates] And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing

at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. [Glaucon] I see. [Socrates] And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. [Glaucon] You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. [Socrates] Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? [Glaucon] True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? [Socrates] And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows? [Glaucon] Yes, he said. [Socrates] And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? [Glaucon] Very true. [Socrates] And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? [Glaucon] No question, he replied. [Socrates] To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. [Glaucon] That is certain. [Socrates] And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? [Glaucon] Far truer. [Socrates] And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him? [Glaucon] True, he now. [Socrates] And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he 's forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. [Glaucon] Not all in a moment, he said. [Socrates] He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will

see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day? [Glaucon] Certainly. [Socrates] Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is. [Glaucon] Certainly. [Socrates] He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold? [Glaucon] Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him. [Socrates] And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the cave and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them? [Glaucon] Certainly, he would. [Socrates] And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? [Glaucon] Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. [Socrates] Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness? [Glaucon] To be sure, he said. [Socrates] And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. [Glaucon] No question, he said. [Socrates] This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the

lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed. [Glaucon] I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you. [Socrates] Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted. [Glaucon] Yes, very natural. [Socrates] And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice? [Glaucon] Anything but surprising, he replied. [Socrates] Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the cave. [Glaucon] That, he said, is a very just distinction. [Socrates] But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. [Glaucon] They undoubtedly say this, he replied. [Socrates] Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good. [Glaucon] Very true. [Socrates] And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth? [Glaucon] Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed. [Socrates] And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue --how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion

to his cleverness. [Glaucon] Very true, he said. [Socrates] But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below --if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now. [Glaucon] Very likely. [Socrates] Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely. or rather a necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blest. [Glaucon] Very true, he replied. [Socrates] Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of allthey must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now. [Glaucon] What do you mean? [Socrates] I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the cave, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not. [Glaucon] But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better? [Socrates] You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State. [Glaucon] True, he said, I had forgotten. [Socrates] Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the cave, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for

power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst. [Glaucon] Quite true, he replied. [Socrates] And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heavenly light? [Glaucon] Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our present rulers of State. [Socrates] Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after the' own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State. [Glaucon] Most true, he replied. [Socrates] And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other? [Glaucon] Indeed, I do not, he said. [Socrates] And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight. [Glaucon] No question. [Socrates] Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honors and another and a better life than that of politics? [Glaucon] They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied. [Socrates] And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced, and how they are to be brought from darkness to light, -- as some are said to have ascended from the world below to the gods? [Glaucon] By all means, he replied. [Socrates] The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below, which we affirm to be true philosophy? [Glaucon] Quite so. | Return to the Lecture | | The History Guide | Feedback | copyright ?2000 Steven Kreis Last Revised -- May 13, 2004 Conditions of Use

Lecture 2 The Medieval World View (1)

For the most part, it can be said that great thinkers lead two lives. Their first life occurs while they are busy at work in their earthly garden. But there is also a second life which begins the moment their life ceases and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful. In the history of the western intellectual tradition -- a tradition reaching back to the preSocratic philosophers of Ionia -- there have always been great thinkers who have attempted to explain the nature and scope of human knowledge. Toward the end of the 18th century, a German idealist philosopher published a number of important philosophical treatises -- treatises which he called critiques. The Critique of Practical Reason, The Critique of Pure Reason andThe Critique of Judgment were the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The

great question which plagued Kant, as well as all philosophers before or after him, was this: what is knowledge? This is an epistemological question and is often joined by other questions: what is reality? what is illusion? What can we know? What does it mean to know something? In the INTRODUCTION to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant began with the following words: There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. This, of course, is the credo of the empiricist. John Locke (1632-1704) was an empiricist. So too were Galileo(1564-1642), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In fact, most scientists are empiricists by nature. This should tell you something. It was Locke who, in the late 17th century, argued that the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience records itself as knowledge. What you see is what you get. For Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), "the point is, that an elephant, when present, is noticed." Things exist -- we experience them -- and this becomes knowledge. But Locke was a rather "modern" empiricist. One of the first empiricists was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). In fact, it's safe to say that it was Aristotle who made the empirical point of view a reality. Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great. Aristotle had also been the pupil of Plato (c.427-347 B.C.), who was in turn, the student of Socrates(c.469-399 B.C.). Plato, simply stated, believed that universal ideas of things - like justice, beauty, truth -- had an objective existence all their own. What this means is that these things existed whether men perceived (apprehended) them or not. They had an independent reality which Plato believed men could come to grasp as knowledge. These ideas exist "apriori," that is, they exist prior to experience and hence, transcend experience. For Plato, our senses are deceptive and what we experience in our daily lives is not reality but the shadow of reality. This is one of the messages of Plato's Republic, specifically THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE. Plato's doctrine of the Forms (Ideas, or Universals) concerns itself with innate ideas -- ideas which exist before men have experience of them. This philosophical school has come to be known as rationalism. So, between 384 and 330 B.C. in Athens, the two major western philosophical traditions of thought were born. For 2000 years, philosophers had to choose whether they followed Plato and his rationalism, or Aristotle and his empiricism. Indeed, Plato comes off as the first philosopher and Aristotle as his first critic. As Whitehead wrote inProcess and Reality in 1929: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Now, getting back to Kant. "Though all our knowledge begins with experience," he wrote, "it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." What Kant did with this one simple statement was to supply a synthesis -- necessary perhaps -- of 2000 years of philosophical discussion on the nature and scope of human knowledge. This single act secured for this solitary Lutheran philosopher a central place in the western intellectual tradition. This much said, however, a synthetic act was created much earlier using different philosophical tools but with an end result whose ramifications were no less profound.

It was the "Dumb Ox" of Roccasecca, as SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274) was called, who, by the end of the 13th century, had also supplied a necessary intellectual synthesis. By the end of the 13th century, Christianity had become the world view of medieval Europe. But Christianity -- especially a Christianity as interpreted by its institutional form, the Church -- was always confronted by challenges. One such challenge was Human Reason -a capacity to think which had been discovered by the Greeks, accepted by the Romans, but which had been labeled pagan by centuries of intellectual arrogance on the part of the Church Fathers. The Church Fathers -- Origen (185-254), St. Jerome (c.342-420) and St. Augustine (354-430) -- sought to explain the Holy Writ through Revelation and Faith alone. But, they soon realized that they needed the classical authors to aid them in their writing. So, men like Plato or Cicero (106-43 B.C.) were thorns in the side of Christian thinkers like Jerome and Augustine. Aquinas recognized this and sought reconciliation. But instead of uniting two philosophical traditions as Kant was to do in the 1780s, Aquinas joined two methods. Reason was no longer conceived as the nemesis of Faith. Neither was Philosophy the enemy of Theology. Instead, Aquinas joined the two by claiming that both were paths to a single truth: "God exists." Hopefully, this should ring a few bells for this is very similar to what Abelard had done a century earlier. Before we turn to the synthesis of Aquinas, it is necessary to examine the historical context from which this synthesis appeared. By the end of the 12th century there were signs of a widespread awakening and progress felt across Europe. For instance, the lords of the manor were learning to make better use of their serfs. They did this by emancipating them and so from this point on the serfs were now called peasants. Peasants were no longer tied to the land by labor obligations owed to the lord. Now, they paid rent instead. Meanwhile, suburbs began to appear around older cities and hundreds of new villages sprang into being. Overall, European society was becoming more diversified and life was beginning to hold more comforts. And in terms of intellectual history, this period has come be characterized as the 12th Century Renaissance. All across northern Europe and England, peasants were freed from labor obligations and were now offered land -- for rent -- under very attractive terms. Peasants expanded into new territories. They leveled forests and drained swamps wherever they went. The peasants also had better tools at their disposal. The plough was now in general use, wind mills were more common and the land seemed to be yielding more. Despite numerous setbacks, the peasantry of northern Europe slowly recognized that a three field system of crop rotation would yield more than the older two field system. The bottom line is this -- peasants were better fed, less afraid of famine and could now raise more children because the land could support a larger, or at least growing, population. And the peasants did raise more children for one of the signs of increased economic prosperity was at the same time an increase in the population. In areas where peasants normally congregated, villages became towns and towns became cities. A process of urbanization was under way -- a process which the Romans had to abandon in the

