'Plato of Athens', by Robin Waterfield: the gold of the thinker who brought philosophy out of poverty

If for Hegel Plato is the teacher of the human race, for Alfred North Whitehead the entire history of philosophy is footnotes to his philosophy. There is a wide catalog of good introductions to Plato's philosophy on the market. There are no biographies in the strict sense, and that void is intended to be filled by Robin Waterfield with his

Plato of Athens. A life in philosophy

. This lack remains surprising and the usual thing has been to use the third book by Diogenes Laertius dedicated to Plato in

Lives and Opinions of Illustrious Philosophers

to prepare the small biographical sketch that accompanies the best studies on the thought of the Athenian philosopher and his very long shadow to this day.

It is not easy, however, to write an authentic biography of a giant in the history of thought without falling into hagiography, especially when there is so little biographical data available to us or because we cannot be certain about a good number of them that They are part of an invented tradition or because they are simply contradictory to each other. Sometimes Plato appears humble, other times arrogant, for some he was altruistic, for others, greedy, in the hagiographies he is a true teacher, for the hostile tradition nothing good can be learned from him. If that is the case, and in the case of Plato it is not a minor problem, the usual thing is to convert the biography of the founder of the Academy into an introduction to his philosophy and in order to cover this function it could be objected that there are better introductions to thought. of Plato than that of Waterfield himself.

Plato of Athens

is not, however, a dispensable work and its merit lies precisely in bringing the learned and the layman closer to the construction of a philosophy as a daughter of its time, of the different crucial moments in Plato's life and of history. of an exhausted Greece like that of the 4th century BC, from the death sentence of his teacher Socrates in 399 BC, whom he would have met at the age of sixteen, to his attempts to establish his ideal republic of philosophers in the Syracuse of Dionysius I and Dion. It is not a minor merit of this essay to show us a philosopher committed to politics and the regeneration of Athens, and other Greek city states, who understood politics as inseparable from ethics and as an imperative for the intellectual to go down to the cave to lead his fellow citizens towards the light of justice and moral commitment.

His aversion to a democracy that was mired in disorder and with unscrupulous politicians is understandable.

Not being a victim of the evil of many stories of philosophy that turn philosophers into beings outside of time, allows Waterfield to correct some commonplaces in Plato's life, such as fixing his birth in 428/7 BC when it seems obvious that he had to be born in 424/3 BC because if this was not the case, it cannot be explained that he did not participate in any of the last battles of the Peloponnesian War. It is also understood that his aversion to democracy is justified if we take into account that he lived the democracy of Athens in its twilight hour, in a city immersed in disorder and demagoguery where unscrupulous politicians made it valid in politics that the end justifies the ends. means, not to mention the impact of the death sentence of his teacher Socrates, to whom Waterfield dedicated his

Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths

. It is no less true that his being a family member of Critias and Charmides, oligarchs linked to the thirty tyrants, being part of an aristocratic family and the anti-vitalism of Socrates and his rejection of participatory democracy had to leave their mark on his conservatism. None of this should scandalize us, nor should we dare to cancel or censor any of his work, since, as Waterfield affirms, “philosophy would have been poorer if Plato had not been born rich,” because wealth provided him with the free time necessary to philosophize.

In 383 BC he founded an elite institution, the Academy, which rivaled the school of Isocrates. Aristotle, Eudoxus, his heir and nephew Speusippus and, according to tradition, even some women, like Axiotea, who after reading the

Republic

dressed as a man to see her wish of being a disciple of the Master fulfilled, studied there. There he taught theoretical and practical philosophy, both to reflect on the principle of all things through his theory of Ideas and to design an ideal state through his political ideas or his tripartite conception of the soul and its three cardinal virtues that culminate in justice and the idea of ​​good. Maybe you learned geometry, that without ethics there is no aesthetics, cosmology than astronomy, or that true philosophy must be a system that answers the why of all things.

Plato died in 347 BC, at approximately seventy-six years after a long life committed and dedicated to returning eternally to the cave, moving from the Academy to the agora to work tirelessly for the best of political systems, whether he was right or not. His tomb was erected next to the altar of the Muses in the garden of the Academy, his traveling companions from the 390s BC when he began to write his first dialogues and until eternity.

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