KEYWORDS: pedagogy in Antiquity, Plato, an ideal polis, caring for the self, higher education.

ABSTRACT: The article examines Plato’s concept of higher education, which was based on two interrelated and interdependent principles – the individual’s care for the self and for the ideal polis. This concept conditioned understanding of the process and result of complete training of citizens.

Introduction

Traditionally, we consider that higher education was born in the Middle Ages as the term ‘higher education’ was hardly ever used in connection with antiquity.  In ancient times there was not a single term that could summarize views on the higher stage of education. However, many ancient teachers focused on educational activities of the higher levels which were supposed to help individuals achieve excellence in a certain type of a really higher ‘school’. A Greek ‘student’ lived in tune with the rhythm of the polis, which consisted of open educational spaces and individual daily experiences including people’s behavior, ways of thinking, desires, aspirations, actions, and achievements, which received public evaluation and had an educational impact on the young people. Socrates established polis as an aid to long-lasting and deliberate self-improvement and as a guarantor of educational opportunities for students. He advised mentors to ensure that their students would discover rather than forget themselves in the stream of everyday life (care for children, property, winning in competitions, etc.). In Plato's dialogues, Socrates often described those who competed for educational success at the stage of higher education as students caring only for themselves. Socratic ‘care for the self’ (“ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ") was bound to an active participation in the life of the polis. According to Wilhelm Windelband, this Socratic ‘care’ was to a great extent the type of care produced for the sake of the whole polis. It had less to do with care for oneself as an individual (Windelband, 1910, p.7). Caring for oneself could be found in the care for others. Socrates prioritized the polis over the individual and displayed loyalty to this view by drinking his final cup of hemlock.

Plato's concept of education and care

Plato had a more positive outlook on how higher education should develop an individual potential for a full personal fulfillment.  His texts shape our understanding of the role and place of Socrates’ views in the theory and practice of ancient Greek higher education. Very often in Plato's dialogues, Socrates builds teacher-pupil relationships with young people; thereby emphasizing that taking care for oneself is a special way to organize higher education in the polis (“Alcibiades I”, “Laches”, “Charmides”, etc.). Some researchers (Power, 1964; Raubitschek, 1952) put forward the hypothesis that the corpus of Plato's works, which specified the ideas of the content of the general humanitarian higher education associated them with taking care for oneself and cultivating inner skills and virtues, should be seen as one of the most ambitious projects in the history of education. Socrates’ and Plato‘s concepts are often unitedinto a single ‘Socratic-Platonic’ model of care for the self (Michel, 1999). However, it should be noted that Plato’s views were more politicized than those of his teacher.

It was obvious for Plato that every citizen needed good education, as much as the polis was in need of well-educated citizens who required care from the first cry to the last day of their lives. The significance of education for an ancient Greek was evaluated differently at each stage of his life. But as children grew up, the momentum steadily built up, along with the number of personal and social responsibilities assigned to the citizen by the polis. Plato connected the educational potential of the urban with its specific organization and power to transform one’s insufficiency into self-sufficiency. He attached crucial importance to the care for the self and one’s soul ("ψυχή) in achieving such transformation. According to Plato, care for the self arises from an inconsistency between educational theory and political practice. In the dialogue “Statesman”, he shows his understanding of care for the self by defining it as activities that allow one to regulate and improve a human life (Plato, Statesman 274d).

Educational attitudes employed by teachers and their arrangements to facilitate the learning pathway, united by Plato in the notion of care for the self associated him with the higher stage of education. Plato connected these paths towards care for the self with his proposed principles of how the ideal polis should be organized, with its ideal legislation, ideal ruler, and citizens who would be able to “shape” themselves (J. Lear). Being in the entirety of educational spaces adapted to their recreational, educational, political, economic, and other needs, they could ‘sculpture themselves’.

Plato’s ideal polis as a place for care

Trying to answer the question what makes the ideal polis, Plato formulated the guidelines for an individual who cares for the polis and for himself. For Plato, the polis is so perfect and harmonious, that it basically eliminates conflicts between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, between leaders and subordinates, and finally between those who had high educational aspirations and those who were lost in ignorance. Plato did not reject natural inequality, which allowed individuals, in accordance with their virtues, to enjoy recognition and honor benefits, but he stressed that the polis redresses this situation through education, allowing those who cultivated themselves to also get ‘proper respect’. If the polis achieves equality between people with different and similar natures, then it can be described as a perfect structure and place. Plato’s “Laws” offer step-by-step strategies for constructing an ideal polis (Plato, Laws 745c-e), which, once arisen, may not please everyone, being liked by everybody. At first it will not be easy for people to accept its laws, but the longer it exists and helps them to pursue their dreams and to promote their plans, the more educated citizens will become thankful to the polis’ strength and permanence of laws. Plato assigned a special role to the laws concerning young people’s education. This role was not confined to external or externally imposed restrictions but was based on internal goals regarding higher education of citizens.