3rd century under the pressures of barbarian invasion. Rome was a specifically urban civilization. The Romans liked their cities and the conveniences the city offered. But by the 4th century at the latest, this began to change as Germanic tribes moved south of the Danube River, deeper and deeper into the heart of the Roman Empire. With the final collapse of the Empire in the 5th century Germanic tribes were everywhere. Not only did they bring their language, religions and customs, they also brought with them a preference for the open country and a general distaste for anything citified. So, between the 5th century and the 11th century, the urban civilization of the former Roman Empire declined. The process of urbanization would not begin anew until the 11th century at the earliest. One of the reasons why this is so is that the threat of barbarian migration began to subside. And the reason this took place was that slowly but surely, the chieftains of the barbarian tribes were converted to Christianity. And once a chieftain was converted, so too were his people converted as an act of homage and loyalty. The economic factors of renewed urbanization affected all orders of European society. However, it was the European peasantry who reaped the fewest benefits of this progress. Just the same, landlords were now making less demands on the peasantry. Peasants could rent land to which they could direct all their energy. They could also pass this land on to their sons. In other words, a degree of liberty had begun to infiltrate the world of the European peasant. While the peasants roughed out their lives in the countryside, there were artisans who inhabited towns and cities. As craftsmen and shopkeepers, builders and tradesmen, they had the potential to spread the fruits of their labor over a wider market, a market stretching from the North Sea to North Africa and from Constantinople to Lisbon. In the towns of Italy -- especially port towns like Genoa, Pisa and Venice -- a passion for money-making resulted in what would eventually become a genuinely capitalist society. It was in Italy that the commercial practices and attitudes so characteristic of later ages first emerged. Italian merchants learned how to change money, they perfected doubleentry bookkeeping, and they formed trading associations in order to protect their mercantile interests. So, by the 13th century, there existed a bourgeois mentality characterized by the spirit of entrepreneurial risk taking, the pursuit of gain and with all that, the demand for greater political freedom. However, although we can locate a growing bourgeois mentality, there is at this time no evidence of a nascent bourgeois culture -- that again would come with time. The ruling orders were also changing fast. The nobility were the men who reaped the most benefits from the emancipation of the serfs and the subsequent increase in agricultural productivity. With improved productivity, the nobility could now collect higher rents and obtain greater profits from the sale of surplus agricultural goods. And while the nobility clearly made more money, they were always quick to find new and quicker ways to spend it. So, they began to improve their castles -- castles became larger and more elaborate. They sought out better armor and weapons. The artisans of the growing towns and cities, now joined together in cooperatives known as guilds, were only too happy to supply the nobility with whatever it was they needed. And while the nobility built bigger and more impenetrable castles, and obtained the best in armor and weaponry, they also began to dress in finer clothes which the merchants of the cities, now also members of their own guilds, brought to them. Many members of the nobility across Europe sought a refinement of life. The economic changes which I have already briefly described brought with them cultural and intellectual progress, especially when compared with the centuries which had come before. The Crusades, for the most

part, were over. What was the medieval knight to do now that his main business of the day -killing the infidels and their children -- had come to an end? Hunting and tournaments, at least for some nobles, began to give way to a lively interest in culture and education. The feudal court, once merely a gathering place for knights to fill their bellies while engaged in a Holy Quest, now became centers of intense literary activity. But, with all this said, it would be incorrect to say that the medieval knight was a more cultured individual. The medieval knight was still a fighting machine, he was still a fierce and oftentimes gluttonous warrior. In the 12th and 13th centuries, something like a revival of the arts and letters was taking place across England and the Continent. This revival -- or Renaissance -- was more pronounced in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is almost a general characteristic of European history as a whole, that compared to the West, Eastern Europe seemed backward and primitive. One of the major characteristics of this Renaissance was the rediscovery of numerous Latin classics. For the philosophers, theologians and poets of the 12th and 13th centuries, there was much wisdom to be obtained in the pages of Virgil's (70-19 B.C.) Aeneid, or Ovid's (43 B.C.A.D. 17) Metamorphosis or the letters and political speeches of that greatest of Roman orators, Cicero, or the Stoicism of a Seneca (5 B.C.-A.D. 65). Besides the ideas implicit in these classical authors, the major contribution of the rediscovery of these texts was a style of writing. That style was classical Latin. Just think about it. 12th century scholars were now reading texts written in Latin over 1200 years ago. It goes without saying that the Latin language had undergone profound transformations over the years, just as the English language has changed over the past 100 years. Imagine what it must have been like to discover ancient texts written in a more or less recognizable form, but which were more expressive and more lyrical. As a result, 12th and 13th century poets began to express their own thoughts and feelings in a language which now came to them naturally. And, it's also worth mentioning that these poets were now writing for an increasingly larger audience. There was a greater use of rhyme and meter and while most poetry remained religious in nature, there were other writers who were beginning to emote over more secular themes. It was the Wandering Scholars or Goliards who used the vernacular instead of classical or even medieval or Carolingian Latin. The Goliards wrote free and joyous poetry -- they have a near immediate appeal to the modern reader because they stand outside the image of medieval piety and religious devotion. GOLIARDIC VERSE -- meant to be sung rather than simply read -praises the pleasures of this world as well as despair over the uncertainties of life. The Goliards were also deeply critical of the "system" -- especially the privileged orders of the knights, bishops and professors. The wandering scholars were dissatisfied with their own age and so they reveled in a rather boisterous, drunken life -- they were Europe's first bohemians. The growth of vernacular literature happened most readily in those places where the authority of the Church seemed to be weakest. But there were other reasons why we can observe this shift from medieval Latin to the vernacular. In the south of France, professional scribes were finding it more and more difficult to write official documents in Latin. The words of the spoken language, the langue d'oc came much easier to them. After all, it was the spoken language which had grown and so literature, whether an official document or poem, had to reflect this change. By 1200, most official documents were now composed in the vernacular. Other examples of

