Why Plato Sucks (especially for atheists).
By Robin Marie on April 3, 2013
“Christianity is Platonism for the people.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
In the course of fulfilling my duties as an underpaid slave to the university a teaching assistant, I’ve had the mixed blessing of reading and reflecting on Plato for two consecutive quarters these past few months. I say mixed because while this has afforded me an opportunity to understand Plato’s thought in more richly textured detail, it has served mostly to reinforce the position I already held on that most beloved of philosophers – which is, simply, that Plato blows.
I am not intimidated by your stone locks nor your piercing blank eyes, sir.
Yes, I’m being hyperbolic. But allow me to make my case. I believe I can argue, with only moderate exaggeration, that any sincere atheist should have some serious misgivings about Mr. Plato – and this is simply because, as Nietzsche argued at length, Plato kind of invented Christianity. We must say “kind of,” of course, because Plato obviously never clearly articulated a concept even of a singular, all-powerful humanoid God, let alone anything as obtuse and ridiculous as a singular, all-powerful humanoid God which first creates imperfect beings in his image, then condemns them for acting on their nature and then creates a son to sacrifice for said imperfect beings who then somehow transforms himself into a sin sponge that sucks up all the ickiness in those poor beings simply by enduring some severe unpleasantness for a mere weekend.
But I digress – because here’s the thing. Plato may not have come up with the exact details of that ridiculousness, but he helped build the intellectual foundations absolutely essential to making the theological claims of Christianity thinkable at all. And in certain respects what he came up with, I dare say, rivals if not surpasses Christianity on the absurdity meter.
The most important such absurdity is Plato’s metaphysics – and his metaphysical framework really builds the scaffolding on which the rest of his philosophy rests. Plato believed that everything in this visible world was merely a degraded, corrupted reflection of the Truth, and indeed Truth with a capital T is appropriate here, if it ever was. That’s because the Truth, or the Good, or what have you, was the absolute everything and absolute awesome – it wasn’t God, exactly, but pretty near to it. According to Plato, the Good is perfection, reality, things-as-they-actually are; but we human beings do not really have direct access to the Good – we experience it only indirectly, and the material world around us comes in a sorry second or even third to the awesomeness of the Good. (There’s also the issue of the realm of the Forms, the perfect versions of things, but even though it is enjoyable for its additional level of absurdity we will leave it aside in consideration of time.)
If this is sounding weird, that’s because it is. It’s called metaphysics for a reason, and there is more than a little mysticism in Plato’s descriptions of experiencing the Good directly. The best way to understand this is through Plato’s metaphor of the cave. In The Republic, Plato asks us to imagine prisoners chained inside a cave, restrained in such a way that they can only look at the wall before them. Behind them a fire burns, and it casts shadows on the wall of the objects that go in-between the fire and the prisoners. The prisoners, having spent their whole lives looking at the cave wall, mistake the shadows for the real thing. This is their entire world. Then, someone, somehow, gets out of the cave. At first when they go outside, the light is so blinding that they can’t see for shit, but eventually their eyes adjust and they are totally into the Real World, as it were. So of course our former prisoner goes running back into the cave to let everyone know – but those still chained to the wall can only see a distorted shadow, and hear a distorted voice (it echoes in there weirdly with a big fire behind you, I suppose). So, they never know they are living in a cave, because it turns out only a few people get to go see the true world outside.
That Plato thought he was one such individual is pretty clear, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First let’s just sit with the implications of this version of the world. Everything you and I see, hear, and experience is a muddied down shadow of the real thing; indeed, it barely partakes in the truth, save for creating a visual distortion that prevents us from grasping true reality. Moreover, your average human being is incapable of understanding, on the basis of their senses, the true nature of reality – they are chained, after all, and they lack the requisite tools and knowledge to know any better. So, the immediate material world around us is pretty degraded stuff, and, moreover, most of us are incapable of freeing ourselves from this world or figuring out with our own cognitive power that we are even in a cave. Does this remind you of anything?
These are all fundamental assumptions of Christianity, a religion which rejected the value of the physical world around us in favor of the ideal of something other, something out there. What we see around us – earth, water, air, life – it’s all pretty shitty compared to you know, what is outside the cave. And furthermore, only so much can be learned from it – contrary to what might be assumed, Plato did not argue that true knowledge could be gained from observing natural phenomenon and constructing hypothesis that fit the observed results of experiments. A type of knowledge could be gained, but such a process – science, basically – is still merely an elaborate version of speculating about shadows on the wall, and therefore is never to be mistaken for Truth. True truth (such a phrase indicates this is a problematic concept we’re dealing with) can only be accessed directly, by staring right into that sun – no intermediaries will do. Thus anyone who identifies as a materialist rejects the foundation of Plato’s philosophy – because according to Plato, not only is the material world corrupted, there is only so much one can learn from it.