Plato’s ideal polis, then, is a particular spatial unit in which everyone can control the use of their time while living there and doing it for the sake of oneself and others. The citizens can pursue a vocation in line with their abilities and become politicians, soldiers, husbandmen or artisans. Alternatively, one can unite all the necessary roles and become entirely independent of others. It is likely that Plato highlighted extreme options so that each person had sufficient freedom of choice and decision-making.

Meaning and content of higher education

The development of abilities of every citizen for the maximum benefit of the polis was viewed as a logical right even before Plato and formed the basis of the ancient Greek civilization. Most Plato’s contemporaries finished their training in ephebia to become ‘good citizens’. At the age of eighteen a young man became an ephebe for two years and, on acquiring the status of civic and military maturity, would undertake the burden of a public and personal responsibility. In “The Republic”, Plato pointed out that only those few, who have revealed a high intellectual level and shown themselves as courageous, principled and incorruptible, would be able to continue higher education under the supervision of a mentor and learn to care for themselves being at the same time students there or after their graduating from ephebia. They will have to take key political posts in the ideal polis, thanks to their perfect education enter the narrow circle of philosopher-rulers, who are supposed to care about citizens and themselves as they have power over the whole society.

In Plato’s view, people should go beyond academic knowledge in their pursuit of an educational ideal and its realization. No matter how vital this knowledge is for participation in maintaining the polis, one needs the ability towards self-making and wise political decisions for the sake of the society. Victor Rosin believes that, for Plato, an individual care for oneself (έπιμέλεια έαυτου), including a care for one’s soul (πσυχαγογε), is an activity-protest against the unjust world: “If an individual, like Socrates, acts independently and contrary to tradition, then he has to work at himself and develop himself on his own” (Rosin, 2004, p. 163). Socrates’ view that he who takes care for the self competes with oneself and one’s own ignorance, vulgarity and lack of ‘paideia’ as education in culture, in Plato’s perception it acquired an additional meaning: the concept of ‘education’ relates to the notion of ‘victory’ (Plato, Laws 626d-627).

Plato drew attention to the fact that the most important victory was the victory in the war with oneself. Under the influence of victories in other wars, a winner often becomes vicious. By contrast, proper education, which takes into account the aptitudes of the learner and the interests of the polis, will never lead the winner to fatal consequences. Plato sadly concluded that most victories, however, had been and would always be as disastrous as that – they bore a taste of personal defeat of the victor. Our thinker thus established a framework of what was permissible for those who cared for themselves as philosophers and who, ideally (if it was really his point of view and not a Plato’s tragic joke), could become rulers of the ideal city.

Plato sought to reconcile ideal norms with the real practice of the people having got higher education. The worst tension and aggravation showed up when the unworthy usurp power came. A.J. Festugière wrote that Plato realized that his ideal polis was inhabited by real people who did not just embody pure reason, but were made of flesh and blood, had physical bodies with their passions, living in the material world, which affected them and to which they responded (Festugière, 2000, p. 74). Plato understood that it was not enough to create an ideal environment with ideal laws. It was important to take into account that polis would be populated with imperfect people who would need good education. Plato highlighted the necessity to set the rhythm of life; the ideal polis needed an energetic and strong personality, who would be surrounded by those who excelled in caring for themselves as politically worthy men. Extant sources suggested that Plato made at least three attempts to implement his concept of the ideal polis. He first saw once a suitable personality in Dionysius the Elder, and then twice, in Dionysius the Younger (both ruled in Syracuse). Since his visits to Syracuse did not produce results, Plato opted to leave political activism and the polis. He founded the Academy which, let's assume, he considered a school-for-politeia, school for politicians-philosophers until his death and where he surrounded himself with those who excelled in caring for the self out of the real cities.

Despite the fact that the Academy of Plato was one of the most popular higher schools, little is known about it. Founded in a grove in the area named after an Athenian hero Academus, the school was associated with the cult of Apollo and the Muses, but it could not be called, according to Edward J. Power, an ‘intellectual monastery’ or ‘an elitist boarding school’ (Power, 1964, p.155). John Dillon, in turn, said that such a “gymnasium for intellectual battles”, which included a Μουσεῖον (Temple of the Muses), περίπατος (a place where the philosopher and his interlocutors walked), ἐξέδρα (a covered gallery with seats), a library, apparently, and a number of other buildings, cannot be reduced to the notion of a ‘cult union’ (ϑίασος) or simply ‘school’ (διατριβή) (Dillon, 2005, p. 24ff).

Having received recognition and appreciation of his professional activity in his lifetime, Plato neither sought to reveal the essence of learning practices in acquiring higher knowledge that existed in the Academy, nor hid it from strangers.

This fact suggests that he never abandoned his attempts to implement the concept of the ideal polis, carrying out, through the Academy, a hidden political program.  He tried to indirectly influence the life of Greek cities-states through higher education, which students received outside the city walls and which provided different poleis with wise politicians and lawyers.

