Plato

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Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher whose surviving dialogues became the foundation document of Western metaphysics. A member of the city’s aristocracy, he turned away from the political career his birth invited after the trial and execution of his teacher Socrates, and devoted himself instead to philosophy, founding the school in the grove of Akademos that gave the academy its name. Almost everything attributed to him takes the form of dramatic conversation, most of it staged with Socrates as its central voice — which leaves a standing problem no scholarship has fully resolved: where Socrates ends and Plato begins.

The teaching most associated with his name is the theory of Forms. The world given to the senses, on this account, is changeable, partial, and never quite itself; behind it stand the Forms — perfect, eternal patterns of which visible things are imperfect copies, with the Form of the Good above them all, the source of being and intelligibility together. Knowledge, properly speaking, is of the Forms, not of their shadows; the philosopher’s work is the turning of the soul away from appearance toward what genuinely is. Bound up with this is a doctrine of the soul as immortal and prior to the body, which learns by recollecting what it knew before birth. How systematically Plato held these positions, and how much the dialogue form was meant to stage questions rather than settle them, remains actively debated.

It is the religious and cosmological strand of the dialogues that carries longest into esoteric history. The Timaeus describes a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, shaping the cosmos by looking to an eternal model; the Symposium and Phaedrus set out an ascent of the soul, drawn upward by beauty and love toward the vision of the Good; the myth of Er and other passages sketch the soul’s fate after death. These were the texts later readers mined hardest.

What practitioners across centuries believed they had inherited from Plato was often a Plato refracted through his successors. From the first century onward, Middle Platonists and then the Neoplatonists — Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus — read the dialogues as a unified, ascending metaphysics and fused them with religious practice, so that the philosophy arrived in late antiquity already half a theology. It was largely this Plato, the contemplative and theurgic one, that passed to Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers, and that the Renaissance recovered when Ficino translated the complete dialogues into Latin. Much of what later traditions call Platonic is in fact this received synthesis. The historical Plato, behind the dialogue form he chose and the successors who recast him, remains the harder figure to recover.

→ In the library: Plato — The Dialogues (Jowett) · Plato — Timaeus (Jowett) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna)

→ Related: Socrates · Neoplatonism · The One · Nous · Iamblichus · Proclus