Plaudits to Plato: An Ephemeral Essay
Something I wrote a few years back in college. I thought that I may as well post it here while I think of what to write for my next real blog post. Hope you enjoy it.
Few men can compare in wisdom, knowledge, vision, or insight
to the illustrious Plato. One of the most influential philosophers in all of
Western civilization, Plato stimulates the intellect like rain to a seedling,
his recordings of the prying Socrates provoke the reader’s spirit of inquiry,
and his contemplations on the nature of reality have been paving the road of
philosophy for over 2,000 years. Delving into the deep waters of his dialectics
is indispensable to fully appreciate the issues and context not only of
contemporary philosophy but also modern, medieval, and ancient philosophy. Whether
it is aesthetics, language, poetry, rhetoric, politics, logic, mathematics,
epistemology, metaphysics, or theology, the arms of Plato’s mind extend and
grasp without limit.
Gripping, active, and entertaining, the dialogues of Plato are eternal colloquies to those who bear witness, the light that illuminates the cowards’ cave of complacency within the mind. A plethora of characters both ragged and rich, friend and foe, pious and proud, who all come together as musicians in an orchestra to play a song of harmony through conflict and wisdom through ignorance. They show that the world is nothing but the shadow of a great giant, the imperfect within the perfect, the finite within the infinite, the temporal within the eternal, a cheap imitation. The Forms, the ideal templates through which all things participate, that which grounds our world and allows us to see, are those that without which we are but illiterate men in a library. The Forms, recollected as if they were old friends from a time gone by, are those whose mind’s fingers only scrape.
From the
rich, proud foes come the false teachers, the sophists, undermined by the
cunning, curious Socrates, for whom we are to thank for providing us with a
push toward the track of truth and way of wisdom. Philosophy itself, fittingly
enough, is the love of wisdom, which Socrates put above any love he had for his
own life when discovery became death. Above Socrates’s queries were no one; no
man too pious, too rich, nor too important would halt him, yet these men could
not allow him to continue and through their own vanity condemned him.
Socrates’s dedication became his downfall, and through his sacrifice he gave
humanity a great boon. Whether true teacher or an inspired character, the
relationship between Socrates and Plato is as crucial as the gardener to the
garden. The effects of the life and teachings of Socrates on Plato were like an
acorn to soil, and that acorn would grow into a magnificent tree of knowledge,
the fruits of which bore the next 2,000 years of Western philosophy.
Plato’s influence can be seen in his own contemporaries all the way into 21st century contemporary philosophy, and the reasons why are clear upon any reading of his works. He took from the wise before him and from their influence the world was given an oeuvre, the likes of which we may never see again. As long as there are those who wish to set sail into the vast ocean of knowledge and wisdom, Plato will live on and continue to be a part of a great intellectual tradition that is at the foundation of Western society. As philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead proclaimed, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (39).
Works Cited
Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality: An Essay in
Cosmology. New York: Macmillan Co., 1929. Print.
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