
How to read Plato (1995) - csdrane
http://plato-dialogues.org/email/950404_1.htm
======
woodandsteel
"Make the assumption that Plato was a smart guy (A. N. Whitehead once wrote
that all western philosophy is but a set of footnotes on Plato's dialogues...)
and, if you find some place where there is a dumb way of reading the text and
a smart one, assume Plato had the smart one in mind"

So if Plato is misunderstood, it is because he failed to make himself clear by
clearly stating that an easy way of misunderstanding him is not what he
actually meant.

"most of what is good in Aristotle is Plato's, often ill digested; but if you
haven't heard of Aristotle yet, you are lucky and enjoy your luck as it last,
and forget about Aristotle; only be aware that even if you don't know it,
Aristotle had a great influence on our way of understanding the world, and
contributed to instilling in our mind the wrong notions about Plato, this
picture of Plato as an idealist dreaming in a world of "ideas" or "forms"
unconnected with the real world).

So the author believes that Aristotle was part right in his philosophical
beliefs and part wrong, and that the parts he got wrong, Plato got right. And
that the modern world follows Aristotle, and so we need Plato to correct our
beliefs.

I wonder what the author's metaphysical and political beliefs are, and how
they would stand up against critiques from Aristotle and also various modern
philosophers if the author presented them as such in a well-organized fashion.
My guess is they would fair quite poorly, and he hiding behind Plato as a way
of keeping this from happening.

~~~
curious_yogurt
>So if Plato is misunderstood, it is because he failed to make himself clear
by clearly stating that an easy way of misunderstanding him is not what he
actually meant.

I think your inference is partly true, but partly not true. In some cases, of
course it is the case that by not saying "this is an easy way of
misunderstanding" a particular claim does lead to Plato being misunderstood.
But Plato is very much unlike Aristotle or the vast majority of other
philosophers in that he wrote dialogues. These dialogues are (almost entirely)
fictional, but they read more like a play than a treatise. So, it's not always
the case that Plato is trying to be clearly understood in terms of
propositions being conveyed in language.

For example, in the dialogue the Phaedo, Socrates is talking to two
Pythagoreans about life and death. They ask Socrates to make arguments
supporting their quasi-religious beliefs that the soul goes on after death,
which Socrates does. But he does so in a very interesting way: the sequence of
arguments keep pushing them until they become uncertain about their beliefs
concerned the afterlife (which they then express).

So the question is: what does Plato actually want us to take away from this
sequence of arguments? It seems, at least, that he is not coming at it head-
on. He is not saying you should believe proposition P. Hence my scepticism
that you claim is wholly true — that Plato is misunderstood because he failed
to make himself clear. I do not think it is obvious that being clear was
always Plato's ultimate goal. My suspicions are that he wanted to put the
readers into a position where we have to figure out what we actually think is
true, and what we think about the arguments themselves. I guess what I want to
say here is that making himself clear, in the sense of stating propositions,
is not obviously the goal of Plato.

~~~
woodandsteel
_My suspicions are that he wanted to put the readers into a position where we
have to figure out what we actually think is true, and what we think about the
arguments themselves. I guess what I want to say here is that making himself
clear, in the sense of stating propositions, is not obviously the goal of
Plato._

You are coming at this all wrong. The important question is not what Plato did
and was trying to do, it is what is the truth and how can it be clearly
communicated to people so they can make use of it. If Plato communicated in a
way that in fact lead many of those who read him to not actually arrive at the
truth, which seems to be what has happened, then it doesn't matter if he
himself knew the truth and wanted people to understand it correctly.

(Oh, and by the way, the author's claim that Aristotle misunderstood Plato
seems quite dubious, given that he was Plato's student for many years, and so
Plato had abundant opportunities to test out his understanding and correct it
if it was wrong.)

Here is a way of looking at it. Take two scenarios

1) Plato is wrong, people correctly understand him, and they are persuaded he
is correct, and so live according to mistaken ideas.

