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Today on Ascend the Great Books podcast, I invited Dr. Daniel Shields of Wyoming Catholic College to come discuss Teaching First Alcibiades to freshmen. Wyoming Catholic has all their freshmen read this text and Dr. Shields shares his insights and observations on how it is received and why it serves as such a good introduction to Plato and philosophy. Two quick housekeeping items. First, go check out our guide to First Alcibiades. Sixteen pages of wonderful information to help you read the dialogue. Good for you or your small group and be looking for our upcoming guide on Plato's Euthyphro as we start that discussion next week. Second, go check out our new project the Ascent on Substack, where we are exploring the soul's ascent to God through all that is true, good and beautiful. But today, join us for a great conversation on teaching first Alcibiades with Dr. Daniel Shields.
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Foreign.
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Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. My husband, father and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We are recording as always, on a beautiful evening here in Oklahoma. You can check us out at YouTube and Twitter and X and Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters. You can go to thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have guides and articles and other things to help you through the Great Books. Today we are discussing First Alcibiades by Plato and particularly its place at Wyoming Catholic College and how they introduce all of their new students via this dialogue. Today we have a wonderful guest. We have Dr. Daniel Shields, who earned his undergraduate at Thomas Aquinas College and his PhD at Catholic University of America. He specializes in philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and medieval philosophy more generally, as well as moral philosophy, philosophy of nature and a history of science. Dr. Shields, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Thank you for having me.
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A
Yeah, so just tell us a little bit about your role at Wyoming Catholic.
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So I'm an associate professor there. I teach primarily philosophy and science. So I regularly have been teaching the first semester class, the logic class where we read Alcibiades and also Philosophy of Nature, but been moving around teaching all sorts of things in the philosophy and science track.
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A
So Wyoming Catholic. Like when I think of Wyoming Catholic, what I think of is these wonderful photos that I find online mainly on X, of like eucharistic sessions through fields and there's like students on horseback and things like this. Do you, do you ride a horse? Is this part of like the ministry at Wyoming Catholic that everyone has to do?
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I do not ride a horse or I Rarely have, but that's something that I would like to do. But there's a lot. The students all learn how to ride horses as part of the program. And some of them kind of embrace it and take it to heart and go beyond the, the class that's required of everyone. And some of them learn to be quite good riders.
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Yeah, no, that's wonderful. I, I'm assuming then like the, the horseback riding, which is, you know, for all the students, which is a, it's a wonderful thing to see nowadays. I'm assuming there's like a lot of virtue building in that. Learning how to actually be one with the animal and work with them and intuit things and take control. I mean there's my, my daughter does horseback riding and that's. It's not an easy task at times.
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Yes. They say that the horses can really intuit or feel what their rider is feeling. And so to ride well, one has to have a sort of self possession and in order to be a good leader. So what virtue is emphasized. But also leadership skills are emphasized in the horsemanship program.
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Yeah, that's beautiful. That's such a unique aspect of that college that always really captures my imagination. But I agree with what you say because I'll go and watch my daughter ride and you know, of course it's like here's this pony or horse or whatever it is. That's, that's very spirited, you know. And for the first 15, 20 minutes, all it does is test the writer. That's all it does. It just tests to see like how much can I get away with. If you tell me to go left, can I go right? Because can I just stop? And so it's, it's really wonderful, I think, for her own formation, I'm assuming, for the formation of the students to kind of find that inner spiritedness of themselves, maybe even that thumas, the thumotic side and actually be able to have that self confidence to actually ride a horse.
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B
Well, yes.
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Yeah. No, that's very good. So you. So along with horsemanship, you also introduce them to First Alcibiades, is that correct?
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That's correct.
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And so what is the context of that? Is this like something that all the freshmen read? Is it just in their freshman course? Like how did First Alcibiades come to kind of have this like prime place amongst the students?
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Well, it's read as the first for the first class of the philosophy track. So our first semester, the students take logic and much of that course is taken up with the nuts and bolts. Of Aristotelian logic, syllogisms and, and what have you. But before diving into that, we have a segment of Platonic dialogues so that the students can kind of get to know what philosophy is all about. And that logic is, although necessary, it's not really what the philosophy track is about. This is just a tool for the rest of the philosophy track and other parts of the curriculum. But they need to get a sense of why they should do this by reading some Platonic dialogues, something that has some. Some content and drama that can make them fall in love with philosophy. And so we do a series of three of them. Alcibiades, Cratylus and Meno, before diving into Aristotle. And the Alcibiades, as you know, was traditionally the first dialogue that students of Platonism in the ancient world were introduced to. And so we start with that to introduce them to the character of Socrates and the kind of drama of Platonic philosophy before moving on to other things.
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Do you, when you introduce them to first Alcibiades, do you present it as an authentic dialogue with Plato?
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I'm upfront with the students and say that we don't know for sure whether or not it was authored by Plato himself. There's disagreement among scholars. It might have been. But whether it was or not, it is an ancient dialogue, clearly written by a Platonist who knew his Plato, and that there's a tradition among, in the Platonic school of reading this dialogue. So in a sense, whether or not it was written by Plato, it's still authentic.
