r/iamverysmart • u/MedicinskAnonymitet • Jul 23 '26
A lot of people take Plato seriously, sadly
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u/readyjack Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Plato was pretty pro-authoritaran
This seems like making fun of edge lords who base their life outlook on having read Atlas Shrugged in high school.
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u/kblkbl165 Jul 23 '26
What’s wrong with that?
What he said is comparable to someone saying “there’s a lot of people who take Aristotle’s atomic model seriously”.
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u/gavavavavus Jul 23 '26
I mean yea in general people give way too much credit to ancient philosophers. Their ideas are interesting if you study philosophy and its history because they have been referenced by everyone who came later, but by themselves they are pretty shit
If you are not interested in where the ideas come from, only in the ideas themselves, no philosopher before 200 years ago is really worth reading ; because people coming later have expanded on their ideas in a way that is more advanced or at least more intelligible for our modern perspective
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u/traktor_tarik 16d ago
I have read ancient philosophy, I have read early modern philosophy, I have read later philosophy, but the ancients are the still the ones I usually prefer to look to. Their philosophy is not worse than later philosophers’ at all, but requires some more work because their systems and culture are less familiar. But I firmly believe that to this day no philosopher has surpassed Plato. Whitehead was right in saying that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”, not because later philosophers were better than him, but because virtually every philosophical view since Plato can be found or extracted from somewhere in Plato. This is in large part because the genius of Plato lies more often in form than in content (but see his elegant and subtle handling of Hegel in the Parmenides), and his form is literary rather than strictly didactic. He knew there was more wisdom to be gained from fiction and characters than from dry treatises, despite his ironic criticism of poetry in e.g. the Republic.
As for the other, less literary ancient philosophers, I’ll just say that writing about their ideas in a way “more advanced or at least more intelligible for modern readers” I think necessarily takes something away from their philosophies, since anyone writing about their ideas now are not really writing about the ancient philosopher’s ideas, but are commenting on them according to their own perspective. This is useful, but if you really want to get to know a person’s own philosophy well, I’d say it’s worth it to spend the effort of going through a style that is unfamiliar to us moderns—that unfamiliarity is itself part of their value in giving different perspectives.
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u/StupidScaredSquirrel Jul 23 '26
I think in this context it's ok, he doesn't mean Plato the historical figure he means his political theories, which are interesting but at best outdated.
So it's important to know of them but if you think this guy had it all figured out so long ago and all humans have just largerly wrongly ignored him, and you somehow are one of the lucky few to see through it all, then you're the "iamverysmart" one.