Athens · 雅典
Plato 柏拉圖c. 428–348 BCE
An aristocrat who turned from politics after Socrates’ death, founded the Academy, and wrote some thirty dialogues on knowledge, justice, love, and the soul.
一位貴族，在蘇格拉底死後離開政治，創立了學院，並寫了大約三十篇關於知識、正義、愛與靈魂的對話錄。
The story · 課文
Plato and the Academy 柏拉圖與學院
01From student to founder 從學生到創立者
Plato was born into one of the old aristocratic families of Athens, around 428 BCE. Diogenes Laertius, writing much later, reports that his real name was Aristocles, after his grandfather, and that “he received the name of Plato on account of his robust figure,” platys meaning broad. He was expected to enter politics, and two of his relatives were among the Thirty. But the violence of the oligarchy and then the execution of Socrates by the restored democracy convinced him that neither faction could be trusted with power. After the trial he left Athens and traveled, probably to Megara, southern Italy, and Sicily, where he met Pythagoreans and learned their mathematics.
柏拉圖大約在西元前 428 年，出生於雅典一個古老的貴族家庭。很久以後寫作的第歐根尼・拉爾修記載：他的本名是阿里斯托克勒斯（取自他祖父的名字），而「他之所以得到柏拉圖這個名字，是因為他體格健壯」；platys 的意思是寬。人們預期他會從政，他的兩位親戚也在三十人之中。但寡頭政府的暴力，以及恢復後的民主政體處死蘇格拉底，使他確信：兩個派系都不能被託付權力。審判之後他離開雅典四處旅行，可能去過墨伽拉、義大利南部與西西里；在那裡他遇見畢達哥拉斯學派，學習了他們的數學。
Around 387 BCE he returned and began teaching in the Academy, which Diogenes describes as “a gymnasium outside the walls, in a grove named after a certain hero, Hecademus.” It was not a university in the modern sense. There were no fees we know of and no degrees, but there was a community of teachers and students, a garden, regular discussions, and a shared commitment to mathematics and dialectic. The most famous student arrived at about seventeen and stayed twenty years. His name was Aristotle. The Academy went on teaching for centuries after Plato’s death, and the word “academy” has meant a place of learning ever since.
大約西元前 387 年，他回到雅典，開始在學院教學；第歐根尼描述學院是「城牆外的一座體育場，在一片以英雄赫卡德摩斯命名的樹林裡」。它不是現代意義上的大學：就我們所知，沒有學費，也沒有學位；但有一個由老師與學生組成的社群、一座花園、定期的討論，以及對數學與辯證法的共同投入。最有名的學生大約十七歲時到來，一待就是二十年；他的名字叫亞里斯多德。學院在柏拉圖死後繼續教學了好幾個世紀；從此以後，「academy」這個字就一直意味著一個求學的地方。
02The Forms and the philosopher-king 形式與哲學家國王
Socrates had asked what justice, courage, and beauty are, and every answer failed against some counterexample. Plato drew a bold conclusion. The things we see are beautiful in some ways and ugly in others, and they change and decay. But when we ask what beauty is, we are asking about something that does not change: beauty itself, the Form of the beautiful. In Benjamin Jowett’s translation of the Republic, Socrates asks about the person “who, having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute beauty,” and answers with a question: “Is he awake or in a dream only?” The dreamer “puts the copy in the place of the real object.” The allegory of the cave, explored in this series in the lesson on seeing, is Plato’s picture of the same idea.
