The Twats of Philosophy: Plato
Writing about web page http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/
The main problem with Plato is that he's a complete tosser. Not only does he think it's good to record the activities of a man who pissed the residents of Athens off with his stupid goddamn questions that made no sense to the point that they actually executed him just to shut him up, but he also introduced into the mix the idea of a "realm of the forms". If you ever say that phrase out loud, please make sure to do the air quotes.
Apparently, in this magical place, there exists a perfect form of every particular thing on earth. There's a perfect boy band. And a perfect Spork™. And not to mention an absolutely smashing from of a shelf bracket. All of these forms, he says, pale in comparison to the "form of the good", which, if we knew it, would tell us how to be perfect people.
Now this all sounds a bit far fetched dosen't it? A magic happy land, in which perfect forms of all things exist? Tosh! Poppyschnap! Fiddlespunk! But wait, the venerable Plato has an "argument"...
There's a lot of waffle to pad it out, but the basic three steps seem to be this:
1. Nothing in this world is certain. It all changes, and so we can't know anything certainly.
2. Plato wants there to be certain knowledge.
3. Therefor a permenant, unchanging realm of the forms exists.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm convinced. If this fantastic argument wasn't enough for you, there's a little analogy: Some blokes are chained up in a cave. Behind them is a fire. People carry objects infront of the fire so that they cast shadows on the cave wall, infront of the guys. Naturally, the guys conclude that the shadows are the real things. But one day, one of the men escapes his chains, and sees the real objects. He goes back into the cave, and tries to tell the men about it, but they don't believe him, and laugh at him, and call him a 'tit'.
This is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for how Plato sat around staring into space, and realised there was this "realm of the forms", and how all the people that dismiss his prattling as deluded nonesense are just "stuck in the cave", and if they'd just sit around "contemplating" as much as Plato did, they'd see he was right.
It gets worse: in "The Republic" this crazy prat goes on to suggest that the people who think like this should actually run the country. He then goes on to justify infanticide, taking infants at birth to be raised away from their parents, and banning any music that is not to his taste. All because he's seen "the realm of the forms". Well thankyou Plato, but I'd rather have my country run by people who could see what they were doing, due to not having their heads lodged firmly in their anuses looking for "forms". You suck Plato, and you know it. Now quit trying to justify your existence, and leave us alone.
Final Scores:
Batshit Insanity: -8
Danger to Humanity: -9
Incomprehensibility of Prose: -2
Relevance Today: -8
Average Twattery: -6.75
06 Oct 2004 00:20
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Tags: Philosophy The Twats Of Philosophy
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7 comments by 1 or more people
[Skip to the latest comment]Lovin' your blog mate!
06 Oct 2004, 00:43
John
You wrote:
"There's a lot of waffle to pad it out, but the basic three steps seem to be this:
1. Nothing in this world is certain. It all changes, and so we can't know anything certainly.
2. Plato wants there to be certain knowledge.
3. Therefor a permenant, unchanging realm of the forms exists."
I really don't understand how Premises 1 and 2 give us Conclusion 3. From the fact that world X constantly changes and from the subjective premise that Plato desires firm knowledge of the world x, how did you conclude that there exists an unchanging world Y?
But maybe you just mean the following:
1. World x constantly changes.
2. Plato desires firm knowledge of world Y.
3. Hence world Y exists.
But what is the connection between Premise 1, on the one hand, and Premise 2 and Conclusion, on the other? It seems that the above argument is equivalent to the following (which is no argument at all):
1. Plato desires firm knowledge of world Y.
2. Hence world Y exists.
Are you saying that THIS is Plato's argument?
06 Oct 2004, 01:23
Okay…
Westley: Thankyou. I plan on covering more of the twats of philosophy over the next year. I'm going to start some new sections too.
John: You seem to have missed the point. There really is no connection between the premises and the conclusion here. It's only because Plato is an arragont twat that he thinks just because he wants there to be certain knowledge, a world must exist for there to be certain knowledge of. This is all Plato. Not me. Let me make this clear: don't agree with him. He's a pillock. I hope that helps you.
06 Oct 2004, 12:56
Des
How heartwarming to see that Warwick philosophy department is unable to instill even a basic understanding of Plato into its students.
21 Oct 2004, 17:02
J Hughes
I find the analogy of the cave to be quite good, with the notion that the majority of people are satisfied to accept the surface as reality and not explore further. This model also explains quite a lot. Provided we maintain the Socratic idea that whatever we think we know, we don't know a damn thing then we are ok. The problem is that throughout history many people seemed to have banged their heads on the way out of the cave, never made it outside and somehow decided that it wasn't a piece of turd that they slipped on, rather they stumbled on "the truth". This wouldn't be such a problem if the ignorant masses simply had, as you suggested, called them twats. No, they rather call them prophets and hence we have centuries of global conflicts because the men with bumps on their heads didn't agree with each other. The sad fact is that many of them are made leaders, and we're all suffering the consequences of that. It seems that those who managed to stumble out of the cave and get a good look at the state of the cave and where it was all going were often called mad. Unfortunately, one of the best of them did indeed actually go mad – I'll leave it to the reader to decide who I mean. Suffice it to say that he wrote as much as he could before actually losing the plot.
You have my favourite blog what I have so far readed. I'm a little shocked at how many Tory types seem active here. however, Warwick was Thatcher's favourite university, so what can we expect? Strange that it has a reputation for protest, I've always found the vast majority to be apathetic binge drinkers, honing themselves for a career in the middle ranks of big business.
26 Oct 2004, 23:23
Dan
Karl Popper got it right…
Anyway, can you imagine what the world would be like if we actually let philosophes run it? This is quite possibly the worst idea in the history of ideas.
03 Nov 2004, 22:12
Wow… people are still posting on this? I wrote it a month ago!
Nietzsche would thank you not to link his name to Plato I expect. Just like me, he thought Plato was a twat, guilty of wrecking greek culture.
I'm actually psychotically liberal to be honest. Like John Stuart Mill, I think that you should basically be able to do or say what you like so long as you aren't hurting anyone else. And I'm exercising my ability to do so on this Blog.
And oh hell no. Philosophers probably shouldn't even be in charge of a philosophy departement, let alone a country…
04 Nov 2004, 12:41
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