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Yeah, my disposition tends to be that, you know, it came down to us from antiquity as a Platonic dialogue. And that tends to be how I receive it. My understanding is that it was only attacked later by the Germans and kind of the same methodology that they attacked Scripture, if that makes sense. The jedp, the German Higher Criticism. So I tend to be somewhat skeptical of that and just default more to receiving it as an authentic dialogue because I think I don't want people to get hung up on the authorship too much. Because I think sometimes if we do that, if we get caught up in that, then it can block us or somewhat impede us from actually kind of extracting. Extracting the beauty or at least being open to the beauty that's actually in the dialogue itself.
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Yeah, that's right.
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So when you. So when your freshmen are sitting there in philosophy and they're like, why do we have to read first Alcibiades? Like, what's your kind of go to answer for that?
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Well, honestly, they haven't given me that question. But if they. If they did ask that question, I think I would respond kind of as I already have, is that there is a long tradition of beginning year. But I also, in addition to just the tradition, which is always kind of good to defer to, unless one's got a good reason not to, is that the Alcibiades is kind of. It's easier to follow the argument in that dialogue than in most other Platonic dialogues. And the students who are freshmen are still just getting their feet under them. They just, like, when you're, you know, on a. On a boat at sea, it takes a little while to get your sea legs right. They. They need to learn how to have a conversation with one another, have a seminar class, and they need to learn how to read a text. And Alcibiades is a good fit for learning those skills because it's somewhat easier to interpret than. Than the other Platonic dialogues. And it's. It's very accessible.
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I certainly agree. Yeah, it is. It's much more accessible. It's. It's more straightforward. It has less of. Less of the drama in it. I guess if you read the symposium, there's like a lot of movement, like where people are sitting, how they. How they're affected by wine. Like, there's a lot of these kind of analogs for salsa. Bides tends to be very straightforward as much as Plato tends to be straightforward.
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And I do introduce the dialogue with a brief introduction of who Alcibiades was historically and the controversy there was between the Athenians and Socrates and Alcibiades and how he was blamed by some people for how Alcibiades turned out. But I don't say a lot about that because we need to dive into the text. I don't want to just be lecturing them about things outside the text. And they're going to learn more about Alcibiades later, some of the other classes. So just give them a heads up that there's. There's more to come about this. This young man.
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Yeah, Alcibiades identity seems to be very central to the text itself. So here on the podcast, you know, we've had an introduction to Alcibiades in a historical context. Looking at BlueTarch's lives. We have an episode there, and then we kind of have two episodes, kind of doing a deep dive on first Alcibiades as a dialogue. But how do you. I'm curious, though, like, when you kind of give a snapshot of who Alcibiades is to your students, like, how do you describe him?
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I say that he was a very talented and gifted young man who engaged in and took part in the political life of Athens and that he ended up being the leader of Athenian forces and there was war against the Spartans, but that things ended up turning up badly. He, he turned traitor, joined the Spartans, turns traitor again, joins the Persians and ends up more or less assassinated. And the ventures that he leads Athens on turn out to be disastrous for Athens. And it was was publicly known that as a young man he was spending time with Socrates and learning from him. And so there was a point of contention there. Did Alcibiades turn out so badly because of Socrates influence? Socrates, as you know, was condemned by the Athenians for corrupting the youth and executed for that. But of course Plato wants to turn it around and say no. The problem with Alcibiades was that he didn't stick with Socrates. If he had remained with Socrates, things would have turned out very differently.
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But why, why is it Alcibiades so here? Because like, one thing that caught my attention is like, okay, here's this dialogue. It is meant to introduce people to the Platonic teachings, but really what it's doing, at least what I understand it doing, is like it's introducing us to the life of the mind. Is it introducing us to the life of the philosopher? What does it mean to live a philosophic life? And what are the principles that we have to know to even really get started? And so it's interesting to me that then Alcibiades is the interlocutor here. Why would you not choose Plato? Now I know Plato doesn't put himself in his dialogue, so we can kind of just knee jerk react to that. But in reality, why is it not Plato? Wouldn't Plato be a much better example of like a student who's, who's turned out? Well, like, what is it about Alcibiades, do you think that makes him a good person to be the interlocutor introducing philosophy to us?
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Maybe because Alcibiades is relatable in that talented young adults are often full of ambition. There are things that they want to accomplish and they are impatient to be accomplishing those things. And we see it nowadays where sometimes students choose not to go to college, think that maybe that's a waste of four years. And even when they're in college, they're just kind of always looking forward to the real world, when they can start having a career, when they can start making a difference in the world. And it's very Difficult for a young adult to say, oh, I'm going to put my life on pause for four years and just study and learn things. And that's the situation Alcibiades is in, right. As the dialogue portrays him. He's right on, you know, the cusp of manhood is kind of has plans to enter into Athenian political life very soon, thinks he's well positioned to do so. And Socrates is trying to say, wait, wait, hold on, don't get involved in politics yet. You need to learn a bunch of things and form yourself before you do. Right. In a way, any, anybody who's about to get an education, whether it's an education in the Platonic academy or liberal arts college now, right. It's kind of being told, you should put your life on pause for a little while and learn and gain a formation. So Alcibiades serves the purpose well, for that reason.