2) Plato is wrong, people misinterpret him as believing ideas that are in fact
true, and they themselves are persuaded of those ideas, and so live according
to the truth.

Now which is the better state of affairs? Obviously the second one. So the
philosophical search for truth is more important than correctly interpreting
Plato. And if you are sincerely interested in finding the truth, then you
should read many more philosophers than Plato, and above all try to think
independently rather than slavishly following any particular philosopher.

And if after doing this you conclude that Plato's ideas are correct, what you
definitely should not do is urge everyone to spend their next ten years
reading Plato according to your interpretation, as veryfew will do that. What
you should instead do is present Plato's ideas to the world as an organized
philosophical work,complete with arguments, making occasional reference to
Plato, and then see if these ideas stand up to critical examination by other
philosophers. When philosophers who are Plato-enthusiasts don't follow the
correct route, I assume it is because they sense, correctly, that their
beliefs could not stand up to critical scrutiny, but don't want to admit it to
themselves.

That is why I turned to the question of what the author thinks is true, and
could it stand up to critical examination. As I said, I think he is hiding
behind Plato, and it seems to me you are doing the same, turning the question
away from what is the truth to your interpretation of Plato.

And with that in mind, let me ask you, what is your metaphysics and what is
your political philosophy? Also, for one particular topic, namely biology, do
you agree that Aristotle invented scientific biology, and that this was a
great advance? Or do you claim that Plato actually invented it, or do you
agree that Aristotle did but that it was invalid and unimportant, or what?
Ditto formal logic.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
What if Plato thought that (at least part of) the truth was that it was more
beneficial for people to _think_ and _seek_ than to be told the pre-canned
truth? Then getting people to actually read and think about Plato (or other
Plato-ish philosophers) would be more valuable than to "present Plato's ideas
to the world as an organized philosophical work".

> Also, for one particular topic, namely biology, do you agree that Aristotle
> invented scientific biology, and that this was a great advance?

I don't know. If I understand correctly, Aristotle said that women had fewer
teeth than men. He was married twice, but apparently never bothered to open
either wife's mouth and count. That may have been biology, but it wasn't very
scientific.

~~~
woodandsteel
_What if Plato thought that (at least part of) the truth was that it was more
beneficial for people to think and seek than to be told the pre-canned truth?_

And what if was wrong about that? Or is it your assumption that Plato was
right about everything, and so therefore he must be right about that
particular idea?

As to Aristotle's specific empirical claims in the realm of biology, the great
majority have been confirmed by modern science.

~~~
woodandsteel
Here's a further point. The question with Plato's dialogues is not whether a
personal dialogue with a philosopher might be the way to go, but rather is a
published dialogue better than a published work of straightforward exposition.

The fact that people disagree so much as to Plato's ideas, but far less over
works of straightforward exposition, would seem to indicate that, when it
comes to written texts, the latter is far superior.

In fact, the dialogue boosters actually seem to believe this. I say this
because when they are writing their interpretation of a dialogue, and they get
to a point people disagree on, they don't write more dialogue, but rather use
a series of propositions to present what they think Plato actually meant.

Beyond that, my impression with the dialogue boosters is that at least most of
them are more devoted to the idea of promoting the superiority of dialogue
than to rationally determining if Plato's ideas are actually correct.

------
noahlt
My favorite is to read Plato as a set of advertisements for the Academy. "Come
to the Academy," they say, "and partake in conversations like this!"

