New Directions in Philosophy and Education
One of the reasons that the sophists, who had flocked to Athens in the fifth century
B.C., had stirred up controversy was that their teachings seemed to many to undermine
time-honored moral traditions. Their relativistic doctrines implied that justice actually
meant, to paraphrase the fifth-century historian Thucydides describing Athenian war-time
behavior, the strong seizing all they have the power to obtain and the weak enduring what
they had to accept. Attacking this doctrine was one of the many different subjects
undertaken by the philosopher Plato in the fourth century B.C. Plato's famous pupil,
Aristotle, combined his teacher's passion for theoretical philosophy with a scientific
curiosity about all the phenomena of the natural world. Their thought helped create a new
foundation for ethical and scientific inquiry. Their philosophical interests seemed too
distant from the concrete concerns of a public career to men like the orator Isocrates,
however, who insisted that a proper education centered on rhetoric and practical
wisdom.
The Life of Plato
Socrates's fate had a profound effect on his most brilliant follower,
Plato1 (ca. 428 -348
B.C.), who even though an aristocrat nevertheless withdrew from political life after 399
B.C. The
condemnation of Socrates2 had apparently convinced Plato that citizens in a democracy were incapable of
rising above narrow self-interest to knowledge of any universal truth. In his works
dealing with the organization of society, Plato bitterly rejected democracy as a
justifiable system of government. Instead, he sketched what he saw as the philosophical
basis for ideal political and social structures among human beings. His utopian vision
had virtually no effect on the actual politics of his time, and
his attempts to
advise Dionysius II3 (ruled 367-344 B.C.), tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, on how to rule as a true
philosopher ended in utter failure. Otherwise we have almost no evidence for the events
of Plato's life.
Political philosophy formed only one portion of Plato's interests, which ranged widely
in astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics (theoretical explanations for phenomena that
cannot be understood through direct experience or scientific experiment). After Plato's
death, his ideas attracted relatively little attention among philosophers for the next
two centuries, until they were revived as important points for debate in the Roman era.
Nevertheless, the sheer intellectual power of Plato's thought and the controversy it has
engendered ever since his lifetime have won him fame as one of the world's greatest
philosophers.
Plato's Academy
Plato seem to have disagreed with Socrates's insistence that fundamental knowledge
meant moral knowledge based on inner reflection. Plato concluded that knowledge meant
searching for truths that are independent of the observer and could be taught to others.
He acted on this latter belief by founding the
Academy4, a shady gathering spot just outside the walls of Athens, which
was named after the local hero whose shrine was nearby. The Academy was not a school or
college in the modern sense but rather an informal association of people, who were
interested in studying philosophy, mathematics, and theoretical astronomy with Plato as
their guide. The Academy became so famous as a gathering place for intellectuals that it
continued to operate for nine hundred years after Plato's death, with periods in which
it was directed by distinguished philosophers and others during which it lapsed into
mediocrity.
The Dialogues of Plato
Plato5 did not write
philosophical treatises in the abstract fashion familiar from more recent times but
rather composed works called dialogues from their form as conversations or reported
conversations. Almost as if they were short plays, the
dialogues have
settings6 and casts of conversationalists (often including Socrates), who talk about
philosophical issues. Divorcing the philosophical content of a Platonic dialogue from
its literary form is no doubt a mistaken approach; a dialogue of Plato demands to be
taken as a whole. The dialogues were meant to provoke readers into thoughtful reflection
rather than to spoon-feed them a circumscribed set of doctrines.
Platonic Doctrines
Plato's views7 seem to have changed over time, and he nowhere presents one, coherent set of
doctrines. Although it is unwise to try to summarize Plato rather than to read his
dialogues as complete pieces, it is perhaps not too misleading to say that he taught
that human beings cannot define and understand absolute virtues such as goodness,
justice, beauty, or equality by the concrete evidence of these qualities in their lives.
Any earthly examples will in another context display the opposite quality. For instance,
always returning what one has borrowed might seem to be just. But
what if a person
who has borrowed a weapon from a friend is confronted by that friend who wants the
weapon back to commit a murder?8 In this case, returning the borrowed item would be unjust.
Examples of
equality are also only relative9. The equality
of a stick two feet long, for example, is evident when it is compared with another
two-foot stick. Paired with a three-foot stick, however, it displays inequality. In sum,
in the world that human beings experience with their senses, every example of the
virtues and every quality is relative in some aspect of its context.
