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William H. F. Altman, "Ascent to the Good: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Symposium to Republic" (Lexington, 2018)
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I was groomed to become one of his wives.
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This week on Disorder, the podcast that
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orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk, you need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now
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welcome to the New
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Books Network
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welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Joseph Liss, your host for this episode. I have the great pleasure to be speaking once again with William Altman. We're discussing his book today, Ascent to the the Reading Order of Plato's Dialogues from Symposium to The Republic. Copyright 2018 by Lexington Books. The book is part of William Altman's five book series collectively titled Plato the Teacher, which proposes a comprehensive reading paradigm for the Platonic dialogues, making a radical break with generations of scholarly emphasis on the supposed chronological composition of the dialogues and the accompanying studies of the supposed development of Plato's thought. Altman instead remains wholly agnostic about chronological composition while emphasizing the development not of Plato the Author, but of the reader student in Plato's academy who progresses through an integrated curriculum of dialogues that present a developing series of core concepts, fundamental problems, and tests of the students comprehension. I refer our listeners to our previous conversations on the newmox network about the books titled Plato the Teacher and Ascent to the Beautiful. The present book, Ascent to the Good is second in line following Ascent to the Beautiful and preceding the central volume, Plato the the Crisis of the Republic. Welcome Will.
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Thank you very much Joseph.
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Good to be speaking with you again. And always excited to get into the enigmas and mysteries and the profundities of the great the divine Plato, we could call him. So yeah, let's start it off. It's often been my suspicion that many people, including many intelligent adults, find the prospect of reading Platonic dialogues to feel rather stuffy, dull, intimidatingly complex. Or else that they're just so old that they couldn't possibly be relevant to modern life. But you've been reading the dialogues and teaching students to read them for many decades. So describe a bit for us. What is the experience of reading the dialogues of Plato and why is it good to have teenagers do it?
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Well, you know, in comparison with the other great classics in the history of philosophy, I'd just be surprised if any adult, no matter how stuffy, would have that kind of reaction to the Platonic dialogues in particular, I mean, when you compare the way Plato writes to the way Aristotle writes or modern philosophers like there's nothing stuffy at all about it. I. Their plays, for goodness sake. I mean that you've got characters running about doing all sorts of interesting and often funny things. The ascent to the good begins with, begins with the dialogue the Symposium. And I think the Symposium is easily read by anyone. It's a highly entertaining dialogue comprised of a number of very amusing speeches. It's the locus classicus, the. This, the point of origin for the phrase Platonic relationship or Platonic love. It introduces the idea of an idea as well as being a kind of a great party with a lot of memorable characters in it. So I, you know, I just, I guess I'd like to meet such a person that, that, that, that it. What, what I will say is that it's, it's often. The question is often raised, why did Plato write dialogues? I mean, why, why, why are they written in this way instead of the typical way that philosophy books are written, where a kind of voice, the divine voice, as you put it in your intro, is kind of telling you the truth and telling you the way things are and all men by nature desire to know, says Aristotle in his own voice at the beginning of the metaphysics. And that doesn't really admit of much debate. Plato never speaks in his own voice in the manner that Aristotle does, ever. It's much more playful. And indeed, if we're willing to admit that Plato's Symposium was ever performed as a play, and it's kind of natural to assume that it was since you got a very large number of characters and there are a number of funny situations and they speak in their turns and each of them have their own characters. And is that what you're really dealing with is. Well, if Plato's dialogues were ever performed as plays, then not only were they the first plays to ever be written in prose, since all of blood Greek drama is written in verse, both comedy and tragedy. But not only they were they the first to be written in prose, but they were the last to be written in pros for over a thousand years. In other words, it's going to take guys like Congreve in the 18th century to kind of pick up on the idea that this is a good way to write a play. You know, French drama, for example, is still written in verse. Comedy and tragedy, of which they were the great masters of the 17th century. So the, the, the idea, I mean, I, I think one could potentially be frustrated. I think that philosophers tend to be frustrated, those that spend A lot of time with philosophy might find it awkward or difficult that these things are written the way they are, where you kind of want Plato to step out and assert what he thinks is true so that we can diagram it, debate it, and discuss it the way we might a. A piece of writing by Kant or Aristotle. And I mean, I guess in that sense, Plato can be frustrating to professional philosophers who kind of take the shortcut of just saying that, well, Plato thinks whatever the lead character in the dialogue thinks. So let's just analyze what the lead character in the dialogue thinks and that. That will be Plato, which leads to statements like, well, the one that Aristotle first made, as Plato says in the tus, meaning that whatever Timaeus says in Plato's Timaeus must. Must be what Plato thinks. So all we have to do is say what Plato says in the TUS is read what Timaeus says instead of understanding that there is a play of character. So, you know, that's a phrase that Ruby Blondell coined, which I think is quite nice, the play of character. Their plays, they're written as plays in my estimation, because they were designed not to appeal to professional philosophers for whom I think Plato has a certain degree of contempt. They're, they're, they're, they're written for those that are younger. And indeed, the, the, the core of my approach to Plato is to see how these dialogues would function as teaching tools, as you said in your intro. What you didn't say is that I kind of consider them as teaching tools for people that are, roughly speaking, the same age as people, for example, in the United States that go to, okay, Andover Academy or Phillips Phillips Exeter Academy. In other words, an academy in a, in. In more like what we would call a secondary school sense. So when the records tell us that Aristotle came to Plato's academy at the age of 17, some of us are going to say, oh, that was very, that was very young. In fact, I think that was quite old for a student. That's why it actually deserved notice. Aristotle began tutoring Alexander the Great when he was 14. And my feeling is that that's about when kids came to the academy and that they left it, they left it when they were, when they were on the brink of, of adulthood, when they were going to take the Ephebic Oath, and in theory, begin their. What should we say, civic life. So, and so we're talking about high
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schoolers, essentially, is coming in at 14, kind of, you know, leaving it around 18 or 19. Yeah, I mean, so in my initial question, I'D said, you know, I was only speaking to the reputation of the dialogues. Feeling stuffy, dull, intimidatingly complex. It's just from my own experiences largely of, you know, trying to. Trying to introduce Plato to, To friends of mine and often finding kind of people like, kind of shy away, finding it a little intimidating. And it's, you know, then it doesn't necessarily help to try and tell them. Well, but, you know, it was quite probable that. That these dialogues were like, kind of taught to high school students. I mean, you know, like teenage boys reading these things. And they're very. And because they're very fun, they have so much color, there's so much, you know, there's so much drama between play of character and just kind of between the lines, kind of implications that are. That are just very rich to get into.
