Category Archives: Plato

Remembrance in the Menexenus

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Plato was not a member of the Greatest Generation, the generation that fought two great wars, the generation of Pericles and Themistocles, Thucydides and Nicias, nor even of Socrates. But he’s old enough to remember them. He knows from his youth what Athens was like at its peak, fortified and overflowing with wealth and prestige. But by the time he reached adulthood, the Delian league had evaporated, Sparta had torn down the long walls and dismantled Athens’ ships. His home was a mere shadow of what it once was. And Athenians paid the price, including wealthy aristocrats like Plato. By all accounts, they were a lesser generation. They weren’t as bold or just or wealthy. They didn’t have the prestige that their fathers commanded. They were sorely lacking in resources and in opportunity. And they had to struggle with all this in the shadow of the Greatest Generation that preceded them.

We too, as I write, are faced with the same. And today we are asked to Remember. We are asked to remember the sacrifices of that Greatest Generation in its battle against tyrannical forces abroad so that we might grow and live in free and prosperous nations. Our forefathers failed. Plato’s forefathers so too.

So how shall we Remember? What, truly, do we owe to the Greatest Generation? In Plato’s Menexenus, he gives us an answer.

The Menexenus consists of two major sections: an introductory conversation between Socrates and Menexenus, then Aspasia’s speech. Aspasia’s speech takes up the bulk of the dialogue and can itself be broken into two, separated by the words of the war dead themselves. That Aspasia’s speech has these two parts is important for understanding its point and Plato’s. It is the ironic contrast between them that gives the speech its force.

Socrates begins the dialogue thus: “Whence comes Menexenus?” Menexenus gives an answer—the Council Chamber—but this is not the only place whence Menexenus comes. He comes also from Athens, and from Athens’ brave ancestors. The first part of Aspasia’s speech concerns the former; the second part the latter. She begins with a history of Athens from the Persian Wars through the Peloponnesian War to the war against Corinth that the speech is memorialising. The major thread is easy to see: Athens was a powerful and noble polis who fought for the freedom of the Greeks first against barbarians, second against Greeks. Freedom is the object, no matter the enemy. Sometimes the tree of Liberty need be watered and all that. But so far so passé. Plato means to provoke with Aspasia’s speech. He does that in the second part, with the speech of the war dead.

These war dead are of Plato’s generation. They live in the shadow of their fathers who fought in the Peloponnesian War, and their grandfathers who fought the Persians. They begin by addressing their sons: “Sons,” they say, “our present condition shows that you are born of courageous fathers.”[1] This is no hyperbole. But their virtue has a reason. It is from their own virtue that they mean to exhort their sons, their fathers, and their city to virtue. They say that they “believe that no one who brings disrepute on his own family truly lives at all,” for “he has no friends, man or god, on Earth or below it.”[2] They continue:

You must remember our words and do everything in partnership with valor, without which all possessions and all actions are shameful and base . . . When sundered from the noble and just, even knowledge most certainly cannot be wisdom but seems rogue and villainous. Endeavour, therefore, for all time from the first to the last to surpass–most fervently, in merit and in worth–we who came before. And if you fail, if we stand above you, ennobled and great, our victory is truly our most shameful defeat. But if you overcome, this defeat is then our joyous victory.[3]

The condition for virtue, for success in the universe, is to make one’s progeny better, to hand off the reins of one’s country and one’s name to someone better, stronger, smarter. Failure is disaster: it is profound, universal loneliness, lacking friends among man and god while one lives or after one has died. This sentiment is repeated in Plato with some frequency, such as in the Lysis with regards to friendship, and the Gorgias on the responsibilities of political leaders. But here, it takes a different, more sombre tone. For as the war dead go on to say while consoling their fathers and mothers still living, “That mortal man has everything in his life turn out as he wishes is no easy feat.”[4] One’s success is all but beyond effect. For all a man’s best efforts, for all his toil and his pain, he may never accomplish anything of any value whatever.

And as Plato’s generation makes clear, exactly this happened in the history of Athens. The Greatest Generation of Athens was powerless to stop the decline of their city and the welfare of their children. And so too was the fate of these men being memorialised by Aspasia’s speech. The decline and fall of Athens was imminent and unavoidable. The present condition of Athens reveals something quite different than that Athenians were sons of courageous men. The war dead themselves must believe themselves to be shameful. They have not improved their city; they have been conquered by it and left it debased and wicked. Athens’ great heroes have all been failures.

