My Dinner with Plato

Here’s an interesting picture: a dinner conversation with Plato, we’re sitting across each on the table, he appreciates the fine olive oil I pour down on everything I have cooked for him, while he indulges me by engaging with my questions. We lack mixing bowls and the concentrated wine, but the meat roasted in Homeric fashion is delicious, so he is not complaining yet. And since I have read the Laws, I know that he looks down on drinking casually, especially in serious-minded people.

I launch myself into heavy reading projects. My last one being the Complete Works of Plato. For the last year, I carried Hackett’s tremendous volume of his collected works with me almost everywhere I went, making myself the butt of many jokes and stares. It was also a good conversation starter at cafés and airports. I read most of it in Egypt, particularly Alexandria, a city that still bears Hellenic reminiscences. The Greco-Roman Museum which presents this heritage was undergoing renovations at the time, but I had a chance to visit it recently on my shorter second trip to Egypt.  The philosopher himself is believed to have travelled to Egypt, though this is just speculation like the other details of his biography.

I am not going to get too much into the philosophy here, this is mostly about reading Plato and befriending thinkers across time and space. I mean, what would Plato have to do with me if I lived during his time? Women occupied a precarious place in ancient Greek society. With few exceptions, they weren’t involved in the activities of the polis, including philosophy. Plato (or his mouthpieces, no one can vouch for what this guy really thought) was in fact quite liberal when it came to women. In his political writings he often radically argues for equality of the sexes in the ideal polis, while in other places he repeats the general opinion of his time that the female sex is not of much use when it comes to politics or philosophy. Two women are known to have studied in his Academy, which is encouraging, yet not reassuring enough. All this is without mentioning that I’d be a foreigner, not Athenian, and God forbid not even Greek. Either way, I am of the view that our friendship is much more congenial because of our, well, logistical and temporal difficulties.

Reading Plato is a pleasurable activity. I do agree that there are more suitable books to take to the beach (definitely lighter ones) but once I make a friend, I am pretty loyal to them. Plato is easy to read, clear to follow and comfortable to digest. Especially considering his student Aristotle, whose works are notoriously difficult to decipher, hence partially explaining the obsession with writing and rewriting line-by-line exegesis of all his corpus. I doubt any other thinker caused as much speculation as Aristotle over the centuries. Either way, though it is difficult to establish Plato’s final views on the questions he engages in, it is not hard to understand and appreciate his works in isolation.

The dialogue form is due a lot of credit for this, whereas Aristotle’s works are thought to be mostly his or his students’ lecture notes. Each Socratic dialogue takes one theme or one question and uses the dialectical method to tear it apart, often arriving at no clear conclusions. It is difficult to establish a reliable chronology of his works, but Plato is thought to be much more assertive in his later writings. Thus, in the Republic and the Laws we get his view on the ideal polis, its structures, and its laws. I have to admit that his utopia is quite dystopic for a modern reader: it is extremely involved in every aspect of the lives of its citizens, in other words, authoritarian. Just to give an example, he proposes sending people off to the colonies if the population limit is reached. Each person acts in the limited realm reserved for their assigned role, and punishments for disobedience (as they imply contempt for the laws) can be quite harsh. Yet, his main point stands very convincing: the purpose of the laws is to establish a system that produces healthy and virtuous individuals. Every other motivation is secondary or insignificant.  

So which dialogues jump at you off the page? If I had to name any at the top of my hand (as I stopped carrying the book around), my favourites would have to be the Apology, Republic, Alcibiades, and Parmenides. These are endlessly re-readable and there is something about them that particularly sparks the imagination. It is hard to contain Plato to the page, his words effervesce with meanings beyond the apparent. There is always a feeling that he is holding something off, a mysterious confidentiality to his attitude that sparked speculations of a secret mystical cult of his teachings. We get an admission of this in his 7^th Letter, thought to be the most likely of the Epistles to be authentic. Here he describes a kind of knowledge that no person who possesses it would attempt to write it down. It is passed down orally from master to student or arises from exactly this interaction. There is a lot to explore here, but I will leave it for later.

I can say that I befriended Plato because of his reassurance that a life worth living is spent in acquisition of virtue, in the contemplation Justice, Beauty, and Truth. And perhaps above all, the Good, which encompasses all. I cannot confirm whether Socrates’s methodology of elenchus which Plato describes and practices is effective in reaching these Ideas. But one gets a sense that this pursuit is capital, and reading Plato is an affirmation of this desire.