What Plato Actually Said About Wisdom
All 5 Plato passages on wisdom, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Plato returns to wisdom five 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 wisdom for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Plato passage on wisdom
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”
“Parmenides: It is impossible to conceive of many without one.”
“Parmenides: Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.”
“The beginning in every task is the chief thing.”
“Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Plato is not offering five opinions about wisdom; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “The beginning in every task is the chief thing” — 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
Confucius, Immanuel Kant, Voltaire and Aristotle all address wisdom too, and they do not converge. Reading Plato alone gives you a coherent position; reading Plato against Confucius shows you what the position is actually choosing against.