Platonist at Large

Many students throughout the University are sure that at least one Harvard professor is new using subversive tactics. Even the most hardened gut seeker in Raphael Demos philosophy classes finds that the lecturer has sneaked across the rudiments of western philosophy to an intellectually calloused mind. I can't understand it, one freshman groaned. "Every time I look at a table or a cat, or a telephone. I wonder what its prefection is in Plato's world of forms."

And every fall more than three hundred students file into Philosophy la fully prepared to withstand the tirades of a lecturer as dogmatic as the philosophers he treats. Each spring they file out wondering how Demos, in a simple, straightforward way, has managed to interest them in "philosophy from Plato through James." Intentionally or not, Demos seems to have learned a lesson in humble erudition from Socrates, the "intellectual midwife."

Born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, in 1892, Demos soon moved to Constantinople where he spent his early years. He was just out of grammar school when he read his first book on philosophy, he recalls in his warm accent. "It was a funny thing. Immediately I knew I liked it better than anything else. Since one of my teachers said that it I like it best, I should make my living that way, that is all there was so it."

After attending Anatolia, a small college in Marsovan, which offered only one course in his chosen field, he decided to sail to America in 1913. "Harvard was the only college I had heard of, and after just two years of college I was very lucky to be able to do graduate work. I guess America has really been the land of opportunity for me," he states.

Demos admits that while his first days at Harvard were stimulating, they were also confusing. "Bertrand Russell who was then with the philosophy department confounded me with huge words that were not in my English vocabulary, and I read a paper by T.S. Elliot of which I understood about half."

Somewhat less stimulating was a job he had in his first year. For twenty-five cents an hour, Demos cleaned out the Lampoon building early every morning. "It was always a terrible mess, beer bottles and cigarette butts." But smiling, he then added, "You might say, though, that the Lampoon financed my way through graduate schools." One might not say, however, that the Lampoon was also responsible for his becoming a Phi Beta Kappa.

Always in the Philosophy Department, Demos rose to a full professorship in 1945, when he succeeded Josiah Royce as Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. He comments about his professorship, "It is such a long title, I have to look it up to get it straight." Not restricting himself solely to philosophy, he has written several articles on the development of the "whole man" at colleges, and was one of the pioneers of the present General Education program at Harvard.

In his field, Demos has an interesting position among modern philosophers. It is not a coincidence that his lectures on Plato seem to bring out much of the lecturer's own philosophy. Ideologically he is a Christian Platonist, and by this philosophical belief he has become the foremost authority on Plato, and propounds Platonism, tempered by Christianity, as a way of life.

Perhaps his most famous applications of Platonism to modern society appeared in the Alumni Bulletin in 1948. The article bade educators to pay some attention to "failure stories" as well as success stories; "By purging man of the original sin of self sufficiency, tragedy makes him sociable and companionable," he writes. And then returning, as ever, to Plato, he concludes, "In Plato's words the philosopher has a view of all time and all existence. With such a perspective, he can put success in its place and failure in its place, and so be unshaken either by misfortune or good fortune."

Living with his wife at 10 Francis Avenue, Demos has a daughter and a son who is now at Groton. "We try to make all the football games, because when one has children you have to keep up with the world." Keeping up with the younger generation seems to count heavily with the Demoses; every Thursday afternoon they extend an open invitation to all his philosophy classes for tea at his house.

"You see," he said, "there is nothing exciting about me; I am not one of those Hollywood starlets. It is quite embarrassing; what can you find to write about me?"