Why We Still Read Plato
A guest essay by one of our senior tutors.
Every summer someone asks me, usually politely, why we spend so much time with a man who has been dead for two thousand three hundred years. Surely we know more now? Surely there are more relevant things to read?
My answer is that we don’t read Plato for information. We read him because he shows us how to have a conversation. In the dialogues nobody is simply told the answer. Characters say what they think, and are pressed, gently or not, until they discover they did not quite think it after all. It is uncomfortable. It is also, I think, the beginning of every real education.
Our students are growing up surrounded by opinions. They are told what to think about almost everything, loudly and constantly. What they are rarely given is the chance to slow down and ask whether any of it is true. Plato gives them that chance. More than that, he gives them the example of Socrates, who would rather be refuted than go on being wrong.
There is also something humbling about it. When a sixteen-year-old in Wrexham or Leicester argues with a text written in Athens, they are joining a conversation that has been going on for a very long time. They are not the first to ask these questions, and they will not be the last. I find that a great comfort, and I think they do too.
So we will keep reading Plato. And every summer someone will ask me why, and I will be glad they did.