Plato devoted his life to one goal: helping people reach a state of fulfillment. To this day, his ideas remain deeply relevant, provocative, and fascinating. Philosophy, to Plato, was a tool to help us change the world.
In this short video, Alain de Botton reminds us of the four big ideas that Plato had for making life more fulfilled.
Transcribed highlights below.
1. Think More
We rarely give ourselves time to think carefully and logically about our lives and how to lead them. Sometimes we just go along with what the Greeks called Doxa, or common sense. In the thirty-six books he wrote, Plato showed this common sense to be riddled with errors, prejudice, and superstition. … The problem is that popular opinions edge us toward the wrong values. … Plato’s answer is know yourself. (This) means doing a special kind of therapy: Philosophy. This means subjecting your ideas to examination rather than acting on impulse. … This kind of examination is called a Socratic discussion.
2. Let Your Lover Change You
That sounds weird if you think that love means finding someone who wants you just the way you are. In his play, the symposium, … Plato says true love is admiration. In other words, the person you need to get together with should have very good qualities, which you yourself lack. … By getting close to this person you can become a little like they are. The right person for us helps us grow to our full potential. … For Plato ‘a couple shouldn’t love each other exactly as they are right now,’ rather they should be committed to educating each other and enduring the stormy passages that inevitably involves. Each person should want to seduce the other into becoming a better version of themselves.
3. Decode the Message of Beauty
Everyone pretty much likes beautiful things but Plato was the first to ask why do we like them? He found a fascinating reason: beautiful objects are whispering important truths to us about the good life. We find things beautiful when we sense qualities in them that we need but are constantly missing in our lives: gentleness; harmony; balance; peace; (and) strength. Beautiful objects therefore have a really important function: they help to educate our souls.
4. Reform Society
Plato spent a lot of time thinking about how the government and society should ideally be. He was the world’s first utopian thinker.
In this, he was inspired by Athens’s great rival: Sparta. This was a city-sized machine for turning out great soldiers. Everything the Spartans did – how they raised their children, how their economy was organised, whom they admired, how they had sex, what they ate – was tailored to that one goal. And Sparta was hugely successful, from a military point of view.
But that wasn’t Plato’s concern. He wanted to know: how could a society get better at producing not military power but eudaimonia? How could it reliably help people towards fulfillment?
In his book, The Republic, Plato identifies several changes that should be made:
We need new heroes
Athenian society was very focused on the rich, like the louche aristocrat Alcibiades, and sports celebrities, like the boxer Milo of Croton. Plato wasn’t impressed: it really matters who we admire, for celebrities influence our outlook, ideas and conduct. And bad heroes give glamour to flaws of character.Plato therefore wanted to give Athens new celebrities, replacing the current crop with ideally wise and good people he called Guardians: models for everyone’s good development. These people would be distinguished by their record of public service, their modesty and simple habits, their dislike of the limelight and their wide and deep experience. They would be the most honoured and admired people in society.
End Democracy
He also wanted to end democracy in Athens. He wasn’t crazy he just observed how few people think properly before they vote. Therefore we get very substandard rulers. He didn’t want to replace democracy with a dictatorship, but he wanted to prevent people from voting until they’d started to think rationally. That is, until they became philosophers. … To help the process Plato started a school: The Academy.
Still curious? So where do you go from here? The Great Books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis recommends this edition of Plato’s Complete Works. Another place to start is with this, slightly more detailed introduction to Plato.