Plato belongs to the “Axial Age” in human history, roughly 800 b.c. to 600 a.d. Axial age movements include Daoism and Confucianism in China, Classical Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Socrates and Plato, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and Mohammed in the Near East. Axial Age movements criticized the social order of their time, and proposed norms and ideals superior to this worldly context. For Plato, this took the form of virtue-ideals transcending the world in the perfection of their goodness.
Plato’s writings cover many different topics, and propose many ideas that cannot stand up under criticism today. The present essays (1) focus exclusively on Plato’s ideas about perfect virtue-ideals meant to serve as models on which idealistic individuals can model their characters in an effort to perfect their being, to make themselves the best persons they can be. They also (2) develop a model of “Socratic” reasoning capable of giving these perfect virtue ideals a solid rational foundation.
Abstract Virtue-ideals vs. Concrete Reality in Plato
Critical Socratic reasoning shows that all attempts to represent goodness in concrete visible form will be inadequate. Platonism is a difficult way of life because it requires the ability to overcome natural human concrete-mindedness, and develop the ability to conceive of Goodness and virtue in terms of concepts separate from anything visible to the senses. Platonism is thus the source of our associations with the word “spiritual,” referring to something invisible and non-material. I think we should separate this from belief in these virtue-ideals as actually existing entities, made of “spiritual” stuff rather than “material” stuff, existing in some parallel unseen universe.
Socratic Reasoning about Virtue
Socrates was known in the ancient world as the person who turned “philosophy” from abstract metaphysical speculation about the nature of reality, to an emphasis on that kind of reasoning that would address practical issues about what it would mean to live the best kind of life. In this essay I draw on some of Plato’s dialogues in which “Socrates” discusses a number of virtues, and draw from them four principles that should guide this kind of reasoning, beginning from reflections on concrete perceptions of good and bad, admirable and not-admirable, cases of human behavior, to eventually raise one’s mind to virtue-ideals rationally known to be precise representations of something always and only perfectly Good.
Sample Socratic Virtue Discussions
— Humility
— Honesty: Some Socratic Thoughts
— Courage
— Romantic Love
