TEACHING PLATO By Marianne Janack *** The Montréal Review, April 2025 |
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Being taught
When I was a sophomore in college, I took a course that was required for the philosophy major: the History of Ancient Philosophy. The course is pretty standard—a survey class that covers the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle. Sometimes St. Augustine (though he is sometimes included in a course on Medieval Philosophy). The History of Ancient is for philosophy majors what calculus is for math majors, or Microeconomics is for economics majors. The professor was a visitor on a one-year appointment—a young man fresh out of graduate school who generally wore jeans, a blue button-down shirt, and his belt backwards (“I used to work at a mental hospital,” he explained, “this was a technique we used which made it harder for the patients to grab hold of us.”) He pretended to smoke a cigarette, which he held—unlit—in one hand while lecturing. The college had recently made smoking in class a violation, and, he said, he still hadn’t quite gotten out of the habit of lecturing about the Ancients with a cigarette held between his fingers as he gesticulated and talked about rivers, caves, the one and the many, and courage. Forty years later, I still have the books; my copy of the works of Plato from that semester:
Looking back at these books and the light blue highlighting pen that I used then is a bit like encountering a different version of myself, and it is a bit disconcerting: the 20 year old who thought that she was going to be a lawyer or a high school English teacher, and who had no idea what philosophy was or even who Plato and Aristotle were.
I can still see the dark wood library tables at which I sat in the evenings, turning the onionskin pages of my collected works of Plato with the light of a warm yellow lamp surrounded by other readers, all of us reading privately these words of other people from other times. It was as if the Athens of the 400 BCs was there in Hamilton, NY in 1984. I’d never been to Greece—I’d only been to Canada, France, and the Bahamas, and I was pretty sure none of those was like Greece of 400 BC. Our class met in a large room on the third floor of Lawrence Hall, the chairs arranged in rows, a chalkboard and old wooden desk at the front. There were 40 students in the class—I always sat near the windows and looked out at the valley, the open fields, and the trees. This view was so different from what I could see in the working class suburb in which I’d spent my whole life, and I wondered how I’d ended up here, in this classroom, at this toney liberal arts college, listening to a young philosophy professor talk about books that I’d never heard of. Looking back now, I realize that I probably wouldn’t have landed on that campus if I hadn’t lived in a country where girls could go to college at 18 instead of becoming mothers and wives at that age; if I hadn’t lived in a time in which financial aid programs allowed students like me, from working class backgrounds, to go to some of the best colleges in the US; if I hadn’t lived at a time when reading was widespread and there was a democratic approach to education. That is, I wouldn’t have ended up in that classroom reading Plato’s dialogues if I’d lived in Plato’s time. But I also learned the following:
My blue highlighter tells me that the works of Plato that we read in Ancient Philosophy were The Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Euthyphro, Meno, and Books 1-6 of the Republic. I’m not sure why we didn’t read all of the Republic; I suppose we had to move on, since we still needed to read Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics, and well, a semester is only so long. While I didn’t know it when I was a sophomore in college, I would later read the Ion and other parts of the Republic in an aesthetics course I took when I embarked on a doctoral degree in philosophy—fortunately, I still had my copy of the Collected Works of Plato. I also didn’t know that I would re-read all these dialogues and read the Timaeus in preparation for a comprehensive oral exam about Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology (in graduate school I used a ballpoint pen, not a light blue highlighter); that I would eventually end up teaching all those dialogues I’d first learned about in that classroom in 1984 plus all of the Republic at the same college where I’d first read them (the notes and underlining from that time are in pencil); and that there were other dialogues that other people in other disciplines read that I hadn’t, and which they thought were essential. I didn’t read Gorgias, Protagoras, Symposium, or Phaedrus until later in life, when I learned that there were other Platos lurking in rhetorical studies, political theory, religious studies, and literary theory. I thought that I had learned Plato, but it wasn’t until I was older and was teaching Plato that I started to think about what it means to learn.
Unlearning
I have just submitted final grades for the fall semester, and one student in my introductory class has contacted me because he is upset with his grade: he got a B. His complaint is that he learned everything and read everything that he was supposed to read and this, he thinks, should earn him an A. He would also like to transfer, he’s told me, and he won’t be able to do that if he doesn’t get an A in all his classes. He was very quiet in class, even though the class was small (15 people). Animated discussions about the readings and the topics were the norm in that class, but the student who is unhappy with his grade did not participate. “Philosophy is a contact sport,” I tell him—which is a quote I’ve borrowed from one of my colleagues. I don’t like the sports metaphor—and I’ve always hated contact sports—but this metaphor seemed apt. Philosophy is not about learning facts that one can carry home in a notebook or look up on Google. Philosophy isn’t about answers so much as it is about questions. But what do we do with Plato? Famously, he does not appear in the dialogues. He does not take part in the discussions. He writes the dramatic scenes in which Socrates and his discussion partners discuss what counts as knowledge, or virtue, or love. And in the Phaedrus, Socrates seems to endorse the claim that philosophy shouldn’t be written, and that writing gives the impression of knowledge and discussion without giving the real thing. Like painting, it is an imitation that can fool people into thinking that they are seeing the real thing when they are merely seeing a copy.