蘇格拉底曾經問正義、勇氣與美是什麼，而每一個答案都在某個反例面前失敗。柏拉圖得出了一個大膽的結論：我們看見的事物，在某些方面美、在另一些方面醜，而且會變化、會衰敗。但當我們問「美是什麼」，我們問的是一個不變的東西：美本身，美的形式。在 Benjamin Jowett 翻譯的《理想國》裡，蘇格拉底問到那種「對美的事物有感覺，卻對絕對的美沒有感覺」的人，並用一個問題回答：「他是醒著，還是只在夢中？」做夢的人「把摹本放在真實之物的位置上」。洞穴寓言（這個系列在講「看見」的那一課探討過）就是柏拉圖對同一個觀念的圖像。
The theory had political consequences. If there is a true justice that only trained minds can see, then the city should be ruled by those minds. In the Republic Socrates says, hesitating because he expects laughter, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy … cities will never have rest from their evils.” Plato tried to test the idea. He went to Syracuse, the richest Greek city in Sicily, at the invitation of his friend Dion, to educate the young tyrant Dionysius II. The attempt failed badly. Dionysius was suspicious, Dion was exiled, and Plato was held for a time against his will and later returned home. The man who argued that philosophers should rule learned how hard it is to make a ruler philosophical.
這套理論有政治上的後果：如果有一種真正的正義，只有受過訓練的心靈能看見，那麼城邦就應該由那些心靈來統治。在《理想國》裡，蘇格拉底遲疑著（因為他預料會被嘲笑）說：「除非哲學家成為國王，或者這世上的國王與君主擁有哲學的精神與力量⋯⋯否則城邦永遠不會擺脫它們的禍害。」柏拉圖試著檢驗這個想法。他應朋友狄翁之邀，前往西西里最富有的希臘城市敘拉古，去教育年輕的僭主狄奧尼修斯二世。這次嘗試慘敗：狄奧尼修斯起了疑心，狄翁被放逐，柏拉圖也一度被強留，後來才回到家鄉。那個主張哲學家應該統治的人，學到了把一位統治者變得有哲學是多麼困難。
03Why dialogues, and why it lasted 為什麼是對話，為什麼能延續
Plato wrote almost everything as dialogues, with Socrates usually as the main speaker, and he never speaks in his own voice. One reason may be in the Phaedrus, where an Egyptian king warns the inventor of writing: “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” Readers of written words “will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” Philosophy, on this view, lives in conversation, in questions and answers between people who can push back. A dialogue is the closest a written text can come to that. It shows reasoning in motion and leaves the reader to finish the argument, and many of the early dialogues end without a conclusion.
柏拉圖幾乎所有的作品都寫成對話，通常以蘇格拉底為主要說話者；他自己從來不以第一人稱發言。原因之一，或許在《斐德羅篇》裡：一位埃及國王警告文字的發明者：「你的這項發明，會在學習者的靈魂裡造成遺忘，因為他們不會再使用記憶。」讀文字的人「看起來無所不知，實際上通常什麼也不知道」。依這種看法，哲學活在對話裡，活在能夠互相反駁的人之間的問與答裡。對話錄是一篇書面文字所能最接近那種狀態的形式。它展示推理的運動，並把論證留給讀者去完成；而許多早期的對話錄，結束時並沒有結論。
The Academy outlived its founder by centuries, and Plato’s dialogues survived entire, which is rare for ancient authors. Later Platonists in Alexandria, Rome, and Athens built religious philosophies on them. Augustine read Plato through those Platonists, so his ideas entered Christian theology, and Islamic philosophers read him in Arabic translation. In the twentieth century Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The line is an exaggeration, and it points at something real. Many of the questions Plato raised are still the questions philosophers ask, among them what knowledge is, whether moral truths are real, who should rule, and what the soul is.
學院比它的創立者多延續了好幾個世紀；柏拉圖的對話錄完整地留存下來，這在古代作者中是罕見的。後來在亞歷山大港、羅馬與雅典的柏拉圖主義者，在它們上面建立了宗教性的哲學。奧古斯丁透過那些柏拉圖主義者讀柏拉圖，於是他的思想進入了基督教神學；伊斯蘭的哲學家則透過阿拉伯文譯本讀他。二十世紀，懷海德寫道：「對歐洲哲學傳統最穩當的概括，是說它由一系列對柏拉圖的注腳構成。」這句話是誇張的，卻指向某種真實的東西：柏拉圖提出的許多問題，至今仍是哲學家在問的問題，其中包括：知識是什麼？道德真理是真實的嗎？誰應該統治？靈魂是什麼？