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I like that because I think that particularly like the first time I read it, I almost saw Alcibiades as having almost, almost that like teenage angst, like he's, he's ready, he's ready to jump in. And I think that's really interesting that that would be a factor. Why Plato chose him, do you think? What do you think the role of the political is here? Because that's another thing that's fascinating to me about first Alcibiades is that in this introduction of philosophy, it's, it can't be divorced from the question of the political.
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Yeah, that's a good question. And the, the relationship between philosophy and politics seems to be a central one in the Platonic corpus. The Apology, another Platonic dialogue that is often used as an introduction to philosophy, is also right about the relationship between the philosophic life and the political life. And then the masterpiece, the Republic, is to a large extent, once again also about the relationship between the philosophic life and the political life. Yeah. Why is that? It seems that part of the reason is that in order to do philosophy well, it's as if one has to check out of the political life for a while. Maybe we don't think of the political life in as widespread of a phenomenon as the ancient Greeks did. We might just say practical life. In order to philosophize well, one has to set aside some time from the practical life to contemplate. And the demands of the practical life always seem kind of cogent, well founded, irresponsible to ignore. How can I put aside, you know, saving up for a down payment on a house so that I can have a Family, Right. Or, or how can I put aside this important work and just go contemplate? I suppose it's somewhat similar to prayer life. It always seems like there are pressing things that one needs to attend to and prayer seems like a waste of time. I should be getting these things done. Right, but you have to push things aside and make room for it. Right? But the political life was in a democracy like ancient Athens was everyone's life, or at least every free man's life in a way that maybe it's not in a gigantic country like America.
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I like that a lot. But it's like, it's almost like Socrates has to pull him away from politics to say, okay, let's make sure your soul is well ordered, which is really the principle. Let's know thyself. Do you actually know yourself before you're going to, to step into the politics? But it seems then that it's not a retreat. It's not come be a Benedictine monk, it's not leave society. But it seems like philosophy in this Platonic sense is actually then preparing to send Al, like in the best case scenario would then almost send Alcibiades back into politics. But as a, but as a politician who loves wisdom, which makes me almost think that Alcibiades is a potential philosopher. Kings.
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Yeah, I think that's right. There's no, there's no escaping for anyone the influence of the political on their, on their own formation as they're young, as their children and they're growing old. Good parents can provide a good formation. But it, it's, it's always more difficult and there's always kind of a mark left when the good parent is continually pushing against the current of a corrupt society and political life. Right? Because none of us are self sufficient and not even a family is self sufficient. Right. It's the perfect community, right. The city or the polis or the country that serves as the community that any human and any child needs. Right. So the philosopher can't not be concerned with the political. It's always an issue. How do you deal with it? What do you do? How much can you do? What's the ideal? And, and what do you do with a situation that's, that's not ideal?
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At the beginning of the, of the dialogue, Socrates mentions his daemon, the, the divine sign. How does that. I mean, I'm really fascinated. Like, how do your students take that? Because I guess, like, if you're particularly now I know you, you like St. Thomas, as I do too, but it seems like a lot of Times those who are more used to reading Thomas and Aristotle, particularly Aristotle, tend to view the pagan notion of God as like the unmoved mover. It's this God that's separated from the world. He doesn't. It's not really clear whether he cares about you or these kind of things. And then you read Plato and it's like, no, I have a Damon. I have a spirit with me that God gave me. And God gave me a vocation. And this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Like, it's much more relational. Like, how do your student. I'm interested. Like, how do your students, over the years, how have they taken, you know, Socrates kind of not only appealing to a monotheistic God at the beginning, but saying, I have a spirit. I have this daemon that's actually been telling me when not to speak. And now he says, I can speak to you.
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Yeah, I think that they find that interesting. They haven't made a lot of it. I think the idea that, oh, this is his conscience, that is certainly something that gets raised. Yeah, I don't. We haven't, in the classroom, in our classes on Alcibiades, really dived into that aspect of the dialogue. But I think you're right that there's something rather important there, that there is, There's. There's a religious sense that shows that kind of manifests itself in Plato much more readily than it manifests in Aristotle. And I think that the, the students, as we read various dialogues and these things come up, they do ask, wait, is. Is this kind of like a proto Christianity? Right. And a lot of them get excited and think that, okay, so Plato is kind of like, you know, what he's saying is like, compatible with Christianity. And of course, you know, then various differences, you know, have to emerge over time. But I do think that there's something to that initial kind of reaction to Plato, that there's something. There's something very amenable to the Christian, something that feels. We can kind of feel a kinship with Plato in that regards. And I've always liked that. And I like that famous picture of the school of Athens where Plato is in the middle and he's pointing upwards and Aristotle's pointing forward. Plato is just religious. He's always thinking about the divine. And yeah, it's not just this abstract unmove mover thing. I think there are elements in Aristotle where the religious aspect comes out a little bit. But all in all, it seems that Aristotle, although he's more precise and maybe gets the science better I mean, I'm a Thomas, so of course, I tend to favor Aristotle. There's maybe something healthier about Plato's attitude, and maybe there was a reason that the early church tended to focus on Plato and ignore Aristotle. There's a real sea change in the Middle Ages where the focus shifts to Aristotle.
