The Cambridge Companion to Plato, The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy
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RICHARD KRAUT
1 Introduction to the study of
Plato
Plato (427-347 B.C.)
1
stands at the head of our philosophical tradi-
tion, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing
that touches upon the wide range of topics that are still discussed by
philosophers today under such headings as metaphysics, epistemol-
ogy, ethics, political theory, language, art, love, mathematics, sci-
ence, and religion. He may in this sense be said to have invented
philosophy as a distinct subject, for although all of these topics were,
of course, discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contempo-
raries, he was the first to bring them together by giving them a
unitary treatment. He conceives of philosophy as a discipline with a
distinctive intellectual method, and he makes radical claims for its
position in human life and the political community. Because philoso-
phy scrutinizes assumptions that other studies merely take for
granted, it alone can give us genuine understanding; since it discov-
ers a realm of objects inaccessible to the senses and yields an orga-
nized system of truths that go far beyond and in some cases under-
mine common sense, it should lead to a transformation in the way
we live our lives and arrange our political affairs. It is an autono-
mous subject and not the instrument of any other discipline, power,
or creed; on the contrary, because it alone can grasp what is most
important in human life, all other human endeavors should be subor-
dinate to it.
2
This conception of philosophy and the substantive philosophical
theories that support it were controversial from the very start; al-
I am most grateful to Terence Irwin, Constance Meinwald, and Ian Mueller for their
helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
2
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO PLATO
though there have been long periods during which some form of
Platonism flourished,* there have always been at the same time
various forms of opposition to Plato's astonishingly ambitious con-
ception of the subject.* For this reason he can be considered not only
the originator of philosophy but the most controversial figure in its
historical development. For one cannot argue that philosophy must
limit its ambitions without understanding the almost limitless
hopes that gave birth to the subject and explaining why these - all of
them or some - are misguided or unachievable. If we are forced to
retreat from his ideal of a comprehensive and unitary understanding
that transforms our lives and society, we must decide what alterna-
tive intellectual goal to put in its place. For this reason, Plato pro-
vides us with an invaluable test case and standard of comparison:
Our conception of what philosophy should be (and whether there
should be any such thing) must be developed in agreement with or
opposition to alternatives provided by the history of the subject, and
so inevitably we must ask whether the ambitions of the subject's
inventor are worthy and capable of fulfillment.
Although Plato invented philosophy as a unified and comprehen-
sive discipline, he of course could not have created it from nothing,
and so to understand how he arrived at his views we must take
account of the currents of his time. His attitudes toward political
developments in Athens and Sparta and his reaction to the intellec-
tual issues raised by the science, speculation, and poetry of the fifth
and fourth centuries decisively shaped his philosophical develop-
ment. The sophistic movement, the mathematical work of the Py-
thagoreans, the theory of flux advocated by Heraclitus and Cratylus,
the unchanging and unitary being postulated by Parmenides - all of
these played an important role in his thinking. 5 But the intellectual
influence that was paramount was Socrates, a man who wrote noth-
ing but whose personality and ideas were so powerful that no one
who came into contact with him could react to him with indiffer-
ence. For Socrates, to philosophize was to engage in adversarial con-
versation about how one's life should be lived; because the ideas he
expressed and the questions he raised were perceived as threatening,
he was tried and convicted on the charge of refusing to recognize the
gods of the city, introducing other new divinities, and corrupting the
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young.
6
While Socrates was alive, Plato was one of many young
people who fell under his spell, and so great was his influence that
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Introduction to the study of Plato
3
often the character named "Socrates" who expounds them.
1
0
And so
newcomers to these works naturally raise the question how any
distinction can be made between the philosophy of Socrates and that
of Plato. How can we distinguish them, since in many dialogues
they have the same lines, the former doing all the talking, the latter
all the writing? Could we not say with equal justice that it was
Socrates (and not just Plato) who invented philosophy?
We could not, for Plato's works themselves provide us with good
evidence that Socrates focused his investigative skills on one ques-
tion only - How should one live one's life? - and was not similarly
preoccupied with the broader range of issues that absorbed their au-
thor. We have in Plato's
Apology
an account of the speech Socrates
gave in his defense, and he says here that although his whole life has
been devoted to the discussion of virtue, he has, despite his best
efforts, not been able to acquire any wisdom about it - except for the
wisdom that consists in knowing that he does not know. Knowledge
of such matters, Socrates thinks, is possessed by the gods alone; the
best we humans can do is to imitate his own example and recognize
the severe limitations in our moral understanding. This profession of
ignorance is a feature of several other Platonic dialogues: In the
Laches,
the
Charmides,
the
Hippias Major,
and the
Euthyphro,
for
example, Socrates searches for an understanding of virtue and moral-
ity, but each dialogue ends with a confession that such understanding
still eludes him. By contrast, when we turn to the
Republic,
we find
the interlocutor called "Socrates" giving definitions of justice, cour-
age, temperance, and wisdom; and in addition he puts forward an
ambitious program of study, ranging over arithmetic, geometry, har-
monics, and astronomy, that will take us away from the unreal world
of sensible objects and eventually culminate in understanding the
Form of the Good and the unification of all branches of knowledge.
