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Plato: Knowledge
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The immediate starting-point of Plato's philosophical speculation was the Socratic teaching. In his attempt to define the conditions of knowledge so as to refute sophistic scepticism, Socrates had taught that the only true knowledge is a knowledge by means of concepts. The concept, he said, represents all the reality of a thing. As used by Socrates, this was merely a principle of knowledge. It was taken up by Plato as a principle of Being. If the concept represents all the reality of things, the reality must be something in the ideal order, not necessarily in the things themselves, but rather above them, in a world by itself.
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Plato's ideal state was a republic with three categories of citizens: artisans, auxiliaries, and philosopher-kings, each of whom possessed distinct natures and capacities. Those proclivities... reflected a particular combination of elements within one's tripartite soul, composed of appetite, spirit, and reason. Artisans, for example, were dominated by their appetites or desires, and therefore destined to produce material goods. Auxiliaries, a class of guardians, were ruled by spirit in their souls and possessed the courage necessary to protect the state from invasion. Philosopher-kings, the leaders of the ideal state, had souls in which reason reigned over spirit and appetite, and as a result possessed the foresight and knowledge to rule wisely. In Plato's view, these rulers were not merely elite intellectuals, but moral leaders.
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Plato had an essentially antagonistic view of art and the artist, although he approved of certain religious and moralistic kinds of art. Again, his approach is related to his theory of Forms. A beautiful flower, for example, is a copy or imitation of the universal Forms “flowerness” and “beauty.” The physical flower is one step removed from reality, that is, the Forms. A picture of the flower is, therefore, two steps removed from reality. This ... meant that the artist is two steps removed from knowledge, and, indeed, Plato's frequent criticism of the artists is that they lack genuine knowledge of what they are doing. Artistic creation, Plato observed, seems to be rooted in a kind of inspired madness.
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In mapping out the constitution for his utopian society or state, Plato starts out with a schematic description of the human soul. Every soul, according to him, is composed of three parts: bodily desires and appetites, “spirited emotions” like ambition and courage, and finally the faculty of knowledge and reason. In a healthy individual all three parts fulfill their proper function. Bodily desires and appetites secure the physical survival of a person, the spirited emotions inspire his more far-reaching plans and projects, and the intellectual faculties make sure that all enterprises remain reasonable and under rational control. Plato lays great stress on the disciplining function of reason. Without the self-discipline imposed by reason a person may easily turn into something like a self-destructive glutton, or into a person carried away by foolish emotions and thoughtless ambitions.
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Plato ... made clear that not all citizens of the ideal state possessed the same capacity to realize the "form of the good." As a result, he proposed distinct educational programs for future artisans, auxiliaries, and philosopher-kings. Plato favored mathematics as a precise and abstract model for the development of thought in the future rulers of the just state. Knowledge, however, could only be attained through the use of dialectic to shed all assumptions and to glean the first principle of all, the "form of the good." After many years of mathematical and dialectical study, followed by fifteen years of public service, the best of this group would have come to understand the "form of the good" and have become philosopher-kings. Cognizant of the interrelationship of all things and confident of the reasons behind them, the intellectually and morally elite would be equipped to rule the just state in an enlightened manner.
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Turning the ship analogy against Plato in this way is a persuasive move, but it ultimately does not take care of Plato's challenge. For if it is plausible to argue that voters may be too uninformed to decide on the best means to reach a certain goal, then it is ... plausible to argue that they may not be informed enough to choose the right ends. A serious lack of knowledge can manifest itself not only in the way a state is run, but also in the choice of destinations. What can and has to be criticized is not only a citizenry's possible ignorance of the measures that a government might take to reach certain goals, but also their ideas and expectations about where their society ought to go--what goals they want to reach as a commonwealth. The democratic election of a leader who plans to replace a capitalist democracy with a fascist warfare state, for example, is a case in point. Hitler, it is worth remembering, was elected by a democratic vote, and it is surely not irrelevant to ask whether those who voted for him did not suffer from an unacceptable degree of ignorance and lack of political education.
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