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What do you think, though? Like, just as you've taught this dialogue to your students, particularly of that generation, like, what. What surprises them the most when they read it? Like, what always catches their attention?
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Well, I think that what they remark on most is how full of himself Alcibiades was and how badly he comes off looking, how much Socrates shows him up. So they seem to be really attuned to that kind of interpersonal dynamic, and they. And they enjoy that. So they like seeing Socrates humiliate this. This arrogant young man. That's the thing they seem to remark on most. But they. But they.
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I was gonna say, when they're commenting on that, is it dawning on them that that's one of the reasons that you have them read it, is because you have this. You. You have this man that has this pride that doesn't want to be broken down, but needs to be broken down in order to be malleable to wisdom? Like, does it click with them that, like, in this dialogue, they are Alcibiades.
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To a certain extent, but I think that many of them kind of come in with. With an attitude that, oh, we're excited to be here at Wyoming Catholic College, so we're not going to be like the Alcibiades at first. You know, we've already kind of embraced this. But. But I think maybe some of them, or maybe some of them have come in excited about other parts of the curriculum and are not so excited about the philosophy track yet, but they're like, oh, well, maybe. Maybe philosophy is important.
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Yeah, I guess there is a. There's kind of a slight difference between signing up to go to a college and then just be walking through Athens and an old man jumps you and starts explaining to you why you need to listen to him. There's probably a slight, Slight distinction there. What is it that when you read this with them, and, you know, here's these. These young people that have presented themselves to Wyoming Catholic College to be formed, like, what is it that you're hoping that they receive out of the dialogue? Like, what is it that you're really hoping as new students, as these kind of fledgling students of wisdom? What is it that you're really hoping that they. They see and kind of sink their teeth into in this dialogue.
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Certainly the, the, the need to not think they know things that they don't know, right? Because that's one of the, the key parts is that Socrates shows Alcibiades that it's not, it's not the people who know who end up failures, nor is it the people who. Nor is it all of the people who don't know. It's the people who don't know and then think they know and thus charge ahead and make blunders. So they should come to be aware of the need to recognize their own ignorance and own up to it. And that doing so is not a, it's not a bad thing. It doesn't have to be a humiliating thing. Socrates confesses to not knowing and needing cultivation and he's not humiliated in the dialogue. But if they can realize that they are ignorant and need to learn things and that feeling like they know is going to impede their, their ability to learn in any of the classes and then to understand a little bit about what philosophy is and why they would need philosophy in particular. Right. The focus certainly in the dialogue is on ethics, right? He's got to learn about virtue, but it's also self knowledge. So philosophical anthropology come to know what human beings are. And, but there's also the. I like to point out the appeal to metaphysics. It's kind of veiled. But there's a point where he says, well, we need to know what itself is in itself, right? And it's this kind of strange passage and no student at that point could be anything but mystified by it. But if you know about other dialogues and the Platonic forms and the language that he uses to describe it, you realize, oh, he's saying we need to know about the Platonic form forms, right? And say, look, he's talking about something that we call metaphysics. And this is actually like the, the highest part of philosophy and that's something that you're going to study eventually in the curriculum. So I want them to, to come to. Want to learn the things that they're going to learn later in the curriculum.
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I like that. I like that a lot. I can see that why that would be so important for the student that the first, one of the very first steps is to understand that you are ignorant, which is kind of a funny thing to come to understand that I come to understand my own ignorance. Like there's a certain interesting juxtaposition there. And I think in the dialogue I always feel like in Plato, like you've Got to laugh a little bit. Like, if you're actually reading these as a back and forth and you've humanized them, there's going to be some laughter. And that was a part that I really laughed out loud was when he gets Alcibiades realize that he's the most stupid person. Because it's not only that you were talking about things that you didn't know about, but you thought you did. But then you're also talking about. You want to go talk about the highest things, which is the most stupid person. You want to go. You're going to go talk to the Athenian assembly about justice. And you have no idea what justice is. And that's like a moment that you have to laugh, but it's a moment that you can see Socrates the teacher breaking down Alcibiades, but only to lift him up.
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It's.
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There's kind of a beautiful destruction there of something that's. That's unreal, something that's artificial. There's some kind of veneer there that kind of has to crack and fracture. So there can actually be real growth and real maturity. And I think that's, that's one of the things in this dialogue that I deeply appreciated and very much loved it as far as, like a guidepost for the student. Because you see these little moments in which Alcibiades has to be broken down. And like you said earlier, it's kind of easy to see it in Alcibiades. You're not at times terribly empathetic to him because he tends to be so prideful. But there's always an analogous way that we're the same way. Right. There's always, there's always an analogy in me in which I, I am like Alcibiades or something that I'm very prideful about that I'm really not open to formation on. I'm not actually malleable to it. And so there's, there's, It's. He always serves as this analog to the student. And so I just really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it just as understanding the psyche, maybe that word in the. In the most kind of. In a logically pure way of the student and what the student has to go through to even be ready to receive wisdom.
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Yeah, that's right.