vernacular texts abound: the Chanson de Roland is perhaps the best French example. From Germany we have the Kaiserchronik. And of course, the 14th century could almost be called the golden age of vernacular literature for there we find Geoffrey Chaucer's (1345-1400) Canterbury Tales, Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313-1375) Decameron, William Langland's (c.1332-c.1400) Piers Plowman, Jean Froissart's (c.1333-c.1405) Chronicles and Dante's (1265-1321) Divine Comedy. While these developments took place across Europe and England, a new institution appeared at which much of this new learning could be found. By the 13th century, universities had been established at Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Padua and Bologna. We have the so-called Dark Ages to thank for the university. University students could obtain a B.A., M.A. or Ph.D. degree in one of four higher faculties: Theology, Philosophy, Medicine or Law. (D.D., Ph.D., M.D., J.D.) Some schools specialized in law such as the University of Bologna -- a university run and controlled by the students. Other universities, like Paris, specialized in theology and philosophy. Padua specialized in medicine. It was at the university that the western intellectual tradition we are most interested in can be found. Indeed, it is at the university that the modern intellectual can be found. At Paris, for instance, we meet Abelard, a teacher so eloquent, so persuasive and so masterful that he attracted students from all over Europe. Even after his expulsion from Paris because of his affair with Heloise, students flocked to his side to hear his dissertations on theology and philosophy. Abelard, in other words, was a product of the university which in turn was a product of the city which was a product of economic and social circumstances which made the rise of cities possible in the first place. And while the university was a breeding ground of consent and conformity to papal authority and Christian dogma, the university could also be fertile soil for dissent or, at the very least, a spirit of inquiry. Abelard was no heretic, but by calling the authority of the Church Fathers into question, he certainly had made the conscious choice to voice his dissent. A spirit of inquiry and skepticism was perhaps here to stay. Although we may be apt to label a man like Abelard a dissenter, or even a radical, he never frontally assaulted the Church or its authority. Instead he raised questions and let the reader decide. But by the beginning of the 13th century, there were numerous and much more direct challenges to the Church which we need to consider. These challenges will help us understand the intellectual or religious environment in which a man like Aquinas lived. | Part Two | | Table of Contents | | The History Guide |?script LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> | copyright ?2000 Steven Kreis Last Revised -- August 03, 2009 Conditions of Use

I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it, feeling myself too ill-instructed to instruct others. (Montaigne)

Contents
A Student's Guide to the Study of History What is History? Resources for Historians Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History Lectures on Early Modern European History (in progress) Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History Lectures on 20th Century Europe Syllabi for European History About the Author Curriculum Vitae Send comments to: feedback@historyguide.org

The History Guide has been created for the high school and undergraduate student who is either taking classes in history, or who intends to major in history in college. The purpose of The History Guide is to better prepare yourself for your history classes and to make your time in class more enjoyable and proficient. The History Guide contains the complete content of three undergraduate courses in European history which will certainly be of use to those of you studying such topics at the college level or in A.P. European history classes. The History Guide contains ninety lectures in European history from ancient Sumer to the fall of Soviet-style communism in 1989. In essence, what is presented here is an online textbook in western civilization, with special reference to the western intellectual tradition. Parents engaged in home schooling their children will find much that is of interest and I urge you to contact me if there are any details I can help provide to you. The History Guide also contains an intellectual autobiography. If you are thinking of pursuing graduate work in history, then you should definitely read it carefully before you jump in over your head. This site has been developed in the Socratic spirit of wisdom and knowledge. If I can't share the knowledge I have obtained over the years then that knowledge has certainly been ill-conceived. Feel free to send me your comments. Enjoy! This is for you! The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn. copyright?996-2010 Steven Kreis Last Revised -- July 21, 2010

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Lecture 8 Greek Thought: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

