What Plato Actually Said About Action
All 4 Plato passages on action, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Plato returns to action four times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. Student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, founder of the Academy. His dialogues — the Republic, Symposium, Phaedo — set the terms of Western metaphysics.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is ancient, but the question underneath is not: what is action for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Plato passage on action
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
“The orators — and the despots — have the least power in their cities … since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.”
“Socrates: But suppose the words used are ‘just’ and ‘good’. Don’t we then go each his own way, and find ourselves in disagreement with ourselves as well as with each other? / Phaedrus: Undoubtedly.”
“There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Plato is not offering four opinions about action; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “Necessity is the mother of invention” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
Plato applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts one such case to Plato.
Love asks you to change in ways you did not expect.
Argued as relational becoming: You are seeing love as formation, not merely preference. The risk is surrendering under the nobler name of devotion.
Work through these yourself
- Love asks you to change in ways you did not expect. — argued from relational becoming and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi, Lao Tzu and John Stuart Mill all address action too, and they do not converge. Reading Plato alone gives you a coherent position; reading Plato against Seneca shows you what the position is actually choosing against.