An Introduction to Plato's Dialogues

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein opens the project with the story of how she met Plato: a library book brought home for the Sabbath, a chapter she had to put down to catch her breath, and a feeling she still calls ecstasy. It is the feeling, she argues, that Plato believed philosophy could produce, and that reading him can still produce.

From there she sets the scene. Athens at its height, inventing democracy, theater, and philosophy. Socrates in the agora, demonstrating to his neighbors that they did not know what they were talking about, and paying for it with his life. And Plato, the young aristocrat who watched, who turned philosophy into drama, and who kept Socrates in nearly every dialogue he wrote.

She closes with the four dialogues ahead and the reversal between the last two, where Plato argues against his own conclusions about love. That willingness to doubt himself, she says, is the thing she loves most.

Transcript

I love philosophy, and we're about to embark on an incredible journey together. I'm Rebecca Goldstein. Welcome to Rebind. Welcome to the four dialogues of Plato.

I am trained as a philosopher and spent most of my life teaching philosophy. I'm also a writer, publishing books of nonfiction but also fiction, novels and short stories. I'm always experimenting with ways of writing about philosophy, and that has a lot to do with the philosopher we're going to be reading together, Plato. My last book was called Plato at the Googleplex. It alternates chapters about Plato and his times and culture with chapters transplanting Plato into our times and culture. I have him running around on a book tour, visiting the headquarters of Google, where he discusses with his media escort and a software engineer whether crowdsourcing can answer ethical questions. I have him on a panel with a tiger mom, debating how best to raise our children, and helping an advice columnist answer questions about love and sex, interviewed by a Fox News-like show, discussing whether politics is supposed to ethically reform us, having his brain neuroimaged in a lab and discussing whether we're nothing but our brains with the neuroscientists. By transplanting his actual statements into these very contemporary settings and conversations, my hope was to show how eerily relevant this ancient philosopher remains.

It's embarrassing to mention my own writings in the same breath as Plato's. His are not only great works of philosophy but great works of literature, and this despite Plato's having written with misgivings: he believed in the in-the-moment give and take of lived philosophical conversation. To him, writing took much of the life out of philosophy. Yet he's acknowledged as philosophy's greatest literary artist, a master of metaphors, myths, and imagery, soaring from lyricism to jokes that land. But most importantly of all, Plato wrote in dialogue form, creating vivid characters and turning philosophy into theater. He wrote in Greek, ancient Greek, because that's what he was, an ancient Greek who lived 400 years before the birth of Jesus. Happily, you don't need to know ancient Greek to appreciate the extraordinary power of his writings.

And to demonstrate this, I'm going to tell you what happened to me. When I first encountered Plato, I was about 12 or 13. I came from a strictly religious family, not inclined to encourage any worldly ambitions. Before each Sabbath, I'd go to the public library to get my Sabbath reading, since almost all activities other than reading were prohibited on the Sabbath. One week, the book I brought home was called The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant. It wasn't written for scholars, which was lucky for me. The first chapter was on Plato, and I experienced something unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I had to put down the book for a few minutes to catch my breath. The only thing I can compare it to is a nighttime dream I sometimes have, in which a hidden set of rooms is revealed, opening out of my normal living space, wonderful rooms, one off to the other. Unlike most of my dreams, which tend to be horrific, this dream is euphoric. And that's what first encountering Plato was like for me, as if I'd entered hidden rooms that were somehow in my possession. It was such a sense of expansiveness, of ecstasy, a word that means, morphologically, standing outside oneself. Standing outside oneself can be ecstatic, so long as, when you're standing outside yourself, you're standing inside something that feels much greater than yourself. That is ecstasy. It can be artistic, religious, erotic, or, as it is in Plato, intellectual ecstasy. Plato not only believes in the transformative power of ecstasy, but reading him can induce it, and that was my experience on that Sabbath day. It made me a lifetime junkie for ecstasy. Nope, not the pill, MDMA, which gets the brain to produce a surge of serotonin, which undoubtedly feels great but then, when it wears off, leaves you exactly the same person you were before. Plato induced in me a taste for the kind of ecstasy that's transformative, taking you out of yourself to stand you within something so much greater than yourself, which in his terms is beauty, truth, and goodness braided together into one sublime unity.

I mentioned that Plato was an ancient Greek. More specifically, he was an Athenian, born in the city-state of Athens. Greece was in those days divided into separate city-states, so separate that they were often warring with one another. Athens held a unique place among them. It was not only at its height preeminently powerful, in fact an empire, but it was also the cradle of astonishing innovations politically, culturally, and intellectually. Politically, the Athenians had developed a wildly experimental form of government that they called demokratia, democracy, literally ruled by the people. Culturally, the Athenians produced masterpieces of marble, in architecture and sculpture, as well as theatrical masterpieces. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides were all Athenians. And when it came to intellectual achievements, Athens truly dominated, most especially in philosophy, to the point of arguably creating Western philosophy. Though there were non-Athenian Greeks cited as the first Western philosophers, it was in Athens that the field of philosophy was honed to such a level of sophistication that its thinkers remain relevant to this day.

The person who brought philosophy to the form of relevance was Plato. This makes him a singular figure in the history of philosophy. What Plato did was to grasp the essence of a peculiar kind of question, the philosophical question, some examples of which were already afloat in the Greece of his day, and he extended the reach of the peculiar type of question, formulating philosophical questions not only about the norms of human behavior, as his mentor Socrates had, but about language, politics, art, mathematics, religion, love and friendship, education, the nature of the mind, personal identity, the meaning of life and the meaning of death, the nature of explanation, of rationality, and of knowledge itself. Philosophical questions could be framed regarding all these areas of human concern and inquiry, and Plato framed them, often in their definitive form. It's as if he raised up the whole submerged continent of philosophy, like the submerged continent of Atlantis, which is an apt metaphor, since our first allusion to the myth of Atlantis comes from Plato.

And not only did Plato have a great talent for sniffing out philosophical problems, but, and this is probably connected with his first talent, he also offered some of the best arguments against shallow efforts to try to make philosophical problems disappear by erroneously conflating them with quite different and more easily answered problems. One of the distinctive features of philosophical questions is how eager people often are to offer solutions that don't address the philosophical problem at all. Sometimes these pseudo-answers are offered in the name of science, sometimes in the name of religion, sometimes in the name of common sense. In one of Plato's dialogues that we'll be reading, the Euthyphro, he offers one of the best refutations of those who argue that religion alone can answer the questions posed within moral philosophy. The Euthyphro argument still packs a punch, capable of stunning people who have never questioned the belief that, so far as knowing the difference between right and wrong, it's God's word or it's nothing at all, leading to the view that non-theists are necessarily amoralists. I myself was brought up with that view, and seeing the fallacy was one of the ways that Plato transformed me.

Plato himself never figures as an interlocutor in his dialogues. Instead, in 25 of Plato's 26 dialogues, you'll find the fascinating figure of Socrates. Often Socrates takes the lead in Plato's dialogues, although not always. I mentioned that Plato wrote about philosophy with some misgivings. Well, Socrates didn't write about philosophy at all. Instead, he engaged exclusively in dialogues, mostly hanging out in the Athenian center of town, the agora, engaging anyone he could, from statesmen to sophists, who were paid teachers of rhetoric, to poets, to artisans, to schoolboys, in philosophical discussions. Socrates believed himself to be doing extremely worthwhile civic work in demonstrating to his fellow citizens that they didn't know what they were talking about, that their premises were unsound and often led to outright contradictions. His favorite ploy was the reductio ad absurdum. He wanted to stun his fellow citizens out of their complacency. He seems to have been, at least as Plato presents him (and it's hard to say where the historical Socrates ends and the Platonic character of Socrates begins), both playful and deadly serious, full of irony and unafraid of offending anyone, most particularly those most impressed with themselves. And the consequence was that he made some dangerous enemies. Socrates' unremunerated occupation eventually got him into trouble, and he was put on trial, convicted, and executed for the crime of persistently posing his peculiar questions. The formal charges were impiety and corruption of the young, and it's true that the young did like to gather round and watch Socrates going after the presumptions of their elders. Among these youths was the high-born Plato.

We're going to be reading four of Plato's dialogues: the Euthyphro, which shows Socrates in full action; the Apology, which presents Socrates on trial; the Symposium, which argues that personal love, the love of one person for another, ought to be discarded in favor of an impersonal kind of love, the love of abstract truth; and the Phaedrus, which, in opposition to the Symposium, argues that personal love has philosophical value. This kind of reversal from one dialogue to another is one of the things I most love about the Platonic dialogues. They show us a philosopher who values critical reasoning so rigorously that he doesn't hesitate to critically evaluate his own conclusions. Lack of certitude can be a virtue, just as certitude can be a vice. And one of the things about which Plato seems uncertain is how important to our lives personal love ought to be.

Plato had a long and extraordinarily creative career as a philosopher, not only raising the vast submerged continent of philosophy but also founding what was arguably the first European university, set in a grove called Academe, and so the school was called the Academy. Because of Plato's Academy, Athens became even more intellectually dominant, drawing the best thinkers from all across the Greek-speaking world, including, from way up north, Aristotle. In his long career, Plato far surpassed Socrates in philosophical creativity, and yet in all the dialogues but one, the Laws, written very late in Plato's life, there is Socrates. It's as if Plato had been trying to bring Socrates along with him in his own philosophical progress, sharing it with him. The word philosophy contains the word love. Philosophy means love of wisdom. Love of wisdom is an impersonal sort of love, of the kind that Plato praises in the Symposium, but it bears mentioning that a very personal love, Plato's love for Socrates, was working itself out in the man who created philosophy as we know it.