The political and social upheaval caused by the Persian Wars as well as continued strife between Athens and Sparta (see Lecture 7) had at least one unintended consequence . In the 5th century, a flood of new ideas poured into Athens. In general, these new ideas came as a result of an influx of Ionian thinkers into the Attic peninsula. Athens had become the intellectual and artistic center of the Greek world. Furthermore, by the mid-5th century, it had become more common for advanced thinkers to reject traditional explanations of the world of nature. As a result of the experience of a century of war, religious beliefs declined. Gods and goddesses were no longer held in the same regard as they had been a century earlier. I suppose we could generalize and say that the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars taught that the actions of men and women determine their own destiny, and not "Moira." Meanwhile, more traditional notions of right and wrong were called into question, and all of this was expressed in Hellenic tragedy and comedy. The Greeks used their creative energies to explain experience by recourse to history, tragedy, comedy, art and architecture. But their creative energies were also used to "invent" philosophy, defined as "the love of wisdom." In general, philosophy came into existence when the Greeks discovered their dissatisfaction with supernatural and mythical explanations of reality. Over time, Greek thinkers began to suspect that there was a rational or logical order to the universe.

The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

The PRE-SOCRATIC philosophers came from the city of Miletus in the region of Ionia. Miletus was a prominent trading depot and its people had direct contact with the ideas of the Near East. Around 600 B.C., Milesian thinkers "discovered" speculation after asking a simple but profound question: "what exists?" It was the Ionian natural philosopher, Thales of Miletus (c.624-548 B.C.), who answered that everything in the universe was made of water and resolves itself into water. What was so revolutionary about Thales was that he omitted the gods from his account of the origins of nature. It is also necessary to point out that Thales committed none of his views to writing.Anaximander of Miletus (c.611-c.547 B.C.), another Milesian thinker, rejected Thales, and argued instead that an indefinite substance -- the Boundless -- was the source of all things. According to Anaximander, the cold and wet condensed to form the earth while the hot and dry formed the moon, sun and stars. The heat from the fire in the skies dried the earth and shrank the seas. It's a rather fantastic scheme, but at least Anaximander sought natural explanations for the origin of the natural world. Thales and Anaximander were "matter" philosophers -- they believed that everything had its origin in a material substance. Pythagoras of Samos (c.580-507 B.C.) did not find that nature of things in material substances but in mathematical relationships. The Pythagoreans, who lived in Greek cities in southern Italy, discovered that the intervals in the musical scale could be expressed mathematically and that this principle could be extended to the universe. In other words, the universe contained an inherent mathematical order. What we witness in the Pythagoreans is the emphasis on form rather than matter, and here we move from sense perception to the logic of mathematics.

Parmenides of Elea (c.515-450 B.C.), also challenged the fundamental views of the Ionian philosophers that all things emerged from one substance. What Parmenides did was to apply logic to the arguments of the Pythagoreans, thus setting the groundwork of formal logic. He argued that reality is one, eternal and unchanging. We "know" reality not by the senses, which are capable of deception, but through the human mind, not through experience, but through reason. As we shall see, this concept shall become central to the philosophic thought of Plato. Perhaps the most important of all the Pre-Socratic philosophers was Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500 B.C.). Known as "the weeping philosopher" because of his pessimistic view of human nature and "the dark one" because of the mystical obscurity of his thought, Heraclitus wrote On Nature, fragments of which we still possess. Whereas the Pythagoreans had emphasized harmony, Heraclitus suggested that life was maintained by a tension of opposites, fighting a continuous battle in which neither side could win a final victory. Movement and the flux of change were unceasing for individuals, but the structure of the cosmos constant. This law of individual flux within a permanent universal framework was guaranteed by the Logos, an intelligent governing principle materially embodied as fire, and identified with soul or life. Fire is the primordial element out of which all else has arisen -- change (becoming) is the first principle of the universe. Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, once made the remark that "You cannot step twice into the same river." The water will be different water the second time, and if we call the river the same, it is because we see its reality in its form. The logical conclusion of this is the opposite of flux, that is, a belief in an absolute, unchanging reality of which the world of change and movement is only a quasi-existing phantom, phenomenal, not real. Democritus of Abdera (c.460-370 B.C.) argued that knowledge was derived through sense perception -- the senses illustrate to us that change does occur in nature. However, Democritus also retained Parmenides' confidence in human reason. His universe consisted of empty space and an infinite number of atoms (a-tomos, the "uncuttable"). Eternal and indivisible, these atoms moved in the void of space. An atomic theory to the core, Democritus saw all matter constructed of atoms which accounted for all change in the natural world. What the Pre-Socratic thinkers from Thales to Democritus had done was nothing less than amazing -- they had given to nature a rational and non-mythical foundation. This new approach allowed a critical analysis of theories, whereas mythical explanations relied on blind faith alone. Such a spirit even found its way into medicine, where the Greek physician Hippocrates of Cos (c.460-c.377 B.C.) was able to distinguish between magic and medicine. Physicians observed ill patients, classified symptoms and then made predictions about the course of a disease. For instance, of epilepsy, he wrote: "It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more scared than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character."

