Plato is a pivotal figure in Western philosophy and laid foundations to modern political science. He instituted the Academy, the original Western university and was a teacher to Ancient Greece’s greatest minds, including Aristotle. His work has survived for over 2400 years, and nowadays considered to be the Bible of political science. He was so influential, one 20^th century philosopher went as far as to describe all of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato. His most famous contribution bears his name, Platonism the doctrine of the Forms known by pure reasons to provide a realist solution to universal problems.

To put in perspective, Plato denies the reality of material world, and stated that the material world that can be felt by our senses is only an image or copy of the real world. Platonism in his ‘theory of Forms’ states that there are at least two worlds: (a) the apparent world of concrete objects, grasped by the senses, which constantly changes, and (b) an unchanging and unseen world of Forms or abstract objects, grasped by pure reasons which ground what is apparent. He argued that world (a) is merely a copy of the perfect world (b).

This was a breakthrough and many cited Plato as the founder of Western religion and spirituality. The early Christians even utilized some of Plato’s ideas, namely his theory of the Forms, to construct defences of Christianity against competing philosophies.

But this article is not to talk about how Plato was smart. Below are 4 stupids things that Plato had said during his lifetime.

1. Let’s start mild. Probably the most infamously dense of Plato’s ideas was to lump human being with the birds, or so he called ‘featherless bi-peds’. Diogenes of Sinope, annoyed by this definition, stormed into Plato’s class with a plucked chicken, announcing: “Behold. Plato’s man”.
2. He, along with all Ancient Greece didn’t really know how human anatomy work. But Pluto was a man of power and wanted to keep his nose in every subject to widen his influence. He chose to describe in lengths about things that he didn’t know, so he ended up looking like an idiot 2400 years later. Plato believed that the womb—especially one which was barren—could become vexed and begin wandering throughout the body, blocking respiratory channels thus causing bizarre behaviour; and for that time that notion was determined for the medical condition ‘hysteria’. Yup, Plato believed that women became hysterical because the uterus decided to wander to your lungs and kidneys and stuffs, squeezing organs and causing discomfort, probably because it was horny. The solution? You should have more children or have more sex. This bad idea was sadly influential for hundreds of years in European medicine.
3. Plato reasoned that women were equally able to rule. Plato even argued that women should be educated, as opposed to his student’s Aristotle disagreeing that women were ought not to be. Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation. However, Plato still consider women to be inferior to men. He in Timaeus claims that men who were cowards and were lazy throughout their life shall be reborn as women and in the Laws, he offers his reasons why women should be educated: “Because you neglected this sex [manhood], you gradually lost control of a great many things which would be in a far better state today if they had been regulated by law. A woman’s natural potential for virtue is inferior to a man’s, so she’s proportionately a greater danger, perhaps even twice as great.”. Plato further establishes his opinion on the inferiority of women’s “natural potential” by claiming in Republic: “women share by nature in every way of life just as men do, but in all of them women are weaker than men.”. Plato’s belief in reincarnation would be indifferent in today’s society; faith of the spiritual is after all down to one’s conscious to perceive ‘internal balance’. He was daft because he perceived women are the weaker sex and to be a woman is a punishment for being lazy in your previous life.
4. He thought that society should be divided into three groups: producers, military and rulers, and that a great noble lie should convince everyone to follow this structure. The noble lie that he proposed is that we were all born with gold, silver or a mixture of brass and iron in our souls, which determine our roles in life. So, can you guess who had the ‘gold essence’? Correct, it was Plato. Guess the slave’s metal. Right, lead. Apparently, you can magically have this gold essence if you worked hard for Plato, fight his war, didn’t rock his boat and paid 40% of your income to fight Plato’s war to kill and enslave your fellow men who was most likely much like you. Congratulations, Plato pioneered totalitarianism, fascism and/or racism.

Throughout the history, Plato’s statements have garnered multiple criticisms from various postmodern philosophers. Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously attacked Plato’s “idea of the good itself” along with many fundamentals of Christian morality, which he interpreted as “Platonism for the masses” in one of his most important works, Beyond Good And Evil. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man.