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We mentioned earlier, which is another part that I, I kind of laughed where. Because Al Sabodi's like, squirming at times. He's like. He's like trying to get out of it and it's, it's comical. But probably one of the best moments is when he just admits, like, I'm better than everybody. Like, why do I need to do this? Like, I'm already better than everybody, et cetera. And Socrates, I'm interested in your thoughts here, because what I thought was going to happen was that Socrates was going to say, you need to be the best that you can be. You don't. Don't compare yourself to lower. You need to compare yourself to higher. And you're. You have great potential, and therefore you need to, you know, be the best you can be. He doesn't do that. And in retrospect, I think he doesn't do that because Alcibiades doesn't know himself. We haven't gotten to that point yet. So Alcibiades can't be the best he can be because Alcibiades has no idea what that is. And so he, he then pivots then to this kind of, like, pseudo myth, this tale about the Spartans and the Persians and et cetera. Like, what is, what is Socrates doing there with Alcibiades?
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B
Yeah, that's a good question. My own sense of it is that he is appealing to Alcibiades. Thumas. Right. That Alcibiades is very competitive, and to a certain extent that's a fault in Alcibiades. But Socrates thinks he can leverage this fault to turn Alcibiades right onto a good path and eventually rectify these faults. Alcibiades seems to want above all to be the winner, right? To be the one who gets the trophy, has the gold medal that everybody, you know, applauds as. As being the best. But there's also a degree of laziness, it seems. I presume that's because he's lived a kind of a life of ease. He's wealthy, he's had lots of influential family members and friends. So he's probably used to getting his way and not needing to work very hard. That's also probably in part due to his superior native intelligence. Over the years, I've occasionally seen the brightest students end up doing the worst because they know they can skate by with very little work because they're smarter than. Than the other students and they can get a passing grade without putting in any effort, whereas other students might fail if they put in no effort. It seems to me Alcibiades is a little bit like that. He think he thinks he can. In this case, though, he thinks he can. He's so superior in intelligence, he can not only just skate by with very little effort, but he can be better than everyone with very little effort. And Socrates thinks he's got to leverage Alcibiades competitiveness by saying, hey, you know what? You actually, the competition is way better than you think it is, right? You might really, you might lose and lose badly if you don't cultivate yourself and work hard.
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I like a lot what you're saying there about leverage because I think one of the things that, you know, we've talked about the student, but also there's a lot of lessons here for the teacher. And one of the things that I really noticed when I read the dialogue is Socrates kind of puts on this masterclass of being able to step into the love of the student and understand what it is that they love and use that as a lore to come back. Because Socrates doesn't jump out at the beginning and be like Alcibiades. You need to be a philosopher and you need to love wisdom. Alcibiades isn't going to follow him. So what's he do? He, he reaches out with this lure of oh, you want victory, you want honor, you want glory? Me and my God can give you that. Now Alcibiades has no idea how he's going to do that or what that actually means, but he's actually doesn't have the capacity to receive that right now. And so I think this is something that I think is really interesting is like, there are lessons here for teachers about like, what is it? How do you reach a student and how can you step into the love of that student? Right. What is it that they love? What's their eros? Right. What's their erotic appetite actually seeking? Can you see that and read that in their soul and kind of use that to kind of reorient them towards like some kind of greater good?
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B
I think that's right. That shows up in really all the Platonic dialogues. Socrates is just so admirable in that regards. He's being a teacher is not just about having a mastery of the material and knowing stuff. It's a deeply interpersonal thing. And so one has to be attuned to the person, the persons with whom one is dealing, the students and the personal element of that relationship. And in many ways that's a lot harder to do than to just have mastery of the material and be able to teach it in that way. So yeah, Socrates, he tells us teachers, or he shows us teachers that we have to have our eyes out for what's going on in the soul of the student. And that's a difficult thing.
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It Is I'm kind of curious. What was your introduction to first? Alcibiades? Was this how you were introduced to Plato? Is this something you came into later? What was your introduction to this dialogue?
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B
Yeah, no, I had never read Alcibiades until I came to Wyoming Catholic College. So it's part of my learning experience at WCC as well. I was introduced to Plato, maybe in grade school with the Euthyphro apology, Crito Phaedo, the Last Days of Socrates. And there's a lot to be said for that way of introducing Plato. There's certainly a lot of high drama there that can make one fall in love with Socrates and the philosophic way of life. And then I read lots of Platonic dialogues in college at Thomas Aquinas College, most of them in freshman year, and that was a good introduction to Plato. I read many Platonic dialogues on my own in later years. And then as a new teacher at another institution, I was teaching the Republic semester after semester. But Alcibiades, I never turned to it, in part because in the table of contents, it's got that little asterisk next to it, right? It's like, I don't know, they're not sure it's Plato. Maybe I'll read a different dialogue. But I am glad to have read it now and serves its purpose well as an introduction to philosophy.
