Plato's Path to Life

How to understand his philosophy. And how not to

Socrates in prison accepting the hemlock from his jailer by William Blake

“A modern European can read Plato and Aristotle through from end to end, he can even write books expounding their philosophy, and all without understanding a single sentence.”
Owen Barfield

Socrates was the teacher of Plato who was the teacher of Aristotle. But what Socrates taught is, of course, the wrong question. For, if there is one thing that Plato is quite clear about, it is that Socrates taught nothing. Something else is going on when you encounter this figure – which is probably why he is still alive in the collective consciousness after 2,500 years and, simultaneously, so wildly misunderstood.

A common error concerns Plato, who gives us easily the most unsettling and interesting portrayal of Socrates. Plato the body-hating, nasty dualist has become a persistent judgement of the Ancient Greek philosopher.

The accusation, from even individuals with academic credentials who have presumably read Plato, will include some or all of:

– he thought the body imprisoned the soul

– that poets should be banned

– and that this world was to be despised in favour of a transcendent realm in which tables are really tables and flaws are burnt away by the burning presence of beauty.

– And if the accuser is a Christian theologian, a further charge will likely be added, that Plato is responsible for Christianity’s troubles with sexuality because of Plato supposed preference for soul over body. That’s a particularly odd one for a philosopher with a main theme of eros, not a word you find in the New Testament, and who recorded stories of his mentor, Socrates, falling silent at the sight of beautiful male bodies.

Ironically, the nub of the issue is that Plato’s cultured despisers have inherited a colonial reading of Plato. Scholars like Julia Annas have shown that reading Plato changed during the period of the British empire, when texts like Plato’s Republic came to be treated as a manifesto for young minds in public schools being preparing to rule the world. They needed clear guidelines and a sense of calling, and Plato the armchair tyrant, as Karl Popper described him, fitted the bill. No worry that Popper later called his reading of Plato “prejudiced” and admitted that he branded Plato an enemy of the open society whilst writing without access to original texts and secondary literature because of war.

So it’s about time for a revision and I think a revision is underway. Crucially, it matters that Plato wrote only dialogues with specific set and settings. When Socrates, says, for example, that the body is the prison of the soul, the context matters. He utters the line whilst in prison, within hours of his certain death, anticipating that moment to be a threshold for which his whole life has been a training. Embodied life is absolutely to be embraced, as a pilgrimage that can ready us for more. So Socrates embraced his final weeks in the prison because it was the culmination of his journey: for prison read portal; transient embodied life is an ever-present threshold.

Alternatively, when Socrates contemplates the banning of poets in one of the several city-states he and his interlocutors consider in the Republic, what gets forgotten is the conclusion subsequently reached. Such a city-state would fall. Poetry must be reformed, not censored, which as a great poet, Plato knew. The issue is how to provide the education that can provide the enlightenment required for such a task. Which is the main purpose of the Republic. It’s a work to learn with, not one to be told by. That, incidentally, is a big clue as to the seeming paradox that Socrates taught nothing but somehow channeled everything.

So what, then, is the heart of Plato’s message and why is it so hard to understand, prompting the misreadings and perversions?

The difficulty is that Plato doesn’t have a message but instead offers a path. Only those who see the value of the path can be trusted interpreters, which means only those who have in some measure embarked upon it.

Some summaries of Plato’s common convictions provide a half-step forward. They are sometimes summarised as believing that

– virtue is knowledge

– no-one errs willingly

– it is better to suffer than commit injustice

– and that virtue benefits those who are virtuous.

The mistake is to attempt to test these statements rationally because, that way, they are readily found questionable. After all, isn’t knowledge virtue-independent, which is the aspiration of modern science? And don’t people do evil deliberately all the time? And don’t the unjust have happy vice-filled lives? And aren’t virtues like honesty or courage routinely costly, not necessarily offering any obvious benefit?

But those critiques misunderstand the nature of Plato’s philosophy. They treat it as eudaimonic, in the jargon, which is to say, offering a training that leads to flourishing or eudaimonia. Only Plato did not construct a science of happiness, like a modern-day positive psychologist. He was, rather, interested in formation, conversion, something deeper than a self-help programme, useful though those can sometimes be. And the truth that is unveiled through an encounter with him comes via a radical transformation of perception.

That’s why he’s difficult. No awakening? Little understanding.

This shows up in another common mistake, which has become standard in the way Plato is taught, which is to treat Plato’s dialogues as stages in Plato’s doctrinal development. The dialogues are typically ordered as being early, middle or late – with the early ones being closest to the historical Socrates, the middle ones showing the emergence of Plato’s own thought, and the late ones representing a gradually disillusioned old sage, who grew tired of the world in which he lived; Plato the misanthropic curmudgeon.

But this, too, is a relatively recent way of reading Plato – not so much a colonial reading as a narrowly psychological one. Everyone develops, right? So Plato must have done too.

However, before this modern turn, readers of Plato read the dialogues as educational tools, not in a didactic sense but a formative one. Contemplating their drama, as well as guidance, offered assistance in the conversion Plato felt he had experienced when he met Socrates. Plato is inviting readers to develop certain attitudes or capacities that might ready you for an awakening.

Roughly speaking, the aporetic dialogues – the ones that end in radical uncertainty – offer a preparation in the form of an undoing – a letting go, a capacity for negative capability, a felt sense of doubt or poverty or emptiness. In spite of the richness of life, and even when it is seemingly going well, there are a whole set of unknowns right at the heart of it. Encountering that seeming void is key to re-establishing a different orientation in life, a Socratic one, with an unexpected sense of purpose and meaning.