So we return once again: what, truly, do we owe those men who fought and sacrificed for our city? What is the purpose of our Remembrance? Now we return to the first part of Aspasia’s speech. For as it stands, Aspasia has demonstrated the courage of the Athenian war dead and revoked it at once. We stand then at a crossroads. Is the Greatest Generation truly great, virtuous, courageous, or are they debased and corrupt? Truly, they are both. As Aspasia shows at the beginning, the Greatest Generation fought, and died, for what was right. Mistakes they may have made, but for everything to turn out is no easy feat. What makes courage, what makes virtue, is not to succeed: it is to know when and for what to fight. The Athenian Greatest Generation fought the Persians and the Spartans. Our own fought the Nazis. The Corinthian war dead too fought for freedom. And what will we do—will we fight Republicans?

So what do we owe to the Greatest Generation, these brave men who fought but failed to preserve our freedom? We owe them forgiveness—forgiveness for their vices and their inadequacies. We owe them the knowledge that despite their failures, they still have friends amongst gods and men.

 

Works Cited

[1] Plato, Menexenus, 246d. All translations are my own.

[2] Ibidem

[3] Ibidem, 246d-247a

[4] Ibidem, 247d

Plato’s Criticisms of Socrates

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Plato offers a number of subtle criticisms of Socrates throughout his corpus. Most of these consist in fairly minor challenges to how Socrates carries out his elenchtic project. The Gorgias, for instance, demonstrates Socrates’ lack of rhetorical success. The Protagoras and Parmenides might suggest issues with Socrates’ metaphysical and ethical theory. The Republic probably challenges Socrates’ anti-democratic political ideology. All of these criticisms ̶ if they are criticisms at all ̶ are subtle and gentle. But there is one dialogue that is much crueler and much more fundamental in this respect. Plato’s Cleitophon is a vicious attack on Socrates’ elenchtic project as a whole. It shows Plato wrestling with his mentor’s example and inadequacy while also overcoming these difficulties. It is in response to the criticisms laid out in the Cleitophon that Plato has crafted not only his philosophy but Philosophy per se. Understanding Plato’s criticisms of Socrates, and especially the Cleitophon, is therefore a metaphilosophical exercise as well as a historical one.

The Cleitophon begins with an insulted and betrayed Socrates confronting his student:

“Cleitophon, son of Aristonymos, we have been told recently that while having relations with Lysias, you have been criticising the time you’ve spent discussing with Socrates and fawning over your intercourse with Thrasymachus.”[i]

Don’t let the sexual language be lost on you. Socrates really is accusing Cleitophon of cheating on him. And Cleitophon doesn’t take this lightly: he spends the remainder of the dialogue breaking up with his old mentor, praising him for what he does well and criticising him for his shortcomings.

But Cleitophon is also doing something else. He is giving his own apology, much like that of Socrates. This is the reason for Socrates’ use of his own name in the third person and the first person plural in his accusation despite being alone with Cleitophon. He is charging Cleitophon not only with cheating on him as a teacher but with a crime against the state. Recall what Socrates claims about his own activities in his Apology:

“This is certainly what the god has commanded of me, and my service to the god is, I believe, the greatest blessing that can be bestowed upon a city, for I make it my business to do nothing but exhort the young and old amongst you to care for the optimal state of your soul as much as or more than your body or wealth.”[ii]

He repeats this sentiment later on:

“Men of Athens, I am certainly not making a defense of my own accord, which could be thought: I am making a defense on yours. By condemning me, you are mistreating a gift from the god. It is this error that I want to prevent . . . For I believe that the god attached me to the city for some purpose, I will never fail to provoke and inspire you, to persuade and challenge each and every one of you in whose presence I find myself at any time and in any place.”[iii]

The idea is simple: by denying Socrates, Cleitophon is likewise denying his service to the city. And here there are a few autobiographical details to mention that count against Cleitophon. We of course don’t know whether Cleitophon really ever followed Socrates. But we do know that he was an influential politician during the political tumult at the end of the Peloponnesian War. He was an ally of Anytus, first in favour of the oligarchic rule of four hundred but later against this, leading to Aristophanes’ description of him as an opportunist, “more clever than wise.”[iv]  This all culminates in Cleitophon’s role in the Republic as a thoroughgoing normative relativist. None of this would endear him to much of Plato’s democratic or philosophical audience. Yet Cleitophon attempts to defend himself.

