Plato: Patriot Or Dissident

Plato, the Greek philosopher is considered to be one of the greatest thinkers in history and is called by one scholar “the fountainhead through which all western thought flows.” In his book The Republic he outlines what the perfect city-state would look like and how it would operate. Along his path of reason he makes no attempt to hide his disdain for other political systems. That includes democracy, a system he does not seem to agree with.

In fact, from what I read, Plato obviously disagrees with democracy and its principals. Plato ranks democracy fourth out of what he considers to be the five major constitutions. Just barely ahead of tyranny! He even ranks it behind oligarchy; a constitution that he himself states in 552a of The Republic is the first kind of city to admit the greatest of all evils! Why does he believe this? Are all the freedom loving Americans with red, white, and blue bumper stickers on their gas guzzling cars wrong? If so, what are they missing?

To understand Plato’s claim that democracy is nothing but a stopgap on the way to tyranny one must first understand Plato’s viewpoint. Plato is credited with developing a school of thought called Platonic Idealism. Platonic Idealism is based upon the assumption that the essence of the qualities you predicate to things is eternal. Examples of that are ideas such as justice, piety or equality. While we may not be able to readily define them we all know what they are and can identify them when seen. Plato contends that only through philosophy can we express those essences in language.

Plato translates his assumption to mean there is something inside each and every person that is the same, it comes inborn, and contains those eternal principals. That inborn intellectual part of every person is what Plato calls the soul. Souls are like those ideas or essences they are eternal. However, if everybody has this greatest truth that is called a soul inside them, why do people do stupid selfish things or even make mistakes at all? Plato’s explanation is that the material part of us, the body stops the intellectual part from exercising the knowledge it has. The analogy that Plato uses is that of a clouded eye. It goes that the soul is like an eye that can see those eternal ideas and truths but the body and its desires cloud the view.