Utopia, Euphoria: Greek Philosophers Searching For The Good Life
To the ancient Greeks, philosophy – literally the love of wisdom - as a therapy or treatment of bodily ailments implied a holistic, psychosomatic understanding of the human mind, body and soul. Conversely, some Greek doctors whose writings have come down under the collective label of ‘Hippocratics’ -in honor of a real Hippocrates, from the island of Cos, an older contemporary of Athenian Plato - philosophized for example, about whether or not disease in general or any one particular disease (such as epilepsy) could be considered to be of divine, super-human origin and causation. Could the ancient Greek philosophers assist modern man in attaining utopia, a good life within a good community, and did the irrational gods have any influence?
Bust of Plato (ca. 370 BC) Academia in Athens (Public Domain)
Plato’s Theaetetus
Plato, who possibly coined the original term ‘philosophia’, was big on medical metaphors – sometimes regarding philosophical nostrums as specifics for the betterment or cure of a sick body politic, at other times for a morally unhealthy individual soul. Much of Plato’s philosophy was to do with individual ethics, right and wrong, justice and injustice, where goodness, for him, required an ultra-high level of intellectual capacity. His most famous pupil Aristotle cast his intellectual net far wider, though he too wrote memorably on ethics, and especially on the ethics of friendship, but for him the social-political context of behavior mattered as much as did personal probity.
