Plato 9.7 Socrates’ Philosophical Legacy
Plato sees himself as a product of Socrates’ education. Socrates claimed not to be a teacher or to have students. But he certainly had followers and disciples in the broad sense, the individuals who had benefited from his questioning of them and from their observation of his questioning of others. They had found themselves transformed from being self-absorbed and self-satisfied to being concerned with moral virtue both intellectually and practically.
Socrates left an indelible impression on Plato as his mentor, his inspiration and guide, and ultimately his exemplar. So much so that in his writings Plato makes Socrates the protagonist of almost all his dialogues, and where Socrates is not the protagonist, he is a kind of master of ceremonies. At some point marked perhaps by his publication of the Meno and the Symposium, Plato makes his character Socrates the advocate of conceptions and theories the historical Socrates never embraced. But even here, Plato sees the doctrines he is introducing as Socrates’ legacy.
Socrates had limited his inquiries to the realm of ethics and value theory. Plato recognizes that a theory of ethics by itself is vulnerable to multiple objections that can be made by sophists and other thinkers, focusing on the nature of knowledge (what do we really know about the world, and how do we know it?), the nature of reality (what really exists?), the nature of the soul or mind (do minds or souls really exist? how do they interact with the world?), the nature of language (how is communication possible? how is true representation possible?) and other peripheral but relevant concerns.
Plato understands Socrates as developing a powerful ethical theory that can counteract the relativism and nihilism of (some) sophists, and support a robust theory of moral action. But Socrates’ theory, as limited to ethics and moral value, makes assumptions that it cannot defend. It assumes that there are knowing subjects who can understand the world, including the world of moral values; who can communicate with each other and make true statements; who can endure through time and make themselves proof against moral corruption. To vindicate these assumptions requires at least a theory of reality (a metaphysics), a theory of mind or soul (a psychology), a theory of knowledge (an epistemology). And to organize a society of moral agents, one needs a social and political theory; to educate them, one needs a philosophy of education; to inspire them one needs a theory of art (an aesthetics). Plato will offer an integrated theory of everything in his middle-period dialogue Republic.
Later on, Plato will see that, to defend his Socratic vision, the complete theory of everything that he has set out to provide will need to include the one subject that Socrates was most loath to address — the topic that captivated most of his predecessors and contemporary philosophers: natural science. Plato will offer, tentatively and provisionally, a paradigm of natural science, complete with a cosmology, complete with astronomy, chemistry, and physiology, in his late-period dialogue Timaeus.
It is unlikely that Plato’s grand blueprint of the philosophic edifice emerged suddenly from his fertile imagination. By the time of Socrates’ death Plato seems not to have hit on a sufficiently robust conception of soul, a sufficiently transcendent conception of value, or a sufficiently reliable conception of knowledge to support his vision. Yet it does appear that his understanding of Socratic ethics provided the inspiration and the motivation for his further speculations.
All of Plato’s theoretical bounty was tailor-made to support a moral theory, specifically, Socrates’ moral theory. For the first time, the world would see a systematic philosophy of everything. And for the first time, cosmology, the erstwhile focus of philosophical speculation, would serve as an appendage to moral theory. Plato’s philosophy would be, for better or worse, a theory founded on moral principles and permeated by moral values.
Plato’s gift to the world will be Socrates’ moral philosophy fortified with theories of everything, theories designed to sustain morality and to show people that the essence of life is what is good and right in contrast to what is evil and wrong. One of those theories presents a cosmology in which the science conforms to the demands of ethics. Henceforth the cosmos would be an explicitly moral cosmos inhabited by potentially moral agents inspired by eternal moral ideals, and designed and created by a moral deity.
