Lifeblood and Hemlock Cup

On Plato, and poetry, and question-asking

This week, I returned to Plato. It’s only been nine months since I read a dialogue, but it feels longer—and how much longer since I first read Plato with wonder? Years. As a philosophy student, I might’ve dug more meaning from the texts, but what weak love compared to the shock of being fifteen and first feeling that the world made sense. I am a Platonist; it’s a bad habit I’d like to quit, but it sticks to me, like nail-biting or insomnia for others. So nine months into withdrawal, I dug out my complete works and made myself a promise: I would go back and read through all of them.

I started at the beginning of my set with Euthyphro and the Apology. In the first, Socrates goes to his jury trial, accused of corrupting the youth and teaching them impiety against the gods. On the way, he meets Euthyphro, a young man on his way to court to accuse his father of murder. In the second dialogue, Socrates gives his defense to the Athenians, though it is less a defense of his actions than a condemnation of theirs.

If Plato’s works followed a sonata form, these two dialogues would be the exposition; within them, we first encounter all the great Platonic themes. Arete—virtue or excellence—justice, piety, the immortality of the soul, the will of “the god”, the aim of philosophy, and again and again, that great Platonic question, is ti esti? What is it? What is piety? What is virtue? Is there a form that makes every case of justice or injustice the same? If we call a man good, and a horse good, and a city good, and health good—what is “the good” we mean? They can’t be wholly different, or we couldn’t use the same word for all of them. They can’t be wholly the same, for we don’t mean that our health is good the way we mean a man is good. The Sophist answer—that it is all just a language game—does not satisfy Socrates. He’s interested in truth, not in embroidering phrases, in words that slip away from ideas as a harbor slips away from a ship launched out to sea.

I, the reader on my couch, share his conviction. My pen burns lines under sentences; I barely taste my tea when I remember to take a sip; I dive into the argument and fling shards of water around me as I sink beneath the words. Some people read novels, I think. I might be less neurotic if I read more novels and less philosophy, but within those dialogues, what plot, what struggle, what contest for truth and virtue. This is the birthplace of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Dostoevsky. All of Western civilization is a series of footnotes to Plato, including its literature.

“The written word is weak,” wrote Annie Dillard. “Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing—and the moral sense, and the intellect.” Those same subtlest senses unfold as I carve my way deeper into the dialogue. With each page, I care more, not whether Socrates lives or dies, but where his struggle to know the good will end. After all, he stakes his own life on the pursuit of virtue; how can I, a bystander, do less?

As I read, I see him before me: the old man, alone on the courtroom floor. Something about the image—not his eyes, not his clothes, not his beard, but something else, something about his stance and presence—reminds me of a former professor. Maybe it’s the quiet intensity with which the specter regards his jurors, a way of listening, not for his sake, but for theirs. When I was young, I read Socrates as caustic, every line laced with sarcasm like bitter hemlock. Now, I see in him a new fervor. He questions Athens, not to mock, but because he cares about his countrymen. With every word, he takes them by the shoulders and shakes them, saying, “Wake up! Realize that you are only looking at shadows on the wall. What greater things lie unloved in your grapple for wealth and glory?” Here is no irony, only a seriousness that startles because it sets the stakes so high.

I shake myself, set the Apology aside, and move into the kitchen to refill the kettle. Like a good novel, I have to force myself to read slowly, to savor every line, instead of racing to the end. I can’t imagine this intoxication stirred by say, Kant, though perhaps he has his own ardent readers, infatuated with his a prioris and imperatives. But when Socrates says, “it is the greatest good for man to discuss virtue every day,” some spirit within me sings a resonant yes.

I think Plato meant it this way, that we feel the struggle for the good in every conversation he records. Some have asserted that Plato hated poetry. In fact, Plato swallowed poetry, he drank it like the wine of mystic rites, and it took seed, took life, and split out of him like Athena burst from Zeus’ head in battle armor. He weaves stories about Socrates, and winged horses, circles spun through life and death, cosmic patterns and sky kingdoms, and at the heart of it all, the burning hope that inspires every poet when they invoke the Muse—that we might be inspirited by the divine. Plato’s corpus is a vast body, not like an old, dead giant, but like the shield of Achilles, a living, glistening wheel in which the whole of life dances as a divine smith hammers out wheat and stars and war and wine within its rim.

Plato’s poetry also sings in his choice of medium, for, like a poem, a dialogue refuses to give a straight answer. “Plato believes so and so—” but in another place he contradicts himself. His dialogues, like a poem, often ask us to read between the lines. With Plato, as with poetry, we can warp whole works in our misconstruing of a line, or read the author’s voice into the personas he creates, or jettison the complex for the part. So I read his dialogues like poems, or like novels, because, like literature, they ask more questions than they answer. But the questions he asks are not just the ones worth asking, but worth living. Literature is mere, Dillard says. But what can literature—and philosophy— infuse into the blood of life?

But then, I am a fanatic like Socrates. When you’ve made your start in adulthood by doubting everything, you may recover a little, but the fevered questioning never cools. When I was fourteen, I took apart the world. The usual way to study philosophy is chronological, to start with the Greeks and work towards nihilism. But I have always been a contrarian, and so I began at the other end. The usual joke about my generation, the iGen kids, is that we hide alone in our bedrooms, manipulating online avatars, cut off from the world. No wonder then, that I was a devoted solipsist before I could drive. I doubted everything. The faces across the dinner table may have masked anything—or nothing—for all I knew. The world was nothing, a simulacra that hung itself on nothing. My own body hung around me in odd and frightening ways, as if space had wedged itself between my mind and my skin and itched when I thought about it too much. I tried not to think about it. I tried to carve off the skin and kill the itch.

This is not merely intellectual despair, but intellectual suicide. I would have drunk the hemlock draught, if not for the intervention of another cup. Instead I came back to the world, and there was Socrates to rebuild it. There, on the page, were my own thoughts. Who are we? What is the world? How can I know that anything exists? What is my soul, my body, my mind? Ironic that Plato, the supposed scorner of the world, tethered me to it, but I needed his questions. I needed them because I needed to feel that someone else had taken the world to pieces, not out of despair, but out of hope that the search led to a resting place. Socrates, like the saints, forces us to ask what desperate search could inspire a man to die. Plato answers: “what if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine...the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal...would that be a life to disregard?”