Moreover, Plato’s metaphysics, even if it did not articulate a concept of a singular, all-wise and all-powerful God, certainly helped pave the way for such a concept. Plato was rather displeased with the religion of his time; in The Republic he argues that all the stories where the gods behave badly should be censured, for should people believe that gods could lie, cheat and scheme, they will be encouraged to do so themselves. Thus only stories of gods being noble, righteous and honest should be told. Intuitively this might make enough sense to us today, but think about the implications – Plato advocated replacing a religious tradition which acknowledged human traits and incorporated them into an understanding of how the world worked with a religious tradition which obliterated these traits and encouraged people to look up to a very-often-impossible ideal instead. So here we again see one of the roots of Christianity; regardless of what most people are actually like, Platonism rejects trying to manage that in a realistic manner and instead holds up an ideal of perfection – an ideal, in Christianity at least, we are all supposed to berate ourselves over if we fail to live up to. In this sense, Plato not only takes a giant piss on the material world, but on material humanity, as well.
So much for the majority of Plato’s thought in terms of how well it might resonate with contemporary atheists. However, what about the politics of Plato? Well, it doesn’t get much better there, either, unless you’re an atheist with an authoritarian bent. Plato believed that only a very small number of people could directly access the Truth, and it was these people who should rule societies in light of this knowledge – hence philosopher kings. However, he did not imagine such philosopher kings going back into the cave, as it were, to educate and enlighten everyone – as Plato suggests, the prisoners inside the cave would for the most part remain helplessly ignorant. Rather, Plato envisioned the philosopher kings using their superior knowledge to organize society in the best way possible – which would involve telling everyone a Noble Lie to make sure they accepted their position in society once the meritocracy sorted out the mediocre from the slightly better and the slightly better from the awesome people. Once your station was determined, however, you ought to be stuck with it – Plato even defined justice as “minding your own business,” and in this manner articulated a vision of a rigid and hierarchical society. But don’t worry – the philosopher kings would rule in the best interest of everyone.
But why couldn’t the philosopher kings just teach everyone about the Good and the Truth, you might ask? Well, it turns out that an understanding of the Good wasn’t something that could really be communicated by good old fashioned language or, as we have seen with Plato’s skepticism about science, even reason. At one point in The Republic, after heavily implying that he is one of the chosen few to know the Truth, his personal lap dog buddy Glaucon asks him to describe what it is like to go out of the cave and be in the sun – but Plato (posturing, as always, as Socrates, mind you) replies that he cannot do so, really – it is impossible to describe unless you experience it. So, here we have an authoritarian political system ruled by people with a special access to truth which cannot be proven by science or reason and is moreover their personal secret knowledge accessible only by personal direct experience with the “sun.” These ideas have historically served us awfully well, haven’t they?
And in the course of all of this, I have not mentioned how incredibly annoying and condescending the Socratic method is, or how absurd and problematic Plato’s ridiculous craft analogies are, or how unpleasant I find the literary style of pretty much all ancient Greek literature, or how I find aspects of Plato which others describe to be “profound” to be totally banal, simplistic, and as imaginative as the speculations of someone stoned out of their minds (“we all have like, three parts to our soul dude and like, they are always struggling for dominance and one is like, a lion and the other, a medusa, with all these snakes coming out of its head and shit”) – because all of this is far more subjective and not to the point: which is that Plato was not merely a douchebag, but a douchebag who gave us a really shitty philosophical tradition that contributed to an ongoing 2,000 year plus tradition of stupidity. Why he is routinely credited even within atheist circles as being some kind of super awesome rationalist thinker is beyond me; this guy helped cement many of the assumptions and traditions we are most opposed to. And this is, of course, not just my personal opinion – and nothing I’ve said here is remotely original in terms of making the link between Platonism and Christianity, which is widely understood and accepted by most scholars and historians.[1] But I think it’s important to know the roots of whence it came – and furthermore, I felt like picking a fight with Tom.
A nice article indeed!
I must say that I had one major problem with it though. If you quote Nietzsche, make sure to spell his first name right as well. It`s Friedrich Nietzsche, not Frederick. Please change that, as a German, it hurts my eyes to see him being disrespected like that.