Then, next, into that space, the visionary dialogues, like the Republic, speak. They offering insights that help establish and develop the awakening.

To put it another way: to encounter Socrates in Plato is not to meet a figure with doctrines or theories to impart, but with a quality of presence that will cause you to reflect. Socrates exposes mistaken beliefs about the self, often in unsettling ways, though which creates the possibility for truer ones to emerge.

Realisations like virtue is knowledge can only come from that direct awareness, not via proof or argument. So what is that direct awareness?

It has to do with virtue, though not virtue as habits of character or your personality, which was Aristotle’s misreading of his teacher Plato. Neither is it virtue as practices, that secure happiness, like practicing being grateful or opening up to love. Rather, the heart of virtue, according to Plato, is what the oracle at Delphi taught Socrates. Apollo’s message is twofold: know yourself and know you know nothing. Make those the foundation of your life; know the virtues that can make for the fulness of life.

I’m indebted to the scholar Sara Ahbel-Rappe for so clearly stating that Socrates stands for a mode of being, thereby imparting a taste for it; stirring a love of it. Socrates can’t give that presence, because it is already within you. This awareness actually already belongs to you, and we sense a distant yearning for it because of feeling separate from it, through ignorance or forgetting. The way back is to clear the space that makes us more ready to know it once more.

So to relate back to the message Socrates received from the Delphic oracle: knowing yourself means knowing yourself, at base, to know nothing because all your theories or assumptions or certainties will turn out to be limited or straightforwardly wrong. Take that on board and then regard yourself as poor,

– or as a lover, who longs to unite with what they have become separated from,

– or as a midwife, who seeks to encourage the birth of a similar awareness in others, because, for Socrates, to care for yourself actually means caring for others.

The reason for this altruism is not ethical but is because if you realise that you possess nothing, you can also realise that you have a share in everything, when that sharing is mutual, collective. The world does not belong to you; you belong to the world. This is why Socrates insisted that he cared for his fellow citizens more than himself and strove every day to help them.

In other words, there is a type of self-knowledge that is not about objects of knowledge – knowing you are a man or a musician, knowing you are happy or anxious, knowing you are bored or in ecstasy. All such attributions are distractions, at least at first. Rather, self-knowledge is about identifying with the presence of awareness itself, through which objects of knowledge come and go. That presence is not your own, though it thoroughly forms you.

The way to relate to it is by stepping back or turning around, which is what happens to the rare prisoner in Plato’s myth of the cave, who dares to consider that reality may not, at root, be the dance of the day, because the dance of the day has a deeper source, which plays within all things. The one who has begun to realise this turns around, which is to say attends to the light that enlivens all things. This is often painful because it goes against all that you have otherwise been taught and, more troublingly, is about acknowledging your lack of power and possession of life; it implies being able to say “yes” to whatever happens. It also goes against the idea of a virtuous life aimed at techniques that enable flourishing; that is to try to possess your life, to cultivate it, which is to bet your happiness on the narrow confines of the isolated self, and is really to leave you beholden to the inevitable ups than downs.

Socratic self-knowledge is knowing you know nothing which opens onto a presence that is beyond but also within you. As Plato puts it, the invitation is to await assimilation to God via theoria, which originally meant contemplation, not proposition. You might say that Platonic philosophy is not eudaimonistic but theotic. That is probably the deepest reason why it is so rarely understood today and, instead, substitutes like eudaimonistic goals or outright dismissals are preferred.

Other elements follow from the rediscovery of the full meaning of Socrates and what Plato aims to transmit.

For instance, power in Plato is not primarily agency-based, but is lover-based; it is about being drawn not manipulating or persuading.

Socrates’s method of questioning is also not about seeking definitions, which is another idea originating with Aristotle. Rather, the elenchus is an exercise in learning to speak truthfully, which really means admitting limits. This is the process by which Socrates doesn’t teach but rather fosters glimpses of the knowing self, by undoing all certain knowledge of, and so identifications with, objects of knowledge – including oneself as this or that.

Again, it’s worth stressing that Plato does not envision his philosophy as an individualistic undertaking. The individual can secure nothing of themselves, an individual being nothing but a transient mortal bobbing on an ocean of being. But the ocean can itself be contemplated, which Plato depicts by Socrates’s calling to benefit the city of bobbing individuals by conversing with individuals to spark an awakening, should they be able to tolerate it.

He is also addressing a crises of his times, which is also our crisis: a false sense of what it is to be human, with power to save ourselves, with intellectual capacities to understand ourselves, with programmes to educate ourselves to happiness. Rather, Socrates in Plato is the ever-present possibility of realising that our intelligence is really a sharing in or reflection of a wider intelligence and life. The individual flourishes when they offer themselves back to that source, which is the only life anyway. Which is how the meaning of Socrates’s death can be perceived: it makes sense for him to die as the city has decreed because that is what he has been doing all his life, stepping towards the wider and omnipresent source of life – the proton philon, or first friend, as he puts it in the Lysis – the dialogue named after one of his interlocutors whose name means separation.

The first friend is the divine awareness or being in all. Through Socrates, who is as much an attitude within us as an historical figure, the divine can make its presence known. But that fundamental truth can only be realised through the path of poverty – knowing yourself, first, as ignorant, suffering, separate. The irony of Platonic philosophy is that the truth is appreciated through aporia, the first challenge and constant invitation that Plato doesn’t teach but shows us how to embrace.