Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Socrates never wrote anything in his life. It was Plato who wrote about him or rather Socrates was one of the main speakers in his early writings. Socrates thought the writings were static and could be misinterpreted by readers. He preferred direct communication over writing. So, he went to town and engaged himself with his students in dialogues. He argued against sophists, for whom there was no truth or universal knowledge and everything was relative. He encouraged his students to seek true knowledge and was always asking “What is it?” questions. He focused his dialogues or questions on the ethical questions, virtues, and the true knowledge. One can only live one’s life virtuously when one learns the truth. He was executed for spoiling the youth of Athens.

Plato studied from Socrates and wrote on every subject of philosophy. No wonder, Alfred North Whitehead said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” He combined and transformed all the previous teachings of Greek thought. He agreed with Sophists that knowledge of appearance is impossible, with Socrates, the genuine knowledge is concepts, with Heraclitus, the world of appearance is in constant change, with Eleatics, the world of ideas is unchanging, with Atomists, the being is plural (ideas), and with Anaxagora, the mind is distinct. The Pythagorean philosophy influenced him greatly. He took many ideas from it. Just like Pythagoreans, he believed in the human soul to be immortal and, as a result, attaining moral virtue was far more important than any material. He took the ideas of forms from Pythagoreans’s numbers (arche), which are ideal. Plato said that the sense perception does not reveal the true reality of things. Genuine knowledge can only be gained from reasoning. He is a rationalist. He said one can’t learn anything new (how can one learn anything — if he knows something, then there is no need for learning. If he doesn’t know, then he would never know if something he is learning is true or false). Hence, he thought that learning is remembering because all the truths lie embedded in our soul and when we learn, we are recalling those ideas or principles. All knowledge is reminiscence and all learning is a reawakening. Hence soul must have existed before its union with the body. The soul becomes possessed with a desire for the world of sense. It originally belonged to Star. If it had resisted the desire in celestial life, it would have occupied itself in transcendent existence, with the contemplation of ideas. As it is, it is condemned to pass through a stage of purification. The release of the soul from the body and the contemplation of the beautiful world of ideas is the ultimate end of life.

Man is just when he is wise (reason rules over impulses), brave (spirited past holds fast through pain and pleasure), and temperate (submit to authority or reason). For a man, a life of virtue, not pleasure, is the highest good. 

The mission of the state is to achieve virtue and happiness for its citizens. The state should be ruled by the philosophers and oppose private property. 

Aristotle, a student of Plato, wrote on several subjects. He is the first philosopher to divide the inquiry into distinct subjects such as mathematics, biology, zoology, political science, ethics, and so on. He rejects the idea of transcendency of Plato and claims that the form and the matter are not separate, but eternally together. According to him, our world of experience is the real world and the general knowledge is not only the facts but their causes or grounds. Without the experience, the truth would never be known and without being implicit in reason, they would not be certain. He tried to reconcile empiricism and rationalism. He explained the matter as the principle of possibility, whereas form is the principle of actuality or reality. The idea of the form is the mover and the matter the thing moved. Since form and matter are together eternally, the motion too is eternal. This notion presupposes an eternal unmoved mover. He claims the first mover to be the absolute spirit or the God, which religious thinkers borrowed heavily to prove the existence of God. For Aristotle, God has no moral virtues i.e., he is not generous or loving or just; he is pure intelligence. God is free from pain and passion and is supremely happy. He is everything that a philosopher longs to be. Aristotle claims that the man, who poses the reason, is the final goal of nature. The highest good for man is to manifest its peculiar essence. The eudaimonia or the pursuit of happiness, for him, is the primary objective of a man and the highest form of happiness comes from contemplation. He believed an ethical man has the faculties of intellect, wisdom, insight, temperance, courage, and liberality. He advocated for the golden mean: courage between foolhardiness and cowardice, liberality between extravagance and avarice, modesty between boastfulness and shamelessness, and so on. The justice, for him, is giving each man his due. Society’s role is to make man virtuous and happy and the state is the goal of the evolution of human life.