Second Post

Plato: An Analysis and Evaluation

It cannot be an accident that nearly all of Plato’s works take the form of dialogues, but neither can we assume that the philosophical perspectives were there first and the dialogues were chosen as the best way to communicate them.  What we do know is that, with Socrates, Plato consciously brought philosophy—and learning—into the context of question and answer, of conversation and argument. Conversation was already the free Athenian’s form of life, but with Socrates it became conversation that aroused, disturbed, and compelled.

• The dialogues present long speeches, swift exchanges, disagreements;
•  they show persons talking at cross-purposes and failing to understand each other;
• they show what it means for persons to speak together where more is at stake than the outcome of an argument.

The purpose of the dialogues is learning, the seeking of truth, and it seems, as Nietzsche said, that for Plato, “truth begins with two.”

Not surprisingly, I have long been convinced that it is in the Socratic dialogues that we find the key to Plato’s most profound contribution to the subject of teaching and learning.  Karl Jaspers was the first to teach me this but I am most indebted for the present discussion to a very fine book by Kenneth Seeskin of Northwestern University (Dialogue and Discovery: A study in Socratic Method).

Seeskin suggests that the first rule of Socratic dialogue is that the respondent must have the honesty to say what he really thinks, the reasonableness to admit what he does not know, and the courage to continue the conversation—because the purpose of the conversation is discovery, and it does not happen by itself, in a sudden flash of illumination. It must be prepared for and it is threatened by the same forces that threaten all civil discourse and social harmony—arrogance, anger, hostility, and laziness, whether from teacher or student. Thus Plato says that learning, discovery, takes place only when questions are asked and answered in a spirit of benevolence.

This notion of learning as discovery leads to the cornerstone of the Socratic way of knowing: that it is not possible for a person assuming the role of authority to lay down for another person a set of true propositions and expect that person to come away with knowledge. The learner is not in the role of a passive recipient of knowledge delivered “cut and dried” from the hands of the teacher-as-giver-of-information. Key to this potential “discovery through dialogue” isn’t that the potential learner is ignorant of something that Socrates/Plato knows but, rather, that he already has the knowledge he is looking for and is just having trouble” getting hold” of it.

This assumes, of course, that the mind has “innate ideas” and it is demonstrated in the dialogue titled, Meno, where an uneducated slave is shown to “know” the principles of geometry by simply asking him the right questions. Although Plato develops an elaborate mythology involving the soul’s preexistence, reincarnation, and immortality to support this point of view, we need not come to terms with this ontology in order to pursue lessons of value in the dialogues.

What is clear is that a person can have opinions, beliefs, that she has not considered or is not aware of, and that the discovery of those ideas may require considerable effort, even courage, to retrieve. It is rare, however, that we encounter in the dialogues a person with sufficient courage to do it. Indeed, it is the irony of the dialogues that most people are portrayed as running away from the discovery of the truth, even in themselves. There is something in them that rebels against what Jaspers called “the rigors of responsible self-clarification:” the inquiry it too tough—it’s easier to go on sleeping in a safe corner of the status quo than it is to wake up and struggle with issues one has taken for granted. 

This is not a scenario that is exactly foreign to our own experience in the world of teaching and learning!

In the Theaetetus Socrates compares himself to a midwife who aids the respondent in the birth of an idea and the “delivery,” the discovery, is not always easy. That is why the dialogues are full of devices to draw the respondent out, to achieve a conceptual breakthrough.  The technical term is “elenchus” (to examine, refute, put to shame). It involves from time to time irony, flattery, satire, paradox, myth, even mockery.

Such a method clearly requires a sensitive touch, because the purpose of the dialogue is not to belittle; the intent is not destructive but therapeutic. So although Socrates as “teacher” (although he would not have accepted the term) usually gets the best of his conversant, he doesn’t always win and it’s not suggested that he is always right. We are in touch here with what Parker Palmer calls “the moral trajectory” of every mode of knowing and, thus, to the moral implications of Plato’s view:

• The purpose of argument is not to win, it is to learn;
• Dialogue is not a method of “intellectual homicide”—its goal is not to annihilate an enemy but to communicate with a learner;
• No matter how confused a person’s reply, it is not worthless;
• A false opinion is not nearly as bad as an insincere one;
• a respondent’s opinions always have some value, even if, sometimes, it stretches our abilities to find the relevance and affirm the learner.

For Plato, every soul is a repository of truth and every soul has a duty to inquire. But if learning becomes an impersonal process—if the questioner assumes the role of “teacher-and-purveyor-of-knowledge” and the respondent the role of “student-and-receiver-of-information”—then the student can no longer take credit for what is learned and see it as his own. Socrates expresses a profound skepticism whether this sort of teaching is even possible.

The moral implications are all the more weighty because of what Plato sees as the subject of learning, what it is possible to discover. The goal of the dialogues is always what we would call a concept and what was for him a “form”—courage, beauty, virtue, goodness, piety—permanent values, universal truths that he believed stood above the flux of experience. Such discovery always lay at the end of the process and the success of the search was never guaranteed, but the possibility of such an insight into “the heart of things” was always close at hand, just around the corner.

We need not share Plato’s idealistic ontology, but unless we want to condemn ourselves, as Robert Frost put it, to live with futility “in the fond faith . . . [that mere] accumulated fact will of itself take fire and illuminate the world,” (from A Cabin in the Clearing) then we can share the loftier belief that education is never about “mere” facticity, but always about connecting knowing with doing, theory with practice, learning with living—to relate what is learned to pressing human need.  For Plato/Socrates, the learner does not discover the “forms” merely to treasure them intellectually, but to live them out in their experience and that is what is at the heart of the partnership of the dialogue, the conversation, and the discovery.

Next up: Aristotle