Artistic Brilliance Aimed at the Moral Good: On the Importance of Plato

Justin Clark

“I remember the first time I was taken in by Plato,” Jay said, “my professor walked into the room on the very first day of class, dropped a large book on the table in the front of the classroom, and declared ‘in this class, we will try to figure out why it is that sometimes Socrates goes up to the conversation that begins the dialogue, while other times, Socrates goes down to the conversation, as he does here in the Republic, when he goes down to the Piraeus!’ The instructor then began reading the opening lines of Plato’s Republic aloud, pointing to the many ways in which the dramatic features of the opening conversation foreshadow key philosophical themes addressed later on in the work.”

Jay Holstein, a dear professor of mine, shared this personal anecdote with me when I was an undergraduate learning about philosophy for the first time.  Hearing it must have left as big an impression on me as it did on him.  At the time, it had never occurred to Holstein that a philosophical writer might be so careful, so attentive with his storyline as to build meaning into the movement of a character toward a conversation.  But that’s Plato.  That’s what makes Plato so unique as a philosophical artist.

In graduate school, when time came for me to choose a topic for my dissertation, and to commit to an area of specialization, that anecdote came back to me.  I had been reading the early dialogues of Plato, where Socrates investigates the individual virtues in a sequence of separate conversations:  Socrates investigates the nature of courage in the Laches, the nature of justice in Republic I, the nature of wisdom in the Euthydemus, temperance in the Charmides, piety in the Euthyphro, and virtue itself in the Meno and Protagoras.  

These investigations all end in apparent failure, of course. The early dialogues are “aporetic.”  Yet serious readers are typically reluctant to conclude that Plato simply wanted us (as readers) to walk away from these individual investigations without any answers. 

What I’ve come to see is that Plato doesn’t write the way other philosophers do, telling us what we should think.  Plato puts the onus on his readers.  He wants us to work for the answers, to dig a little deeper, to embody a spirit of inquiry.      

As I looked closer, it occurred to me that Plato was interweaving the early dialogues, tying them together, as a creative way of advancing a parallel philosophical position concerning the relationship among the virtues. 

Plato, in his artistic brilliance, chose to weave the early dialogues together into a literary network, planting little hints in one dialogue that are necessary for answering questions raised in other dialogues.  In this way, he assembled an interconnected “family of dialogues,” which must be taken together as a unit, so that each work is interpreted in light of the others.  One cannot truly understand the Laches unless one has read the Meno and the Charmides, since the Meno and Charmides contain critical hints for interpreting the Laches, and so on, and vice versa. 

In a parallel way, within these works, Socrates weaves the individual virtues together philosophically into a unity, arguing that one cannot really acquire one virtue without cultivating the others.  One cannot become a just person, for instance, unless one also cultivates courage, because standing up for a just cause will often require placing oneself in harm’s way, and so on, and vice versa. 

As the ethical dialogues are interconnected, so too are the virtues they investigate. 

As I see it, Plato is illustrating (with unique literary flare) that the arduous work of self-improvement— the life-long process of inching our character toward excellence— is similar to the work of interpreting the early dialogues, of uncovering the Socratic theory of virtue that lay hidden just below their surface.   

This is what amazes me most about Plato, I think.  It’s not just the creative genius, it’s the moral aim.  If studied diligently, Plato’s dialogues can influence our character for the better.  I honestly believe that.  It may sound lofty— artistic brilliance aimed at the moral good— but that’s what makes Plato uniquely important, as far as I can tell.