Maybe Plato was trying to recreate the dramatic discussions but by leaving himself out he hoped to avoid charges of creating a false image? Or maybe not all representations (or art) are to be condemned? Maybe some have redeeming qualities, or can be put to the use of philosophizing? There have been attempts to resolve the seeming paradox of Plato’s writing by either arguing that 1) the representation of a dialogue is supposed to prompt further dialogue or 2) that the paradox itself is meant to prompt us to think about imitation or 3) the representation of a dialogue is a way of using the rhetorical tools of the poet/playwright to make readers think philosophically.
Drama and dialogue
Not all dialogues are dramatic. George Berkeley’s dialogue between Hylas and Philonous is more like a position statement presented in dialogue form: Philonous argues for positions that Berkeley argues for in his own authorial voice, so Philonous is usually taken to be Berkeley’s mouthpiece. But who is Plato’s mouthpiece? Some commentators assume that it’s Socrates or, in some dialogues, The Athenian Stranger, but some commentators think that this is the wrong question to ask. Julián Marías has argued that philosophical writing that is framed as a drama—as Plato’s is—may not be amenable to a search for the author’s theses or doctrines. That is, the point of the drama might be the drama, and not the establishment of a thesis or claim. Marías is not alone in arguing this—people like Drew Hyland, Debra Nails, and Gerald Press have argued that we who think of ourselves as students of Plato miss the point of the dialogues if we treat them as we would treat treatises or arguments for a thesis. The dialogue form, they argue, is not just the form into which Plato poured his ideas, but is, in fact, part of the philosophical content that Plato the author was trying to give his readers. Hyland remarks that Plato’s commentators often pay lip service to the idea that the dialogue is different from the treatise or argument, but then use interpretive strategies that fail to take into account the dialogic form of Plato’s writing. It’s as if, Hyland says, these interpreters assume that the dialogues should be read as if they were academic journal articles. Marías argues that the professionalization of philosophy (and philosophy teaching) has led to a way of reading and interacting with Plato’s works that fails to see how the dramatic dialogue makes different demands of the student, the philosopher, and the reader. Nails argues that the tendency to treat Plato’s dialogues as nonfiction “transcripts” of discussions between Socrates and the (historical) figures who appear in the dialogues makes Plato seem more like an historical realist than is warranted; furthermore, she argues that there are no uncontroversial or unambiguous grounds for thinking that Socrates (or the major dramatic speaker in a given dialogue) is intended by Plato to be his representative in the dialogue. That is, Nails argues that the tendency to attribute to Plato the positions and claims argued for by the major figures in the dialogues is part of an interpretive strategy. That strategy makes an assumption about the author and the reader which does not seem to be justified by anything other than habits developed by contemporary forms of philosophical activity and writing. But maybe that’s not a reason to reject the strategy—or at least that might be the response that one should expect from those who are suspicious of the idea of the “real meaning” of a text, as opposed to the ways in which readers use a text. Maybe the meaning of the Platonic dialogue rests in its uses—in this case, uses that might differ by academic discipline and by the interpretive community to whom the interpretation is offered. So if the professional philosophers want to read Plato’s dialogues using the mouthpiece strategy, and seek the “real Plato” and his doctrines in those dialogues, then that’s the standard to which we teachers of Plato ought to hew if we are also teaching philosophy. Insisting that this is a misreading, or that it is insufficiently attentive to the genre of the dialogue is a form of appeal to the “real meaning” or to Plato’s intentions. The real meaning of the texts is not to be found; the search itself resurrects an idea of meaning that should be buried, not celebrated. The appeal to the right interpretation—as opposed to the uses to which a text can be put—is an argument strategy that reifies the idea of context-less meaning.
What does this mean for teaching Plato to students?