He begins by denying the charges. He says that he did criticise Socrates for some things, but he also praised him. He wants to avoid hurting Socrates, who is pretending not to feel hurt, by telling him himself what he said in order to improve his now former mentor. His subsequent speech can then be broken into two parts. The first half praises Socrates and the second half criticises him. The structure is the same structure employed consistently by Socrates in his hortatory speeches, and the overall themes are thoroughly Socratic despite concluding in a very anti-Socratic manner.

For my purposes here, the first half of the speech is uninteresting. It details Socrates’ commitment to exhorting others to care about justice and the state of their soul. But for Cleitophon, this isn’t good enough. He relays to Socrates questions he asked of Socrates’ other followers and of Socrates himself:

“Men of highest esteem, I ask: what should we think about Socrates’ exhorting us to virtue? Should we think that there is nothing else than this exhortation and that it is impossible to pursue the matter further and understand it fully? Should this be our life-long purpose, simply to exhort men who have not been exhorted so that they themselves can exhort others? We may agree that this is what we should do, should we also ask Socrates and each other what comes next? How do we say we should begin to learn about justice?”[v]

The answers that Cleitophon received to this question were unsatisfactory, both from Socrates’ followers and from Socrates himself. Socrates, as it happens, gave Cleitophon the answer that Polemarchus will give him in the Republic, possibly suggesting their closer connection. But that answer is there and here found to be inadequate for the same reason, and it says nothing in the Cleitophon itself that Socrates knows what justice really is, especially since we do not know whether what Socrates says in the Republic is what the real Socrates believed (and likewise what he says in the Cleitophon).

Cleitophon says that he endured this ultimate vacuity “for quite some time,” and was thereafter forced to one of two conclusions: either Socrates is capable of praising justice without knowing what justice is, or he knows justice but does not wish to share his knowledge of it. It is here that most commentators jump off the train. The usual response is that Plato cannot be criticising Socrates, so there must be an implicit answer to Cleitophon in the dialogue. Usually that answer consists in Socrates embodying justice by exhorting others to justice. Justice, on this view, just consists in making others care about justice. Another response is to suggest that the Cleitophon is unfinished, with Plato intending Socrates to answer Cleitophon’s criticism. And another further is to deny that Plato was the author of the Cleitophon at all. All of these responses are inadequate. Committing to justice being no more than exhorting others to justice is obviously inadequate and inconsistent with Plato’s life and corpus. The dialogue concludes naturally given how it began. A defense of this sort need not beg a response, after all, just as Socrates’ defense does not receive a response in the Apology. And finally, the stylistic and thematic evidence strongly suggests that Plato was the author of the dialogue, even if it seems odd for him to be criticising his mentor. We need a better reason to deny authorship than that our cherished view of a philosopher is inconsistent with the evidence of his writings. On those grounds, Lakatos must not have been a spy who destroyed the careers of many of his peers and Frege must not have written about Jewish conspiracies.

So we must conclude that the Cleitophon is an authentic criticism of Socrates by Plato. But Plato’s criticism is more than just what Cleitophon says. Here the sexual language returns. One does not break up with a person after praising him so greatly. One breaks up with someone because one has found another who provides one with what was missing in the preceding relationship. And with Cleitophon, he found that in Thrasymachus. For Plato’s audience, this is a dangerous and detestable eventuality. Most Athenians do not end up in Thrasymachus’s influence, but Socrates’ exhortation to virtue and lack of follow-through drove Cleitophon there.

Cleitophon offers Socrates a way to change that, a way to get Cleitophon back: “If you were willing to refrain from exhorting me, but instead, willing to do what follows exhortation . . . do that now.”[vi] Socrates can say nothing. And hence Socrates is not merely an impediment to virtue, as Cleitophon concludes: He is actively harmful to it. Ultimately, Cleitophon gets his revenge on Socrates through his political allies: he was executed for corrupting the youth just like he corrupted him. Plato must have believed this to be a great evil, and Socrates was not blameless in this. He did not take care to keep the end in mind when he conversed, and that is something that philosophy must do. Philosophy must take care to identify what precisely virtue is while it inspires concern in others for it.

 

Works Cited:

[i] Plato, Cleitophon, 406a; All translations are my own

[ii] Plato, Apology, 30a-b

[iii] Plato, Apology, 30d-e

[iv] Debra Nails, The People of Plato, 285

[v] Plato, Cleitophon, 408d-e

[vi] Plato, Cleitophon, 410d-e

Is Plato a Platonist?

