The Plato Project

Lately I’ve been toying – toying! – with the idea of reading through Plato’s works at the beginning of the new year.

Now, this is not for the faint of heart. But I’ve been very discontented with the stuff I’ve been reading of late, and I’m looking for something harder and heartier to chew on. I have the series The Great Books of the Western World in two storage bins in a closet. One volume, Volume 7, is devoted exclusively to Plato. It contains 23 dialogues, 1 letter, and The Republic. It’s a hardcover gnarled with age but not use, and weighs about five pounds.

I would divide my project into two phases: The dialogues and the one letter, and The Republic. Volume 7 is roughly a thousand pages; Republic alone is 40% of that. In January and February I’d tackle either the first or second phase, take a month or two off, and then read through the other phase. It’s doable, and it would be immensely intellectually satisfying.

Way, way back in my night school college days, er, nights, I guess, if you spare me the redundancy, I had to take two philosophy classes, Intro 101 and 102. It was my first real experience with the subject, and it ignited a lifetime of dancing around the issue. I’d read and not understand, or understand but not read (called, ahem, Cliff Notes), buy books that were only skimmed, lurk online on philosophy bulletin boards. I guess I have a street education about philosophy. My knowledge of Plato and $5 would get you a cup of coffee.

But I loved the classes, and could listen to my professors for hours. The first was a young man in his mid-twenties (my age at the time) with a heavy Czech name but an American accent. The second was a mailman who moonlighted as a college philosophy professor. Go figure. For the latter’s class I had to read the last couple of dialogues known as the Trial of Socrates, which include, if I remember correctly, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. It was very, very moving. It was also very, very many years ago. It deserves another re-reading.

Along with a first reading of the rest of Plato.

That is what I am slowly trying to convince myself to do come the New Year. I dunno if I’ll do it. Yet. Probably will. Or maybe I won’t. Oh, and a lot of this has to do with keeping pace with Little One, who’s studying the classics at her college this freshman year.

So this January you might find some posts here about me dipping my toes into the waters of Forms, of Allegorical Caves and Rings of Gyges-es. Philosopher Kings and a curmudgeonly old gadfly willingly taking the cup of hemlock as opposed to modifying and mollifying his codes and ideals.

As a side note, I’ve read – don’t remember where, it was so long ago – that everyone’s either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian. After much thought, I classify myself as a Platonist in an Aristotelian cloak, which he wears out of doors when walking about amongst the citizens of the polis but discards as he enters his warm home, draws a pipe, and sits down with an old book in front of a roaring fireplace.