Plato’s legacy has been a divided one. His own school, the Academy, for most of its life took philosophizing in Plato’s way to be arguing against the views of contemporaries ad hominem, without commitment to a position of your own. It was not till after the end of the school, in the first century BC, that philosophers started to study and promote Plato’s own ideas as a system. Interpretations of Plato perpetually risk overstressing one side at the expense of the other – seeing him as throwing the argument over to us, and seeing him as passionately concerned to put forward certain positions.
It is modern rather than ancient interpreters who have stressed Plato’s evident desire to establish philosophy as a distinct way of thinking. When he has Socrates tell us at the end of the Republic that there is an old quarrel between poetry (or literature more generally) and philosophy, he seems to be projecting his own view back. For one of the most striking things about Plato is the way that he is willing to use his own brilliant literary gifts to establish that philosophy is crucially about ‘dialectic’, sheer argument which does not rely on rhetorical or literary skill. Philosophy, he keeps insisting, is just for this reason different from what other people, such as orators, poets and sophists do.
Whatever the tensions this produces in Plato’s own work, one of his lessons was well learned. Later philosophy develops for itself a professional style: straightforward, transparent, relying only on the force of rational argument. Unsurprisingly, this is often unattractive to ordinary readers, and we find that a gulf comes about between easier, more literary works written for the general public and ‘real’ philosophy, written in an uncompromisingly professional and technical way.
This gulf is also strengthened by philosophy’s institutionalization. We know almost no detail about the organization of Plato’s school, the Academy, though in every age philosophers have interpreted it on the model of their own university or college. But it was something new, a philosophical school, to which young men like Aristotle came to study philosophy. They probably learned Plato’s ideas; they also learned how to argue. When, later in life, Aristotle set up his own philosophical school, this was seen by some as an uppity gesture, but it established the pattern whereby an original philosopher would set up his own school, finding pupils and disciples who would learn, further and spread his ideas. Hence Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s philosophy came to have a history in their own schools; they became objects of study to other philosophers.
Once we get schools of philosophy – the Stoic and Epicurean schools getting established on similar principles – we can see the activity of ancient philosophers as astonishingly like the activity of modern philosophers. Although Plato, who was rich, refused to take fees for teaching, payment by pupils soon became a necessary feature of the system. Young men (and occasionally young women) would join a philosophical school as part of their education. (Or they might have a trained philosopher as a tutor at home.) They were educated to understand and appreciate important philosophical ideas, many of which were already part of their cultural heritage. In the schools, they were also trained in argument, acquiring abilities which had more practical application when they left, in politics and law, for example. Those most gifted at philosophy, and committed to it, would stay and become part of the school’s permanent philosophical community. This does not sound so unlike the picture of philosophy teaching in universities today. (Or rather, in the less rigid university system that existed before degrees and grades came to be important as credentials.) This idea of philosophy as a kind of university education continued on until late in the ancient world, throughout vast political and cultural changes.
The similarity extends to many of the specific ways in which philosophy was carried on. We find philosophers writing treatises and essays, and also books of arguments against other philosophers’ treatises and essays. We find commentaries on texts of past philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle. We find controversies within a school, for example as to which of two contemporaries has got Epicurus right. We also find extensive arguments against other contemporary schools. In their style and purpose many of these works are quite like modern philosophy journal articles and books. Indeed, modern philosophy students can find it easier to relate to works of this kind, the products of philosophical professionalism, than to Plato’s dialogues, which are in form unlike any modern kind of philosophical writing.
Philosophy after Plato is, then, the history of philosophical schools (with two exceptions, to which we shall return). There is an interesting shadow side to it – a running complaint till the end of antiquity about bogus philosophers, who use philosophy’s prestige to further their private agenda, whether money or reputation. The bogus philosopher, high-minded in class and money-grubbing outside it, is a stock figure of ridicule. This brings home the fact that in the ancient world philosophy was taken to offer people not only intellectual challenge but also practical help in living a better life and finding answers to the search for the meaning of life. Philosophers were expected not only to convey intellectual skills but also to provide in their own persons examples of the search for living well. Nowadays we are more likely to seek the latter in religion, or in less intellectual pursuits. Ancient philosophers did not offer just one subject among many, but a subject that was uniquely close to the hearts of their audience.
Although Aristotle was Plato’s pupil, in some ways his is the least representative of the schools which formed after the Academy. This is because of Aristotle’s own huge range of interests. He studied, furthered or invented a wide range of subjects, from literary theory to logic, from economics to biology. The works he left behind are vast, some of them theoretical treatises and others more like records of research. In this respect Aristotle’s school differs from the philosophical schools that come after him, which had narrower interests.
The Stoics’ school began, as the earlier ones had, in a public place; Epicurus was unusual in holding his school in a private residence, the Garden. And Epicurus was unusual also in requiring his views to be held deferentially and memorized. But before very long the Epicurean school and its offshoots in other places were doing very similar things to the Stoics and other schools – arguing and counter-arguing, commenting on founding texts, generally continuing the philosophical activity of the founders. Every generation of students needs to learn afresh and understand philosophical positions for themselves, and hence even philosophical schools dedicated to teaching the thought of the founders will develop philosophically in the give and take of philosophical interpretation. Moreover, with changing political and social circumstances new issues had to be dealt with and new challenges met. When the Romans became rulers of the Mediterranean, for example, Greek intellectuals started educating unintellectual Romans.
From the first century BC we find that the continuing debates between the schools give rise to some schools which are hybrids, or ‘eclectic’ – combining positions from different schools to form a new stance. One who was influential in his day was Antiochus, who thought that the core views of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics on a number of issues were compatible, and that the differences had been overplayed. Histories of philosophy tend to rank these schools lower in interest than those founded by more original thinkers. But we can sympathize with their position. Once philosophy has formed a teaching tradition, it can well seem foolish to seek originality at all costs, and sounder to argue from and build on what are already going positions. This is what most philosophers do today, so we should pause before turning up our noses at it.