Back to Plato

Why the philosopher we blame for modern rationalism may be the sharpest critic of technocracy, AI culture, and the crisis of meaning

There is a certain kind of person many of us have learned to distrust. They are highly intelligent,  credentialed,  articulate—and curiously tone-deaf and out of touch. They argue brilliantly but struggle to read the room. There is a gap between what they say and what they do, and they are largely oblivious of the gap. They are clever without being wise, fluent without being attuned. They optimise, analyse, and explain, and yet, they often fail to understand.

Too many academics exemplify this type, although they don’t have to work within institutions to put this orientation on regular display.  Too many academic philosophers provide the purist modern archetype.  Brilliant arguments, narrow specialisms, endless theory—combined with a striking inability to illuminate the problems that actually trouble modern life. If anything, philosophy sometimes appears as an accomplice to the very forces that now feel most alienating: technocratic rationality, managerial abstraction, and the sense that intelligence has outpaced wisdom.

And looming behind all of this, at least in the popular imagination, stands Plato.

Plato is often cast as the original sinner: the father of Western rationalism, the man who launched us down the path of abstraction, theory, and disembodied thought. The thinker who taught us to distrust appearances, elevate intellect, and retreat from lived experience into conceptual systems. If modern philosophy feels sterile, elitist, or detached, Plato is frequently blamed. Even many academic philosophers peg Plato as too rational!

This story is neat. It is also almost entirely wrong.

If Plato were alive today, I’m pretty sue he would be more disturbed by contemporary philosophy—and by AI culture—than most of its critics. Not because it is too rational, but because it is rational in the wrong way. Not because it values cognition, but because it mistakes cognition for wisdom. Not because it seeks truth, but because it has forgotten what truth demands of the seeker.

To go back to Plato is not to retreat into classical scholarship and out of date, out of touch, philosophy.  It is to recover a radically different vision of philosophy—one that speaks uncannily well to our moment of fake news, populism, algorithmic manipulation, and the hollowing-out of meaning. Far from being the godfather of rationalism, Plato may be its most penetrating critic. There is much we can and need to learn from Plato.

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Philosophy After Philosophy

Part of Plato’s bad reputation stems from what philosophy became after him.

Spend any time around modern philosophy departments and a pattern emerges. Philosophy is treated primarily as an academic discipline: a professional activity governed by methods, subfields, and peer-reviewed outputs. One can excel cognitively—mastering arguments, publishing papers, winning debates—without any expectation that one’s character, perception, or way of life should be implicated.

Philosophy, in other words, has become something one does, not something one undergoes.

This transformation owes more to René Descartes than to Plato. Descartes redefined philosophy as a foundational epistemic project: begin with indubitable premises, apply rigorous method, and build knowledge systematically. The philosopher becomes a detached observer, standing outside the world, manipulating representations. Truth becomes something you establish; wisdom something you might optionally admire.

Plato would have rejected this framing outright.

For him, the central problem is not that we lack secure foundations. It is that we mis-see. Our perception is already distorted by desire, fear, habit, status, and self-interest. Under these conditions, better methods do not save us. They merely make us more efficient at rationalising our blindness.

This is why Plato never writes treatises. Treatises present finished systems. They imply mastery and closure. Plato refuses both. Instead, he writes dialogues—dramatic, unsettling conversations that expose confusion rather than resolve it. The reader is not given doctrines to assent to but experiences to inhabit. The aim is not agreement but transformation.

That alone should give us pause. The thinker so often blamed for Western abstraction deliberately avoids the literary form best suited to abstraction.

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Cleverness Is Not Enlightenment

If Plato were surveying the modern intellectual landscape, he would likely be struck by a familiar danger: the rise of cleverness unmoored from wisdom.

Plato was acutely aware that intelligence is morally ambivalent. It can illuminate, but it can just as easily serve ego, ambition, and power. His dialogues are populated by people who are rhetorically brilliant, logically adept, and disastrously wrong. Their problem is not a lack of intelligence but a misorientation of the soul.

This is where Plato’s relevance to our moment becomes hard to ignore.

Consider contemporary AI culture. Machine-learning systems excel at pattern recognition, optimisation, and prediction. They manipulate symbols with astonishing speed and scale. But they have no stake in what is good, meaningful, or true. They are cognition without commitment, intelligence without orientation.

The real danger, as many critics have noted, is not that AI will become too powerful. It is that we will increasingly model ourselves on what AI does well, while neglecting what it cannot do at all. We begin to value efficiency over understanding, optimisation over meaning, control over wisdom.

Plato saw this danger long before silicon chips. He called it sophistry.

Sophistry, in Plato’s sense, is not mere trickery. It is intelligence divorced from truth-seeking—argument deployed for status, persuasion, or power rather than for insight. The sophist is not stupid; he is clever. And that, for Plato, makes him more dangerous.