Platonic Forms
Plato refused to accept the relativity of the virtues as reality. He developed the
theory that the virtues cannot be discovered through experience; rather, the virtues are
absolutes that can be apprehended only by thought and that somehow exist independently
of human existence. The separate realities of the pure virtues Plato referred to in some
of his works as
Forms10 (sing. eidos ,
plur. eide , or sing. idea , plur. ideai ); among the Forms were
Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality. He argued that the Forms were invisible,
invariable, and eternal entities located in a higher realm beyond the empirical world of
human beings. The Forms such as Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality are, according
to Plato, true reality; what humans experience with their senses are the impure shadows
of this reality.
Each Form, Plato seems to say, is an essential quality, one that people experience only
through contrast between opposites. For example, that a stick embodies equality to
another of the same length but inequality to a stick of a different length demonstrates
equality only through contrast with the unequal stick. The Form Equality, however, is
the pure essence of equality, which under no circumstances can be unequal or possess the
quality of inequality. Such a pure Form is beyond human experience. The same reasoning
applies to the other virtues such as goodness or beauty or justice.
Plato's concept of Forms required the further belief that knowledge of them came
through the human soul, which must be immortal. When a soul is incarnated in its current
body, it brings with it knowledge of the Forms. The soul then uses reason in argument
and proof, not empirical observation through the senses, to recollect its pre-existent
knowledge.
Plato was not consistent throughout his career in his views on the nature or the
significance of Forms, and his later works seem quite divorced from the theory.
Nevertheless, Forms provide a good example of both the complexity and the wide range of
Platonic thought. With his theory of Forms, Plato made metaphysics a central issue for
philosophers ever since.
The Platonic Demiurge
Plato's idea that humans possessed
immortal souls11 distinct from their bodies established the concept of dualism,
positing a separation between spiritual and physical being. This notion of the
separateness of soul and body would play an influential role in later philosophical and
religious thought. In a dialogue written late in his life, Plato said the pre-existing
knowledge possessed by the immortal human soul is in truth the knowledge known to the
supreme deity. Plato called this god the
Demiurge12 (“craftsman”) because the deity used knowledge of the Forms
to craft the world of living beings from raw matter. According to this doctrine of
Plato, a knowing, rational God created the world, and the world therefore has order.
Furthermore, its beings have goals, as evidenced by animals adapting to their
environments in order to flourish. The Demiurge wanted to reproduce in the material
world the perfect order of the Forms, but the world as crafted turned out not to be
perfect because matter is necessarily imperfect. Plato suggested that the proper goal
for human beings is to seek perfect order and purity in their own souls by making
rational desires control their irrational desires. The latter cause harm in various
ways. The
desire to drink wine to excess13, for example, is irrational because the drinker fails to consider the hangover
to come the next day. Those who are governed by irrational desires thus fail to consider
the future of both body and soul. Finally, since the soul is immortal and the body is
not, our present, impure existence is only one passing phase in our cosmic
existence.
Plato's Republic
Plato employed his theory of Forms not only in metaphysical speculation about the
original creation of the everyday world in which people live but also in showing the way
human society should be constructed in an ideal world. One version of Plato's utopian
vision is found in his most famous dialogue, the
Republic. This work,
whose Greek title (
Politeia
14) would be more accurately rendered as
System of Government,
primarily concerns the nature of justice and the reasons that people should be just
instead of unjust. Justice, Plato argues, is advantageous; it consists of subordinating
the irrational to the rational in the soul. By using the truly just polis
as a model for understanding this notion of proper subordination in the soul, Plato
presents a vision of the
ideal structure for human society15. Like a just soul, the just society would have its parts in proper hierarchy,
parts that Plato in the
Republic presents as three classes of people, as
distinguished by their ability to grasp the truth of Forms.
16 The highest class constitutes the rulers, or
“guardians”17 as Plato calls
them, who are educated in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. Next come the
“auxiliaries,”18 whose function it is to defend the polis. The lowest class is that
of the
producers,
19, who grow the food and make the objects required by the whole population. Each
part contributes to society by fulfilling its proper function.
Guardians in the Republic
Women as well as men qualify to be guardians20 because they possess the same virtues and abilities as men, except for a
disparity in physical strength between the average woman and the average man. The axiom
justifying the inclusion of women, namely that
virtue is the same in women as in
men21, is perhaps a notion that Plato derived from Socrates. The inclusion of women in
the ruling class of Plato's utopian city-state represented a startling departure from
the actual practice of his times. Indeed, never before in Western history had anyone
proposed— even in fantasy— that work be allocated in human society
without regard to gender. Moreover, to minimize distraction,
guardians22 are to have
neither private
property nor nuclear families23. Male and female guardians are to live in houses shared in common, to eat in the
same mess halls, and to exercise in the same gymnasiums. The children are to be raised
as a group in a common environment by special caretakers. Although this scheme is meant
to free women guardians from child-care responsibilities and enable them to rule equally
with men, Plato fails to consider that women guardians would in reality have a much
tougher life than the men because they would have to be pregnant frequently and undergo
the strain and danger of giving birth. At the same time, he evidently does not believe
they are disqualified for ruling on this account. The guardians who achieved the highest
level of knowledge in Plato's ideal society would qualify to rule over the ideally just
state as philosopher-kings.
