We met one sunny afternoon in a nook about a round table at Snack Taverna. The sun shone on some of our backs in the tiny greek restaurant in New York City’s West Village. Our task was to climb a mountain I called Plato’s Republic, but more specifically, to get a view from the top of that mountain of what Plato’s reason for writing it was and why he wrote it as a dialogue. As a trailhead to the top of this mountain I picked the following kickoff question: Let’s assume Socrates/Plato is a self-help guru. Based on the Republic, how would they coach me to live my life?
The book goes through step by step what justice looks like for the individual, me the coachee in this scenario, and for the city. But I was curious to start with the individual because the book, in popular culture is most often seen as a political treatise. In fact, as I mentioned in our conversation, there’s a surprising amount of “psychology” in the book. Fascinating because usually people think of psychology as a relatively modern thing dating back to Freud.
To gather for yourself what these self help gurus recommend for you living your best life you’ll have to read the book and/or book a dialogue session to talk it through. (We came to our own answer and it wasn’t pretty). Through this trailhead we were able to access the top of the mountain to get a glimpse of or a bit of greater clarity into why Plato went to such pains to write this epic dialogue of his. My greatest takeaways from our conversation though were about the format he chose, dialogue.
If you’ve read some of my previous posts you know I spend an abnormal amount of time dwelling on the concept of dialogue (they live here and here). Some of that dwelling started when I first read Plato in my late teens over 20 years ago. I was enamored with these works. Why? I’m not entirely clear. As several of us mentioned, revisiting this work all these years later was revealing. We used to think this was a bone of truth we must suck every last bit of marrow from. Reading it this time around it was more annoying than anything else. Why this contrast? Again, I reflect and I realize, I’m just not so sure. Rereading books is a very funny thing. It shows how subjective an experience it is. How consuming art in one state of mind or one phase of life changes completely as you change. I think it’s a beautiful thing.
I think I really dug Plato’s dialogues in my late teens because they were alive in a way many of the other books we were reading in undergrad were not. The back and forth enlivened them, whereas the monologues were interesting stories, but they were maybe less relatable. But reading recently, I noticed that these “dialogues” we not dialogues in the way I think of dialogue. Dialogue, for me, in its best form is “generative.” Both or all people conversing are on equal footing contributing net new ideas, learnings, questions, and disagreements.
The Republic is not a generative dialogue. It is a back and forth. Plato unfurls an argument through Socrates but makes it go back and forth, sometimes bloody maddeningly. So maddeningly, in our conversation about the book we had to ask, WHYYYYYYYYYYY?
Why drag us through Glaucon’s incessant, “Yes it seems to me at least you’re correct in saying what you’re saying Socrates.” It must have taken so much effort. But here’s the thing, I never realized these are not generative dialogues until this rereading. I always falsely remembered Socrates’ interlocutors had more to add. They weren’t such “yesmen” in my mind. Not so in fact, they have very little to add. I was disappointed. These most famous of “dialogues” were not even dialogues, to me at least.
We came up with a few fun guesses as to why he wrote his argument this way and they were all interesting. One question slash explanation that came up was did people write monologous treatises hundreds of years BC? We remembered that it was a culture transitioning from the oral, a la Homer’s epic poems to these written Platonic Dialogues. We were unsure how true it was that people wrote long things. We were very sure the culture of drama and comedy performances was alive and well and these dialogues were much more akin to a play than a book. We found ourselves trying to picture if people at the time Plato was writing would sit around Athens reading “books?” Thousands of years before the printing press or even commonly illuminated manuscripts this seems unlikely. It’s fun to imagine though. If you’re a scholar of antiquity reading this, maybe you can educate me and I’ll share with my group.
The guess that seemed most likely to me was more core to Plato’s message. As a philosopher himself he argues throughout that philosophy, wisdom and justice are what we need to shoot for most. Assuming you’re convinced by his argument, how then do you love wisdom? Pursue wisdom? Participate in wisdom? The good and slowly better understanding what is justice? While it seems to me it’s not about dialogue itself, it does seem like it is by thinking. Reasoning, thinking, crafting an argument based on mutually accepted starting points. Building from that which is reasonable. Not making things up, not whim nor poetry, but really trying hard to start from what’s true and move toward what’s true. And what better way to display a well-crafted argument then speaking it out loud?
OK maybe you can display it in a speech. But, I’d guess displaying this “process” of philosophy is only part of Plato’s message. I think he also wants to convert you. He doesn’t just want to convince you of his pro philosophy stance. He wants you to join his movement. He wants you to perform like he and Socrates perform. He wants everyone to become philosophers for their benefit and for the greater good. For that he has to show you how it’s done. And done by the best.
Read it (once). Talk it through. And tell me how you’d live your life if this was your gospel. I’m dying to know if you think you’d have to live it constantly in “dialogue.” If you think this is your only path out of the cave of knowing only shadows in spite of sitting in a bright West Village taverna nook.
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