How can Socrates be so opposed to himself: a seeker who professes
ignorance about the one subject that absorbs him - the human
good - and yet (in the
Republic
and elsewhere) a confident theoreti-
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Plato made him the central figure in many of his works, most or all
of which were composed after the death of Socrates in 399 B.C.?
Plato's writings are almost without exception in dialogue form,
8
and
frequently the figure who takes the leading role in these conversa-
tions is Socrates.9 Plato did not write a part for himself in these
dialogues; rather, when they advance philosophical positions, it is
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4
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO PLATO
cian who speculates at length not only about morality but also about
knowledge, reality, politics, and the human soul? The most plausi-
ble answer, one that is now widely accepted by many scholars, is
this: In the
Apology
and in several other works that search for ethi-
cal definitions but show no deep interest in mathematics and make
no inquiry into metaphysics, we have a portrait of the historical
yond anything dreamt of by that philosopher.
1
2
And this interpreta-
tion of Plato's development accords with the distinction Aristotle
makes between the real Socrates and the Socrates who is a mouth-
piece for Plato: the former, he says, professed ignorance and inquired
about ethical matters but not "the whole of nature",-^ to the latter
he attributes no such limitations, but instead regards him as a
thinker who speculated about a wide range of issues and fell into
utter confusion when he posited a realm of separately existing
Forms and made the Form of the Good central to ethical theory.
z
*
Evidently, Aristotle reads the
Republic
as a presentation of the phi-
losophy of Plato and not of Socrates.^ We can assume, then, that for
some time Plato continued to use "Socrates" as the name of his
principal interlocutor because he wanted to emphasize the continu-
ity between himself and his teacher. Socrates gave to Plato the funda-
mental idea that it is vital to our well-being to discover the single
uniting factor in our diverse use of moral terms; and Plato also
inherited from Socrates the method of seeking the truth by exposing
our beliefs to the systematic cross-examination of interlocutors.
When Plato used that method to make the discoveries that Socrates
also sought to make, he paid tribute to his teacher by letting him
continue in his role as the main interlocutor.
This way of distinguishing between the philosophies of Socrates
and Plato has been given further support by studies of Plato's style of
composition that have been undertaken since the nineteenth cen-
tury.
1
6
There has now emerged a broad consensus that we can say, at
least in many cases, which of Plato's works were written during
which periods of his life; for it is widely accepted that he wrote the
Laws
in his later years,
x
? and we can determine which dialogues are
stylistically closest and which farthest from this late work. And so,
partly because of these stylistic studies, and partly because of Aris-
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Socrates,
1
1
but then, as Plato continued to develop in his thinking,
he retained Socrates as the main interlocutor of his dialogues, even
though the doctrines of this more ambitious ''Socrates" go well be-
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Introduction to the study of Plato
5
and late.
1
8
The early dialogues are the ones in which he is most fully under
the influence of Socrates (hence these are often called Socratic dia-
logues), and among them are the works which unsuccessfully seek
definitions of moral properties. During this period, Plato wrote the
Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor,
Ion, Laches,
and
Protagoras.
1
*
These have been listed in alphabetical
order, for although there may be good reason for saying of some of
them that they were written later than others in this group, scholars
are very far from a consensus about such issues. It would be safe to
say, however, that the
Gorgias
is one of the latest in this group - and
probably
the
latest - for it contains a number of features that link it
with dialogues that do not belong to this early period.
2
0
Other works
besides those just mentioned are widely accepted as early, but since
they have a greater stylistic similarity to the middle dialogues than
do the ones listed above, there is some basis for thinking that, like
the
Gorgias,
they were composed after the earliest of the early dia-
logues, but prior to the middle dialogues. These are (in alphabetical
order) the
Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus,
and
Re-
public
Book I.
2
1
Although many of these works portray Socrates as someone who
raises questions that neither he nor his interlocutors are able to
answer, it would be a serious mistake to regard him as a purely
negative thinker who had no convictions of his own. On the con-
trary, he passionately defends a number of theses that are radically at
odds with the common sense of his time (and ours). For example, he
holds that human well-being does not consist in wealth, power, or
fame, but in virtue; that so long as one remains a good person one is
immune to misfortune; that to possess the virtues is to have intellec-
tual mastery over a distinct subject matter,- that this mastery can be
acquired only by means of a successful investigation of what the
virtues are; and that if one leaves these questions unexamined, one's
life is not worth living.
2
2
Although Plato no doubt accepted these
doctrines when he was under the spell of Socrates and wrote his
earliest dialogues, he was eventually to modify them in important
ways. For example, one of his most significant departures is his
belief that Socrates had overlooked a nonrational aspect of human
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
totle's distinction between Socrates and Plato, it has now become
common to divide Plato's writings into three periods: early, middle,
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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