To become a guardian, a person from childhood must be educated for many years in
mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics to gain the knowledge that Plato in the
Republic presented as necessary if one was to rule for the common good.
Plato's specifications for the education of guardians in fact make him the first thinker
to argue systematically that education should be the training of the mind and the
character rather than simply the acquisition of information and practical skills. Such a
state would necessarily be authoritarian because only the ruling class would possess the
knowledge to determine its policies and make decisions determining who is allowed to
mate with whom to produce the best children.
Philosophy and Life
The severe regulation of life that Plato proposed for his ideally just state in the
Republic was an outgrowth of his tight focus on the question of a
rational person's true interest. Furthermore, he insisted that politics and ethics are
fields in which objective truths can be found by the use of reason. Despite his
harsh criticism of existing governments such as Athenian
democracy24 and his
scorn for the importance of rhetoric25 in its functioning, Plato also recognized the practical difficulties in
implementing radical changes in the way people actually lived. Indeed, his late dialogue
The Laws
26 shows him wrestling with the question of improving the real world in a less
radical, though still authoritarian, way than in the
Republic. Plato
hoped that, instead of ordinary politicians, whether democrats or oligarchs, the people
who know truth and can promote the common good would rule because their rule would be in
everyone's real interest. For this reason above all, he passionately believed that the
study of philosophy mattered to human life.
Aristotle, Scientist and Philosopher
Plato's most brilliant follower was
Aristotle27 (384-322 B.C.). Aristotle's great reputation as a thinker in science and
philosophy rests on his influence in promoting scientific investigation of the natural
world and in developing rigorous systems of logical argument. The enormous influence of
Aristotle's works on scholars in later periods, especially the Middle Ages, has made him
a monumental figure in the history of western science and philosophy.
The son of a wealthy doctor from Stagira in northern Greece, Aristotle came to Athens
at the age of seventeen to study in Plato's
Academy28, where he stayed until the death of Plato in 348/7. He next went to stay with
Hermias29, a ruler of towns in Mysia in western Anatolia. When
Hermias fell from power and died in 345, Aristotle moved to the town of Mytilene on
Lesbos, and then in 343
he took up a post at the royal court of Macedonia to tutor
Alexander30, the son of king Philip II. By 340 he had probably returned to Stagira, and in
335
Aristotle founded his own informal philosophical school in Athens named the
Lyceum31, later called the Peripatetic School
after the covered walkway (peripatos ) in which its
students carried on conversations while strolling out of the glare of the Mediterranean
sun. When Alexander, who had succeeded his father as Macedonian king, died in 323,
anti-Macedonian feelings among the Athenians forced Aristotle to depart for Chalcis,
where he died in 322.
Aristotle's Interests
Aristotle lectured on nearly every branch of learning: biology, medicine, anatomy,
psychology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, music, metaphysics, rhetoric,
political science, ethics, literary criticism. Apparently an inspiring teacher,
Aristotle encouraged his followers to conduct research in numerous fields of specialized
knowledge. For example, he had student researchers compile
reports32 on the systems of government of 158 Greek states. He also worked out a
sophisticated system of logic for precise argumentation. Creating a careful system to
identify the forms of valid arguments, Aristotle established grounds for distinguishing
a logically sound case from a merely persuasive one. He first gave names to contrasts
such as premise
versus conclusion and the universal
versus the particular that have been commonplaces of
thought and speech ever since. He also studied the process of explanation itself,
formulating the influential
doctrine of four causes33. According to
Aristotle, four different categories of explanation exist that are not reducible to a
single, unified whole: form (defining characteristics), matter (constituent elements),
origin of movement (similar to what we commonly mean by “cause”),
and telos (aim or goal). This analysis exemplifies
Aristotle's care never to oversimplify the complexity of reality. Some of Aristotle's
most influential discussions concentrated on understanding qualitative concepts that
human beings tend to take for granted, such as time, space, motion, and change. Through
careful argumentation he probed the philosophical difficulties that lie beneath the
surface of these familiar notions, and his views on the nature of things exercised an
overwhelming influence on later thinkers.