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Plato is obviously best known for the metaphysical view that bears his name. Are we wrong to make this association? What if Plato isn’t actually a Platonist? How could we make this determination? And what affect might this have on our interpretation of the dialogues?

Before I get into the meat and potatoes, I have to mention one small issue. Platonism, specifically capital P Platonism, is a squirrely position. It’s inherently linked to Plato as a character; Platonism is what Plato actually believed. There is a Platonism in metaphysics. There is a Platonism in aesthetics. There is a Platonism in ethics. There is a Platonism in pretty well every philosophical discipline. But in general, we aren’t certain what that might be and if we ask whether Plato is a Platonist in this sense, the answer is trivial. That doesn’t help matters, so we should try a different strategy.

So what’s at stake? Why does it matter whether Plato is a Platonist or not? Of course, most people might think that it wouldn’t. I want to believe that. But I’m afraid that Plato’s own position is importantly central to how we interpret the dialogues and hence understand Plato’s project. If we as readers are supposed to get something out of a given dialogue, we should try to figure out what Plato actually wants to give us, and that thing might differ quite substantially if we begin the dialogue thinking that Plato is committed to Platonism or otherwise.

Consider the Republic. It’s the typical source for Plato’s Platonism. It contains some of the basic arguments and analogies, all in the context of a largely anti-democratic political conversation. Given that Plato wrote this dialogue, we might immediately be justified in thinking that Plato is in fact a Platonist. To hold this view, however, is to be committed to some questionable interpretations of Plato’s life and of the setting and plot of the dialogue itself. Josiah Ober, for instance, claims that Plato cowered away from the difficult life of Socrates and retreated to the Academy to practice philosophy in isolation.[1] He grew and maintained his household alone, free from the fetters of democratic politics. But none of this is strictly true. Plato certainly did spend a large amount of time teaching and discussing philosophy at the Academy, but he also engaged life as a fairly normal Athenian, but for being one known for his wisdom and his justice. He served in several Athenian military expeditions. He chastised his fellow citizens for gambling and for drinking excessively. He sponsored dramas in the public theatres. He defended friends in court, even at the threat of peril. As Diogenes Laertius tells us, when Plato was threatened that “the hemlock of Socrates awaits [him],” he replied: “As I faced dangers when serving in the cause of my country, so I will face them now in the cause of duty for a friend.”[2]

Ober’s interpretation of the Republic‘s setting and plot is likewise mistaken. The dialogue begins with Socrates and Glaucon returning to Athens from the Piraeus before being accosted by a group led by Polemarchus, who demand that they accompany them to a new festival in the Piraeus. Socrates initially resists, but is met with a democratic injunction that he and Glaucon must join them for Polemarchus’s group is larger and hence stronger. Socrates contends that the larger group can be persuaded, but Polemarchus responds that persuasion cannot be effective if he refuses to listen.

So far so good. But from here on, Ober errs quite significantly. He recalls that this was the same difficulty that Socrates faced in the Gorgias. Socrates, despite having the stronger argument, could not convince Callicles to renounce his love of the demos because Gorgias refused to listen. So the Republic was playing on that parallel. Here was Socrates once again threatened by the strength of the many who refused to be persuaded towards justice. On Ober’s accounting, Socrates responds with a kind of treachery. While debating with Thrasymachus, he objects to the latter’s rhetorical style, saying that if he were to proceed with long speeches, they would require dikastai, or jurors, to adjudicate the victor. Instead, Socrates supposes, the victor shall be decided internally. And hence Cephalus’s house becomes a sealed, hermetic society free from the influence of the democratic polis.

This is all wrong. Socrates was not escaping the democratic polis in Cephalus’s house: he was embracing it. Cephalus was a good democrat, an opponent of the Thirty Tyrants, who lived in the Piraeus, a democratic stronghold. If Socrates means to escape the democrats, he has ventured to the wrong place. Socrates has willingly ventured into the lion’s den. For what reason? To improve the democrats, to make them listen. And he did this with democratic ideals in mind. The elenchtic style of Socrates’ questioning is democratic, and so too are the principles that he uses to refute Thrasymachus. Indeed, the sheer act of building a city in speech is democratic.[i] The Republic was not a counter to the democracy but a realisation of its highest ideals. It’s just that to the democrat, this eventuality is ghastly and vile. No good democrat would support Socrates’ city. It is antithetical to democracy itself.