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Well, there's a, you know, there's a famous phrase by Hegel where he talks about the owl of Minerva taking flight only at the setting of the dusk. And in other words, by, as Hegel said, by the time that philosophy paints its gray on gray, an age is already gone, cold. And in a way that applies very well to Plato in the sense that Plato, a son of democratic Athens connected to some great democratic heroes, Solon on his mother's side, he's writing only a few years before Athens is going to lose the battle of Chaeronea and her freedom is going to be curbed forever by Aristotle's patron, Philip of Macedon. That there is a sense in which Plato's dialogues are written when the owl of Minerva is taking wing at the setting of the dusk. On the other hand, when Hegel posits that when that philosophy will write its gray on gray. And that really doesn't apply to Plato. Plato's dialogues are green with the freshness of youth and life and indeed are. Are classics for just that reason. That a classic, it seems to me, is something old that yet seems new. And Plato's dialogues, I think, fit that bill because of the play of character, because of their liveliness, that you could never think that they were gray on gray. My colleague as a Plato scholar, Catherine Zuckert, wrote a book in which she challenged, as I have, the kind of traditional way of reading Plato in terms of the order of composition. And she proposed a. An order. It had been called the natural order back in the 19th century by a German scholar by the name of Mulch, of reading them in terms of their fictional chronological order. In other words, ending with Socrates death in the phaedo, but beginning when Socrates is At his youngest, and he happens to be at his youngest in a dialogue called the Parmenides, where he presents himself as a very young man. And so she, in her book kind of begins with the Parmenides. And here I would think that the friends that you were referring to might, I mean, there are certainly certain dialogues of Plato that you could begin with. I'll use the Parmenides, an example that would cause somebody to think, I don't want to read any more of this. This is way too complicated. I don't understand what's going on. And of course that's very closely tied to my own project of establishing a reader friendly or pedagogical reading order, which is partly where do you begin? Like where do you introduce a 14 year old to Plato? And I was very fortunate that this question of where to begin the study of Plato, I didn't have to invent it. It was a very ancient question. It had been, it's preserved in a number of commentaries by some Neoplatonic Platonists who generally seems to have agreed, seem to have agreed that the Alebiades, the greater Ales, is a good place to begin. Alcibiades is 19 at the, the beginning of the dialogue. And Socrates describes a process of education in the Persian Empire, which I guess is Iran today, where kids began learning at the age of 14. And that seems to me to be a much better place to begin. And I myself as a high school teacher have taught the Alcibiades Major to 9th graders. I know it's a very accessible dialogue. And so if you're it, there's a colorable case to be made that if you begin the study of Plato in the wrong place, you can get the kind of result that you're referring to. But that if you give any thought to pedagogy, it's clear that there are other dialogues that are much more accessible to readers of all ages. And they just happen to be the dialogues that my own reconstruction of the reading order puts at the beginning. At the beginning of the reading order.
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Right. So yeah, the core of your reading of these dialogues is that they comprise an integrated curriculum with an intended reading order where the. Just the issues that emerge early on are developed and complicated and sometimes there are apparent refutations and just. And things that cause the students to question what they've seen in the past and also prepare them for. For, for some definitive test coming in the future. So tell us a bit about what is the structural principle of this curriculum? What are the dialogues intended to teach the students and what are they intended to test for?
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Well, let's see. Following along a long line of earlier Platonic commentators, I located the Alcibiades major very close to the beginning of the reading order. But I say only very close to. Because there's a little detail in the Alcibiades major that persuades me that it was not the first dialogue that Plato intended his students to meet when they came to the academy. I mean, I should state that, that, that the, that that the simplest and most radical idea in my series as a whole is that the curriculum of Plato's academy was the dialogues of Plato. In other words, scholars have spent several thousand years trying to figure out what Plato taught in the academy. And it's one of the great wonders, perhaps the central wonder of my academic life that nobody has trotted out what seems to me to be the completely obvious view that Plato's eminently teachable dialogues were the curriculum of the academy. And the fact that I get to be original for advancing so boneheaded an idea is, what can I say? It's, it's what Plato would call a hermion, a gift from, you know, just an all undeserved and unexpected gift. Anyway, to get back to this detail, the detail is that that in the Ale Major, Ale uses a very clever argument when Socrates proves to him that he couldn't know what justice is. And, and just to answer your question, it seems to me that teaching, teaching his students what justice is and to act in accordance with justice is pretty close to a one second soundbite of what Plato's trying to teach. I mean, you could generalize from justice to virtue in general, trying to teach his students virtue, but justice, perhaps the queen of the virtues can stand in the place of the whole. At any rate, having proved with a beautiful argument that, that, that Alcibiades doesn't know what justice is because he can't point to any teacher and he can't have tried to discover it for himself because there was never a moment in time where he thought he was ignorant of it and therefore began looking for it, is that he comes up with this argument that, well, maybe I learned it the way I learned Greek. Maybe I just picked it up by osmosis, by having, by, you know, having people generally teach me what it was. And that's an argument that has been used in the dialogue the Protagoras. The dialogue the Protagoras is first of all, it's in the Protagoras where Socrates claims that virtue cannot be taught so if Plato is trying to teach virtue, introducing his students to the subject of the teachability of virtue with a claim that virtue cannot be taught is ends up being very characteristic of the way that Plato teaches. After all, we're dealing with a guy that has his lead character make an argument against imitation. Despite the fact that he writes 35 dialogues that imitate all sorts of conversations between all sorts of different people, he's classically been viewed as being the philosopher that banished poets from his city. And yet it would be hard to find a philosopher more poetic than Plato. And indeed Nietzsche, who probably comes the closest to being so dedicated, his considerable poetic skills to bring to bear against Plato, who he identifies many times as the leading opponent, where he's trying to attack Platonism. There are other examples. The critique of writing, the Critique of Rhetoric. Cicero was the first to discover that when he had a dialogue in which one of his characters said. What amused me while reading Plato's Gorgias was that that Plato was never more eloquent than when attacking rhetoric in the Gorgias, which to me is the. The. The. It's the first example of somebody getting Plato's joke. An eloquent argument against rhetoric, a. An imitation of conversations where your lead character comes out against imitation. A series of beautifully written dialogues where the lead character makes a criticism of writing, saying that it's nothing a serious person would devote any considerable amount of time to, and then to create a school which on my account is designed to teach virtue, where you're introduced to it by a lead character saying virtue cannot be taught. Now, what happens actually in the Protagoras, which, by the way, isn't part of the book exactly that that is under discussion today, but there's one argument, the culminating argument that I think is worthwhile is that, you see, the book that we're talking about today is called Ascent to the Good. As you pointed out in your intro, it follows a book called the Ascent to the Beautiful. And it's relatively easy to see that. To see that the good and the beautiful could be somehow equated. Well, they are equated. They are equated in the Protagoras. And what makes it even more interesting is that he's already equated the good with the pleasant. In other words, the last stage of the argument where Socrates gets himself into a battle royal with the most famous sophist of the day, whose name, of course, is Protagoras, who gives the name to the dialogue. And by the way, Alcibiades is right there Watching this so that the verisimila multitude of Alcibiades, hearing Protagoras make the argument that he'll use the following day, Plato was adumbrated. That made that possible for a reader to see. He first browbeats Protagoras into acknowledging that the good and the pleasant are the same thing. And then by slipping in the equation of the good and the beautiful, he can get. He can get Protagoras committed to the idea that the pleasant and the beautiful are the same. So that at the culmination of the dialogue, when he says so going to war, going into battle, facing death and wounds, we'd all agree that that is noble, gallant and beautiful. Because by the way, the word kalon doesn't just mean physically beautiful, it means admirable, noble, gallant. And so to a Greek, it was obvious going into battle is noble. But then when he says, and if it's. If it's noble, it must be good, well, naturally he agrees. And then if it's good, it must be pleasant, so that he. So that he actually gets this situation where the sophist has to admit, on the basis of his priority admissions, that facing death and wounds in battle is. Is. Is. Is pleasant. It may be noble, maybe the right thing to do, but that it's pleasant. This is what's going to allow him to be caught up. So when you first see the Protagoras and you see Socrates mop the floor with Protagoras, using a variety of arguments that seem a little suspect, I think, to any reader, is that that sets the stage, it seems to me, of what Platonic education is like, that he's not going to simply tell you the truth. He's not. He's not going to simply spell out the correct answers for you. He's going to give you a variety of false answers, often for which you have been prepared to see them as false, but is going to leave it to you to see them as such. So, for example, in the book that we're discussing today, the great central dialogue in the dialogues between the Symposium and the Republic is, is the Gorgias. And one of the things that happens in the Gorgias is that Socrates retracts what he said in the Protagoras and, and, and, and absolutely denies that the good and the pleasant are the same. So that when we go back and look at the Protagoras without that, without the assumption that Socrates was telling us the truth and telling it to us straight, we see a very different kind of process and a Different kind of education going on, a much more dialectical kind of education going on. And the, the, the, the simplest way of putting it, I think, is to say that Plato invented the root concept of the multiple choice exam. So if you ever have to make up a multiple choice exam, which I never have, even though I was a high school teacher for many years, I always resisted it. But now, after writing all my Plato books, I can now see some of the Platonic wisdom behind it, which is there's, you know, you're given four possibilities. One of them is true and maybe two of them are ridiculous, but one of them is so close to the truth that, that, that some, some good students are going to get the wrong answer by picking something that appears to be true, but which actually isn't. So it seems to me that Plato does that a lot. In other words, you can come up with the idea that Plato hated poetry. He's opposed to rhetoric. He believed that writing was not the way to convey philosophy. He's dead set against imitation, and he doesn't think that virtue can be taught. So you can come away and think that about Plato. But, but what makes Plato fun, and I, I think it's fair to say what makes Plato a great teacher is that he challenges the reader to figure those things out for themselves and to have the, what, the integrity, the personal integrity, something like a combination of a sense of humor and a certain amount of self assurance. To talk back to the text, to talk back to these texts and say, I don't think that the good and the pleasant are the same. And I don't, you know, I don't, I don't buy that. And I, and I believe that if, if, if while reading a dialogue of Plato or performing one, if a student were to turn to Plato and say, hey, Plato, you know, what's the matter with you? This, this funeral oration you wrote, you wrote for Aspasia. These are talking about events that took place 14 years after Socrates died. What's the matter, what's the matter with you is that if a kid said that Plato would say, good lad, you know, well done. That, that, that, that the, the critique of writing in the Phaedrus, which belongs to the dialogues after the Republic, is that the problem with writing is that it continuously says the same thing to all and sundry. You pick up a book, you read it, you can't question it, you can't debate with it. It just keeps on droning the same, same, same old message again and again. And it seems to me that Plato Invented a way of writing that defied, contradicted, that critique. Because Plato's dialogues, to read the Protagoras before the Gorgias, you read a different dialogue than if you read the Protagoras after the Gorgias. And the same thing with the Symposium and many others. Plato's dialogues don't say the same thing to all and sundry. That there's a certain point when you start understanding what Plato is teaching you that you kind of pass through the looking glass and stop reading Plato the way so many philosophers since Plato have expected to be read. And that that is when they become truly delightful. So maybe a teacher is needed. I think certainly a good teacher helps. But Plato's dialogues, I think Plato intended the dialogues to keep his way of teaching alive after he himself died, and that I think that with some care and thoughtfulness, that one can rediscover a great teacher in Plato easily by reading his dialogues.
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Yeah, it certainly seems that a real and deepened understanding of Plato's dialogues kind of depends upon a reflective capacity and one that is not perhaps very well served by. By an approach to, you know, textual practices that we certainly see in Aristotle, which is just is this very, very linear approach where, you know, like, Plato is named as an authority, and then, you know, Aristotle gives a little excerpt to Plato and says, Plato says this. And, you know, and in this very linear and authoritative way of kind of asserting a truth. And then Aristotle is able to, you know, take some rather fatuous kind of like, refutation of that out of context, little snippet and say, well, clearly Plato was wrong. But it's really just once one has been introduced to the more reflective way of reading the dialogues, kind of putting these statements, even of Socrates into context, into the dramatic context, who he's talking to, what the preceding conversation has been like, the meaning of that out of context snippet could be entirely different from what Aristotle's taking it to say.
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Sure.
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Interesting. All right, so let's get into specific dialogues of this section of the reading order that you're covering in this book. So talk about the issues that are being exposed in these texts and why you describe them as the ascent to the good. And maybe you could start out with just sort of a list of the relevant dialogues in the reading order here.