Aristotle's Methods
Much of Aristotle's philosophical thought reflected the influence of Plato, but he also
refined and even rejected ideas that his teacher had advocated. He denied the validity
of Plato's theory of
Forms34, for example, on the grounds that the separate existence that
Plato postulated for them failed to make sense. This position typified Aristotle's
general preference for explanations based on common sense rather than metaphysics. By
modern standards his scientific thought paid relatively limited attention to
mathematical models of explanation and quantitative reasoning, but mathematics in his
time had not yet reached the level of sophistication appropriate for such work. His
method also differed from that of modern scientists because it did not include
controlled experimentation. Aristotle believed that investigators had a better chance of
understanding objects and beings by observing them in their natural setting than under
the artificial conditions of a laboratory. His coupling of detailed investigation with
perceptive reasoning served especially well in such physical sciences as biology,
botany, and zoology. For example, as the first scientist to try to collect all the
available information on the animal species and to classify them, Aristotle recorded the
facts about more than five hundred different kinds of animals, including insects. Many
of his descriptions represented significant advances in learning. His recognition that
whales and dolphins were mammals, for instance, which later writers on animals
overlooked, was not rediscovered for another two thousand years. His gynecology,
however, in contrast to much of his other learning, was seriously flawed.
Aristotle's Teleology
In his zoological research Aristotle set forth his teleological view of
nature— that is, he believed organisms developed as they did because they had
a natural goal (
telos
35 in Greek), or what
we might call an end or a function. To explain a phenomenon, Aristotle said that one
must discover its goal— to understand “that for the sake of
which” the phenomenon in question existed. A simple example of this kind of
explanation is the duck's webbed feet. According to Aristotle's reasoning, ducks have
webbed feet for the sake of swimming, an activity that supports the goal of a duck's
existence, which is to find food in the water so as to stay alive. Aristotle argued that
the natural
goal of human beings36 was to live in the society of a polis and that the city-state came
into existence to meet the human need to live together, since individuals living in
isolation cannot be self-sufficient. Furthermore, existence in a city-state made
possible an orderly life of virtue for its citizens. The means to achieve this ordered
life were the rule of law and the process of citizens' ruling and being ruled in
turn.
Aristotle on Slaves and Women
Aristotle was conventional for his times in regarding
slavery37 as natural on the
grounds that some people were by nature bound to be slaves because their souls lacked
the rational part that should rule in a human being. Individuals propounding the
contrary view were rare, although one fourth-century B.C. orator, Alcidamas, asserted
that “God has set all men free; nature has made no one a slave.”
Also in tune with his times was Aristotle's conclusion that
women38 were by nature
inferior to men. His view of the inferiority of women was based on faulty notions of
biology. He wrongly believed, for example, that in procreation the male with his semen
actively gave the fetus its form, while the female had only the passive role of
providing its matter. His assertion that females were less courageous than males was
justified by dubious evidence about animals, such as the report that a male squid would
stand by as if to help when its mate was speared but that a female squid would swim away
when the male was impaled. Although his erroneous biology led Aristotle to evaluate
females as incomplete males, he believed that human communities could be successful and
happy only if they included the contributions of both women and men. Aristotle argued
that marriage was meant to provide mutual help and comfort but that the husband should
rule.
Aristotle on Just Behavior
Aristotle sharply departed from the Socratic idea that knowledge of justice and
goodness was all that was necessary for a person to behave justly. He argued that people
in their souls often possess knowledge of what is right but that their irrational
desires overrule this knowledge and lead them to do wrong.
People who know the
evils of hangovers still get drunk, for instance39. Recognizing a
conflict of desires in the human soul, Aristotle devoted special attention to the issue
of achieving self-control by training the mind to win out over the instincts and
passions. Self-control did not mean denying human desires and appetites; rather, it
meant striking a balance between suppressing and heedlessly indulging physical
yearnings, of finding
“the mean.”40 Aristotle
claimed that the mind should rule in striking this balance because the intellectual is
the finest human quality and the mind is the true self, indeed the godlike part of a
person.
Aristotle on Human Happiness
Aristotle believed that human
happiness41, which was not to be
equated with the simple-minded pursuit of pleasure, stems from fulfilling human
potentialities. These potentialities can be identified by rational choice, practical
judgment, and recognition of the value of choosing the mean instead of extremes. The
central moral problem is the nearly universal human tendency to want to “get
more,” to act unjustly whenever one has the power to do so. The aim of
education is to dissuade people from this inclination, which has its worst effects when
it is directed at acquiring money or honor. In this context Aristotle was thinking of
men in public life outside the home, and he says that the dangerous disorder caused by
men's desire for “getting more” occurs both in democracies and
oligarchies.
