Was Plato Really Gay?

What’s Wrong With Platonism

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Back when Joel Davis and I were doing the ImperiumCast podcast, I started doing what I called “Mini-ICasts”. These were short monologues, usually an afterthought from the latest ICast episode. One of them was provocatively titled Plato is Gay. From this, I quite understandably became known as the anti-Plato guy. This entirely is my own fault, but it’s not strictly true—I admire Plato in some ways.

In Plato is Gay, I critiqued a few Platonic doctrines, especially anamnesis.¹ This is not the only corrosive idea in Plato—he offers a buffet of them, and as Dave Martel pointed out at the time, the main reason why Plato is taken as an authority is because we’re starved for legitimate authority. If I came to you today as a guru offering doctrines like that the moral and political guide is in each of us individually,² that traditional myth must be substantially recast or abandoned,³ that all things must submit to human reason,⁴ that sensible nature is icky and wrong,⁵ and that we must abolish the family and private property,⁶ I would be run out of town before sunset. Plato is given a pass, though these doctrines are his own.

It was almost three years ago now that I posted this little monologue. Since then, paganism has grown enormously, especially in the radical right. As a result, the Germanic heathen sphere and the Platonic sphere have come into much closer contact, and into conflict. This is not a mistake—the two cannot co-exist in the same space because heathenry is authentic Germanic paganism and Platonism is inauthentic Greek paganism. Platonism is, rather, heresy against Greek paganism. This is not some fringe minority position, but the actual position held by the Greeks themselves.

At the time, the doctrines of Socrates—which is what I mean by Platonism⁷—were regarded by conservative Athenian society as a kind of atheism. What’s more, they were regarded as morally corrosive, licentious, and frankly, liberal in the literal sense of the word—“you’re free to follow your own conscience, not traditional authority”. When accused by Meletus of teaching the Athenian youth to obey himself and to disobey their fathers, Socrates frankly owns up to it.⁸ He defends this by comparing himself with an expert general to whom the youth would defer in military matters, anticipating the modern liberal who makes the same case for why he and not you should be in charge of your children’s moral education.

Socrates was put to death for this impudence. Whether you think rightly so or not, is beside the point. The point is this: anyone who disagrees with this judgement disagrees with traditional Greek paganism. Platonism is not authentic, traditional Greek paganism—traditional Greek paganism is revealed in Homer, Hesiod, and others. Platonism is a radical critique of authentic Greek paganism; it is what was brought in to replace it.

Socrates’ execution was not corruption or mere politicking; it was the considered position of a whole traditionalist society. Aristophanes’ play The Clouds holds up Socrates as being far from opposed to the sophists, but the best of them. He teaches new, radical, and subversive thought that explicitly questions what every Greek schoolboy learned from birth. And Aristophanes is hardly alone here. We could add to this list Polycrates, an orator who wrote in defense of traditional interpretations of the myths, and Anytus, a traditionalist general who opposed the Thirty Tyrants, among whom were members of Socrates’ circle. We could add many others.

But Socrates was not the big bang of subversive ideas like that the gods are metaphors for the “necessary existent” and what have you. These ideas were in the air at the time, and grew out of centuries of structural conflict aimed at undermining the traditional familial and heroic cults. Before Socrates taught anything, Euripides has Menelaus defend the traditional Greek view of the gods against what would later come to be called Platonism. When Hecuba says “Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of mortal men, I address you in prayer,” Menelaus finds this de-personalization of the high god to be grotesque, and tells her to watch her step.⁹ She later suffers a terrible fate.

History portrays Socrates as a lone voice speaking truth to power, but he was simply the most silver-tongued proponent of a doctrine brought in by power to dissolve tradition a century or so earlier.¹⁰ Socrates comes in when that doctrine was on the eve of success. Although Socrates was on the right side of later history, at the time, objections to Platonism came not from cynical politicians, but from the great minds of Athens. History has retconned Socrates’ execution as corruption—in his day it was viewed as right and just by moral and cultural authorities.¹¹ This view would change, and once it did, Athens was conquered by the more vigorous and traditional Rome.

So far, we have not objected to the Platonic doctrines themselves, only to Platonism’s hostility to tradition. Platonism was the crest of a wave that had been building against tradition for some time, and when the wave finally broke, it smashed all barriers to what came later, which Platonism was then powerless to oppose—the abandonment of polytheism altogether. And yet, Platonism did make some gestures to tradition, trying to reconcile its revolutionary doctrines with the ancient myths and folkways of Greece.

