PLATO’S ETHICS

Socrates’ central concern was to goad his fellow Athenians into accepting
that being a “good man” was the most important goal they could ever have
in life. They should strive to embody those marks of human excellence
(aretê) Greek tradition prized so highly: wisdom, bravery, self-control,
justice, and piety.

Problem of Relativism

The Ring of Gyges

(Republic, Book II)
“. . . To be just is always better than to be unjust?”

Now that those who practice justice do so involuntarily and because they
have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something
of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do
what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then
we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding
along the same road.

Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a
great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place
where he was feeding his flock.

Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other
marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he
stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him,
more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from
the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together,
according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the
flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his
finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of
the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest
of the company and they began to speak of him as if he was no longer
present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turn
the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring,
and always with the same result – when he turned the collet inwards he
became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to

the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her
help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.

Suppose now that there were two such rings, and the just put on one of
them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an
iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his
hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out
of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or
kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a
God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the
unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.

A. Traditional Presentation of the Theory of Forms / Ideas

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Plato’s Response: 2-World View
realm is the world where things
images or shadows of the really
space and time. The really real
Forms.
of Reality. The sensible (perceptible)
keep changing. The things we see are only
real, which are in an ideal world outside
- ideas - are in the realm of Ideas /

Road of Defining (Laches 191d-192). Definition is the attempt to reach the

form or that which makes something what it is. The task of finding proper
definitions is aimed at isolating the objective essence of whatever we are
trying to define.

Ideas as Objective Essences. These universal concepts are not mere

subjective concepts, but that in them we apprehend objective essences. To
these objective essences Plato gave the name of 'ideas' or 'Forms'. We
must not be misled into thinking that this term means a subjective concept
in the mind. Rather, when Plato speaks of Ideas or Forms, he is referring
to the objective content or reference of our universal concepts. In our
universal concepts we apprehend objective essences, and it is to these
objective essences that Plato applied the term "Ideas."

The Form of the Good

For Plato, even in the realm of ideas, "there is an ascending order of

more and more inclusive, more and more fundamental ideas. But there is
one such idea under which all ideas (including being itself) fall under.
This is the idea of the GOOD.“

The Good, in fact, is the Idea of ideas, i.e., the Good is the source of
all reality, the Good transcends every particular real thing. It is more
exalted than being. To describe the reality of the Idea of the Good,
Plato, in the Republic, uses the Simile of the Sun and the allegory of the
cave.

Allegory of the Cave

(Rep., Bk VII, 514a-518d

We are like a people imprisoned in an underground cave, all of our

experience limited to the wavering shadows, not of trees and horses but
only of puppet-images of such realities and shadows cast on the wall. . .
, not by the clear and steady light of the sun, but by the smoky,
flickering light of a fire we take for the only kind of light there is. We
take these deceptive shadows to be genuine. . . ; were we able to turn
about, we would see that they are not even shadows...but only puppet-
images. . . . To see genuine trees or horses, we would have climb upward .
. . to the bright surface of the earth, where real trees and horses are,
illumined . . . by the sun itself. The upward climb would be a painful
and strenuous one: we would even be tempted to resist the one who came to
free us from our cave-prison . . . and then, were we to return to our
cave-companions to tell them of the real . . . they would tell us we were
crazy . . . .

Summary: The traditional presentation of Plato's theory of ideas

designates the objects we apprehend in universal concepts to be objective
ideas or subsistent universals, exist-ing in a transcendental world of

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their own–somewhere "out there"–apart from sensible things, understanding
by "apart from" prac-tically spatial separation.

Sensible things are mere copies of or participations in these universal

realities. The latter abide in an unchanging heaven of their own, while
sensible things are subject to change, are always becoming, and can never
truly be said to be.

. “Ideas” as “IDEALS”

Plato’s route to Ideals

Eidos as “paradigm” (Cratylus389b)

“When a shuttle-maker wants to make a good shuttle, he “looks,” not at
some shuttle he had made before, but “to” or “at” the eidos of shuttle, at
that which is “naturally fitted to be a shuttle.”

Eidêas norms, or paradigms: as ideal “models” (think of the artist’s idea,

once again) or “standards” our minds (or meta-physical imaginations) must
“consult” when evaluating whether this or that experienced instance
“resembles,” or better, “measures up to” its appropriate ideal.

The “concrete” style of thinking was encouraged by the fact that Plato
drew his inspiration from that concrete individual “embodiment” he
detected in Socrates, an individual who represented for him a contemporary
version of the equally concrete poetic ideal of courage represented by
Homer’s Achilles. The artist’s and the poet’s “eyes” work in much the
same way. Do you want to know what “manliness” would look like? Then
look at Achilles, or better, look, but insightfully, at (or “into”)
Socrates.

Concrete Ideal as Deontological

For Plato, Socrates is eidosand idea in the sense of Ideal: the kalos, the
“beautiful” human being who peremptorily “calls” us to become as beautiful
as we can be, and makes us feel “ashamed” about being less than that. Not
only “artistic,” Plato’s style of thinking is markedly “deontological” in
tone.

Socrates as “Ideal Concretized”

(Symposium, 212-223c)

What he reminds me of more than anything is one of those little sileni

that you see on the statuaries’ stalls; you know what I mean – they’re
modeled with pipes or flutes in their hands, and when you open them down
the middle there are little figures of gods inside… (215b)

I don’t know whether anybody else has ever opened him up when he’s been
being serious, and seen the little images inside, but I saw them once, and
they looked so godlike, so golden, so beautiful, and so utterly amazing
that there was nothing for it but to do exactly what he told me… (217a)

I’ve been bitten in the heart, or the mind, or whatever you like to call
it, by Socrates’ philosophy, which clings like an adder to any young and

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gifted mind it can get hold of, and does exactly what it likes with it.
(218a)

Plato’s central concern: moral cosmos But that we should believe that our
cosmos was a moral one, this was Plato’s central and primary concern. . .
. For only in a genuinely moral cosmos could the precise kind of aretê
exemplified by Socrates’s manner both of living and dying make ultimate
sense. And the form which that moral cosmos takes for Socrates, and
eventually for Plato as well, is distinctively personal: it is one in
which gods exist, and exercise such effective care for humankind, that
they will never permit either goodness to go unrewarded, or evil
unpunished. Perfectly responsive, or, totally subject to, or, better
perhaps, perfectly “attuned to” such Ideals as Goodness, Justice, and
Beauty, they can, in consequence, assure that everything in our human
world harmonizes tunefully, “as it ought,” “in measure.”

Simile of the Sun (Rep., Bk VI, 508a-509b)The Good as the Source of

Reality: As the sun bestows light upon the objects of the world of
becoming and perception so that they may be seen, and power of vision upon
the eye so that it may perceive, so the highest good, in the world of
being, endows the object of knowledge with "truth" (aletheia) and the mind
with the power of perceiving true knowledge. The simile then turns from
epistemology to ontology.

As the sun bestows development and growth, as well as the law of growth,
upon the objects of the world of becoming, so the Idea of the Good gives
being and order to the objects of the world of being. Thus, the true
circle, like true justice, owes its perfection to that ultimate
perfection. At last, still another dimension becomes visible above the
level of being. As the cause of becoming is not itself becoming, so the
source of being is not itself being. Then we encounter the highest
paradox: not itself being but beyond being.

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