The Art Of Dialogue. What would Plato say?

The public mood is discordant, politics chaotic, a wider imagination lost, though it can be refound

Image: Socrates’s accusers by William Blake

Next weekend is The Realisation Festival. We meet at the remarkably beautiful St Giles House, Dorset. There are still a handful of tickets available. I’m one of the directors. So why take the time out, why spend the money, why meet? One way of answering is to say that such gatherings deepen much needed true dialogue.

There is a shallower form, what is sometimes called “Socratic dialogue”. Often run as exercises designed to enhance shared discourse, participants are encouraged to consider a question - what is friendship, what is virtue, what is democracy, say - and then engage in a rational consideration of possible answers.

The aim is to educate the mind in so-called critical thinking: to analyse ideas and put them to the test. Facts are sifted from fictions, verities from manipulations. Thereby, it is believed, sense prevails and, following that, consensus. The rational animal saves itself by the power of clear thought.

What a mistaken understanding of Socrates. His goal, it is presumed, was to settle answers to questions and derive better definitions of crucial civic notions like justice, courage, piety.

Only then you remember that Socrates upset people, so much so that the gadfly of Athens was put to death. Or here's an inconvenient fact: in his time and Plato’s, the word “analysis” hadn’t yet been invented. Rationalism? No-one had conceived that trusty reason might be made to add up.

Look at Plato’s written dialogues. These encounters with Socrates include the telling of myths and the practice of rituals, concerns about the spirit of places and respect for gods. The character of the unruly figures taking part matters quite as much as what they stumble over and fail to say.

Do you care for your soul, Socrates inquires, not your logic - another word that didn’t exist at the time? Or there is the halting style of the dialogues, ending not because matters have been neatly sorted, but because the interlocutors have run out of steam. However, a pregnant silence might contain possibilities inaccessible to the algorithms of the unillumined mind. Might a hiatus mean an awakening?

After all, rationally speaking, the arguments presented are often not very good, which modern philosophers pounce on and deconstruct with glee. Poor talkative modern philosophy. As to Socrates's love of sympathies and images, myths and prayers? Pah! The detritus of a supernatural age - as my PhD examiner summarised before awarding the degree.

But. But. Expansive dialogue restores this wider, richer notion of discovery. Encounters are not designed to winnow but to stir a presence: possibilities. Participants offer their best and, aided by virtues of porosity and goodwill, there emerges a generative realm, held by the gathering: way more than its parts.

Dialogues in this properly Platonic tradition are like constellations of stars: sparks of divinity together forming patterns of light to enjoy, receive from, revere, investigate.

Image: The Pleiades or Seven Sisters, NASA

As the written dialogues of Plato show, the aim isn’t agreement but transformation; friendship matters not competition. The promise is discovery and commodious community, not uniformity of thought. Dialogue the Platonic way is a practice of undefended speaking and self-honesty; it is like music - a mix of fresh melodies and developments through discord that make an unexpected harmony.

Reading a Platonic dialogue is, therefore, a meditation, an encounter. They are certainly not supposed to be reports of actual exchanges or presentations of well-honed dogmas - another word happily unavailable to Socrates and Plato. Remember this, too: Plato never speaks in his dialogues and appears without speaking in the background of only two of the 35-odd by him.

As Virginia Woolf noted: the ideal artist disappears in their work because the whole of life flows through them; they have developed an “androgynous mind”.

Plato knew that a drama would be more valuable to subsequent generations than an argument; the discovery of divine life more useful than a history. Why else do people still read and profit from him 2400 years on?

This love of wisdom called philosophy dies when reduced to a debate about terms, but grips us as whole persons; it is not about testing theories but more life. (Plato did have the word “theory”, though it didn’t mean a proposal to surpass, but an active participation in the divine mind that shines in encounters and experiences when amplified and contemplated.)

Plato and Socrates must sigh every time a modern student sweats through a philosophy exam, when an ethical issue is presented as a matter of right or wrong, or when poetry, imagination and spirit are treated as optional colouring in not crucially bearing truth. The examination Socrates strove to nurture was of one’s life, not of one’s cleverness; think spiritual sage, not published professor. In one dialogue, the Symposium, it becomes clear that Socrates channelled nothing less than the go-between daemon, Eros.

Imbibe that curiosity, introject that inner freedom, feed on the love of life that his life radiated! Dialogue together can be, therefore, not just about speaking but participating - fieldwork in the manner Plato himself described: seed sowing, story telling, inspired investigation, soulful invocation.

Want a taste of a way of dialogue, a manner of being, that is almost lost but can be found? There is a welcome at The Realisation Festival.

Image: St Giles House where the gathering is held