(This is why Phaedrus ends with Socrates arguing that you cannot learn
anything by reading, only through discussion with a teacher.)

~~~
ianai
Funny viewpoint, but let’s not forget that Socrates was part of the oral
tradition and skeptical of the worth of writing. It’s why we’re reading
Plato’s account of Socrates’ teachings.

------
soniman
This guy says ignore the scholars, then says, this is the order the dialogues
were meant to be read, and lists "tetralogies." Nobody knows what the order of
the dialogues is or how they are grouped, if at all. The best way to group the
dialogues is probably the dramatic order, for instance Theatetus-Sophist-
Statesmen-Apology-Crito-Phaedo, but there are other ways to group the
dialogues too. For instance, some dialogues are narrated by Socrates (Lovers,
Charmides, Menexenus), others are narrated but not by Socrates (Theatetus,
Symposium), others are straight dialogue (Crito, Euthyphro) etc etc. There are
a lot of ways to look at it and the best way is probably just to pick up the
Apology and start reading it.

Second, he says that the dialogues should be examined as a whole. Well, how
would we understand the entire corpus of dialogues without first understanding
each individual dialogue on its own, and vice versa? An individual dialogue is
easier to understand on its own, that's probably where we should start.

~~~
emblaegh
I don't think he's contradicting himself. His scholar opinion is about the
_form_ of Plato's work (i.e. the order it should be read), and not about its
_content_. I think he recomended people to avoid the second, as following the
first is very helpful for the beginner who sees themself without knowing where
to start, even if the suggested order is very opinionated.

------
loupeabody
If you're interested in Plato and Platonic thought, I highly recommend looking
into the work of Pierre Grimes and the Noetic Society. Pierre has done dozens
of lectures on Plato, see this channel[0].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpMRCoVgSJ-
rKyV1yhWljg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpMRCoVgSJ-rKyV1yhWljg)

------
yannis7
I find the earlier/Socratic dialogues, from Symposium to Apology, much easier
to read, more fluid and dynamic - that probably has to do with the character
of Socrates himself.

Works such as the Republic are a bit too heavyweight / scholarly for me..

~~~
blueprint
You make an interesting observation. By way of example, those who were taught
rightly by Gautama Buddha apparently were trained to prefix their accounts
with "I heard that…". The reason was that they were told when they say
something they don't know then it makes karma in themselves which obscures
their view of reality and can also come to ruin themselves. Simply put, if 51%
of your knowledge is falsehood then if you were to try to teach others, it
would make you change for the net worse by accumulating falsehood. So karma is
something in a person which tries to make itself exist through its own
activities and comes from what happened to that person, and makes a person see
'what was' instead of 'what is'. Anyway, I notice a lot of people saying Plato
was a terrible person. He may have had an idealistic streak due to lack of
specific training (the limitation of Socrates, perhaps). I believe it's true
that idealism can kill. But suppose he had just stuck to reporting what
happened during the trial and during the actual conversations with Socrates
(and perhaps even himself). Do you suppose there would be nearly the surface
area upon which to mount a campaign against Plato (culminating in accusations
of being complicit in inciting totalitarianism etc) if Plato had said "I heard
that…"?

------
yters
Check out:

[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/)

The author is currently writing a series of articles on his reading of the
Republic.

------
spinchange
Recommendation for _Plato at the Googleplex_ by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. A
very fun set of thought-experiment/narrative dialogues exploring why
philosophy (still) matters.

------
fmajid
The author’s conclusion that Plato was working for the betterment of humanity
is simply laughable. He was an Athenian aristocrat, deeply resentful of his
loss of social standing by the newfangled invention of democracy. Like many of
Socrates’ students, he was disloyal to democracy (his uncle Critias, also a
Socrates associate, was the leading member of the quisling Thirty Tyrants
imposed by the Spartans when they defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War).

That’s why Socrates was executed, for treason really but under different
charges because of an amnesty on collaborators imposed by Sparta in exchange
for the restoration of democracy. And why Plato was exiled to Syracuse, where
he failed to worm his way into Dyonisios’ favor with his transparent flattery.

The Spartan-inspired political system advocated by Plato in The Republic is
totalitarian beyond the wildest dreams of a Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. It does
suggest philosophers ought to be the supreme rulers, which may explain that
useless profession’s fondness for the guy, and the excuses they make for him.

Far better to read Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies”, volume 1,
“The Spell of Plato” to understand how abominable Plato’s influence has been
for mankind.