- [36:53]
A
Yeah, it really just seems like a lost gem. Like I mentioned earlier, like the. The attack on the authorship then kind of casts this pall over it. Meanwhile, like when you read, you know, the ancients, they're turning to it first and foremost because it really is now because I'm a new reader to it as well. I just read it to prepare actually for, you know, Ascend, the Great Books podcast, kind of entrance and studies into Plato. And so I'm very much a new reader of it as well. And now I feel like I've stumbled upon some treasure that everyone should know. Like, you know, you love Plato, but you haven't read First Alcibiades. Like, how could you? Well, it's because, you know, like you said, there's that little asterisk there. And so people set it aside. And also I think too, or maybe I mean, feel free to push back on this, but I think too is how we approach philosophy. So First Alcibiades is very much showing you philosophy as a way of life. It's showing you philosophy as like a moral formation of, you know, can we be noble, you know, and wise and prudent as a human, like, achieve A certain human excellence. And if your goal to read Plato is just to extricate somewhat coldly philosophical principles from the dialogues, like I.
- [38:04]
B
It.
- [38:05]
A
It doesn't, it doesn't seem to me that first Alcibiades is going to hold a lot of weight for someone like that.
- [38:11]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, a lot of the other dialogues, although they've got this personal drama, the philosophy is a way of life built into them. Right. The Republic, for example, it's like he's trying to pull in Glaucon and Adeimantus, right? And then there's the Thrasymachus is an enemy and he tames him and ends up. He ends up being friendly later. Right. So the, the philosophy as a way of life is. Is there in other dialogues. But you can extract arguments. But it strikes me that the apology is going to be a lot like the Alcibiades in this regards, where the apology, unlike, say, the Euthyphro people, don't walk away with like, the argument. Right. The euthyphro dilemma or what, whatever. There's no like, apology dilemma or the apology argument. Right. Like, there might be like the Meno argument. Right. The teaching this late, boy, you know, about the, the, the. The square. Yeah, but I guess the apology has more drama to it. And with the. Alex, as I said before, you kind of have to know a little bit about history to see the drama, because the drama is not like, there as much in the dialogue, whereas with the apology, the drama is all right there.
- [39:42]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's correct. What do you think about the very beautiful image of. Well, we need to know ourselves. We need to know. And if we say we know ourselves, we need to know the soul because that's who we are. Particularly for Plato, we are the soul. But if the body wants to know itself, it looks into a mirror. That's how it knows itself. So we, we need a mirror for the soul. And he then he kind of pivots and says, well, we. We find this in the eyes of the lover, someone looks at us, and in the eyes of the lover, that. That is the mirror. We see ourselves back into them kind of as the beloved, and we start to see ourselves and get to know ourselves through the eyes of another. And I find this, like, really fascinating because it shows that the philosophic life in a certain way is communal. Like, we, we can't. We can't see it ourselves. Like God has made us. We have a nature that actually has to rely on the other. The others in Our life. I think that his analogy here, I'm not, I'm certainly not against it. I think it's very beautiful, but I actually don't think it precludes other relationships. So for instance, like when I was thinking about this, I think it's probably true in a student teacher relationship in the context he gives it. But also I think it's really true in the father to child relationship. I think when I look, when my four year old boy looks into my eyes and I tell him, you are a smart boy, you are a brave boy, right? I love you. He is seeing himself in my eyes and coming to know and love himself. I think some of the things that Plato says here about student teacher run in all kinds of different relationships that we have, right? It's very much true in husband and wife as well, right? I mean, how much we come to know ourselves. And even in that, Pope Benedict 16 talks about this eros, right? We've been talking about Eros, this love. Eros is a need love, it's a self love. It wants to be satiated, right? We want to satiate in beauty and be happy. But marriage is really interesting because, you know, particularly bringing in the Hebrew understanding when we then marry, even as a natural institution, it extends my eros to the other because my wife becomes. We become one body. And so my need love, my self love actually brings my wife into that. And so even in seeing her in her eyes and I come to know myself, she also becomes myself in a certain way. And all this kind of happens even within the natural realm. So I think at least one thing I would like to explore as I've been kind of digesting this dialogue, is that the analogies that he gives here, I think play throughout multiple different relationships.
- [42:35]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. And in the, you know, father son or father daughter relationship, as you said, child comes to know who he or she is by being known by the parents. But I have certainly also experienced that my children bring me face to face with my own faults, right? Because I see them in them. So they teach me about who I am as well. And it seems that the same thing is going to be true with teacher student relationships is that they learn from each other about who they are. And it's also got to be the case that any person who's engaged in the philosophic life is going to need not just relationships with students, with people who are younger in the intellectual life. It needs also friends and colleagues who are more like peers who can come to know each other. And each other's minds through dialoguing with each other. The philosophical life can't be lived well in isolation. And that's kind of a challenge because it's easy for those who are living an academic life to kind of isolate themselves, get kind of wrapped up in their own work. But yeah, we need relationships with other people so we can see ourselves in the mirror and be a mirror to other people.
