The older I get the more insensitive and ludicrous Plato appears. He looks more and more like a chud.
I share the traditional complaints about how annoying his confrontational style and avoidant conclusions are. I have little patience for any philosopher who cannot speak literally and linearly (emphasis on “little” because I handle aphorisms or essays, but not hundreds of pages). Plato’s works often lack definitions or end in outright contradictions or disjointedness. Plato’s character Socrates is one of the least sympathetic in all of literature. Ask him a question about justice, and he responds by asking what you mean by the term and quizzes you on your definition. (Confrontational, annoying, avoidant.) And if on the off chance you get him to talk about his own ideas, he almost immediately begins speaking in myths and metaphors. (Avoidant, annoying.) I can deal with some of this, but not an excess of it, especially in ethics and politics.
How, at some point, in talking so much about the nature of justice or good or character, does Plato not talk about the suffering of actual people? How do you not look at the vast classes of disenfranchised people, e.g., women being relegated to the home and the tens of thousands of slaves in Athens? How do you not look at the harms of imperialism?
And don’t come at me with the “Well, we can’t judge them by today’s standard” remark. Hesiod warns against violence. Empedocles and Pythagoras were vegetarians. And both wrote long before Plato. And a few hundred years after Plato, Dio Chrysostom writes against slavery. So, there are huge institutional practices that were in fact criticized by philosophers. Yet Plato does next to none of this. There are glimpses here and there of enacted moral decency, such as him allowing women in the class of philosopher rulers in Republic. But not much more.
Plato stays quiet issues that impacted the people of Greece (and any culture in the Mediterranean). And this oozes complacency and comfort. It feels like debating a Young Republican. You ask him what we should do about homelessness in America, and he starts talking about the conceptual incoherence of positive entitlements or true-exclusively-in-theory capitalism or Classical Liberalism. It’s all non sequiturs and idealistic arguments in response to a real concern. Will the invisible hand feed people? Will inviolable and sovereign autonomy prevent the rich exploiting the poor?
There’s a way in which beautiful myths or allegories can be comforting. Talking about capital-T Truth and capital-J Justice can instill hope. But if that’s all you do, it gets tiring. It comes off as insincere. Plato, a wealthy and well-liked man, could’ve helped many people. And maybe he did. But he probably didn’t challenge society too much. We can surmise this from the fact that Athens tried to execute his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle. But not him. (I know we can’t know for certain what Plato was like, which adds a layer of frustration.)
So, what did Plato do? As a writer of literature, he gave us some interesting conversations and analogies. As a philosopher? He gave us a bunch of non-answers and the foundation for the most obnoxious forms of Neoplatonism and Christianity.
I love so much of his work—Symposium’s openly celebrations of love, Republic’s grappling with moral nihilism. But maybe this love is what catalyzes the disappointment.