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Sure. So the. The bottom line is that in Plato's Republic, which I locate at the center of the reading order as his masterpiece and that to which everything builds and from which everything else follows, is that the central idea of the. Of the Plato's Republic is the idea of the good. So assent to the good therefore means preparing to make that ascent to the republic. The, the journey begins with the Symposium, which ends with a vision of the beautiful of Tokalon in the great speech of, of Socrates where he tells us what he learned from Diotima. So starting with the Symposium, what, what happens is that at the end of the Symposium he kind of gives a post mortem on the Symposium. He's talking to the greatest tragic poet and the greatest comic poet in Greece. And according to the faulty memory of Aristodemus is passed on to Apollodorus. He was trying to persuade these two very sleepy and drunken playwrights that if they really had a techne that would allow them to write a comedy or a tragedy, they should be able to write both. In other words, that a comic poet should be able to write a tragedy, a tragic poet to write a comedy, which has generally and accurately been taken to meaning to mean that Plato is talking about himself as the kind of poet that could write both a tragedy and a comedy. And I think a good reading of Symposium has to be prepared to explain why it is both at the same time. At any rate, the, the, the, the, the memories of Aristodemus is passed on to Apollodorus say well, that after this, you know, Socrates went on and lived his normal day and he went to the gymnasium called the Lyum and spent the normal day as usual. Well, the first dialogue that follows the Symposium begins with Socrates saying to the audience I was on my way to the Lyceum. It's the only dialogue that begins that way. So it seems to me it was a very natural way to establish reading order. And remember that my attempt to re. Establish reading order is entirely based on the tiny little clues, the apparent little dramatic. Dramatic details like I was on my way to the Lyceum that Plato's dialogues are peppered with. These little dramatic details end up being most usefully used, most usefully employed, it seems to me to try to reconstruct the order in which Plato wanted things to be taught anyway. So the Lysis has many, many overlaps with the Symposium. It repeats the definition of philosophy that has been introduced, that has been introduced in the, in the, in the Symposium, which is that philosophy, the root to virtue is neither, is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but is somewhere in between them. You referred a little bit before to Aristotle taking a sound bite out. One of the great sound bites that Aristotle took out of Plato's Protagoras is that is that, is that virtue is knowledge. Virtue is knowledge. And, and so, so he took that sound bite out, which by the way is used in exactly the argument where Socrates is brow beating Protagoras into accept the equation of the good with the pleasant. That's where it actually comes from in terms of context. He takes that and builds an entire conception of Socrates which, since Socrates is a major character in most of Plato's dialogues, is hardly irrelev relevant to the interpretation of Plato and says Socrates believed that virtue was knowledge. Well, the problem with that is that in both the Symposium and then followed in following in the Lysis, philosophy, which seems to be the core of what Plato's trying to teach here, is neither knowledge nor ignorance. In fact, it involves a knowledge of ignorance. In other words, that one is ignorant because one would never search for virtue if one thought one already possessed it. He'd already proved that with Alcibiades back at the beginning and that that the idea that Plato, or that the young Plato or Socrates thought that virtue is knowledge is a really good example of what you were referring to earlier. And by the way, Aristotle has no difficulty showing Socrates was wrong. Virtue isn't knowledge. It involves a lot of other things, habituation and so forth and so on and so forth and so on. He thinks he's refuting Socrates, just as in many cases he thinks that he's refuting Plato, but doing it very much along the lines that you very aptly put it. He's taking a sentence out, out of context at any rate. The Lysis. The, the Lysis. That, that, that. When you look at the characters in the Lysis. Lysis, Menexenus, there's a lot of overlap between them and the characters that we meet in the Euthydemus, which is the dialogue I put after that. The Euthydemus ends up being a really important dialogue because Socrates makes some claims there that have been taken as emblematic of what Plato thought. And by far the most important of those is he says. It's kind of like what Aristotle says at the beginning of the Metaphysics when he said that all men by nature desire to know. He says that all men by n. He doesn't say by nature, but we can paraphrase and make it sound more Aristotelian. All men desire to be happy. The way it actually is in Greek. All men desire to. You proten. To farewell. To. To do, to. To. To. To. To farewell, meaning to be happy. That equation is made later in the speech and that has been taken as, as, as bedrock for Plato and Socrates. It's a doctrine called eudaimonism, in other words, that the highest good is happiness, and that that is what all men aim towards. And that is what Aristotle says all men aim towards in the Nicomachean Ethics. It's a famous claim of him when he refutes the notion of the idea of the good and says that the actual telos of human behavior is eudaimonia. And you'll find many, many scholars that think that Plato was a eudaimonist, in other words, that he believed that happiness was the highest good. And they use Euthydemus, the dialogue Euthydemus, to do that which is just so deliciously funny in Platonic terms, because the Euthydemus is a dialogue between Socrates and a pair of sophists who use deliberately fallacious arguments again and again and again, where the fallacy is egregious and that. So in a dialogue rife with fallacy. Rife with it, that you get an argument that is based on the claim that all people desire to you protein, and that people have just taken that literally. Now, just to go on, I'll come back to you protein in a, in a, in a, in a moment. But, but that there's. There's a reference to these two brother sophists as guys that in addition to being great sophistic fallacy making sophists, they're also very good at, at fighting, in weapons. They're very good at armed combat and martial arts. The dialogue Lakis begins with, oh, we just saw the guys fighting. We just saw the guys at the Lyceum fighting with their weapons and the martial arts. So it's a very clear reference back to the, back to the Deuthydemus. The dialogue Carmides that follows the Lakies is similar to Lakis in a way because they're, they're both quite short dialogues that deal with one particular virtue. The Lakis dealing with courage, the Carmides dealing with temperance. We could get back into that in a minute. That's a slightly more problematic, I think. But at any rate, there are a lot of overlaps. They both make heavy, heavy, heavy use of Athenian history. You really have to have read both Xenophon and Thucydides histories of Greece to really understand either of those dialogues. And then the Charmides, which is a dialogue with a tyrant, leads directly into the Gorgias, which is largely about tyranny and justice. And then, and then the, the. So, so just to recapitulate from Symposium to Lysis, from Lysis to Euthydemus, Euthydemus to laches, then laches to Charmides, to Gorgias. Gorgias. Many people have seen the parallels between Gorgias and Meno. I fit in a little despised dialogue called the theages on piety and the divine sign in between, for reasons that, you know, have to do with little dramatic details in both Gorgias and Meno, and of course, in theages itself. And then the mino, the. The. The meno, then leading into the. The. The little introductory hors d' oeuvre to the republic, the kleitophon, and then into the Republic. So look, the short answer is that they're about the ascent to the good, because the idea of the good is the central idea in the Republic. The longer answer is that that the phrase you protein in Greek, that can be made synonymous with to be happy, that the best way to think of you protein. And I think we discussed this in another session, but it's so important to the way Plato teaches in these earlier dialogues that it deserves, you know, emphasis is that a good way of thinking about it is. You know, when I was a kid, you'd say to somebody, hey man, how you doing? And the guy would say, I'm doing good. And when they said, I'm doing good, they didn't mean I just came from the soup kitchen where I've been, you know, spooning out free meals to the homeless, or I just gave away all of my fortune, you know, to in philanthropic enterprise. It doesn't mean I'm doing good. It means I'm fine, I'm happy, I'm great. How you doing? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. So the uprooting fallacy in ancient Greek involves exactly that ambiguity. It literally means to do well. In other words, to do something well. Like a flute player, who's an accomplished flute player, plays the flute. Well, he makes a speech. Well, he, he. He runs a farm. Well, he does something well. But colloquially, it just means doing good. I'm fine. I'm, I'm happy. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm fair and well. So what this create. See, the Greeks, the Athenians who had rushed out there to fight the Persian bad guys at Marathon, they had a very clear idea of what Ta Kalan was. The noble, the gallant, the admirable. They, they. They knew that what earns you the Congressional Medal of Honor was doing something gallant, like jumping on a hand grenade and saving the rest of the guys in your platoon. Like they had a pretty clear idea of what the noble was. Now, whether you would be well advised to do it or not is another is another matter. But the good was a much more ambiguous phrase. It could mean simply the good for me, in other words, happiness in other what's good for me. This actually is introduced in the Symposium where, where Diatima asks Socrates, well, let me ask you this, Socrates, what do you get when you've got the beautiful? Like what accrues to your account when you have the beautiful? And Socrates says, I don't know. And they say, okay, well, let's try another one. What accrues to your account if you got the good? He said, oh, well, that's easy. You've got happiness. So from that moment in the Symposium, in the Symposium itself, Plato skillfully shows you that that kind of shortcut of substituting the good for the beautiful, which we've already seen back in the Protagoras, that that kind of shortcut doesn't really get you where Diotima takes you and Socrates in the Great Speech, but the dialogues after the Symposium kind of revive that as a real possibility. And in dialogue after dialogue, the. The slide between you. Protein, between doing something well and being happy is used again and again, not just in the Gorgias and the Carmides, but in the. In the beginning of the Republic as well. And it seems to me that the reason that it, that it. That the dialogues that involve the ascent to the good are later, more advanced dialogues than the dialogues that involve the ascent to the beautiful is that there is an ambiguity that needs to be parsed if you really are going to ascend to the good. One of the things that has often caused Plato scholars some concern is that it's. Everybody acknowledges that the idea of the good is somehow or other the central idea in Plato's Republic, and therefore the central idea among Plato's ideas that, that. That's widely acknowledged. What has troubled a lot of people is why he says so little about it. Some scholars have said, well, it's. It means happiness. Well, he never says that it does. And some scholars have said he means the one. He never says that either. The, the. The failure of him to say very much about what the idea of the good is, is it unity, is it harmony, is it beauty, is it. He. He doesn't tell you what it is. And I think the principal thing I learned while writing Ascent to the Good is I finally figured out why Plato says so little about what the idea of the good is. And the reason is that all he really has to get clear to you is what the good isn't. And what the good isn't is that it isn't what is good for me. It. It's. It's. It's. It's a good without the dative. They call it the ethical dative in Greek. The. The good for me is happiness. The good for me is to slide from doing something well to faring well. Plato has to lead you step by step of showing the fallacy of that notion of the good. And by the time he gets to the Republic, he's prepared to lay that out with clarity, but he's prepared you for it all the way through. In other words, starting with that substitution in the Symposium, if not already with those with the various equations of the Protagoras, but certainly with the substitution at 204 in the symposium, and then following up in the Lysis and the Euthydemus and in the Lakis and the Carmides and the Gorgias and in the Theages and the Meno, right up to the. Right up to the Klitophon, with a critical question like, what do you do? What's my next step? I'm persuaded to be virtuous. What do I need to do? And where the answer finally is, is. Is revealed in the great speech that begins, I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, that. That all of those dialogues are leading up to the good, and that it's a more complicated enterprise because the good is susceptible of being either a transcendent good that is just absolutely good and therefore is not necessarily good for me. In fact, it may not be like, in other words, that. That. That. That the great advantage of the good is that it motivates action, like, for example, jumping on the hand grenade to save the rest of the members of your platoon, which it's difficult to prove is good for you, but which might very easily be noble, excellent, admirable and gallant, thereby going back to the Symposium, but now having deepened it in the context of the city and of politics. Because, of course, the Republic is a highly political dialogue that contains the, you know, the kind of heart of Platonism and, by the way, has been. Has been largely recognized as doing so. I mean, most people don't say Plato wrote 35 dialogues, and since the middle of 35 is 18, since 17 are on either side, and therefore the Republic, the 18th dialogue is in the middle, and there's 17 before it, and of the 17, since 9 is in the middle of that, the Symposium is the middle dialogue of the 17 that proceed like, obviously people don't do that. That's what I do. But, but, but that people have generally acknowledged that the Republic is, you know, the central dialogue. That, that, that, that's, that's not original. I've just kind of grounded it and rooted it in a much larger structure of the dialogue of dialogues, that is the 35 dialogues of Plato. It's crunch time at work and you need to bring wings to your workday. Visit redbull.com gettingitdone and answer a couple questions about your work style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity. Plus, score a can of Red Bull on us while you go from to do to done. And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited. Terms apply. Visit the website for more information.
- [46:01]
B
Right, and so this also very helpfully answers the question of what the dialogues are intended to teach and what they're intended to test for. So fundamentally, the students are being tested by their responses to the dialogues about what their grasp of the good is. So they can grasp in the first section of the, of the reading order, you know, what it is to be Kalon, to be behavior that is fine and noble and implicitly fine and noble for itself. You know, something that's fine and noble is good in and of itself. But the real question, the ethical question of the good which comes to a crisis in the republic is does the student only, does the student reduce the idea of the good to, oh, that which is merely advantageous for oneself? Or is the student capable of grasping that the good is to go beyond oneself and to do and to do good for, for, for others, for the community, etc.
- [46:59]
A
Exactly. And, and look, the, the, the, the republic. You read the first four books of the republic and he gives you a very eloquent argument for why, look, the two boys, Plato's brothers, challenged Socrates to prove to them that virtue and that justice would be good for them. I mean, they're challenged to prove that justice is advantageous for them. And Socrates can do that. Socrates knows how to use uprotane to slide from doing the right thing to faring well. And that's why it reappears again and again and again. But by the time we get into the great middle books of the republic, starting in five, climb, you know, building in six and then climaxing with the allegory of the cave in seven, you're starting to see something that different. And you use the word crisis. That, that's, that to me is the key word. There's this marvelous moment after he is introduced the allegory of the cave. And Socrates says, you know, we've got to take these philosophers that we've been training since, since childhood, these guardians of the city, and we've got to compel them to go back down into the cave and take place of their fellow citizens by holding political offices and doing all kinds of things for the benefit of the city, the city as a whole. And Glaucon says, you mean we're going to do them this injustice? They've got this better life. They now have been introduced to this life of philosophy. It's an infinitely better life. You're going to rob them of that. You're going to deny them that better life when it's within their reach. And Socrates says something like, well, look, we didn't train them for their own happiness. We trained them for the good of the city. And anyway, if philosophers in other cities were, we didn't train them. If they come to us and say, you know, we, we don't want to do any of these civic things, well, that's fine. They, they don't, they don't need to do it because they haven't been trained and educated to do it. But you, he says, but you, you have been trained to see things more clearly. We have given you a better education. You see clearer than the rest. And therefore down you must go, each in your turn, into the darkness. And your vision will be better than others. You'll see more clearly what is right and wrong and good and just. And that the bottom line is that we'll never have well regulated cities unless the people ruling them wouldn't rather be doing something else. In other words, unless we can find in philosophy a life infinitely better than ruling, for those who are going to be our rulers will never have well ruled cities, because people will just be going into politics to enrich themselves and to enrich their family and to get their name on a, a building or a statue. They'll be doing it for the wrong reason. So the crisis of the Republic, as I call it, is with that word, you. And there are two possibilities. You can look at that passage and say, we have trained you. Down you must go. You can say, okay, this is Plato's writing a dialogue in which the lead character, Socrates, now masquerading as the founder of a city, is responding to Plato's brother Glaucon, and is talking about the imaginary guardians that they have created in speech in the city that they've just made up and that he's telling them that they have an obligation to go back down into the cave. So that's taken it literally. That's what literally is going on. And what I'm saying the crisis of the Republic is, is for the you to say, he's talking to me. That, that you is not just these imaginary guardians of a hypothetical city, but that he's, he's talking directly to you. And that the superior education that you've been given began with the Protagoras and the Alcibiades Major and the Alcibiades Minor and the, and the Lovers, and then in the Greater Hippias, the Lesser Hippeis, the Ion, the Manexenus and the Symposium, and then from there into the Lysis and the Euthydemus and the Laches and the Carmides and the Gorgias and the Theages and the Meno and the Kleitophon. You've gotten a better education than the others. You've, you've learned, you've learned what virtue is and isn't. You've learned how to read carefully between the lines. You've developed a whole, a whole series of skills that have promoted your ability to think for yourself and to see what's really going on. You have gotten a better education from the rest. And you, and you have the obligation. And so the, the, the, the dialogues as a whole lead up to that moment. And just as I said earlier, just as you can read Plato and say Plato was the poetry hating rhetoric, enemy of rhetoric, critic of writing, opponent of imitation, who thought that only the, that only the hypothetical guardians of his city had an obligation to go back down in the cave, but nobody else does that. Those are all birds of a feather in terms of the way you read Plato. And of course don't think that virtue can be taught well when it, when a person confronted with the crisis of the Republic realizes, oh my goodness, I don't want to go and I don't want to have a political life, but you know, I have an obligation to do so. That, that, that at that moment, that is where they've learned virtue. In other words, they've learned to put something higher than themselves. And what that is, is the good. They've seen the good.
- [52:44]
B
Excellent. So let's dwell for a moment on the largest dialogue in this section of the reading order, that being the Gorgias. So the centerpiece of this dialogue is Socrates confronting a rather self confident young man named Callicles. And Calicles is kind of in the position of, you know, of one, of one of these Students who would be, who would be coming up through, through Plato's academy and is the kind of student who is convinced that the good simply means the pleasurable, that well, okay, well, pleasure is naturally good. I know that because I feel it. And so the best man is naturally the one who's most able to, to provide himself with pleasures. And so philosophy could easily be bad because it separates us from nature and tries to convince us that the good is something other than what we directly sense. So tell us a bit about why Socrates calls Callicles his touchstone. Why is this encounter the crucial testing point in the reading order thus far?
- [53:39]
A
Okay, well, great. So I guess the first place to begin is that when I began my reading order project I, I used a typology of three of, of, of three terms which the central one was just, I called it visionary because there's certain dialogues, the Symposium, the Republic and the Phaedo especially which people that are interested in the order of composition of Plato's dialogues generally link those as the great middle period dialogues of the kind of, of middle period Platonism. It's some somehow called it Plato at his most idealistic. I called those, those moments visionary moments where, where, where, where you see the idea where you get a vision of the idea not seen with the eyes of the, what's the word? Idea has to do with vision, but not, not material or bodily vision on either side of the visionary. I, I, I borrowed a term from, from Charles Kahn, a scholar I admired a great deal which was called proleptic. He, he had dealt with a lot of the dialogues that I deal with in Ascent to the Good, arguing that they're all leading up to the Republic, that they're proleptic, they're preparing you for it. And I, I think that, that, I mean I, I wholeheartedly agree, I agreed with Kahn there. The, starting with the Protagoras, the proleptic dialogue. A proleptic dialogue is designed to confuse you about things that will ultimately be very good that you are confused about because it will prepare you for the vision that will come in the, in the, in the kind of central moment. Now the last moment I used a term that I took directly out of the Gorgias, which so, so as you mentioned, I mean there are other great characters in the Gorgias, Gorgias himself, his whippersnapper student polis, and then finally Callicles the Athenian. These others are foreigners and sophists by training. Callicles is a native born Athenian, otherwise unknown in the historical record, although a very brilliant man. Without a doubt the most brilliant interlocutor that Socrates ever has to. Has to tangle with. As, I mean, I guess you could perhaps say that he doesn't really tangle with the Eliadic stranger, doesn't tangle with. With. With Parmenides, that of all the people that give Socrates a hard time, including Thrasymachus in the Republic, Callicles stands out among them. When, When. When Callicles makes his great speech against philosophy, and he makes some very interesting points about that, which I'll come back to in a minute. Socrates makes this amazing statement. Callicles has made this very eloquent speech, and Socrates says, you know, Calicles, if my soul were made of gold, don't you think I'd be very happy to find one of those kind of, you know, testing touchstones that they use to. To test the finest gold? Don't you think I'd consider it of great worth to come up to come across such a testing touchstone? The Greek word for that is basanos, a touchstone or test. I refer to the dialogues that the third moment in the dialogues as basinistic, a term I took directly, simply out of this passage of the Gorgias. The idea then being that there, that having confused you in a salutary way, he then gives you a vision, but then he tests whether you will stick with that vision, adhere to it, or whether you will abandon it in the heat of battle. And that those tests are what I refer to as basinistic. So the character of Callicles introduces the term that I use to give this kind of sense of Platonic pedagogy. Where to? Just. I'll just briefly say that the guys that have argued for the order of composition of Plato's dialogues, they have relegated the great visionary dialogues to a middle period and then say that Plato somehow outgrew that, abandoned that, became more down to earth, moved in the direction of Aristotle. So my big break from the developmentalists or the order of composition people, I still put the dialogues that they make late. I still make them late. I just say that that's not because Plato has changed his mind. It's because Plato is testing whether the student will remain true to what they've been taught in the Symposium and the Republic and the phaedo, which by the way, are nowhere near each other in the reading order the phaedo at the very end, the symposium halfway between the beginning and the middle, and the republic in the middle. So by spreading out the visionary dialogues and locating the late dialogues, identifying them as bassinistic, that kind of led into my reading order reconstruction. Because you asked earlier what were the principles of it? And the simple answer to that which I could have given, which is that the principles of the reading order are that there are elements that are proleptic, there are elements that are visionary, and there are elements that are basanistic. Now the, The. The most provocative idea in my book, the Ascent to the Good. Well, I mean, given the history of philosophy, the most, the most. The most. The. The most revolutionary idea, I guess, that would, as considered by historians of philosophy, is my ongoing claim that Plato's not a eudaimonist because that's become bedrock and that Socrates is not a eudaimonist either. And that involves pushing back on a long tradition that begins with Aristotle in which virtue is knowledge and that happiness is the highest good and that therefore we can read Plato along those lines. And you know, there's a colorable argument Sid in Nancy has to prove to those two boys that justice is to your benefit. So there are clearly eudaimonistic elements in the first part of the republic and in the last part of the republic, just not in the middle part of the republic. So. Right.
- [59:56]
B
And just to. Just to interrupt.
- [59:57]
A
So.
- [59:58]
B
So eudaimonism, which you're referring to, this essentially means that this is a kind of a. A reductionistic reading of. Of Plato's idea of the good, that the good is essentially reducible to that which is ultimately in some sense good for me or advantageous for me. That's the quality of diamondism.