And this is perhaps Plato’s point here: the Republic is not an alternative to the democracy but a reductio of it just as Socrates refuted Callicles in the Gorgias by proposing the kinnaidos as a reductio of his view. This strategy occurs again and again in Plato’s corpus, but we don’t think that Plato really supported the kinnaidos‘s insatiety, so why do we think that Plato supported the polis built on words in the Republic? Indeed, it was Plato’s commitment to the democracy that forced him to improve the minds and the virtues of its democrats by means of writing. After all, Plato was widely published and more widely read by his Athenian counterparts, and one might think that these democrats would scarcely hold such an anti-democratic elitist in such high esteem. Yet they did.

So what does that mean for Plato’s Platonism? Simple: we cannot be sure if Plato’s arguments for his Platonism are made sincerely or ironically. If the Republic really is a reductio, how can we know whether Plato thinks that Platonism isn’t just instrumental in shaping the democratic ideology? One answer could be that Plato elsewhere discusses Platonic metaphysics. But similar reinterpretations can be made in those places as well. We must then recite the common refrain: we simply cannot know what Plato believed. His dialogues actively prevent this. And maybe this was the point all along.

 

Notes:

[i] There is a fairly significant tradition in Athenian drama of creating ideal cities. Aristophanes’ Birds is probably the best example of this outside of the Republic. All of the extant examples are quite explicitly founded upon democratic principles, including the Republic.

 

Works Cited:

[1] Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998: 214-240

[2] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers III.24.3-5

How to Interpret Plato

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Interpreting Plato is difficult work. It is made even more difficult with the strategy championed by Gregory Vlastos and commonly employed by Analytic philosophers. This strategy has three main commitments: (1) Plato’s views are distinguished from those of Socrates, (2) both views are constructed on the basis of the arguments presented in Plato’s dialogues, and (3) those arguments are interpreted with an eye to constructing a cohesive view for both philosophers. All three of these strategic commitments are problematic and hold us back from rightly understanding Plato’s corpus.[i] And all three commitments are derived from the same basic oversight: Plato wrote dialogues to be read.[ii]

Plato begot the tradition of Socratic dialogues as a medium for public debate. Artistic works such as tragedy and comedy were an important element of Athenian democracy. Poets were divinely inspired: the moral dilemmas presented in their works were given by the gods, and their lessons were taken seriously by the demos as a result. But by the end of the fifth century, Athens was declining. Devastating civil wars ravaged the city amid the Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent dissolution of the Delian League, which provided Athens its wealth and its power.  The demos was hungry for change, and Plato, among others, was willing to bring it. He positioned philosophy as an alternative to tragedy and comedy. This is well known. But he also positioned it as continuous with these more dominant genres. It is this continuity that often goes ignored and is really at issue when we consider (1), (2), and (3). Let us turn to these commitments themselves, beginning with (1).

Plato is often denigrated as something of a scribe, someone who merely recorded the conversations of Socrates for posterity. This is what other Socratic dialogue writers purport to do. Xenophon, for instance, explicitly claims to present the conversations of Socrates as they really took place, according to what he and his sources could remember. But Xenophon criticises Plato for putting words in Socrates’ mouth that he did not say.[iii] This should be historically unsurprising since there was at least a decade between Socrates’ death and the publication of Plato’s first dialogue. Surely Plato would have forgotten the precise wording of Socrates’ conversations. But so too would have Xenophon. What seems more likely is that Xenophon’s critique is not merely pedantic but principled. He knows that Socrates didn’t say what Plato wrote because Socrates couldn’t have said those things. Socrates’ opinion differed from what Plato presented in a way that would have been well known to Socrates’ followers. So what, then, is going on? The answer is pretty simple given the history of Athenian poetry more generally. Socrates was a caricature in Plato’s dialogues just as he was in Aristophanes’ Clouds. Everyone knew who he was and some general features of his personality and his life. But more importantly, Socrates was well known to have been sentenced to death in 399, and by the time of Plato’s writing, this was a matter of severe public guilt. Plato was no doubt inspired by his teacher, but he also capitalised on the facts surrounding his life and his death for his own ends. And hence the picture that Plato gives of Socrates may not be a faithful one. It need only be close enough for his audience to recognise the character as Socrates the wandering questioner. So how then can we on the basis of Plato’s dialogues distinguish between Plato’s view and Socrates’? Quite obviously, we cannot.

