One reason to read Plato is that many of our ideas can be traced back to him.  So many of them in fact that Plato might rightfully be said to have invented Western Civilization.

Did you know Plato created the idea of romantic love?  Surely you must have seen the movie hit Jerry Meguire.  Remember the elevator scene.  Here’s how it is described in Cameron Crowe’s screenplay:

The elevator stops. A young, amorous Couple enters.  Both are about 24, and the Guy presses a number five flights down. In a moment, we realize they are deaf. They sign to each other, murmuring noises of love. And then the Guy signs something, obviously powerful, because the Girl emits a delighted gasp, as does Dorothy. The Couple are truly in their own world. They kiss before exiting on their floor. And suddenly the elevator seems empty without them.

What the deaf man signed to his girlfriend was that he loved her, and in a very special way. For each person there is one and only one person who is their other half, the person who makes them whole.  He told his girlfriend that she made him whole.  What a powerful notion.  We all saw Dorothy melt as she watched the young man sign his love.

Plato gave birth to this idea in his dialogue Symposium.  In the dialogue we follow Socrates to a dinner party (what the Greeks called a symposium).  The dinner guests decide to entertain each other by giving speeches on love.  One of the guests is the famous playwright Aristophanes.  He tells an incredible tale.  This is the translation in Plato Unmasked

Aristophanes was over his hiccups, the sneeze cure having worked, and now volunteered to speak. He wanted to approach the topic differently, though, with a mythical tale.

“Originally,” he said, “the human race was different. Each individual was like two people with their backs pressed together. They had four arms and legs and a head with two faces, one looking forward, the other looking backward. And there were three sexes: individuals with two male organs, those with two female organs, and hermaphrodites possessing one female and one male organ.  These beings could walk forward or backward with equal facility. And when they wished to move quickly they performed cartwheels, whirling along faster than any human can run today. Since they were twice as strong as men today, and much faster, they united to overthrow the gods.

“In the councils of heaven the gods debated whether to annihilate these impudent beings or merely humiliate them. The decision was to humble them by slicing them in half, reducing their strength while doubling their numbers, so there would be more men to honor the gods.  After the slicing, Zeus ordered Apollo to twist their necks around so they faced backward.  Then Apollo pulled the loose skin together and tied it into knot, which became our naval.

“Finding themselves separated, the sliced individuals threw their arms around each other trying to reunite, holding the embrace day and night, neither eating nor sleeping. When one of the pair died of hunger, the survivor sought another mate to replace his or her lost half: the split males seeking another split male, the halved females another split female, and the split hermaphrodites a halved hermaphrodite of the opposite sex.   They, too, joined in an unending embrace, and the deaths continued.

“Fearing the annihilation of the human race, Zeus had Apollo move each human’s sexual organ around to his or her new front. Now the embrace of male and female produced offspring, while same sex unions offered sufficient gratification that the pairs separated long enough to sustain life with food and rest before their next embrace.

“Since then humans have been half-beings, each seeking union with the other half to become complete.  And it is why some men, the hermaphrodites, love only women; others (the double males) love only men; and some women (the double females) love only women.

“It is rare that two halves actually discover each other, but when they do it is as if they have melted into one another, becoming one.  The couple is then inseparable and their love so profound it defies normal explanation.  And if a god were to appear to them and offer to meld them into one being, they would instantly agree, realizing this is what they wanted all along.

“Were the world a better place, we would all find our other half and the human race would live in complete bliss.”

Has this made you curious about Plato’s other ideas?  We’ve seen how one idea inspired a movie scene.  Another of Plato’s ideas inspired an entire movie.  Actually three of them.  I’m talking about the movie trilogy Lord of the Rings. 

The story is about a magic ring that makes its possessor invisible and powerful.  The ring was created long ago by the evil Lord Sauron.  But Sauron lost the ring and the Hobbit Frodo now has it.  Frodo’s uncle, Bilbo had passed it on to Frodo for safekeeping.  As it happens, Sauron now wants the ring back.  He’s busy conquering he world, you see, and he needs the ring’s power to pull it off.

It becomes Frodo’s job to destroy the ring before Sauron gets it   There is only one way.  Frodo must go to Sauron’s kingdom and toss the ring into the volcano called Orodruin.

In this adventure, Frodo is hounded by the creature Gollum.  It is a shock to learn that Gollum is a Hobbit.  He doesn’t look like a Hobbit.  But Gollum once possessed the ring, and it changed him from a rolly polly Hobbit into a gruesome reptile-like creature.  For it turns out that people who wear the ring want to do evil things.  And the ring gives them the power to get away with it.  However, as their evil acts multiply, they are physically transformed into a picture of the evil they commit, into a monster.

