Well, we are very attached to this idea,
and if you think about it, 
it is actually quite hard to justify.
Socrates didn't try to justify it.
He just does this and says
to have refuted the definition.
But if one set out to give
a theory of what he is doing,
then one would have to say 
something like, what I've just said
and you've just implied the idea
that we all have within us
the means for making the true vanquish the false.
And that is exactly what Plato does in the Meno.
He produces, as it were, a theory 
of Socratic or philosophical discussion
which puts forward the suggestion that
we all have latent within our minds
the correct answers to these questions
'What is courage?', 'What is justice?' and so on.
And it's that knowledge, 
deep back within not immediately accessible,
that knowledge is what enables us
to knock down all the wrong answers
and show that they're wrong and 
that knowledge is gradually emerging
bit by bit in the course of that bit of
discussion where, for instance,
one thing that Laches says is used to show that 
some other thing that Laches says must be false.
Now I know that, in your view, the doctrine
you've just expounded for us ties up directly with
what the basis is for Plato's most famous
doctrine of all, the Theory of Forms.
That doctrine must have been 
the most influential part
of his philosophy in the whole history of philosophy.
In fact, it's what the word Platonism
was historically almost come to mean.
Can you explain that to us?
Well, remember that these discussions 
that Socrates has are all centred on a definition of question:
What is the definition of courage? 
Of beauty? Of justice?
If now we have latent within our souls 
the knowledge of the answers to these questions,
and we have that knowledge independently of
and prior to our experience of the world we live in
and using our senses and
going around from place to place;
if our knowledge is prior to that, 
and independent of all that,
then surely what we know 
- justice, beauty, courage -
must itself be independent of and prior
to this empirical world we are now existing in.
And that thesis is the fundamental
assertion of the Theory of Forms,
that justice, beauty and the like exist
independently of and prior to
all the just actions, just people, all the beautiful things,
statues, objects, anything you can find.
They are not questions about the here and now,
and that's the contrast.
There's a point in the Phaedo where Socrates is saying 
that to do philosophy is to rehearse for death.
It is in fact to practise being dead. Why?
Well, because being dead is having
one's soul separate from the body.
And not considering the things of this world.
And in doing philosophy you are, so far as you can,
separating the soul from the body,
because you are not thinking about the here and now.
You are asking 'What's justice?'
anywhere, anytime, justice in itself,
you are not asking 'Who did me wrong now or yesterday?'
' If you are asking 'What's beauty?', you are not asking
'Who is the most beautiful person in this room?'
And if you are not thinking about the here and now,
then, in the sense Plato is interested in,
you are not here and now.
You are where your mind is, not because you are
in some other particular place but a better one,
but because you are no
in place in that sense at all.
You are immersed in generalities.
So, it is all right to use the phrase 
'the world of Forms',
subject to the qualification that
that means the realm of invariable generalities.
Yes, so the word `world´ here is actually misleading.
We mustn't think of it as a place 
where certain spiritual things subsist.
Now, these middle-period dialogues
that we're talking about now,
I think particularly the Meno, the Phaedo, 
the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedrus
these were written by Plato when
he was absolutely at the height of his powers
and I think this is actually a good point for us
to pause for a moment
and think of their literary and
the aesthetic qualities.
Why are these dialogues regarded and always 
have been regarded as supreme works of literary art?
Why is that so?
They are so alive. I mean, a lot of other 
philosophers have tried writing dialogues,
in both ancient and modern - Xenophon,
Cicero, Augustine, Berkeley, and Hume.
But the only one of those, ones I've just named, 
who comes anywhere near Plato is Hume.
And I think this is because for Hume, 
like Plato, it's the process of philosophical thinking
that counts at least as much as the answers.
With Xenophon or Berkeley all too clear that 
you are reading somebody who cares about the answers,
not the process of journeying towards them.
Where Plato is concerned, we have to add
his fantastic mastery of language,
whether it's high-flaring, imaginative descriptions, 
or witty repartee, jokes, images.
He's terribly good at making crystal clear
the most difficult thoughts.
You can go on adding.
I mean, cause in the end just that
he's an artistic genius as well as a philosophical one.
Do you share the traditional view 
that his masterpiece is the Republic?
- Yes, I do
- Why?
I think because it is in the Republic 
more than anywhere else that he makes good his belief
that every question is connected with
every other and that the inquiry really can't stop,
so even a 'conclusion for now'
leads on to the next problem.
I mean, you begin with a straightforward question, 
'What is justice?',
a familiar Socratic kind of question 
that becomes the question:
"Is justice a benefit to its possessor?"
And Socrates sets out, and this is really
the task of the whole Republic,
to show that justice is a benefit to its possessor,
indeed the thing you need
most of all if you are to be happy,
whereas the unjust man is
the most miserable of all creatures.
But to do that, it turns out;
he has to give a theory of human nature.
He divides the soul into three parts
and this is where he reneges on
Socrates's thesis that virtue is knowledge.
Virtue turns out to involve more than knowledge,
though knowledge must be in control.
And with the idea that knowledge is something that can
and should be in control of the non-rational factors,
you also get the idea which that, but now become possible,
of a society in which knowledge was in control.
So we get a whole political theory 
of a new, better way of life in society.
All this emphasis on knowledge
being in control raises the question,
'what knowledge, and what is knowledge anyway, 
and why is it better than opinion?'
So you've got a theory of knowledge. 
The question what's knowledge?
That philosophers need in order to rule the rest of us 
becomes an inquiry into the sciences.
There's a lot about mathematics.
A whole vision of understanding 
the world that it is that we live in
is produced in order to support the claim
that this understanding of the world as it is,
really is what should be, in charge of ourselves, 
both individually and in society
and so, all of that growing out of this one question, 'What is justice?'
the enquiry really doesn't cease until death
with the vision of the after-life and
the myth of Er at the end of the book.
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