In the golden age of classical Athens, the average citizen had exactly two fears: the
war with Sparta, and talking with Socrates.
The Spartans at least were outside the city walls, but that wily Socrates was even more
terrifying because he could be anywhere.
You might be at a party for elite Athenians, walking through the Agora marketplace, or
even waiting in line to be put on trial, but as soon as you smelled Socrates coming you
knew you were in trouble.
Then once he stepped barefoot into your line of sight and heard you so much as thinking,
this disheveled goblin of a man would delight in dissecting every aspect of your conscience,
question by question.
Why do you hold your opinions, are you doing enough to be a good person, are you qualified
to know what Goodness even means?
In the eyes of the Athenian public, Socrates was a vulture scavenging the city for errant
ideas, ready to dive on any offhand comments or boasts of wisdom.
Socrates was, by all accounts, profoundly irritating to political bigwigs and self-proclaimed
“experts”, but he was undeniably an upright citizen, having served in the Athenian army
on three occasions and holding a deep respect for the laws of the city, and the boisterous
Athenian youths absolutely loved the guy.
Among that bunch, none was more devoted than
his student Plato.
Born to an aristocratic family in the mid 420s BC, Plato grew up among the leading political
elite during the height of the Peloponnesian War, whereupon he bravely ditched any chance
of a career in business or politics to instead study Philosophy.
My hero.
Around 387 BC, Plato founded an informal academy on his family estate where Athenians could
freely gather to discuss and debate topics from the most ethical and practical to the
abstract and theoretical.
Plato’s Academy inspired other philosophical schools across Greece, such as the Lykeion
of his student Aristotle, and it remained in use until its untimely destruction in the
80s BC – Long story, blame the Romans.
Yet, like many a frustrated Athenian citizen, Plato could never escape Socrates, and Plato’s
greatest philosophical legacy lies in his Socratic Dialogues, a collection of 30-odd
philosophical discussions featuring his beloved mentor.
These are not the first written works of philosophy, nor the first to ask big questions about the
nature of the world and our place in it – but Plato’s approach is so thoroughly systematic
and wide-ranging in its treatment of ethics, politics, epistemology, and abstract concepts
that we can rightly credit Plato with creating The analytical toolkit of Western Philosophy,
elevating it from a field of casual inquiry to a defined system of investigation.
In short, the man is good, but more than anything else, it’s the dynamic between Socrates
and Plato which makes these dialogues so darn captivating.
To see how, as kánoume philosophía!
Now, Plato had studied with Socrates for at
least a decade before striking out on his own, and the instigating factor was Socrates
dying.
Because being a compulsive conversationalist wasn’t a crime in ancient Athens, and neither
was being annoying, but Socrates was such a profound pain in the ass that three Athenians
brought him up on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth in the hopes of getting him exiled
or killed.
And Socrates was so stubborn it worked perfectly!
They held a trial, he told them to piss off, they sentenced him to death, he drank the
poison, and simple as that, he’s on a boat to the river Styx!
And after that rather traumatic experience, Plato’s outlet for grief and at least a
little rage was writing, codifying the memory of his mentor through the activity he’d
loved most, dialogue.
At the time (and basically ever since), Philosophy was usually written as a treatise, where the
author talks at you, but Plato instead adapted Athens’ local style of theatrical drama.
The dialogue format was certainly new and unique, but it’s really a philosophy play,
so it made perfect sense as a distinctly Athenian mode of philosophy, as well as a Socratic
one.
It also helps solve the issue of Socrates’ complete disdain for writing.
He loved to talk, but thought that an idea dies as soon as it hits the papyrus.
Writing is static, it can’t converse, it can’t react – but usefully: it also can’t
drink poison, so Plato was willing to do it anyway.
And by writing dialogues instead of treatises, Plato upheld the Socratic ideal of lively
debate, and, in some cases, preserved actual discussions Socrates likely had.
Among the earliest and most famous of Plato’s
dialogues are the Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, which depict the trial and imprisonment
of Socrates, leading to his death in the latter Phaedo dialogue.
These are a small slice of Plato’s total work, but they offer the most dramatic portrayal
of Socrates’ character, and combine into the foundational narrative that all the other
dialogues build on.
So, what does Plato show us?
The first dialogue in the series sees Socrates
awaiting his trial outside the law court, where he meets a man named Euthyphro who’s
prosecuting his own father for killing a murderer; he knows this is bold of him, but he considers
it the pious thing to do.
So Socrates asks “what is piety really?”
and Euthyphro offers some ideas, but Socrates keeps finding problems, so they end up going
in a circle without landing on a solid answer.
Critically, Socrates isn’t being a mean-spirited contrarian, but genuinely wants to find an
answer and is willing to defy conventional ideas to get at deeper truths.
But the dialogue also asks how Athenians have any right to accuse Socrates of impiety when
they themselves can’t even define it.
This leads right into the Apology, which is not apologetic in the slightest but rather
comes from the Greek word for Speaking in Defense.
Here we listen to Socrates’ arguments for his innocence against the crimes of impiety
and corrupting the youth, as well as a general defense for his philosophical questioning
that the Athenians are actually upset about.
He compares himself to a gadfly biting a lazy horse: an annoying presence that’s necessary
to stimulate the Athenians to be better, and declares that even if acquitted he’ll never
stop asking questions of people because the unexamined life is not worth living (38a5–6).
After his defense, the 501-man jury finds him guilty, and this triggers a fascinating
step in the Athenian legal process.
After a guilty verdict, the prosecution and the defense each propose a punishment, and
the jury votes once again.
