Reflections on Plato’s dialogues — or, if I break it out as a separate post, links to reflections — to follow below. The order is that of the Ukemi Audiobooks series The Socratic Dialogues, which dramatizes Benjamin Jowett’s translation with a full cast of great British actors (headlined by David Rintoul as Socrates). Jowett’s translation may be “out of date” from a scholarly perspective (which I am unqualified to judge) but in Rintoul’s hands (vocal chords?) is enduringly lucid. Ukemi also organizes the dialogues loosely according to a traditional early-middle-late periodization, which I gather is a contested approach, but it doesn’t seem to harm the understanding for a first pass. (I’m already suspecting that the “dramatic ordering,” following the chronology of Socrates' life as best that may be reconstructed, might be more fruitful… but that’s for a second round, and I’m just beginning the first!)

Early Period

1. Apology. A barnstormer to start in medias res — better, near the end of things. We meet Socrates for the first time as he defends himself, before the assembly, against the charges laid at his door: of being an evildoer and “making the better appear the worse,” of being an atheist and introducing new deities, and of corrupting the youth. He does not succeed, though he is condemned by only a small margin. Socrates here introduces a number of key motives in the corpus: his claim to “know nothing at all” and thus to only be the “wisest” by exposing everyone else’s ignorance (which makes him quite unpopular); the deceptiveness of rhetoricians, who know how to speak elegantly and persuasively, but know really nothing of the Good and therefore of how to make men better; his own role as a sort of “gadfly,” provoking the polis into active self-reflection which it might otherwise neglect, and seeking thus to improve it; the absolute priority of caring for the soul over against all other cares (of property, wealth, body, etc.), and the absolute refusal to employ any tactics unworthy of the soul; the “daemon” or voice of God — or Conscience — speaking to him and infallibly guiding him toward the right course of action, though all public opinion be against him; his real indifference — perhaps, even here, optimism! — in the face of death, but absolute service to the truth. We also get a taste of the dialectic style as he cross-examines his accuser Meletus. It is an extraordinary bit of writing by Plato, moving and sweeping and incisive. Apology thus introduces and crystallizes the brilliant literary paradox of the Socratic corpus: Socrates disclaims all “rhetoric” and “elaborate defence,” portraying himself as a humble and artless seeker of wisdom — using brilliant rhetoric and elaborate defensive strategies to demolish his opponents' arguments. I loved Apology, and expect to revisit it with great enjoyment, but there is undoubtedly something inhuman and irritating (gadfly-like!) about Socrates. One understands instantly why Socrates had so many admirers in his own day (including Plato), and why Plato’s Socrates has been such a titanic figure in the history of thought and culture; and, equally, just why Socrates made so many enemies. Most of all I chafe at his claim that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” Is it not the other way round: no life which is lived is worth leaving unexamined?
2. Crito. A simple but moving dialogue, set in prison on the night before Socrates' execution, on the question: “Is it right to disobey an unjust law?” Socrates' answer in this case, of course, is No. The titular Crito (also mentioned in Apology) comes to him in prison and makes one last effort to persuade Socrates to escape his condemnation. But — despite his complaint in Apology that his trial was not conducted with full propriety — Socrates is determined to accept the death penalty meted out by the state. The most curious, and seemingly central, feature of the dialogue is the lengthy portion spoken by Socrates in the voice of the personified Laws of Athens. How, the Laws ask Socrates (and thus Socrates asks Crito), can one who is so personally committed to justice defy the demands and decisions of justice?
3. Charmides. Now we flash back several decades, and get going with our first, though assuredly not last, “What is X?” The X in question is the virtue of temperance.
4. Laches.
5. Lysis.
6. Euthyphro. “What is piety?”
7. Menexenus. A parody of the funeral oration genre, in which the ostensible praise of Athens and of great Athenian heroes turns out to just yield a series of digressions, backhanded criticisms, and trite aphorisms.
8. Ion.
9. Gorgias. Is it okay to really rather dislike this dialogue? It is long, repetitive, and occasionally mean-spirited. The subject matter is of great importance, of course: moving from the more specific question “what, if anything, does a teacher of rhetoric need to know about goodness?” to the general question “what is the best way of life?”. Yet in these early dialogues Plato does not often set up Socrates' interlocutors as particularly compelling or thoughtful — see Euthyphro or Ion and their namesakes — but in Gorgias he seems to regard, and Socrates seems to treat, all three of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles with barely-disguised contempt. And they are, in differing ways, worthy of contempt (less so, perhaps, Gorgias).
10. Protagoras.
11. Meno.
12. Euthydemus. A merciless satire on sophistry. At first Socrates is baffled, then infuriated, then bemused, then amused by the “method of contradiction” employed by the brother sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus; finally he pulls himself together and shows himself a master at it, if he chooses. There is a substantive philosophical point lurking within the mockery, though. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are boxers who have but lately taken up sophistry (in order to make money and increase their reputation). They have grasped that the key to successful sophistical argumentation is equivocation: exploiting multiple meanings of their opponents' words in order to catch them in apparent contradictions. Of course, as soon as one scrutinizes their arguments, these fall to pieces, so the sophist must keep his opponent permanently off balance and give him no room to strike back. Sophistry is dialectic reduced to boxing: a contest of strength and speed in which one hit is as good as another. The true philosopher, however, cares not at all for victory, but only for the pursuit of truth. And truth requires valid arguments, clear and consistent definitions, and patient exploration.
13. Lesser Hippias.
14. Greater Hippias.