~~~
Tomte
Right, but those supreme rulers (not a single ruler, but many) may not marry,
they may not own stuff (kind of a monk caste), and they are not hereditary,
but relentlessly sieved out until they reach that ruler status in old age.

I doubt that would have appealed to Hitler or Stalin.

I think your judgement is clouded by „democracy is good“ which is (a) a very
modern stance and (b) one that many philosophers through the ages opposed.

~~~
js8
"I doubt that would have appealed to Hitler or Stalin."

Probably not. But it could appeal to many popes, and it didn't prevent many of
them to be scheming manipulating power-hungry a------s. (The "may not own
stuff" is not really different from "I am a CEO with no salary and a company
plane.")

I just don't see a smart and reasonable person wanting to rule over other
people. And even if you wanted to, I don't think there is a good strategy on
how to do it.

For any benevolent enlightened dictator, I see an analogue of the classical
Epicurus quote about God:

Is the ruler going against the will of the people by manipulation? Then he
cannot claim to be enlightened.

Is the ruler going against the will of the people by force? Then he cannot
claim to be benevolent.

Is the ruler not going against the will of the people? Then he cannot claim to
be a dictator!

What Plato is describing is simply a fantasy that glosses over many real-world
complications of ruling. Such as, even if you were a genius ruler, how do you
select your associates and underlings? You need a system anyway, there is no
way around it.

(It is also kinda similar to fallacy of Cartesian theater - if only we had a
perfect component where all the decisions are made, we wouldn't have to deal
with all the complicated details of how that component actually arises from
more elementary things.)

~~~
blueprint
It's natural that you don't realize the answer yet. If you did, you'd be
capable of being such a leader because the world would be filled with enough
people who understood how they must behave in order to keep such a leader.
Such a leader would not need underlings. The whole of society are the members
of his society. The leader is in a special role because he can do or does do
something the others can't or don't: he uses a single formula in order to
correctly answer endless questions that are brought by people who realize that
the leader can see something. It's like how a mathematician operates. The
answers can still be correct despite the leader not yet having achieved 100%
truthfulness (e.g. 98%). There is a certain threshold such a leader needs to
have crossed in order to have the ability that others can't have. However, I'm
extremely confident there have only been one or two men in history who had the
ability and realized it. That's why you ought to be more careful using the
word enlightenment. It's probably true that none of the people you think of in
that set are actually close. If you yourself are not close, how can you use
the term with confidence? If you say you can, I merely have to check your
clear definition of the term. The genuine answer to the definition of it is
very obvious and can be confirmed by anyone. Everything in the world is made
according to one principle (which someone taught me). Every substance,
material, and product are all made by very specific causes. That's why it's
very easy for me, specifically, to tell who really knows about this subject
from who doesn't after hearing only a little from them. But if even someone
like you can't find out the real meaning of the term and confirm it then it's
not right to expect people will simply recognize the leader and have the
ability to actually question and learn from, MUCH less follow such a one.

------
westoncb
> Make the assumption that Plato was a smart guy (A. N. Whitehead once wrote
> that all western philosophy is but a set of footnotes on Plato's
> dialogues...) and, if you find some place where there is a dumb way of
> reading the text and a smart one, assume Plato had the smart one in mind,
> even if Aristotle tried to make us believe he had the dumb one, ...

This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most
favorable way possible... (And the second rule btw is that Plato is better
than Aristotle—which incidentally also makes up most of the first rule.)