What a wild idea.  And Plato thought of it.  Plato talks about the ring in the Republic.  In the dialogue, Socrates’ friend Glaucon claims that men are only good because they fear punishment for doing evil.  Even a truly good man will do evil if he can get away with it.  No one can withstand the temptation. As proof, Glaucon presents the myth of Gyges.   Here is the translation in Plato Unmasked: 

Give a man who seems just the power to get away with evil and he will behave like a monster.  You know the legend of Gyges the Lydian shepherd?  An earthquake struck while he was tending his flock, cracking open the ground to reveal a sarcophagus.  Inside lay the corpse of a giant wearing a jeweled ring.  Gyges took the ring and put it on.  Later that day, at the assembly of the king’s shepherds, he sat fiddling with the ring as each man gave an accounting of the king’s sheep.  Gyges turned the ring’s jewel downward and suddenly became invisible to the others, noticing this when they spoke of him as if he were absent.   With a twist of the ring he reappeared.  Realizing the power of the ring, Gyges arranged to be among the assembly’s envoys sent that evening to give an accounting of the flocks at the king’s court.  Once in the palace, he turned the ring and became invisible.  Gyges went to the queen’s chambers and seduced her, then killed the king and assumed the throne

Imagine we had two such rings and gave one to a complete villain and the other to a man acclaimed to be just.  Would they behave differently?  I think not.  Both would emulate Gyges: raping women, stealing whatever caught their fancy, and killing anyone who angered them, as though they were a god.  It’s the fear of punishment that makes men honest, and nothing else.

Are you still interested?  Good.  Then you are ready for one last movie.  It’s The First Monday in October.  It came out in 1981, the year Sandra Day O’Conner was appointed as the first woman to the Supreme Court. 

In the movie, Walter Matthau plays the role of a Supreme Court Justice.   There has been a death on the bench and the President has nominated the first woman Justice, the conservative ninth circuit judge, Ruth Loomis.

The scene that interests us is Ruth Loomis’ confirmation hearing:

Ruth sits at a table before a microphone.  Senators look down on her from a raised dock.  Two of the senators incline their heads together and whisper conspiratorially.  Then the senator on the left looks sternly down at Ruth Loomis. He holds up a piece of paper.

“Well, according to this fact sheet, Judge Loomis has never had any children.”

“Yes,”   Does the Constitution say that a Supreme Court Justice has to be a mother?”

The two senators are a tag-team.  The second one takes over.  “Judge Loomis, we don’t mean to probe into your private life.”

“Why not,” Ruth answers.  My entire life is public.  But the FBI is wrong on reporting to you that I have no children.  I have hundreds.  We are the parents of our ideas and so my children, in other words, my opinions, my decisions are the result of conception and the delivery is sometimes painful.  You may not like my children.  You may find them ugly, but by God your ideas and mine have equal rights to live together — to grow, to change, even to die.”

What a notion!  Judge Loomis tells us her ideas, her decisions recorded forever in the judicial record, are her children.  Where did the screenwriters, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (no kidding, that’s his real name) get this idea?  From Plato of course!  It comes from the fertile dialogue Symposium where Plato tells us the meaning of life, or actually three meanings of life.

When it’s Socrates’ turn to give a speech on love, he confesses that what he knows about love he learned long ago as a young man from the old priestess, Diotima.  She was wise in many mysteries.  The priestess told Socrates that love was a quest for immortality.  People seek everlasting life in three ways.  Each way makes our life and our struggles meaningful. 

The first road to immortality is through devotion to family.  It’s by having children, caring for them and living through them, that a man lives on after his death, continues through his children and through their line. 

The second meaningful life is to seek fame through great deeds so you will be remembered for generations, or perhaps forever. 

The third kind of meaningful life is the choice made by Ruth Loomis.  It is to create something wonderful, in art, science, or literature.  The books or paintings you leave behind are your immortality.

Look at the people around you, and those in the news.  Aren’t many of them following one of these three paths?  Why do most ordinary people work so hard?  Isn’t it to support their family and give their children a good life.  Mothers and fathers everywhere live through their children, through the next generation. 

A smaller number of people work hard for fame.  The instant fame of a rock star, or the hard won fame of a high office in politics. 

Then there are those, perhaps even fewer in number, that try to leave a footprint behind in art, science, or literature.  Aren’t these people following one of the three paths, too?  What is amazing is that Plato understood this 2,500 years ago.

Here is the relevant passage from Plato Unmasked.  Diotima is talking to Socrates.

‘So what men love is everlasting good.  And how do they pursue it?’

“I had to admit I didn’t know.

‘I will tell you, Socrates,’ she said.  ‘Through procreation.  It is love, by his attraction for the fair, that makes young men desire to possess beautiful maidens, not only for their beauty, but to gain immortality through their offspring.  For love is really a desire for immortality.  That is why a father cares for his child—to continue his line and, in a sense, live on.  Nor is it remarkable that men think this way.  A man’s identity is a fluid thing, constantly changing from childhood through adolescence into manhood and then old age.  Is it such a leap of the imagination to believe that this identity goes through one last transformation after death, continuing in the person of one’s child?’

“The old woman’s tale astonished me.  And she wasn’t finished.

‘This is only one way men seek immortality, Socrates.  As much as a man will sacrifice for his children, even more will he struggle and suffer and even die to leave behind a reputation that is everlasting.  Perpetuation through flesh lasts only a generation, but fame—kept alive and passed from generation to generation—can survive for centuries or, as with the Achilles and Odysseus, perhaps forever.

‘The last route to immortality I have yet to mention.  It is a form of procreation — not of the body, but of the soul.  I speak of the works of Homer and Hesiod, and the constitutions of Lycurgus and Solon.  These works are children of the mind, and they accomplish what no flesh and blood child can do: earn their fathers immortal fame.