One such gesture came in the form of Neoplatonism, which is not really a separate doctrine to Platonism, nor was it so regarded by Neoplatonists. Rather than rejecting Homer, Neoplatonism tried to incorporate him by making him into an esotericist. Sure, the ancient myths never happened, at any rate not literally. Zeus didn’t actually turn into a swan and rape the Queen of Sparta. “That would be gross and unbecoming of deity,” says the Neoplatonist. “But,” he goes on, “the myths still have value in so far as they allegorize eternal truths.”

What the eternal truth of a swan raping a queen is, remains unexplained. These myths are regarded by the Neoplatonist as so uncanny and deformed that no serious person could have taken them at face value. “They’re for the plebs,” he says, and drawing on the Platonic idea that the manifest reality of the world must conceal a metaphysically prior abstraction, he then goes on to say that “elites understood the myths as allegorical, as the exoteric and superficial expression of an esoteric truth.” “Actually,” he concludes, “Platonism is the primordial religion, and the complete absence of evidence for this and the mountains of evidence that yes indeed actual priests did believe the myths, is the result of a secret and conspiratorial history designed by those priests to guard the true esoteric meaning against the profane gaze of the uninitiated mouthbreathers.” This is not theology; it is schizophrenia.

Pictured: Neoplatonists doing theology

This is not to gainsay esoteric readings of the myths—these can be valid. But not at the expense of literal readings. If esoteric readings are more valid than literal readings, we have gone wrong somewhere. If they are the only valid readings, we are atheists.

Sensible Platonists will bypass all the voodoo and just say “tradition is nice, but we know better than some illiterate steppe chieftain.” But do they?

It would require several articles in themselves to refute even the just main Platonic doctrines. Suffice it to say that Platonism does not have much currency in academic philosophy, and where it does, it is still mostly rejected. Its strongest showing is on the question of abstract objects, where Platonism is still a minority position—40% of professional philosophers accept some form of Platonism. 27% accept some form of non-physicalism. On the question of the ontological status of the world, 4.3% are idealists. The list goes on.¹²

One might object that philosophers are simply wrong. If so, this would be strange indeed because Socrates himself thought that philosophy was a kind of knowledge that could be taught.¹³ Science is another such enterprise, and Platonists would not deny that our scientific knowledge has accumulated—we know far more about the world now than in Plato’s time. Why should philosophy, a technical and rational enterprise like science, be any less cumulative? Sure, the questions are harder. But per Socrates himself, we must think that philosophy is a body of knowledge, and on the whole, bodies of knowledge tend to advance. If so, advance means generally leaving Platonism in the rearview mirror.¹⁴

Most philosophers have serious doubts about Platonism, which comes as no surprise, because Socrates himself had some of the most serious doubts about Platonism. In fact, most of the fatal arguments against Platonism come from Socrates himself. The celebrated theory of forms—the whole metaphysical basis of Platonism—is dealt a fatal blow in the Platonic dialogue Parmenides when Socrates offers the third man argument.¹⁵ In a nutshell, if the theory of forms is right, then for any group of things we have an abstract object that is the group itself, over and above any members of that group. If we have three apples, we really have four things, because we have the apples plus the group. But then, we also now have five things, because we have those four, plus all of them taken together, which is another abstract object. In which case we also now have six things because etc. Plato’s metaphysics demands that we either are hard monists—there literally is only one thing—or we accept an infinite plurality of things.

Parmenides is a highly technical and obscure dialogue, but one of Plato’s best, as we can see him wrestling honestly with difficult questions and making no attempt to force a resolution. All of Plato’s best dialogues are a frank and honest record of perplexity in the face of questions that are necessarily insoluble. If all Socrates were doing was showing metaphysics to be fruitless and impossible, perhaps he would not have been made to drink the hemlock. Plato was one of the most original and honest thinkers who ever lived. The issue is not so much Plato, but Platonism. The problem comes when we cherry-pick the positive doctrines and ignore the fatal objections that sit alongside them. Plato was too brilliant to be a Platonist—the “ism” would await a later and inferior generation.

The hard monism required by Platonism gets us into trouble. As we have seen, there is no One-Above-Many, because that resolves into Infinitely-Many-Things. So, there must simply be the One—the absolute reality that is behind all appearances, everything-there-is-with-no-remainder. What can you say about such a thing? That it exists? That’s basically a tautology. Can you describe its attributes? No, because any attribute is grounded in it. To say anything at all about anything, we must make a distinction between that thing and something else, if only between subject and predicate. The One cannot do that by definition. So, the ultimate Platonic reality turns out to be something that is totally ineffable and unintelligible, and that renders any plurality metaphysically impossible.