This encourages moderation, so when the prosecution proposed death, the assumption was Socrates
would request exile and most likely get it, but instead he doubled down, saying if you
want to know what I Deserve, I’ll tell you what I deserve.
Put me up in the Prytaneion and give me free meals for life, because I’m doing Athens
a service and that’s what I deserve…
Naturally, the jury voted for death, but Socrates remained undaunted.
The beauty of the language in the Apology is Plato’s gift, but that unshakable moral
core was all Socrates – And that attitude pervades the next two dialogues.
Now, the day before Socrates’ trial, a ship
left port for a sacred festival on the island of Delos, and until it came back no executions
were allowed to take place, so Socrates stayed in prison for a month, until his friend Crito
arrives to tell him the ship was spotted off the coast of Sounion and would be back in
the city soon after.
Crito offers Socrates one last chance to escape but Socrates refuses on principle.
Sure, the guards couldn’t care less if he bolted so long as he just left the city, but
justice is justice and Socrates would rather die.
In the next dialogue, he sure as hell does.
The Phaedo portrays the last conversation with his students about the immortality of
the soul before the sun sets and he drinks the poison Hemlock.
The death is immaculately dramatized, as his friends swing between laughing and weeping
while Socrates remains calm, serene, and pious to the very end.
This is the stuff religions are made of, but Plato leverages the drama of it all to better
explore those topics of piety, justice, and death his characters investigate.
Now, we have an interesting problem here,
because Socrates is all aboard the immortal soul train in the Phaedo, but earlier in the
Apology he explicitly does not know what happens to him after he dies.
And that gets to The Big Question in Platonic philosophy: Where does the historical Socrates
end and Plato’s character of Socrates begin?
The simplest answer is chronological, as Plato’s early dialogues hew much closer to how other
sources paint the historical Socrates and have more basis in actual conversations – while
the later dialogues see Plato get more inventive, developing Socrates into a character that
he can drop in any story and set loose.
Early dialogues often have plausible context or full historical precedent like the trial,
but middle dialogues like the Republic create whole scenarios and characters for Socrates
to bounce off of.
We can also distinguish the dialogues by what
Socrates is doing in them.
The early dialogues typically follow a format of some smartypants declaring that they know
something about politics, religion, ethics or the like, whereupon Socrates exercises
carte blanche to ruin this person’s whole career, systematically skewering their positions
and leaving them as a confused blubbering mess before carrying happily along with his
day.
This is the Socrates who Athens wanted dead.
However, the middle and late dialogues show Socrates offering ideas for a change, possibly
in line with Plato developing his ideas and delicately weaving them into the texts.
Socrates in the latter dialogues takes a more rigorously mathematical approach and has more
interest in abstract concepts.
He still operates through lines of questioning, but we can clearly see Plato’s hand in this
version of the character.
Looking at the structure of the Republic, book 1 reads as a standard early dialogue,
investigating the question of justice and ending with no clear answer, but in book 2
Socrates puts forward his own definition, using the metaphor of a city’s government
to illustrate how justice works in a single person, and this discussion drives the subsequent
nine books of the Republic.
After several tangents and extra philosophical scaffolding to support the main argument,
the metaphor falls apart, but several key ideas make it through intact – most significant
being the theory of Forms, the intangible ideals and concepts that govern the universe.
These forms are reflected down into mathematics, the physical world, and then images.
So this drawing of Blue is an image of me, who is an image of humanity, which is itself
an image of the concept of Life.
This is where we glimpse Plato’s own philosophy; he never states it outright, because he also
believes that philosophy is a process rather than a singular truth, but he gives Socrates
more and more ideas that survive scrutiny and convince other characters in the dialogues.
Those ideas, taken on their own, form an entire corpus of thought that’s gone on to inspire
secular philosophy and Abrahamic theology for millennia.
That all is plenty impressive, but it’s
not why Plato is the best philosopher.
See, the dialogue format isn’t just a cute recreation of Socrates’ antics or a clever
riff on Athenian theater, it’s the only way to convey philosophy that meets the Socratic
ideal.
Plato recognized that text becomes fixed and static once it’s written, so his strategy
is to make the reader participate with him and Socrates and the other characters.
When the Euthyphro ends without an answer on what piety is, that invites the reader
to use what they’ve learned and try their own hand at it – so that dialogue continues
in our minds, millennia after Plato took his hand off the papyrus.
The dialogues leave open questions, so as long as the text is read, the conversation
remains alive as we craft our own answers.
With the possible exception of Jewish philosophy in the Midrashic tradition, which is a beautiful
communal exploration of the Torah unfolding over generations, almost no other western
philosopher does this!
Plato’s distinctly Athenian innovation is the best mode to convey philosophy, and I’m
baffled that this isn’t the main way we do this!
The craft of discussion and the process of investigating our ideas through questions
gets us a greater understanding of real-world and theoretical truths.
If we read a regular old treatise and just take an author’s word for it, we’re only
coming at the idea from one angle, which then leaves some rhetorical flank exposed for someone
like Socrates to rip it apart, but when we use the Socratic method to challenge our ideas,
reconfigure and strengthen them, that’s when we approach real wisdom.
Now go read a dialogue and start asking some questions!
Thank you so much for watching!
I first thought of doing this video last summer when I was re-reading the Euthyphro and thought
“wait, this is, like, really really good???”
There are plenty of other Platonic gems I didn’t get to cover, like the Protagoras
and the Gorgias, but maybe that just means you should go read them for yourself and see
what I’m on about.
Oh no, what a shame, you just HAVE to go read Plato now, agh, damn, sorry, [laughing] – anyway
I’ll see you in the next one.