The Sophists
Into such an atmosphere of change came the traveling teachers, the Sophists. The Sophists were a motley bunch some hailed from the Athenian polis or other city-states, but the majority came from Ionia, in Asia Minor. The Sophists were men whose responsibility it was to train and

educate the sons of Athenian citizens. There were no formal school as we know them today. Instead, these were peripatetic schools, meaning that the instructor would walk with students and talk with them for a fee, of course. The Sophists taught the skills (sophia) of rhetoric and oratory. Both of these arts were essential for the education of the Athenian citizenry. After all, it was the sons of the citizens who would eventually find themselves debating important issues in the Assembly and the Council of Five Hundred. Rhetoric can be described as the art of composition, while oratory was the art of public speaking. The Sophists abandoned science, philosophy, mathematics and ethics. What they taught was the subtle art of persuasion. A Sophist was a person who could argue eloquently and could prove a position whether that position was correct or incorrect. In other words, what mattered was persuasion and not truth. The Sophists were also relativists. They believed that there was no such thing as a universal or absolute truth, valid at all times. According to Protagoras (c.485-c.411 B.C.), "Man is the measure of all things." Everything is relative and there are no values because man, individual man, is the measure of all things. Nothing is good or bad since everything depends on the individual. Gorgias of Leontini (c.485-c.380 B.C.), who visited Athens in 427, was a well-paid teacher of rhetoric and famous for his saying that a man could not know anything. And if he could, he could not describe it and if he could describe it, no one would understand him. The Sophistic movement of the fifth century B.C. has been the subject of much discussion and there is no single view about their significance. Plato's treatment of the Sophists in his late dialogue, the Sophist, is hardly flattering. He does not treat them as real seekers after truth but as men whose only concern was making money and teaching their students success in argument by whatever means. Aristotle said that a Sophist was "one who made money by sham wisdom." At their very best, the Sophists challenged the accepted values of the fifth century. They wanted the freedom to sweep away old conventions as a way of finding a better understanding of the universe, the gods and man. The Sophists have been compared with the philosophes of the 18th century Enlightenment who also used criticism and reason to wipe out anything they deemed was contrary to human reason. Regardless of what we think of the Sophists as a group or individually, they certainly did have the cumulative effect of further degrading a mythical understanding of the universe and of man.

Socrates
From the ranks of the Sophists came SOCRATES (c.469-399 B.C.), perhaps the most noble and wisest Athenian to have ever lived. He was born sometime in 469, we don't know for sure. What we do know is that his father was Sophroniscus, a stone cutter, and his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife. Sophroniscus was a close friend of the son of Aristides the Just (c.550-468 B.C.), and the young Socrates was familiar with members of the circle of Pericles. In his youth he fought as a hoplite at Potidaea (432-429), Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422) during the Peloponnesian Wars. To be sure, his later absorption in philosophy made him

neglect his private affairs and he eventually fell to a level of comparative poverty. He was perhaps more in love with the study of philosophy than with his family -- that his wife Xanthippe was shrew is a later tale. In Plato's dialogue, the Crito, we meet a Socrates concerned with the future of his three sons. Just the same, his entire life was subordinated to "the supreme art of philosophy." He was a good citizen but held political office only once he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred in 406 B.C. In Plato's Apology, Socrates remarks that: The true champion if justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone. What we can be sure about Socrates was that he was remarkable for living the life he preached. Taking no fees, Socrates started and dominated an argument wherever the young and intelligent would listen, and people asked his advice on matters of practical conduct and educational problems. Socrates was not an attractive man -- he was snub-nosed, prematurely bald, and overweight. But, he was strong in body and the intellectual master of every one with whom he came into contact. The Athenian youth flocked to his side as he walked the paths of the agora. They clung to his every word and gesture. He was not a Sophist himself, but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. In 399 B.C., Socrates was charged with impiety by a jury of five hundred of his fellow citizens. His most famous student, Plato, tells us, that he was charged "as an evil-doer and curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heavens; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others." He was convicted to death by a margin of six votes. Oddly enough, the jury offered Socrates the chance to pay a small fine for his impiety. He rejected it. He also rejected the pleas of Plato and other students who had a boat waiting for him at Piraeus that would take him to freedom. But Socrates refused to break the law. What kind of citizen would he be if he refused to accept the judgment of the jury? No citizen at all. He spent his last days with his friends before he drank the fatal dose of hemlock. The charge made against Socrates -- disbelief in the state's gods -- implied un-Athenian activities which would corrupt the young and the state if preached publicly. Meletus, the citizen who brought the indictment, sought precedents in the impiety trials of Pericles' friends. Although Socrates was neither a heretic nor an agnostic, there was prejudice against him. He also managed to provoke hostility. For instance, the Delphic oracle is said to have told Chaerephon that no man was wiser than Socrates. During his trial Socrates had the audacity to use this as a justification of his examination of the conduct of all Athenians, claiming that in exposing their falsehoods, he had proved the god right -- he at least knew that he knew nothing. Although this episode smacks of Socrates' well-known irony, he clearly did believe that his mission was divinely inspired. Socrates has been described as a gadfly -- a first-class pain. The reason why this charge is somewhat justified is that he challenged his students to think for themselves to use their minds to answer questions. He did not reveal answers. He did not reveal truth. Many of his questions were, on the surface, quite simple: what is courage? what is virtue? what is duty? But what Socrates discovered, and what he taught his students to discover, was that most people could not