I've read some plato and been very impressed with what he was doing _at his
time_. That said, I've run into a number of folks who insist that he is
_still_ one of the most important philosophers to read (in the sense of being
capable of benefitting modern readers)—but I can never get them to say what
any particular idea(s) he has that's useful or true/important but not already
well known. And any ideas I came across in my own reading were either easily
demonstrable to be incorrect (and which someone as intelligent as Plato never
would have espoused if he lived with our modern knowledge), or I'd already run
into them in other contexts.

~~~
curious_yogurt
>This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most
favorable way possible

Actually, as a principle of reading in general, this is not a bad one. It does
not mean that we have to decide that the most favourable interpretation is the
one correct interpretation, but it does mean that it is reasonable to search
for such an interpretation in the beginning. This is called the principle of
charity. The reason the author recommends it is that often people will impute
a particular view to a philosopher that implies the philosopher made
elementary errors in reasoning or obvious falsehoods.

This may, of course, be the case. It is trivially true that philosophers make
invalid or weak inferences, and false claims.

But there are two good reasons to adhere to the principle of charity that the
author does not make explicit. First, if we do not, then we often end up
short-circuiting our understanding of what the philosopher may be trying to
say. That is, we may prematurely dismiss the claim as absurd instead of trying
to sort out what might be the actual claim. Second, while part of philosophy
depends on what philosophers are actually saying, a good part of doing
philosophy is figuring out what our response to a particular claim is, how we
ourselves would support that claim (if the inference is invalid), and what
claim we would put in its place (if the claim is false). If we do little more
than dismiss a claim as absurd, then we are not really doing philosophy.

So I guess what I am saying here is that making the assumption "Plato is a
smart guy" is actually not a bad start for one taking a serious study of what
he has to say.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

~~~
abecedarius
I would be careful about applying this principle to Plato because he himself
advocates lying to students, insofar as you can take him at face value -- and
if you can't, well, here we are. Plato seems to have been a smart guy with an
agenda and no qualms about manipulating his readers. That it's manipulative
doesn't mean it's false or worthless, but I won't read it in the usual Gricean
way.

~~~
curious_yogurt
Does Plato actually advocate this? If you are referring to an argument
Socrates makes in the Republic regarding politically motivated lying, it seems
to me not unreasonable at an initial glance to say that Socrates represents
Plato's position.

But it also seems to me that there are other ways to take this. First, the
Socrates in the Republic is a character in an exchange — and so it seems not
unreasonable to think that perhaps that character is not a simple mouthpiece
of the author. For example, nobody would say Hamlet is Shakespeare's
mouthpiece. Second, there are dialogues where Socrates gets completely
trounced by his opponent — in particular, the Parmenides. Interpretations of
what is going on in the Parmenides are diverse; but at the very least it seems
that Socrates is not Plato's mouthpiece. Third, if (contrary to the previous
two points) it turns out that Socrates is Plato's mouthpiece, but that
mouthpiece is telling us that Plato will manipulate the reader as he sees fit,
then it seems at least possible that the whole idea that Socrates is Plato's
mouthpiece is itself not a straightforward claim. Thus, the grounds for your
claim that one should be careful about applying this principle to Plato —
assuming I am right that you base it on evidence in the dialogues — is not
entirely solid.

As an additional point, it seems to me that even if the author wants to
manipulate the reader, it still stands us in good stead to have a principle of
charity. It is a starting point, not an ending point.

~~~
abecedarius
Yes, it's a passage in the Republic that I'm particularly thinking of. I have
only the vaguest memory now, something like that only a few of the oldest and
wisest should be told the real reasons for rules, and the rest should get
various levels of cover stories?

Agreed that there's a deliberate indirection in dialogs; that's why I included
the caveat. But to take another example, the Turtle is not always
Hoftstadter's mouthpiece, yet Hofstadter doesn't seem especially manipulative
to me. Plato (at least in translation) does. The passage I brought up just
crystallized that reaction. I started out reading Plato from the usual
charitable standpoint, and ended feeling that's a mistake: whatever's he's up
to, it's not primarily to help the reader become a better independent thinker,
or to accurately report events.

I've read less Aristotle, but he gives a different impression: someone with
faults like overconfidence, but who's honestly pitching in to the project of
improving collective knowledge and thinking.