Middle Period

15. Symposium.
16. Theætetus. Fantastic. Far and away the most enjoyable, dare I say riveting, of the dialogues so far. “What is knowledge?” Must revisit and write a longer reflection.
17. Phædo.
18. Phædrus.
19. Cratylus. Some people, apparently, say this dialogue is “tedious.” I had the exact opposite reaction! (Perhaps I am a tedious person…) Admittedly, for the first two thirds, I repeatedly thought, “Surely you can’t be serious!”, as Socrates offered increasingly speculative and unsupportable folk etymologies for all sorts of words (though the more abstract a concept denoted by a word, the less speculative it seemed to me) to supposedly show that the relation between a word and the thing it represents is not arbitrary or merely conventional, but is based on nature… only to experience philosophical whiplash in the final third as Socrates dismisses that linguistic theory and argues that words are given by convention and have no necessary naturalistic aspect!
20. Parmenides. This one is fascinating, and demands revisiting. A precocious, but philosophically underdeveloped, nineteen-year-old Socrates meets Zeno (he of the Paradoxes) and the famous Parmenides. Socrates knows the teaching of the great Heraclitus that all things are in constant flux and motion (“You cannot step into the same river twice”): the One is an illusion, the Many is all. Parmenides and Zeno, on the contrary, propose to show that eternal reality is unchanging and flux is impossible: the Many is an illusion, the One is all. Socrates, mock-naïvely, proposes a synthesis: all earthly things are indeed in perpetual flux, but they derive their thing-ness from participating in eternal unchanging Forms or Ideas. Parmenides, somewhat unexpectedly, dismantles this proposal with six increasingly devastating counter-arguments, exposing all sorts of internal contradictions, absurdities, infinite regresses, and the like. But then… Parmenides flips the script and sets out to show, in tremendous (and occasionally mind-numbing) specificity, how one might after all defend a theory of Ideas as logically coherent. Does he succeed? Can the One and the Many be held together? What is the real point of the deductions? It’s hard to say. I must reread it, and write a longer reflection.
21. Republic. Fascinating, riveting, eye-opening: “oh, that’s where that comes from!” a million times. Must revisit. Must write a longer reflection.

