Platonic Ideals

I am working on an essay for Extracted Magazine about the similarities between specialty coffee and craft beer using my trip to Portland over Christmas vacation this past year as the context. In one of my lines in the essay I used the term "platonic ideal" and then had the realization that beyond the Cave illustration, I really didn't have a lot of knowledge about Plato and what he believed and wrote about.

So, I quite literally dusted off this book above which, to my surprise, is a hard critique of Plato and his philosophy. This book was from my Philosophy 100 class in college and was one of the few tomes I have kept over the last three decades on my bookshelf from life at the university. I had not recalled that this book is a serious critique of Platonism. Which either demonstrates that I never had really read it to start or did read it, and forgot its main thesis.

What struck me as odd in retrospect about it being a critique about Plato was we didn't first read Plato's The Republic. The prof taught us about Plato yet he didn't let Plato speak for himself. Instead, he assigned this text by Karl Popper as the primary book for the course. Seems kind of anti-democratic and rather authoritarian. 

Popper penned this book during World War II where Europe had been set aflame by the ideologies of totalitarianism, Nazism and Marxism. Popper believed that the idea of "great men" fanned the flames of the totalitarian spirit. And its source was Plato and his belief that there is little equality in humanity, excellence--by its very definition--was rare and exclusive. So Plato feared that the democratic spirit would lead to degradation of the ruling class and the polity in general.

In one of his dialogues with Socrates and his opponents written by Plato, Socrates opined that democracy would be like children telling adults what to do. That it is understood that parents generally know more than their children and it's the parents responsibility to guide their children as a consequences of their superior maturity and experiences. It would be madness to assert otherwise.

So, Socrates and Plato's argument was that egalitarianism and equality would be the rule of lesser men over better, because democracy was a numbers game, quantity over quality as it were. Athens of course was not a true democracy, as it was limited to those who owned land and etc. Yet, Plato feared its implications, particularly as it had sentenced his mentor Socrates to death for the corruption of the youth of Athens.

The larger context of where I have gone with all of this is that I went out a bought a copy of The Republic at a local bookstore and I am working through its dense and obtuse text, trying to deduce its thoughts into some coherent whole. It is hard going but I am plowing through. I am jumping back and forth between books so that I can hear and consider both sides of the argument and speculation. I have found it rather interesting that I agree with both Plato and Popper, both sides have truth. Not total truth but a part of it. Democracy, for all of its ideals, have shown many of the fears of Plato to be well-founded. Yet, we'd be naive to not see the dark side of monarchy or worse. 

My take, already formulated, is that each person in society has dignity as being made in the image of God, yet that doesn't imply that we are all equal in a practical sense. We have different skills, personalities, experiences, and giftings.  Some people are just better are certain things than others and it is hardly sane to proffer otherwise. Where the Christian ethic makes the crucial innovation is that the greatest is to be the servant of all, and to whom much is given, much is expected. Excellence, therefore should not lead to self-aggrandizement but service. Our faith is able to entertain both sides of the argument, acknowledge the tension, and to reconcile them into a coherent whole.