For one thing, it might mean that students need to think of reading and learning about Plato as itself bound by contexts. To read Plato in a course on the History of Ancient Greek Philosophy might reveal a different Plato than the Plato revealed in a rhetoric course or a literature course. In my course on Literary Philosophers, I pair Plato’s dialogue about love, The Symposium, with Ray Carver’s short-story-cum-dialogue “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” to get them to think in terms of dialogue and drama. Both Carver’s story and The Symposium present us with characters who are complex, and who debate about what counts as love. Mel is a cardiologist who once wanted to be a priest and whose idea of love is represented by stories he tells about a knight and about an old couple who have been in a car accident. He is divorced and seems to hate his ex-wife, whom he once thought he loved. His new wife, Terry, tells a story about a former boyfriend who beat her up and was willing to die for her. Terry begs Mel to agree that this was love; Mel is not willing to agree. The reader is like a fly on the wall, listening in to this debate which features two heterosexual couples. The Symposium, however, is a discussion among men, and it is told by someone who was told about it by someone else. And there is another telling within this telling: Socrates tells a story about Diotima who, he says, taught him that physical love of a beautiful individual is, for the philosopher, the gateway to a love of the Good—a more universal and philosophical form of desire. The love that expresses itself as sexual desire and attraction is only a poor imitation of the real thing, but it can serve the purposes of philosophy. The published version of the Carver story has a conclusion that suggests that real love is shown in quiet, non-linguistic ways—it closes with Nick and Laura, the unmarried couple who are visiting Mel and Terry, reaching for each other’s hands. The suggestion is that they do not need to define love—they know what it is, and it defies definition. When I had students read these recently, the result was a lively—and completely unresolved-- debate about what love is. One student—a neuroscience major-- suggested that the problem of deciding whether something counted as ‘love’ could be avoided if there were a machine that could record brain activity and decode it: one could tell if someone loved a particular person by consulting the machine. “But what if the machine says that you don’t love someone, but you think that you do?” Camille, a philosophy major, asked. “Then you’re wrong,” Sawyer, an art major but science fan, replied, “The brain scan reveals that. Love is just a brain state.” He then looked up the definition on line. “It’s defined as an intense feeling of deep affection—end of debate.” But that didn’t end the debate, of course, because then students asked if, as in the Carver story, treating someone badly could be consistent with the intense feeling of love. That it didn’t seem to be inconsistent gave some students pause. Is love a feeling, or is it a way of treating others? Should filial love and the love of a parent for a child be grouped with romantic love? The consensus seemed to be that the machine couldn’t answer those questions. “Then so much the worse for those questions,” a political theory major said. “We’re in a philosophy class!” said a sophomore economics major. “Aren’t these the questions that we’re supposed to be talking about in a philosophy class?” The students then debated the value of asking questions that don’t have empirical answers. It will probably come as no surprise to you, reader, that they did not agree. Some thought such questions were important, even if they couldn’t be settled by empirical or scientific evidence; some thought that such a discussion was fruitless and frustrating. The discussion wasn’t exactly a copy of either the Carver dialogue or the discussion in the Symposium. It was a group of 15 people that included men, women, non-binary people; students who identified as bisexual, gay and straight; students who represented a variety of racial and ethnic identities; students from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds; and students in different concentrations and with different intellectual tendencies. Some of the students knew each other from other classes or had already established antipathies or friendships with other students in the class. Some of them made assumptions about a given discussant’s intellectual tendencies. And of course, our discussion took place among students at a highly selective liberal arts college in the shadow of intellectual trends like the Me Too movement and logical positivism. A class discussion is, in all these ways, a drama. Is that relevant to a dialogue about love? That, of course, is exactly what is up for discussion in the way we understand Plato. Should we be thinking about who the actual characters are? Alcibiades, who enters the discussion of love in the Symposium, would go on to live a life full of intrigue and was known for switching his allegiance from Athens to Sparta and for his playboy lifestyle. This isn’t information that a contemporary reader would know, and if we focus on the theses defended and the doctrines argued for, that might seem to be a better way to interpret the dialogue if we are to understand it as philosophy. Plato, of course, may well have expected his hearers to know who Alcibiades was. And he may have had in mind the rumors that circulated about a love relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates, but that might not be relevant to a theory of love.