answer these fundamental questions to his satisfaction, yet all of them claimed to be courageous, virtuous and dutiful. So, what Socrates knew, was that he knew nothing, upon this sole fact lay the source of his wisdom. Socrates was not necessarily an intelligent man but he was a wise man. And there is a difference between the two.

Plato
Socrates wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes from the writings of two of his closest friends, Xenophon and Plato. Although Xenophon (c.430-c.354 B.C.) did write four short portraits of Socrates, it is almost to Plato alone that we know anything of Socrates. PLATO (c.427-347 B.C.) came from a family of aristoi, served in the Peloponnesian War, and was perhaps Socrates' most famous student. He was twenty-eight years old when Socrates was put to death. At the age of forty, Plato established a school at Athens for the education of Athenian youth. The Academy, as it was called, remained in existence from 387 B.C. to A.D. 529, when it was closed by Justinian, the Byzantine emperor. Our knowledge of Socrates comes to us from numerous dialogues which Plato wrote after 399. In nearly every dialogue and there are more than thirty that we know about Socrates is the main speaker. The style of the Plato's dialogue is important it is the Socratic style that he employs throughout. A Socratic dialogue takes the form of question-answer, question-answer, question-answer. It is a dialectical style as well. Socrates would argue both sides of a question in order to arrive at a conclusion. Then that conclusion is argued against another assumption and so on. Perhaps it is not that difficult to understand why Socrates was considered a gadfly! There is a reason why Socrates employed this style, as well as why Plato recorded his experience with Socrates in the form of a dialogue. Socrates taught Plato a great many things, but one of the things Plato more or less discovered on his own was that mankind is born with knowledge. That is, knowledge is present in the human mind at birth. It is not so much that we "learn" things in our daily experience, but that we "recollect" them. In other words, this knowledge is already there. This may explain why Socrates did not give his students answers, but only questions. His job was not to teach truth but to show his students how they could "pull" truth out of their own minds (it is for this reason that Socrates often considered himself a midwife in the labor of knowledge). And this is the point of the dialogues. For only in conversation, only in dialogue, can truth and wisdom come to the surface. Plato's greatest and most enduring work was his lengthy dialogue, The Republic. This dialogue has often been regarded as Plato's blueprint for a future society of perfection. I do not accept this opinion. Instead, I would like to suggest that The Republic is not a blueprint for a future society, but rather, is a dialogue which discusses the education necessary to produce such a society. It is an education of a strange sort he called it paideia. Nearly impossible to translate into modern idiom, paideia refers to the process whereby the physical, mental and spiritual development of the individual is of paramount importance. It is the education of the total individual.