- [44:28]
A
Well, there's just something so thoroughly. Well, this is probably, maybe too strong, but there's something thoroughly anti modern about this understanding because we've atomized ourselves so thoroughly. Where, you know, I, I mean, I'm not a Descartes scholar, but this also came to mind where Descartes, to understand his philosophy, just goes off by himself in a cabin or whatever, and he's just going to sit there and think, right, there's no either the other. It's just him. And he, he goes inward to find these things. But even in a lot of the other fictions of, like human anthropology that the, that the moderns tend to take up, so many of them are highly atomized. Like, we don't really need anyone else, it's just me. It's individualistic. And so here, for Plato to really point out, like, no, you need the eyes of the lover to come to know yourself. That's the mirror of the soul. It's. I, I don't know if we're really understanding how profound that statement is about human nature and what it means. I mean, you know, Aristotle says certain things that, that, you know, I like the poetic. I like Plato. Aristotle, though, is very helpful at times just to kind of just come out and just say it. So the fact that, like, we are political animals, we are social animals, like, we aren't. I actually thought about Aristotle in this section where he talks about, you know, that you have to be either a beast or a God to live outside the city.
- [45:44]
B
Yeah.
- [45:45]
A
And you kind of see that in this moment of. Well, no, because you need the eyes of the other to come to know yourself and to live a good life and do these kind of things. And if you're just going to divorce yourself from everyone else, then, yeah, you're either, you either have to be divine in some capacity or you're going to kind of plummet into some type of beastial reality. So I think that, yeah, that this is something that, like, I, I want to continue to think about because I also think it also has some implications even for the Symposium and the Ladder of Love. But there's something here and there's something here that I think is quite beautiful when you get to this point with your students, like, how do you really bring home why we need to know ourselves? Like why. Why is this the beginning of the philosophical life?
- [46:30]
B
Good question. We'll certainly walk through Socrates's own argument for that. Right. You can't take care of yourself unless you know who you are. You can't know what belongs to you, what doesn't belong to you, if you don't know who you are. So how can you even take care of, you know, what belongs to you? So I don't know. I think that the times when I have taught that maybe I haven't sufficiently emphasized that point, although, you know, I have drawn attention to it. And it comes up again in the apology. Right. Know thyself. I guess it's. We all have choices that we can make in our life, and given the, the way things work, we can only really make choices and direct ourselves. Everything else we have, at best, indirect control over. My kids find that really frustrating because they, you know, will really hard that their brother, you know, give them that toy or agree with them about whatever it is they're arguing over. Right. And no matter how hard they wish it and no matter how forcefully they say it, it doesn't seem to change their brother's behavior. Right. So each person has control most directly only over himself. Right. So that means that we have to take care of ourselves first and foremost. So really the only thing we can take care of is ourselves. So we better get to know who we are, otherwise we're going to make poor decisions and not really do a good job with anything.
- [48:26]
A
Yeah, it seems too that there's, I mean, it's a crude analogy, but it seems to, as I've been kind of explaining to people and trying to kind of show them, like maybe just a practical reality. Because I also teach in our diaconate formation program, and we're very blessed that our diaconate formation program has a great books sequencing that is attached to, to it. And so we, we find ourselves being very much in compliance with our Holy Father's letter on literature and the formation of clerics in the diocese of Tulsa, because we're reading these ancient and modern texts. But one of the things there that we kind of talked about, like, I'm just on a really practical level of trying to understand this is like, you know, Alcibiades in a lot of ways is trying to improve himself, but he doesn't know himself. And what is that like? And it's like, well, imagine someone trying to be like, well, I'm. I'm going to make this engine better. I'm trying to work on my car.
- [49:17]
B
I'm to.
- [49:17]
A
Trying. Trying to improve my car. Oh, really? That's great. What does this part do? I have no idea. Right.
- [49:23]
B
Yeah.
- [49:24]
A
You see immediately the problem of you have to have this knowledge as an antecedent before you can, you know, self cultivate, before you can grow in virtue. Like, how. How are you going to, you know, use prudence to perfect your intellect and its love of truth and its pursuit of wisdom if you don't even understand how any of this works? And I think that, you know, I think that even though it seems like really simple to us, I think we see it in our culture all the time where people are off and they're. They're waxing long about what we should do or what we should do in society or what they should do, or we give other people advice or we do whatever. And it literally is like, it's a bunch of car mechanics running around telling you how to fix your car. And then you say, okay, well, great. Well, what's this part? Do I have no idea. Well, what's this part? Do I have no idea? No, like, let's stop. Like, let's come. Let's know ourselves. Like, come to know. Like, how does my soul function? What are the parts of my soul? What are the loves, what virtues, Perfect, those loves. Like, how do I actually start to order my arrows? And I think that, you know, in a certain way it shows. I think it really dovetails well into Christianity. I think it really does, that we have to know ourselves and know who we are. I think this is something that we've been talking about recently with myself and some of my friends about, like, even how we evangelize now. If you tell someone, like, well, Jesus died for you, it's like, well, great. Why? Well, because you're a sinner and you're. You're in need of, like, a savior, like that. That narrative doesn't make sense to people anymore because they don't see themselves as sinners. They don't even see themselves in need of anything. They're perfectly fine. And so to know thyself in this natural kind of platonic way, this is kind of what I would say is an observation of our nature seems to be this kind of first step of the philosophic life tends to also be a preliminary step to understanding our need for salvation and our need for grace. Do I truly understand myself and the defects that I have. And you kind of see St. Paul getting into this too. He, St. Paul tends to understand, you know, the things that he wants to do, he doesn't do and the vice versa. And so he sees that he's been, he's struggling internally with himself and he sees the need then for a certain level of grace. And I think that this is really an antecedent in a lot of ways to being receptive to the Gospel.