The problems don’t end there. The upshot is that the One as required by Platonism exists necessarily. As the only thing there is, it can’t not exist—it is what we call the necessary existent. But also, according to later theological conceptions, the necessary existent is God. So, we have a situation where God, existence, and the world are ultimately not distinguishable. As such, the concept of God is redundant; we must either bring in an unprincipled exception to differentiate the world and God, or admit their total identity. This does not enchant the world, but disenchants it. If God and the world are in no way different, one or the other cannot be said to exist. Between God and the world, which is more in doubt? Have you ever had someone offer to prove the existence of the world?

In Platonism is the atheist principle—far from being the culmination of religion, it outsources divinity to a transcendental realm and then by its metaphysics it does away with that realm. The conceptual chain from monism to pantheism to atheism follows of necessity. Small wonder, then, that this is the historical trajectory that Platonism did indeed follow, paving the way for polytheism’s replacement.

Many Platonists are indeed effectively atheists. But far from all—there are certainly some with bonafide religious feeling. If Platonism tends toward atheism, what is its appeal for pagans?

Let us speak frankly. After thousands of years of Christian apologetics, pagans are insecure about their status as theologians. With a few notable exceptions, there is little in the way of academic theology in the heathen sphere that would stand up to serious scrutiny from non-heathens. Platonism offers an apparent defense of paganism, one that comes ready to hand with impressive metaphysics, fully worked out doctrines, and an influential history. It has all the appearance of profundity and serious scholarship, and this is attractive for religions that are only now beginning to hold their own in the debate sphere. But let us not be fooled by the siren song. There is no shortcut to a restoration of our traditional worldviews. Our job as folkish pagans is to formalize what was only ever unspoken from time immemorial. This is the work; this is the labour. Platonism’s work is different—it is to supersede and secularize traditional worldviews. All Platonists with genuine religious feeling should join us. There are many of you, and you belong with us. The task that lies ahead of us is great, the glory of fulfilling it, still greater.

Platonism is to Greek paganism what liberalism is to the feudal world—a revolution and a supersession. Platonists get indignant when you tell them this, and point to Plato’s supposed “fascist” authoritarian tendencies. These are mostly found in Plato’s Republic. In his late dialogue Laws, the old master wearily walks back most of his earlier politics and largely acquiesces to the traditional Greek social order, which this dialogue helpfully records for us.¹⁶ And when you point out all the wife-swapping and abolition of property in the Republic, Platonists then say it was an allegorical description of the soul, which is mostly true, but then what of Plato’s based “fascism”? We have here Schrödinger's fascism—literal when it’s based, metaphorical when it’s cringe.

Platonism was the liberalism of its time. The Socratic hero was a conscious attempt to replace the Homeric hero with a genteel one more to the tastes of a weak and exhausted society that had just lost a war and was about to become a permanent vassal state. The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk—a society becomes self-reflective and critical of its own tradition just before it dies. Earlier Greeks produced many heroes who submitted to the state cult without irony. The Greeks of Plato’s time could only produce an ironist who cried out in pain as he struck at the heart of his own civilization.

1. The idea that all knowledge is remembering what you already know.

2. Meno 86.

3. Republic 379–383, 608b.

4. Republic, 441–442.

5. Theaetetus 157–182, Republic, 514–519, Cratylus 440.

6. Republic 457, 464.

7. Gregory Vlastos argues in The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays that Socrates and Plato can be disentangled. This would carry us beyond the scope of the present article, but what people mean by Platonism is what Socrates says in the dialogues, hence my use of the term.

8. Xenophon, Apology.

9. Euripides, The Trojan Women.

10. Philosophy arose primarily as a response to the debasement of sacrificial religious customs by political conflict. These customs were losing authority, and philosophy came in to replace that authority.

11. The main defence brought against this is that the Oracle at Delphi named Socrates as the wisest man in Greece. This is a “trust me bro” moment, as Socrates himself is the only source for this story.

12. https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

13. Plato, Protagoras.

14. Philosophy is of course generally off-track now, but thinking of it in terms of classical epistemology forecloses on this conclusion. We have drawn out the same progressive implications of thinking of morality as a kind of knowledge in a separate article. Both issues trace back to Plato.

15. Plato, Parmenides, 132.

16. Laws is probably second only to the Parmenides, and maybe Plato’s best dialogue.