Late Period

22. Timæus. Whatever the opposite of riveting is; I really, really struggled for motivation to keep listening to this one. I know it’s one of the most influential texts in the history of Europe, but even with the capable David Timson reading the part of the eponymous monologist, I found my attention slipping over and over again.
23. Critias. It’s Númenor! Or, really, Númenor is Atlantis: “But even the name of that land perished, and Men spoke thereafter not of Elenna, nor of Andor the Gift that was taken away, nor of Númenórë on the confines of the world; but the exiles on the shores of the sea, if they turned toward the West in the desires of their hearts, spoke of Mar-nu-Falmar that was whelmed in the waves, Akallabêth the Downfallen, Atalantë in the Eldarin tongue.” More seriously, we do get hints — reminiscent of Republic (which takes place, dramatically, just the previous day) — at the Platonic ideal for a political constitution.
24. Sophist. The follow-up to Theætetus is not quite as much fun, though it introduces a fun new hermeneutical device: most of the philosophical exposition is not in the mouth of Socrates, who is a mere spectator, but spoken by a nameless Stranger from Elea (home of Parmenides and Zeno). The bulk of the dialogue consists in the search for a single definition via numerous “divisions” and “classes” — much more similar in some ways to Parmenides (to which it makes reference) than to its ostensible precursor. And of course the sophist as a figure is an unflattering subject. It’s quite interesting, however, after hearing Plato decidedly privilege the One over the Many in Republic, to hear some… back-pedaling, maybe? Perhaps the One and the Many can be held together after all. Dramatically speaking, Parmenides is set at the very outset of Socrates' philosophical career, whereas Theætetus, Sophist, and Statesman are said to take place at nearly the end of his life.
25. Statesman. A direct continuation from Sophist, though Socrates takes over from Theætetus as the Eleatic Stranger’s primary interlocutor.
26. Philebus. At one point near the three-quarters mark of this dialogue, Protarchus, who is Socrates’ principal interlocutor, remarks to the philosopher, “Your many repetitions make me slow to understand.” Socrates responds, infuriatingly, “As the argument proceeds, my boy, I dare say that the meaning will become clearer. Protarchus’ dry response, “Very likely,” sums up my experience of this dialogue. Here is an undoubtedly sophisticated, mature, exacting reflection on a classic Socratic-Platonic theme — the superiority of a life spent seeking wisdom to a life spent seeking out pleasure — whose intelligibility is compromised by its repetitiveness. The argument is just difficult to follow. Socrates multiplies distinctions, which no doubt are useful, in service of the general thesis that the enjoyment of pleasure (and its coordinate, the avoidance of pain — though how, precisely, they are coordinated is one of the many subjects of discussion) is not the highest good in life, but rather a faculty like any other, which admits of distortions and falsities, and which therefore cannot be the highest good of a human life. Here there are none of the dramatic fireworks of the earlier Gorgias which touches on similar themes (and which is referenced occasionally). It was, however, worth listening to this dialogue just for the hilarious aside near the beginning in which Socrates describes those young men who are first intellectually thrilled by the paradoxes of One and Many (15e—16d); not much about Philosophy Bros has changed, it seems, in at least 2400 years.
27. Laws.

One recurrent theme throughout Plato’s work, increasingly prominent in the later dialogues (though I recall it as early as Euthydemus), is the challenge posed for his theory of knowledge by falsehood or false knowledge. The problem goes something like as follows. Everyone agrees that there are things called falsehoods which we can utter. Yet, logically speaking, this should not be possible. After all, we speak using words; the meaningfulness of words depends on their signifying things that really have existence; there are no words to speak of non-existence; therefore, we can never speak of that which does not exist; so also we can never speak falsely but can only speak the truth. Similarly, we can never know anything false, but always and only know things that are true; our difficulties come not from false knowledge, which is strictly speaking a contradiction in terms, but from ignorance alone. The argument sounds persuasive when considered abstractly, yet it yields an obviously ludicrous conclusion! It receives its most extended treatment, if I recall correctly, in Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger explores the problems raised by the term “non-being”. What does the term “non-being” actually indicate?

There is something here formally similar to — and no doubt influential upon — the evidently unsolvable (in the technical sense, absurd) problem of evil in the Christian tradition. God, Who created all things, is (on the classical-theistic view) perfectly good, perfectly knowledgeable, and perfectly capable. He must therefore have created all things perfectly. Furthermore, as He is (by definition) the unique Creator, no creature can contravene His created design or overrule His will if it wanted to. So where does evil come from? For it is evident to all that something has gone horribly wrong. Does it come from some kind of deliberate possibility for evil which He gave to His creatures as part of their creation? If so, how is He not the creator of evil also? But if that is the case, how can He be perfectly good? For that matter, how would a perfectly good Creator be able to conceptualize the possibility of evil so as to deliberately create it? The limitless perfections of classical theism seem to be in tension. But the alternatives are even less appealing. If evil is somehow inherent in the nature of creatureliness, such that anything with any limitations at all has not only a potentiality for but an actuality in evil, then either “evil” is a fundamentally relativized category with no real purchase, or it might be better to never have been created at all. Or if the Creator is limited in any of His moral goodness, knowledge, or capacity, one must suppose that evil might be able to permanently and ultimately gain the upper hand over Him and His creatures. One could fall back on saying that evil cannot exist, because it is a logical impossibility with no satisfactory explanation — yet we have a strong and near-universal intuition that it does exist.