- [51:43]
B
Yeah, that's right. But we have to know two things. We have to know our brokenness and our need and the kind of sorry state that we're in. But we also have to know the greatness that we were made for. We have to know that there's actually something more, something much more than the good things we've got and the good things that have seemed within our reach that we're aiming for. And with St. Augustine, the confessions opens with, right, you have made us for yourself. Our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Right away there's an appeal to. We're not, we're not just made to like kind of, you know, enjoy ourselves in this life, have a successful career, get along with other, you know, colleagues and what have you, and you know, maybe have a nice house and car or something like that. We're actually made to sit down at table with the Lord of the universe. Right. Somehow we can be divinized. Right. There's a way in which Plato is doing, or Socrates is doing something like that in the Alcibiades. Right. He's certainly showing Alcibiades the sorry state that he's in. You know, we focused a lot on that. There's also an appeal that there's something divine and we need to look at the soul and the most divine part in the soul. Right. There's a kind of call upwards to something more. You're in a sorry state now and you need help. But there's also this greatness that you haven't even yet conceived of that you're called to.
- [53:37]
A
Yeah, because I agree, you see Socrates doing that with Alcibiades. Come to me and me and my God will give you glory and honor and fame and. Etc, but it's unclear entirely that might include some of the glory and fame that Alcibiades desires in the present. But it also, I think mainly would include a lot of glory and being spirited and things like this that Alcibiades doesn't quite fathom right now. Because the soul all works together, so you have to be spirited to live the philosophic life, like, you have to have courage to be a philosopher. You think about Plato's cave, right? The, the capacity of the individual to turn away from the cave wall and to ascend out of the cave is arduous. Education is difficult. And so, you know, the soul's not. We talk about the parts of the soul and what they're loves and et cetera, but they're not isolated from one another. And so, you know, the higher always perfects the lower. And so as you kind of move up the soul, I think that, you know, Alcibiades, why, the reasons he could make a great philosopher is actually because he's very spirited, because he has this, this courage. Right. So as we kind of look at the dialogue as a whole, you kind of have your, your own experience teaching it to your students at, at Wyoming Catholic College. As they're learning first Alcibiades, they're learning horsemanship, they're learning all kinds of things to kind of introduce them to living a good life. What is the good and what does it mean to live a good life? Any kind of parting thoughts or final conclusions or lessons about first Alcibiades?
- [55:13]
B
Yeah, I guess the, the thought that's occurring to me now is as you speak is that there's one of the three parts of the soul that is delineated in the Republic is. Seems to be mostly missing in the dialogue. Right. There's not a lot of appeal to spiritedness. And as you pointed out earlier, there seems to be an appeal also to the appetitive part of the soul. Right, but what about the highest part of the soul, right, where the intellect is the reason, the part that is supposed to know and then rule. Right. And the Republic. Well, it seems that Alcibiades, although he's got a. He's very intelligent, he's got a. That part of his soul is very much present and powerful, but he has so little experience with it yet. He doesn't yet understand the attraction of the pursuit of wisdom. And he, Socrates makes the argument mainly in terms of, oh, you need to know about things like justice so that you can, you know, advise the Athenian people and be a leader. But, right, he, he plays on his curiosity a little bit, right, with that line where he's like, well, we need to know what the itself in itself is, right? This very enigmatic line that, of course, Alcibiades has no idea what he's talking about is, but presumably his reaction is going to be, wait, wait, what is this thing that you're talking about? Right. That You're. That you're tiptoeing around. He's trying to waken up a desire for wisdom in the soul of Alcibiades, but he can't go straight there. So that third part of the soul, it too yearns for something, and one has to wake that yearning up. That seems true in an even deeper level, that all of us are yearning for a relationship with God, our Father, but a lot of us don't know it yet. And that has to be woken up. And you can't always go straight there.
- [57:37]
A
Very good. No, I like that a lot. Well, Dr. Shields, we really appreciate you being here today. We appreciate you kind of guiding us and leading us through your experience of teaching first alphabeties to your students at Wyoming Catholic College, which sounds like a wonderful, wonderful place, any place that people can find you and more of your work. Do you have a website? Do you have Twitter? Do you have anything like that? Are you smart and stay away from all that?
- [57:59]
B
I mostly stay away from it. I do have a website. It's updated very infrequently. Danielshields.info I am on Academia Edu, just as a place to kind of park my cv. People are interested in, you know, knowing what I, you know, what I've written. They can find that there. But, yeah, those. Those would be the places to look.
- [58:24]
A
Okay, well, very good. We appreciate you being here today.
- [58:27]
B
Okay, thank you.
- [58:28]
A
All right, everyone, next week we will continue in our studies of Plato, and we will be reading Plato's Euthyphro. So if you want to join us, read the euthyphro and we'll be discussing it over the next couple weeks. All right, everyone, you can check us out on thegreatbookspodcast.com on Twitter or X, YouTube, Patreon, and Facebook if I ever remember to actually update it. And we will see you next week. Thank you.