The method that Vlastos and others appeal to to make that distinction is to evaluate the arguments presented in the dialogue and all of their various entailments. This method generates two significant questions, one of which we shall leave until we discuss (3). Nowhere does Plato come out and say “I, Plato, will argue for such and such in the following way.” It is left up to the audience to interpret what Plato means by presenting any given dialogue in the way that he has, and in many cases, it is precisely what is not said and not argued that is important for understanding a given dialogue. Perhaps the best example of this is the Meno. The dialogue begins with Meno asking Socrates “Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?” Here we have four possible sources of virtue: teaching, practice, nature, or something else. In the succeeding discussion, Socrates and Meno consider three possibilities: teaching, nature, and the gods. They end up with a hesitant commitment to the gods as the source of virtue. Yet throughout there are allusions to tasks commonly learned by practice, and its absence among consideration is conspicuous, especially given the orthodoxy of the period. This of course does not mean that Plato believed that practice is the source of virtue. It means only that Plato is clear on the inadequacy of the discussion and is pointing it out to his audience. Focusing only on the arguments of the Meno, however, would miss this possibility entirely. It would lead one to believe that Plato truly did believe that knowledge is recollection and that virtue is given by the gods. That may be the case, but it is far from certain, and Vlastos’s method doesn’t clear up the matter.

One way that Vlastos tries to clear up various ambiguities in Plato’s arguments is by committing himself to demonstrating that a given argument is consistent with other arguments elsewhere. He constructs Socrates’ and Plato’s positions as coherent wholes that manifest themselves in the arguments of Plato’s dialogues. Each dialogue then gives a piece of the overall whole that Plato’s audience must then hold together to understand what Plato seeks to show them. The difficulty of doing so should be sufficient to demonstrate the ridiculousness of this commitment. Holding all of Plato’s works in one’s head is difficult enough for specialists, let alone for Plato’s Athenian audience reading a dialogue before all of them had even been written. There of course may be some relationship between some dialogues. There was some speculation by Hellenistic commentators, for instance, that Plato presented his dialogues as tetrologies like the tragedians did.[iv] But aside from that, no one of Plato’s audience would be expected to understand how the dialogue he is reading fits into Plato’s broader view. This might be expected of Plato’s students, but the dialogues were published beyond the academy, and purposely so. As Steven Robinson points out, if Plato was simply writing for his students, he would have no reason to do so. These students are philosophers themselves, and they know better that philosophy is no threat to the polis. What matters, on the other hand, is the opinion of the demos, and it is that which Plato seeks to change. And he can’t do that if the demos must first read and comment on everything that Plato has written and will write. (3) completely misses the point of Plato’s writing. Maybe we can find something common amongst Plato’s corpus as a whole, but this would be no help at all in understanding the point of any single dialogue. The really important interpretative work demands that we understand the individual dialogues, not Plato personally. And to this end, there is no reason why there can’t be ten Platos or ten Socrateses in ten different dialogues.

So how do we interpret Plato? Ultimately, I don’t know. But I do know that we can’t do it like we tend to do now. We have to treat Plato’s dialogues as dialogues. They are not essays in analytic philosophy: we cannot mine them for their arguments and be sated by that alone. We have to consider the traditions that influenced Plato. We have to understand his audience. We have to weigh what has been said against what has not. We have to admit the possibility of irony and satire and other dramatic tropes. All this is what makes Plato so difficult, but also so engaging and persistently rewarding.

 

Notes:

[i] This is important for more than merely historical interest. I shall save a full demonstration of this for another time. Briefly, however, when we ask about how to rightly do philosophy, what philosophical methods are appropriate or otherwise, we must defer to what philosophy itself is for. This kind of functional demand can only be decided by looking to the foundations of philosophy and to the problems that it was established to solve. Plato happens to be the centrepiece of those foundations.

[ii] There is some dispute about whether Plato’s dialogues were performed. There is good reason to believe that they were, at least in some respect, but they need not have been in order to support the general appeal to the public upon which my account relies.

[iii] This criticism is specifically about the Lysis, an early dialogue of peripheral import.

[iv] Diogenes Laertius considers this rather plausible but attributes the hypothesis to earlier commentators.

 

Works Cited:

Steven Robinson, “Plato in the Crito” in Jonathon Lavery, Louis Groarke, and William Sweet [eds.], Ideas Under Fire: Historical Studies of Philosophy and Science in Adversity, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, WI), 2013: 37-65