Sublime

The Apology

I would have you know, that if you kill such an one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing will injure me, not Meletus nor yet Anytus—they cannot, for a bad man is not permitted to injure a better than himself.

who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.’

All three agree that the highest good for human beings is happiness, and that a rational choice of life will be one directed to one’s own happiness. Only a life in which one cultivates the traditional virtues (justice, temperance, courage, and practical wisdom) will be a happy life. Plato’s

Plato’s solution was his famous Theory of Forms. He concluded that our higher minds must be tethered to some transcendent plane of superreality, where fixed, stable ideas (Forms with a capital F) exist in timeless perfection.

But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets;—because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom;