What if Plato is deluded?
Most people said they enjoyed reading Gorgias as part of our readalong, but the feeling wasn’t universal.
One subscriber said this:
“…I like your articles so I gave [Gorgias] a try, but I was disappointed. I don’t get why Plato and Socrates are held up as philisophical paragons. Some of their claims are ridiculous. As you say, I don’t buy that it’s better to be punished than to get off scot-free. Prison terms aren’t some magic moral cleansing agent for sin.”
Let’s run with this idea. Let’s assume the “moral content” of Gorgias and the other Platonic Dialogues is off base. Virtue is not the only good, etc.
Is there anything of value to salvage? Should virtue skeptics still engage with Plato?
I think there are several reasons why they should consider reading at least several of the dialogues.
Monologue vs Dialogue:
Philosophy is about conversation, questioning, and testing, not monologues and certainties. Unreasonable assumptions and tidy answers fall apart when exposed to good questions, so anyone devoted to truth needs interlocutors.
I bet my subscriber gained a better appreciation of the lackluster elements of Plato’s ideas by reading the back-and-forth. They seem firmer in summary. And by mentally pushing against them as the dialogue proceeds, he may have firmed up his own ideas.
Whatever we decide to believe, holding our ideas up for criticism will make them better ideas. This is one of the greatest lessons Plato teaches.
The Negative Path:
Many Platonic dialogues end without resolution or eureka moments. No great universal mysteries are worked out. Instead, using apophatic reasoning, aka, via negativa — the negative way — Socrates and his interlocutors agree on some of the things which a thing isn’t.
You may scoff at this, but so often in life we can’t find the truth. Yet moving closer to it via subtraction is almost always an option. In conversation with romantic partners, business associates, and politicians, we might get further by agreeing to subtract and narrow the scope/target rather than butting heads over specific asserted truths.
Wrapped in the Tradition:
No matter where you go from here, you’ll never escape Plato. His ideas are everywhere, often filtered and transmuted by generations of thinkers. Even if you think he’s a fool, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you can’t spot his thinking all around you and have refutations at the ready.
The Other Morality:
If you scoff at virtue, there’s another sort of morality we might pick up from the dialogues. Plato never names it nor endorses it, but we might call it “pluralism.”
There are multiple values (pleasure, justice, aesthetics, utility) asserted by Socrates’s interlocutors, and while Plato knocks some down, they’re in the air the Greeks were breathing. They’re still in our air, along with many more. We’ll never all agree on virtue, or any other moral system or goal.
If you’ve embraced virtue, you’ll need to exercise it in a world where most people aren’t on board. And if you think virtue in bunk, you still need to figure out how to work with your fellow humans and do good by them, whatever their beliefs and inadequacies. Stoics would call that justice, but others might simply call it good sense. The dialogues help us practice.
Notice that Socrates never loses his cool, even when interlocutors heap insults on him and call him ridiculous. He’s self-depricating and yet relentless. We’d all benefit from being a bit more like Socrates.
That doesn’t mean you need to read every dialogue, but I think there are three or four most people should read. And that’s a topic I’ll be tackling soon.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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