The Republic discusses a number of topics including the nature of justice, statesmanship, ethics and the nature of politics. It is in The Republic that Plato suggests that democracy was little more than a "charming form of government." And this he is writing less than one hundred years after the brilliant age of Periclean democracy. So much for democracy. After all, it was Athenian democracy that convicted Socrates. For Plato, the citizens are the least desirable participants in government. Instead, a philosopher-king or guardian should hold the reigns of power. An aristocracy if you will an aristocracy of the very best the best of the aristoi. Plato's Republic also embodies one of the clearest expressions of his theory of knowledge. In The Republic, Plato asks what is knowledge? what is illusion? what is reality? how do we know? what makes a thing, a thing? what can we know? These are epistemological questions that is, they are questions about knowledge itself. He distinguishes between the reality presented to us by our senses sight, touch, taste, sound and smell and the essence or Form of that reality. In other words, reality is always changing knowledge of reality is individual, it is particular, it is knowledge only to the individual knower, it is not universal. Building upon the wisdom of Socrates and Parmenides, Plato argued that reality is known only through the mind. There is a higher world, independent of the world we may experience through our senses. Because the senses may deceive us, it is necessary that this higher world exist, a world of Ideas or Forms -- of what is unchanging, absolute and universal. In other words, although there may be something from the phenomenal world which we consider beautiful or good or just, Plato postulates that there is a higher unchanging reality of the beautiful, goodness or justice. To live in accordance with these universal standards is the good life -- to grasp the Forms is to grasp ultimate truth. The unphilosophical man that is, all of us is at the mercy of sense impressions and unfortunately, our sense impressions oftentimes fail us. Our senses deceive us. But because we trust our senses, we are like prisoners in a cave we mistake shadows on a wall for reality. This is the central argument of Plato's ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE which appears in Book VII of The Republic. Plato realized that the Athenian state, and along with it, Athenian direct democracy, had failed to realize its lofty ideals. Instead, the citizens sent Socrates to his death and direct democracy had failed. The purpose of The Republic was something of a warning to all Athenians that without respect for law, leadership and a sound education for the young, their city would continue to decay. Plato wanted to rescue Athens from degeneration by reviving that sense of community that had at one time made the polis great. The only way to do this, Plato argued, was to give control over to the Philosopher-Kings, men who had philosophical knowledge, and to give little more than "noble lies" to everyone else. The problem as Plato saw it was that power and wisdom had traveled divergent paths - his solution was to unite them in the guise of the Philosopher-King.

Aristotle
Plato's most famous student was ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.). His

father was the personal physician to Philip of Macedon and Aristotle was, for a time at least, the personal tutor of Alexander the Great. Aristotle styled himself a biologist he is said to have spent his honeymoon collecting specimens at the seashore. He too was charged with impiety, but fled rather than face the charges I suppose that tells you something about Aristotle. At the age of eighteen, Aristotle became the student at the Academy of Plato (who was then sixty years of age). Aristotle also started his own school, the Lyceum in 335 B.C. It too was closed by Justinian in A.D. 529. Aristotle was a "polymath" he knew a great deal about nearly everything. Very little of Aristotle's writings remain extant. But his students recorded nearly everything he discussed at the Lyceum. In fact, the books to which Aristotle's name is attributed are really little more than student notebooks. This may account for the fact that Aristotle's philosophy is one of the more difficult to digest. Regardless, Aristotle lectured on astronomy, physics, logic, aesthetics, music, drama, tragedy, poetry, zoology, ethics and politics. The one field in which he did not excel was mathematics. Plato, on the other hand, was a master of geometry. As a scientist, Aristotle's epistemology is perhaps closer to our own. For Aristotle did not agree with Plato that there is an essence or Form or Absolute behind every object in the phenomenal world. I suppose you could argue that Aristotle came from the Jack Webb school of epistemology "nothing but the facts, Mam." Or, as one historian has put it: "The point is, that an elephant, when present, is noticed." In other words, whereas Plato suggested that man was born with knowledge, Aristotle argued that knowledge comes from experience. And there, in the space of just a few decades, we have the essence of those two philosophical traditions which have occupied the western intellectual tradition for the past 2500 years. Rationalism knowledge is a priori (comes before experience) and Empiricism knowledge is a posteriori (comes after experience). It is almost fitting that one of Plato's greatest students ought to have also been his greatest critics. Like Democritus, Aristotle had confidence in sense perception. As a result, he had little patience with Plato's higher world of the Forms. However, Aristotle argued that there were universal principles but that they are derived from experience. He could not accept, as had Plato, that there was a world of Forms beyond space and time. Aristotle argued that that there were Forms and Absolutes, but that they resided in the thing itself. From our experience with horses, for instance, we can deduce the essence of "horseness." This universal, as it had been for Plato, was the true object of human knowledge. It perhaps goes without saying that the western intellectual tradition, as well as the history of western philosophy, must begin with an investigation of ancient Greek thought. From Thales and the matter philosophers to the empiricism of Aristotle, the Greeks passed on to the west a spirit of rational inquiry that is very much our own intellectual property. And while we may never think of Plato or Aristotle as we carry on in our daily lives, it was their inquiry into knowledge that has served as the foundation for all subsequent inquiries. Indeed, many have argued with W. H. Auden that "had Greek civilization never existed we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human."

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