In a culture saturated with “AI slop,” fake news, and algorithmically amplified outrage, Plato’s diagnosis feels uncomfortably precise. The problem is not that people lack information. It is that attention is captured, desire manipulated, and perception distorted. We are not ignorant prisoners in the cave; we are highly informed ones.

What is missing is not data, but orientation.

Eros: The Missing Dimension

This is where Plato parts company most decisively with the tradition that later claimed him.

Modern rationalism tends to treat desire as a source of bias to be neutralised. The ideal thinker is dispassionate, detached, objective. Plato thought this was a fantasy. Human beings are always already oriented by what they love. The question is never whether eros is present, but whether it is educated or corrupted.

For Plato, eros is not a marginal topic. It is the engine of the soul.

We desire honour, recognition, pleasure, security, power—or truth. Our intelligence then goes to work serving those desires. This is why Plato believed that cognition alone is never enough. If eros is misdirected, reason becomes its accomplice. If eros is rightly oriented, reason becomes its guide.

This insight aligns Plato far more closely with the Buddha than with Descartes.

Like Gautama Buddha, Plato begins with a diagnosis of distortion. Ordinary consciousness is unreliable. We cling to appearances because they flatter our desires. Liberation—whether from suffering or illusion—requires disciplined attention and transformation, not mere belief revision.

The difference is not that Plato is “rational” and the Buddha “spiritual.” It is that Plato chooses a different language. Where Eastern traditions often work through meditation, silence, and paradox, Plato works through dialogue, argument, and conceptual clarification. But the orientation is strikingly similar: awakening rather than accumulation, seeing rather than possessing.

This is why defining Plato exclusively by cognition misses the point. His interest in thinking is inseparable from his concern for desire. Logos matters, but only within a larger economy of eros.

Modern philosophy largely dropped this thread. Desire became psychology’s problem, not philosophy’s. Plato would have regarded that division as disastrous.

Nous: Seeing, Not Calculating

Alongside eros stands another Platonic concept that modern philosophy has largely forgotten: nous.

Nous is often translated as “intellect,” but that translation is misleading. Nous is not discursive reasoning or analytical thought. It is the capacity for insight—for seeing what is there rather than projecting what we wish to see. It is closer to perception than to calculation.

Crucially, nous cannot be forced. It cannot be produced by method alone. It emerges—if at all—when the soul is sufficiently prepared. This preparation involves humility, patience, and the willingness to endure confusion. It is why Plato places such value on aporia: the experience of not knowing.

Modern philosophy tends to treat aporia as a problem to be solved. Plato treats it as a condition to be inhabited.

This again makes him an awkward ancestor for contemporary academia. One can build a successful philosophical career while avoiding aporia entirely. One can publish endlessly without ever being existentially unsettled. Plato would have seen this not as professional success, but as philosophical failure.

Nous also explains why Plato is more relevant to our moment than Aristotle in certain respects. Aristotle gives us a magnificent account of virtue, practice, and flourishing within a stable social world. Plato confronts something darker: the ease with which entire cultures mis-see reality, mistake shadows for substance, and persecute those who challenge the illusion.

That insight matters in an age of populism and epistemic breakdown.

Plato Versus Post-Modernism

Plato’s critique also cuts deeper than post-modernism.

Post-modern thinkers rightly exposed how claims to truth are often entangled with power. Plato would have agreed. He spends much of his work dissecting rhetoric, manipulation, and the seductions of status. But where post-modernism often responds by dissolving truth into discourse, Plato responds by intensifying the demand placed on the truth-seeker.

The problem, for Plato, is not that truth is impossible. It is that we are unreliable.

This is a subtle but crucial distinction. Plato acknowledges distortion without surrendering normativity. The fact that perception is compromised does not mean there is nothing to perceive. It means that seeing requires discipline, formation, and courage.

Post-modernism offers critique without ascent. Technocracy offers power without wisdom. Plato offers neither comfort nor control—but he offers orientation.

Why Plato Now

The irony, then, is sharp. Plato is blamed for a tradition he would scarcely recognise, while his most urgent insights lie largely ignored.

He is not the father of out-of-touch rationalism. He is one of its earliest critics. He does not sanctify abstraction; he warns against mistaking images for reality. He does not exalt cognition in isolation; he insists on its integration with eros and nous. He does not imagine philosophy as an academic exercise; he understands it as a way of life that demands personal transformation.

This is precisely the kind of philosophy our moment lacks.

In a world saturated with information but starved of meaning, Plato reminds us that the deepest problems are not technical. In a culture obsessed with optimisation, he insists on orientation. In an age of AI, he warns that intelligence without wisdom is not progress but peril.

Going back to Plato is not about reclaiming an ancient authority. It is about retrieving a forgotten vision of philosophy—one capable of critiquing modernity at its roots.

Plato understood something we have been slow to relearn: that truth is not merely something we establish, but something we must become capable of seeing. And that capability, he believed, is the real work of philosophy.

If that sounds more like spiritual practice than academic theory, that is not a mistake. It is the point.

Back to Plato.