Megan Sullivan

Plato looks around and thinks, oh my gosh, if a democratic government is willing to put somebody as important as Socrates to death, democracy is broken.

Like, democracy is a joke.

And we were so confused and screwed up by our upbringing that instead of realizing that this better life was possible, we killed the guy who was sent to set us free.

And he thought philosophy is not only going to help you become a better person.

But he radically thought that philosophy would help us overthrow terrible forms of government and build a form of government that would set the human race free.

And that was his greatest ideal.

Absolutely.

And Aristotle looked at his teacher and thought, this is too radical.

This has gone too far.

And Aristotle famously broke away.

He started his own school, the Lyceum, where he was going to teach people virtue ethics in a much more systematic and less politically radical way.

So Aristotle famously thought that the entire pursuit of our lives is a form of happiness that he calls eudaimonia, or flourishing, the good life.

That we have a goal that's in front of all of our lives, which is to achieve this kind of flourishing.

And to do it, we have to live in healthy communities.

But we also have to learn how to exercise our powers of reason and our powers of self-control.

And this is the kind of thing that you can learn how to do.

He literally taught a class on how to achieve happiness in ancient Greece.

And he did not think that it was a matter of starting a political revolution so much as it was a matter of learning to train your habits.

And if you think about Plato as the great political revolutionary of ancient Greece, Aristotle, and I mean this with huge respect, is like the great self-help philosopher of ancient Greece, where he really gave people a lot of advice for how to flourish where they're planted.

The thing that ultimately got Socrates killed but which was his real power was that he gave young people a moral imagination.