The greatest threat to democracy was the teaching of the sophists
that freedom is living exactly as a man likes42. True freedom, he stressed, consisted in
ruling and being ruled in turn
according to the agreed-on laws of the community43.
Aristotle regarded science and philosophy not as abstract subjects isolated from the
concerns of ordinary existence but rather as the disciplined search for knowledge in
every aspect of life. That search epitomized the kind of rational human activity that
alone could bring the good life and genuine happiness. Some modern critics have replied
that Aristotle's work lacks a clear moral code, but he did the study of ethics a great
service by insisting that standards of right and wrong have merit only if they are
grounded in character and aligned with the good in human nature and do not simply
consist of lists of abstract reasons for behaving in one way rather than another. An
ethical system, that is, must be relevant to the actual moral situations that human
beings continually experience in their lives. In ethics, as in all his scholarship,
Aristotle distinguished himself by the insistence that the life of the mind and
experience of the real world were inseparable components in the quest to define a
worthwhile existence for human beings.
Practical Education and Rhetoric
Despite his interest in subjects such as the history of the constitutions of states and
the theory and practice of
rhetoric44, Aristotle remained a theoretician in the mold of Plato. This characteristic set
him apart from the major educational trend of the fourth century B.C., which emphasized
practical wisdom and training that had direct application to the public lives of
upper-class male citizens in a swiftly changing world. The most important subject in
this education was rhetoric, the skill of persuasive public speaking, which itself
depended not only on oratorical techniques but also on the knowledge of the world and of
human psychology that speakers required to be effective. The ideas about education and
rhetoric that emerged in this period exercised tremendous influence throughout the Greek
and Roman eras and long thereafter.
Influential believers in the general value of practical knowledge and rhetoric were to
be found even among those who had admired Socrates, who had placed no value on such
matters.
Xenophon, for example, knew Socrates well enough to write extensive
memoirs recreating many conversations with the great philosopher45. But he also wrote a wide range of
works in history, biography, estate management, horsemanship, and the public revenues of
Athens. The subjects of these treatises reveal the manifold topics that Xenophon
considered essential to the proper education of young men.
Isocrates on Rhetoric
The ideas of the famous Athenian orator
Isocrates46 (436-338 B.C.) exemplified the dedication to rhetoric as a practical skill that
Plato rejected as utterly wrong. Isocrates was born to a rich family and studied with
sophists and thinkers including Socrates. Since he lacked the voice to address large
gatherings, Isocrates composed speeches for other men to deliver and sought to influence
public opinion and political leaders at Athens and abroad by publishing speeches of his
own in writing. He regarded
education47 as the preparation for a useful life doing good in matters of public importance.
He sought to develop an educational middle ground between the theoretical study of
abstract ideas and purely crass training in rhetorical techniques for influencing others
to one's own personal advantage. In this way he stood between the ideals of Plato and
the promises of unscrupulous sophists.
Rhetoric was the skill that Isocrates sought to develop, but that development, he
insisted, could come
only with natural talent and the practical experience of
worldly affairs that trained orators48 to understand public issues and the psychology of the people whom they had to
persuade for the common good. Isocrates saw rhetoric therefore not as a device for
cynical self-aggrandizement but as a
powerful tool49 of persuasion for human betterment, if it was wielded by properly gifted and
trained men with developed consciences. Women were of course excluded from participation
because they could not take part in politics. The Isocratean emphasis on rhetoric and
its application in the real world of politics won many more adherents among men in Greek
and, later, Roman culture than did the Platonic vision of the philosophical life, and it
would have great influence when revived in Renaissance Europe, two thousand years
later.
Isocrates on Panhellenism
Throughout his life Isocrates tried to put his doctrines to use by addressing works to
powerful leaders whose policies he wanted to influence. In his later years he believed
the state of Greece had become so unstable that he promoted the cause
of
Panhellenism50— political harmony among the Greek
states— by urging
Philip II51, king of Macedonia, to unite the Greeks under his leadership in a crusade
against Persia. This radical recommendation was Isocrates's practical solution to the
persistent conflicts among Greek city-states and to the social unrest created by
friction between the richer communities and the many poor areas in Greece. Isocrates
believed that if the fractious city-states accepted Philip as their leader in a common
alliance, they could avoid wars among themselves and relieve the impoverished population
among them by establishing Greek colonies on land to be conquered and carved out of
Persian-held territory in Anatolia. That a prominent Athenian would openly appeal for a
Macedonian king to save the Greeks from themselves reflected the startling new political
and military reality that had emerged in the Greek world by the mid-fourth century
B.C.
