Literature as philosophy

One of the more remarkable facts about Plato’s dialogues is that many of Plato’s doctrines are bound to strike an unfamiliar reader as strange or alien or just plain wrong: we are told variously that no one willingly does wrong, that the just man cannot be harmed, that injustice harms its perpetrator, that it is better to be just and whipped than to be unjust and wrongly thought honest, and so forth. It is probably a tribute to Plato that legions of philosophy students come to nod their heads in agreement when these noble truths are asserted even though ordinary life suggests that they are patently false. Part of the reason that Plato is so convincing is his preferred method.

The typical Platonic dialogue features Socrates, the historical teacher of

Plato, as the protagonist who encounters some other character claiming to have knowledge about a favored topic. Socrates then gets him to concede that he does not really know after all. In the Apology, Socrates insists that every claimant to knowledge that he has engaged so far has failed to demonstrate that he really has it (21b-23b). Socrates’ method of philosophical interrogation and investigation has come to be called the elenchus. Sometimes the elenchus results only in the negative conclusion that the subject matter in question isn’t really understood; this is the result in Euthyphro, for example. Sometimes the elenchus results in a positive conclusion; at the end of the Gorgias, for example, Socrates takes himself to have shown that no one ever does wrong willingly. But whatever the result, Socrates’ refutations are typically decisive and his interlocutor either kowtows to Socrates or clearly appears wrong. Socrates, of course, has his critics. The Greek poet, Aristophanes,

lampoons Socrates in The Clouds as a teacher of useless and dubious information. For his part, Plato accuses poets of misrepresenting reality and fostering shameful feelings, noting that “there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 607b5-6), a quarrel that arguably rages on.1 Importantly, the old quarrel between philosophers and poets is not a trifling disagreement about style, but a substantive disagreement about something of substance: each offers a different account of how we ought to live.2 Martha Nussbaum makes the case that Plato rejects a particular view of human life endorsed by the poets of his time. On this poetic view, what happens by chance is of great importance to the ethical quality of people’s lives, and good people should care deeply about what happens by chance.3 For Plato, by contrast, what matters is simply virtue, and good people will be largely unconcerned with chance since they can bear the slings and arrows of fortune, however outrageous. It is striking to note the asceticism prized by Plato: