On TedEd's idea of a Bad Idea of Plato.
It would be unfair to chide a TedEd video (here) titled, ‘Plato’s Best and Worst Ideas’ for focusing on Plato's worst and best ideas, but this way of framing things is not very illuminating and sometimes glides into error. And while I will be mostly critical, I kind of enjoyed the way that the significance of Plato’s theory of the forms is the heart of the first two minutes of the (not even five minute) video. I also liked that being the co-founder of political science (the discipline that pays my salary) was treated as a good idea.:)
Okay, having said that, first, it is unclear what the sorting criterion for good and bad ideas is. The video as a whole, and especially the conclusion, implies that what makes the best ideas so great is that they generated, as a “place to start,” a process to test and refine his ideas and therefore to accept some and reject others over millennia. But oddly, that’s also a virtue of some of the ideas that get mentioned in the bad ideas category, so it is wholly unclear what divides the two categories. (Below I discuss an example.)
More subtly, as the previous paragraph implies the criterion tacitly inscribes Plato into a kind of Popperian conception of philosophy where the job of the philosopher is to generate hypotheses that are refutable. In fact, the video actually implies — ignoring the pre-Socratics and Socrates — that Plato got us started on this Popperian approach. I actually view this as not wholly anachronistic (and will allow my fellow historians of philosophy to make fun of me), but it is an odd way to approach the significance of Plato.
On this very point: Whitehead's famous footnote remark is also quoted (without explicit naming of Whitehead). But that’s a very different, competing conception of the significance of Plato. I don’t think it impacts which ideas are bad and which are best in the video, so I am not claiming it is inconsistent.
As an aside, I mention Popper because his impact on the video also shows up in other places in it. Plato’s Noble Lie is treated as foreshadowing “twentieth century propaganda” (as suggested by “some thinkers”) and the “Philosopher-King” as “inspiration for the dictators that use” Noble lies (ca 3:30)
Be that as it may, in the video Plato’s ideas are also treated as good because they anticipate ideals that are praised in modernity. For example, that Plato thought women could be leaders of the polity.
The video also makes some errors: for example, for Plato, “ruling is” not “the craft of contemplation of the forms.” (ca. 2:45) More in the category of misleading: we are shown how for Plato “justice is the ultimate goal” and we are shown (ca 2:50) a picture of a blindfolded Lady Justice (really a fairly modern image). But this conception of justice is really not Plato’s concern in his treatment of justice in the city and the individual. (I don’t deny there are some connections with Plato’s views on how the law should be impartial.)
You might wonder how I came to focus on the TedEd cartoon. I am not especially known as a consumer of youtube videos. Well, one of my students came up to me after my second lecture this week to ask me why Plato thought a women’s womb wanders around her body. I was a bit baffled because I was pretty sure this was not in the required reading, but I vaguely recalled a debate over the proper translation of Timaeus (also not in the readings). Naturally I asked the student why he thought Plato claims this, and this is how I was directed to the TedEd video.
Now, the TedEd video introduces this idea after praising Plato for allowing women leaders, and then noting that Plato is “inconsistent with women” because he also likens women to children. (In my lecture I myself mention other sexist tropes, too.) At that point, the narrator seamlessly goes on to claim (and, thereby imply that a kind of sexism is driving the argument) that “Plato also believed that a women’s womb was a live animal that could wander around her body and cause illness.” (ca 3:15) This is treated as a “bad idea” in part because it was influential in European medicine” for “hundreds of years.” So leading people down an epistemic cul-de-sac is what makes it a bad idea. Of course, since the idea became linked with (male) physicians’ explanations for hysteria and men’s unease with women’s sexuality, the inductive risk of this idea turns out to have been rather great. But Plato has so many apparently wacky ideas — my favorite is the universe’s temporal reversion that diminishes all things in Statesman— that it seems uninformative to pick out this one.
Now, the video notes that “other contemporaries” of Plato also held the wandering womb view. In fact, if Plato held the view at all,* there is no reason to believe it originated with him or he was the reason why it was influential in medicine. It was, after all, a view espoused in then medicine (see for example Wilberding). And while there is good reason not to impose our disciplinary divisions on Plato and his contemporaries, Plato was himself not taken as medical physician of the body (leaving aside physician of the soul or the state) by anyone.
Let me sum up. The TedEd video is fun and inviting. I am not especially bothered by the errors and problems I have noted. If a young teenager sees it and is thereby inspired to learn more about Plato so much the better. But since online visual/film sources and forms of education are becoming so important in my students’ lives — and TedEd’s youtube channel has 21 million subscribers and seems like a trustworthy brand —, I do view this video as problematic for more mature students if this becomes the main way of thinking about Plato even if only for its focus (rather reductively) on his best and worst ideas. Hopefully, before long AI can take a SEP article and turn it into an attractive and reliable introductory youtube video about Plato’s best and worst ideas and push TedEd out of the disseminating of introductions to Plato videos business. Better yet, maybe an academic press wants to commission educative videos on the philosophers with better quality control.
*Most translations support the attribution to Plato of the wandering womb doctrine. My own contrary view is informed by Adair’s (1996) piece in The Classical Journal. Although that seems to be the minority position in more recent, contemporary scholarship.