Phaedrus
Phaedrus is present for the discussion of love in The Symposium, but the dialogue named for him is quite different. It is a discussion between Socrates and Phaedrus, and begins with a discussion of the differences between the town and the country and between knowledge of nature and knowledge of human beings. Much of the Phaedrus is famous: the indictment of writing that Socrates seems to endorse; the story of the chariot and the horses; the story about reincarnation; and the idea of the pharmakon. It is usually characterized as one of the dialogues about love and eros as well as a dialogue about rhetoric and persuasion. The story that Socrates tells Phaedrus about writing has been a puzzle to many commentators—it seems to justify Socrates’s own practice of not writing while undermining the value of Plato’s written accounts of Socrates’s encounters. Looking at the parts of an object separately might give us a good sense of those parts, but might make us unable to see the object in its entirety, however. Looking at the parts of this dialogue—rather than thinking of it as a unified whole—may hide from us the story about education, teaching and learning that we may see if we look at the dialogue as a whole—and we think of the dialogue itself as a way of doing philosophy. In the dialogue Phaedrus does not come off like some of the other characters in the Platonic dialogues: in the other dialogues, interlocutors can come off as self-righteous, as belligerent, or as passive yes-men. Phaedrus is not any of these—he is genuinely likeable but, as Simon Critchley has remarked, not the sharpest pencil in the pack. He loves listening to speeches; he seems to be open to persuasion. Phaedrus seems to be someone who will take to heart what he learns, and while this might make him a good student, it can also put him in danger—he might learn the wrong things. In his discussion of the dialogue, Daniel Werner (2012) points out that Phaedrus is someone for whom mythological stories might be either poison or medicine, and argues that the Phaedrus is one of the dialogues that shows us that Socrates/Plato are not entirely opposed to myths—they are only opposed to myths that don’t help students become more philosophical. And while dialectic might be the “straight” road to philosophizing, myth can be a more indirect route to the same end. The dialogue begins with a discussion of the location of the discussion: Phaedrus is surprised to see Socrates outside the center of the city. He tells Socrates that he has been advised to walk on the open road instead of among the colonnades—the implication is that Socrates is more at home in the city, though Phaedrus is walking in the country because he has been advised (by someone) to do so. Phaedrus also calls attention to his feet (he is barefoot, which he suggests is unusual for him, but not for Socrates who, Phaedrus remarks, is always barefoot. This fact may be a sign that Socrates, unlike Phaedrus, is not a creature of comfort, and has been a warrior). Phaedrus and Socrates find a place to sit under some trees and begin their discussion. Socrates is eager to hear the speech that Phaedrus has brought with him; it is written down so that Phaedrus might read it to others. It is a speech in which the speaker tries to seduce the hearer, which Phaedrus has just heard delivered by Lysias. Phaedrus reads it and asks Socrates what he thinks. Socrates says that he loves the speech, though he shows Phaedrus that he can do better. After he gives his better speech, and Phaedrus is impressed, Socrates says that his speech has offended the gods, and that he must make up for it. So he offers another speech—often called the palinode, because it is, he says, meant to be an offering to the gods. The setting for the discussion and the remarks by Phaedrus about Socrates’s habits invite readers to puzzle over this: is there symbolism in the contrasts (human vs. nonhuman worlds; the idea of learning through discussion versus learning about the natural world; the city versus the country; predictable, well-planned routes versus the unpredictability of the open road)? Or is this just Plato warming up the audience and motivating the discussion? Daniel Werner (2012) argues that the beginning of the Phaedrus, with its emphases on paths, knowledge, and the comparison of the city and the country is relevant to understanding the dialogue as a discussion about education and philosophy: this is the only Platonic dialogue that takes place outside the city walls, and the beginning is a stylistic departure, too. Phaedrus (and the reader) are meant to be led to philosophizing by thinking about speeches, seduction, and myth. Mythological stories and their value enter the dialogue early. There is a short discussion in the beginning of Phaedrus between Phaedrus and Socrates about the mythological story of Boreas’s abduction of Orythia, which Socrates says that scientific types will try to explain in naturalistic terms. He tells Phaedrus that the question of whether the event really happened as the myth says or whether there is another non-mythological explanation is not worth his inquiry. He is, he says, still trying to fulfill the Delphic oracle’s command to “know thyself”—that is the important inquiry, and he cannot be troubled to inquire about whether the mythological story is true. Since we are to think of Socrates as a philosopher, concerned with truth above all, this seems odd—but what Socrates seems to say is that it’s important truths, not just any old truths, that he is interested in. This is the frame for the discussion of speeches, love, rhetoric, writing, and memory that follows. It is tempting to go straight to the arguments presented in the dialogue, but this discussion of myths, knowledge, and inquiry—if we are reading the dialogue as a dramatic piece—cannot be ignored. Nor can we ignore the setting of the dialogue in the country (rather than in the city). Joanne Waugh (2000) argues that these details point to the role of persuasion and influence: which genres have a claim to providing wisdom? Which should we be persuaded by? Which should we be influenced by? Speeches, myths, and drama all present themselves as offering wisdom; Phaedrus’s written version of Lysias’s speech about love is a way of isolating that wisdom—and that act of persuasion—from its context of utterance. And yet teaching has to happen in that moment, between real people, who discuss big topics which may not have answers. We might be able to reduce those questions to questions about empirical fact; we might be able to think of ourselves as knowing something important because we know facts. But real knowledge might be something that only comes after discussion, and it might not be something that we can show on tests. ***
*** Bibliography
*** FROM THE ARCHIVES *** KAFKA TEACHES ME HOW TO TEACH KAFKA By James Martel The Montréal Review, March 2025 *** “VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D”: TEACHING WALT WHITMAN By Stephen Haven The Montréal Review, August 2024 *** TEACHING MILOSZ: THE EVOLUTION OF A POET by Ira Sadoff The Montréal Review, February 2025 *** |
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