- [60:15]
A
Right. The mo. The most. So the American Plato scholarship has focused very heavily on the dialogues that I deal with in Ascent to the Good. And that's why there's more dialogue with those scholars, mostly students of Gregory Vlastos, who was the big Plato expert when I was a kid and was a kid that a guy that I knew when I was a kid that. That the students of lastos in the Anglo American tradition, the most radical of those, have pointed to happiness as being not only the telos that Aristotle says it is, but is also the telos in Plato's dialogues as well. Now they're not that. That's not the only view of the good. I mentioned the German guys of the tubing in school who think that the one. So if, if you, if you go on the line of Platonism that leads to Plotinus, they're going to be people that think that the one is the good and therefore that unity or the blend of the one and the dyad or blah blah, blah meant. In other words, there's not just one monolithic thing because Plato's so vague about what the good is. It opens the door to many possibilities and they're people that have, I mean he, he expressly denies that it's pleasure, but had he not done so, there clearly would have been people that thought that he was saying that the good was the pleasant. So, so I don't, I don't want to say that Eudaimonism is the only approach to saying what the good is, but it does, but it does seem to be the dominant one in the Anglo American sphere at the present time. So the idea that Plato's not a Eudaimonist in terms of what practicing philosophers think is important, that, that, that might be the boldest or from their perspective, craziest claim in my book. What, what I think is the boldest and most interesting claim in the book is that Calicles, this great opponent of Socrates and that and, and from whom Nietzsche, the great anti platonist of the 19th century, will borrow many, many ideas, as has been pointed out many times, most, most effectively many times by great Plato scholars, is that my claim is that in Callicles Plato gave a portrait of himself before he became socratized, in other words, that he was the exact antithesis of Socrates and was attacking Socrates and he was his most formidable opponent. And that's why Socrates says, you know, if I can persuade you, if I can persuade you to see things my way, then I'll know that I'm speaking the truth. Because you've got a couple of things. You got three things that nobody I know you're well disposed to me because you give me good advice that I know you give to your friends. You're smart as hell, like nobody you know, no, nobody could doubt that. And you're honest. You, you don't, you don't, you don't. You're telling me directly what I should do. And while it's not a beautiful thing that you're saying, I know it's, you're very outspoken and, and you're, you kind of put shame aside. So if I can persuade you, I'm home free. And so the Gorgias is this amazing dialogue where, where Callicles is fighting Socrates. But although Callicles threatens to leave at several points in the dialogue is that he's still there at the end. So that O Calicles is the last word of the Gorgias. And it seems to me that, that the great question, it's, it's a little bit like the crisis of the Republic. In fact, you're Being prepared for the crisis of the republic there. Because the natural question is, what do you think that Calicles did in response to the Gordon. Now remember, this was the dialogue that Cicero made his great joke about when he said that Plato was never more eloquent than when he was attacking rhetoric and the Gorgias. Because of course Callicles is, is telling Socrates, dude, this philosophy stuff is a waste of time. You should be teaching people how to make great speeches. You should be teaching them about the laws of the city. You should be teaching them about how to gauge the characters of men. None of which you're doing. You're just like a guy hanging around with a couple of adolescents in a street corner whispering some, you know, grand sounding, fine sounding words that have not to do with being a noble, gallant or excellent person. That your students don't even know the way to the center of the city where fame and glory is one. All you're doing is sitting around whispering with a couple of, you know, complicated terms. The, the, the unpersuaded Calicles. And he's clearly not persuaded in the dialogue. The great question is what did he do next? What was his next step? Which by the way is the question of the Klidophon. What's our next step? What do we do next? What do we do next? And there are two possibilities. Number one is that Calicles stayed Calicles and turned into Nietzsche. In other words, he had a view. It was a good view. It's going to become emblazoned in the history of philosophy a couple of hundred years, thousand years later by Nietzsche. He's not going to change his view because his view was right. In other words, a Nietzschean reading of the Gorgias. And we can see many such readings. I think Leo Strauss gave the Gorgias a Nietzschean reading. And, and, and, and he's not unique. He's not unique. The other possibility is that, and it's the possibility that my hypothesis is designed to. Well, that, that my hypothesis depends on this other possibility which is that he changed his mind. That in response to this great eloquence, this beautiful plea for justice, this, this, this, this, these marvelous speeches of Socrates and the Gorgias, never more eloquent than when he was attacking rhetoric, is that Calicles changed his mind and turned into Plato. And that, that what the Platonic dialogues are, are the synthesis of Plato and Socrates. And that, that what's most amazing is that the criticism that Callicles levels against philosophy, which is that it makes you unprepared to be a noble and gallant person that can secure good repute in the city, that you don't even know the way. Your students don't even know the way to the city center or the Agora. They don't even know. They don't know anything about the laws of the city, and they don't know anything about the speeches that they need to get there. And they don't know anything about the characters of men. That each of those terms are all addressed systematically in the curriculum that Plato created for his academy, with the great Dialogue on the Laws being his legal training in the Laws of the City, with the Dialogues in the Ascent to the Good. Especially this book that we're discussing now, where the characters of Meno, Callicles, Laches, Carmides, Critias, the dialogues that lead up to the Symposium, are quite monochromatic from a character standpoint. The characters of Alcibiades and Greater Hippias are almost caricatures. Not so when you get into the dialogue. The Lysis. The Lysis is named after a character named Lysis. My own feeling is that if you think that Lysis is the most important character in the Lysis, you miss the boat because Menexenus is. And the same thing happens, like if, if you think that Nicias should be the lead character in the Lakis, you missed the point of that too. That actually Dionysidorus is a better character than Euthydemus in the euthydemus, etc. Etc. Amino, callicles, Gorgias, Polus. That an education in character is what he's given you in these dialogues, as well as an education in rhetoric. So that the synthesis of Plato and Socrates, where he literally was Socrates, Hermione, look, Socrates died. Socrates was put to death by the Athenians. And if it weren't for his, you know, great students, Xenophon and Plato, he would have died along with the hemlock. He didn't die along with it. He was kept alive as an indelible character and will live as long as philosophy lives thanks to these wonderful writings of his students. And of course, Plato is with the. One of the most brilliant writers that ever lived. My own view is that he couldn't have been as brilliant if it weren't for Xenophon. But that, that's an, that's another story. But, but the, the, the, the idea that, that a lot of Callicles Critique of Philosophy survives and is embodied into the curriculum of the academy, which is not about turning out a student that can say, excuse, excuse me, Professor Liss, but is your view that The Kantian categorical imperative is an epistemological attempt to ground morality on a more substantial basis. Kind of along the lines of lordy and ra. A kid that. I mean, you've been in philosophy classes, so we both know that there are plenty of kids that can write, you know, ask questions like that. And what do they do? You know, philosophy is something that they, you know, play around with for a few years and then they go off and make some money. The. The idea that a lot of academic philosophy is just term splitting subtlety and sophistry. Plato was a critic. Plato was a critic of that. And I think that what he felt was that if you can give me a kid at an impression, I don't want to sound like Ms. Jean Brody, but if you can give me a girl at an impressionable age, it's not that she will be mine for life, as Ms. Brody says, it's more that she will be. She will follow the good, come hell or high water. That she will do right. That she will, you praten, without worrying about whether she will. You praten. In other words, that she will do what's right without worrying about whether that will do her good. So. And of course, that became the watchword of the Platonic academy. You know, Plato's letters and the letters of all Platonists have the word EU protein. It's the last word of the Republic. And the question is, what does that mean? Does that. Does that mean to take a shortcut whereby by doing the right thing you will prosper? I think Plato was perfectly happy to go down in the history of philosophy as a guy that gave really good arguments about why doing the right thing was the right thing to do, because you would prosper by doing the right thing. I don't think he's ashamed of that. I just don't think he thinks that that's true. I think that he thinks that there's a higher truth where you do the right thing because it's the right thing. The way I used to teach my high school students this was with that Christmas carol about like, he knows if you were sleeping, he knows if you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good. So be good for goodness sake, where the phrase be good for goodness sake, all it means in the rhetoric of the song is we'll be good. I'll be good for goodness sake. But you could take it literally, the same way you could take you protein literally. And of course, the reason to be good is not so that you'll get a railroad said under the Christmas tree. It's not like be a good little kid because he knows when you've been bad or good. So you won't get a, you know, Santa won't come if you've been a bad little fellow. Is that you can, you can read it that way. But the good for goodness sake is what Plato's actually teaching. And you can understand why, why he doesn't just demolish the eudaimonist argument, but rather why he informed folds it and makes it a stepping stone, a climb, an epibosmos, a kind of ladder on the route to the highest good. He needs it because he needs you to overcome it. That the reason he can say so little about the good is because all he has to do is show you that it's not this good that he's made so many arguments for based primarily on this slide between farewell and do well.