Socrates’ vision of education as care for the polis and the self thus fell into a trap of Plato’s multipolar personality. For him, a deep reflection was necessary to define an acceptable balance between the care for the self for the purpose of bettering oneself and care for the thriving and prosperous polis; Plato contemplated the relationship between them from all possible angles: as a pupil, teacher, citizen, philosopher, theologian and politician.

He drew many conceptual conclusions concerning conflict-free coexistence of the care for the self for the sake of the polis and care for the self as a self-cultivation in his capacity as Plato, real man, who lived and worked in the imperfect polis.

One of the passages of “The Republic”, along with Plato’s biography, reveal the nature of his personality. Plato argues that for an educated person “with a great soul” everything is fairly simple in a small polis: “he will contemptuously disregard the affairs of his state”, as well as pursuing non-philosophical pastimes for self-realization (Plato, Republic 496 b-e). This man is a philosopher who has achieved the highest level of knowledge and takes care of the self for the first time exclusively for his own sake and for his vocation, not for the polis which is a distant aim. Plato availed himself of this right at the Academy. Having spent a long and important period of his life in Athens, he left the largest polis in Hellas and founded a higher scientific and philosophical school as a special place for a mentor and his pupils to take care of themselves. In a large polis, according to Plato, there were two life strategies for its citizens. The first involved active and open participation in the political life of one’s polis which would inevitably lead to proscription or even expatriation and loneliness. (Plato, who was forced to leave Athens and spend several years in exile after Socrates’ death, who was three times expelled from Syracuse, had firsthand experience of political exile.) The second strategy involved an active but hidden involvement in the political life of the polis, supported by a clear understanding that any openness was doomed to a pointless death.

Plato's character in “The Republic” describes a person who strives to find oneself: remain appalled he quietly does his job, as if hiding from the weather behind a wall; he lives and dies with dignity. Having settled in the Academy, hidden behind a similar wall, Plato turned separation from the polis into a special hidden unity with himself, which allowed him to live to a ripe old age and, according to one of legends, rest peacefully at the wedding feast.

Conclusion

Plato developed a dual concept of higher education, based on the notions of ‘care for the self’ and ‘the ideal polis’, though the latter was not, strictly speaking, a term yet in the Plato’s text corpus. On the one hand, this dyadic concept is etatist and conservative since it subordinates educational objectives to the preservation and transmitting of the human experience of care for the self only in the state’s interests. On the other hand, it is innovative because it puts forward the thesis that improvement of the world stems from the transformation of the inner world of an individual. Plato’s principled position arose from a serious and long overdue conflict between the philosopher (theoretician) and the citizen (practitioner). Before and after Plato ancient authors pointed out to the enormous disparity between higher (read: philosophical) education, which more or less presupposes a reclusive lifestyle away from the city, and the polis which opens horizons of self- realization for the thinker as a politician and integral part of the urban community.

Plato's concept is interesting and important even today, because it highlights effective and original dialogues of the thinker with himself about the ideal polis, headed by the people, who, thanks to the higher education, would have acquired an exceptional ability to care for the self, which ‘paradoxically’ could turn the imperfect reality of their homeland into its bright future.

Bibliography

1. Dillon D. Nasledniki Platona: issledovanie istorii Drevnej Akademii (347-274 gg. do n. je.) / Tr.by E.V.Afonasin. – SPb.: Izd-vo S.-Peterb. un-ta, 2005. – 281 p.
2. Mihel' D.V. Mishel' Fuko v stategijah sub#ektivacii: ot «Istorii bezumija» do «Zaboty o sebe»: materialy lekc. kursov 1996-1998 gg. – Saratov: Izd-vo Povolzhskogo filiala Ros. ucheb. centra, 1999. – 140 p.
3. Plato. Republic // Plato in Twelve Volumes / tr. by P. Shorey, 1969. Retrieved from http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg030.perseus-eng1
4. Plato. Laws // Plato in Twelve Volumes / tr. by R.G. Bury, 1967; 1968 . Retrieved from http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg034.perseus-eng1
5. Plato. Statesmen // Plato in Twelve Volumes / tr. by H.N. Fowler, 1921. – Vol.12. Retrieved from http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg008.perseus-eng1:274d
6. Rozin V.M. Predposylki i osobennosti antichnoj kul'tury. – M.: Institute of Philosophy, 2004. – 297 p.
7. Festugière, André-Jean. Lichnaja religija grekov / tr.by S. V. Pakhomov. – SPb: Aletejja, 2000. – 256 p.
8. Lear J. (1992). Inside and outside the «Republic». Phronesis. 37 (2). 184-215.
9. Power E.J. (1964). Society Plato's Academy: A Halting Step toward Higher Learning. History of Education Quarterly. 4 (3).155-166.
10. Raubitschek A.E. (1952). Plato's College. The Classical Weekly. 45 (13). 193-196.
11. Windelband W. (1910). Plato. München: Frommanns Klassiker der Philosophie.

This research was conducted with the support of The Russian Foundation for Humanities’ grant (Project No. 14-06-00315а).

In 399 Socrates was tried and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock provided to him.