- [73:14]
B
Right. So, yeah, no, on that note, I like the Callicles as a self portrait of Plato and which, you know, you can even see by just simply by recalling Plato's own born name, which was of course Aristocles. I only mention that because a lot of people don't know that Plato is a pseudonym. He was born Aristocles, meaning call called the best and such that callicles would be called noble and of course callicles called noble, but espousing a philosophy which is really quite ignoble. I can imagine Plato going through a phase of his development, so to speak, where he would rather have resented the name he was given by his parents being called the best, implying like, well, wait, am I actually the best? So, yeah, well, I think in this conversation we have, we have, we have done well and I think, and I hope we have, we have done, done some, some amount of good also. So, so yeah, just to, to wrap up, what have you been, what have you been working on recently in the meantime? I know you've been publishing many books and so.
- [74:18]
A
Yeah, tell us. Well, thank, you know, thanks for asking. I, yeah, it's, I mean it's, it's, you know, it's a great honor for me because, you know, as you said, this book was published back in, in 2018. That's, you know, six years ago. Six, eight. It's a long time ago. And, and it's nice to be, to have it get attention from, from you, Joseph. And I really, I really appreciate that. You know, when you were talking about the name, the, the, the last book that I wrote is on the Jewish philosopher Philo of, of Alexandria. I Just completed that and I was thinking about it when you were talking because it's pretty obvious that Phylon, Philon was not his name, that, that, that we know the name of his brother. It was a much more complicated Roman sounding name that, that, that, that. It seems to me that, that like Plato and of course Philon just means friend. I've really enjoyed working with Philo a lot and. And I would say I found him as a friend and indeed a fellow Platonist. So you see, I guess what I would say is that after I wrote the five volumes on Plato the teacher, the first step was to take a couple of snippets out of those things and develop them more. So I mentioned Xenophon a little bit. And I had become convinced that Plato relied on Xenophon pretty heavily in writing a lot of dialogues. And so that I wrote a book on the relationship, relationship between Plato and Xenophon. One of the things that became clear is that one of the great obstacles to. I saw that Plato was teaching rhetoric in his dialogues, especially in the Symposium and others. And that added greater support to what I'd already discovered in Cicero, who argued repeatedly that Demosthenes, the great Athenian statesman who fought against Philip of Macedon, Aristotle's patron, that Demosthenes had been a student of Plato's at the academy. I knew that Cicero thought that I wrote a book trying to defend that view that he actually had been. And in fact that that's what the troop. That's what true Platonism, that true Platonism involves going back down into the cave and fighting for Athens rather than becoming Aristotle, as it were. And then I kind of jump forward and dealt with the kind of great Platonist or Neoplatonist Plotinus. Having done that, I. Then I've got. I've gotten increasingly interested in these three guys that, that Cicero, Philo and Plutarch, all of whom belong to a period in the history of philosophy that's usually. They're usually classified as belonging to the middle plate, not, not the middle period dialogues of Plato, but what's called middle Platonism, which is the period before Neoplatonism. So you got old Platonism, you got middle platinum. Well, in, in studying middle Platonism, I've realized that the guys that have invented middle Platonism are really just Neoplatonists that are showing that those things that led up to Plotinus and a lot of my current work is pushing back on that. So having built a foundation around Plato and what Plato taught and then having shown that some of the people that we think are the paradigmatic Platonists really weren't. I'm really trying to show that Cicero, Philo and Plutarch were not only the great Platonists of the period and the last great Platonists, but that they were all building a bulwark against what is going to become Neoplatonism in Plotinus. So that by immersing myself in Plotinus I've gotten to understand so called Middle Platonism better. And so I'm now working on trying to create a sense of middle Platonism. See, one of the, one of the paradoxes of Middle Platonism is that the, the scholars that, that have built the category of Middle Platonism are guys that exist only in fragments. Whereas Philo, Cicero and Plutarch, who left behind huge amounts of writing, Plutarch, more than any other ancient, except perhaps Galen and Aristotle, just monumental amounts of work left behind have been kind of relegated into, they belong to the middle Platonic period, but they're not, they're, they're not very original. Well, perhaps not. They were, they were preserving Plato in, in his original form. And of course Cicero was a great statesman who died defending the Republic. Philo was a Jew who tangled with the Emperor when you know, just 20 or 30 years before the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D. where the temple was destroyed. And, and of course Plutarch, who kept alive the memory of all these Greco Roman heroes, Republican Roman heroes who had fought against, well, whatever is going to turn into the Caesars anyway. Those have become, that's become more my focus now. So that's what I'm, I'm working on now.
- [79:41]
B
Fascinating. Well, I know you have, you have assembled a decently sized library of your own contributions and yeah, I hope to be talking to you about more of those as we go forward. So I wish you the best of luck for your studies and your work.
- [79:55]
A
Thanks.
- [79:56]
B
And so yes, I've been speaking with William Altman about his book Ascent to the the Reading Order of Plato's Dialogues from Symposium to the Republic. Copyright 2018 by Lexington Book Books. Thanks for listening to. Thanks for listening everyone. This has been the New Books Network.