A DIALOGUE.

Persons: Cyril and Vivian.
Scene: the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire.

CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). What a wonderful day it is.
VIVIAN (looking up from a book). You speak the truth, Cyril. Though what day leaves us “as on a darkling plain,” I do not know.
CYRIL. I hardly realized—tempus fugit and all that. What an injustice you perpetrate by cooping yourself up indoors!
VIVIAN. This is far too engaging a work to set aside for youthful pleasures, no matter how placid the ponds and perfumed the peonies and picturesque the Pleiades.
CYRIL. Oh?
VIVIAN. I’ve been writing a dialogue, “The Decay of Living: A Valediction,” a farewell if you will. And for the sake of argument, for ideas to challenge and champion, I’m rereading Plato’s Republic.
CYRIL. Rereading?
VIVIAN. Rereading.
CYRIL. Plato?
VIVIAN. Come now, Cyril! You don’t know Plato? You read the descendents—Hegel, Heisenberg, Nietzsche—but not the progenitor? Your philosopher friend, Whitehead, once even characterized European philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.
CYRIL. Well, I know a Plutarch, a Plotinus… and… ahh… Plato! Socrates’s greatest student!
VIVIAN. The very same. From an illustrious Athenian family—the sage Solon and the self-sacrificing King Codrus were ancestors—later mentored by Socrates, who left such an indelible mark on Plato that he began writing, capturing Socrates’s lived-out philosophy and relentless questioning in elenchi.
CYRIL. The one I remember of those early elenchi, those dialogues, discussing Socrates’s last days, after Euthyphro—
VIVIAN. On justice and piety. Is something pious because God approves of it or does God approve of it because it is pious?¹ A friend wrote his dissertation on this very aporia—still unresolved, I’m told.
CYRIL. —Is Socrates’s final Apology. A phenomenal defense of the philosopher, of his whole method—I can’t believe they convinced themselves to convict such a master, gadfly though he may have been. “Corrupting the youth” of Athens—what utter tosh? If only I had a soul to spare! I’d join him up there. But I value life too much, I think, too much to be a great philosopher; thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, the antithesis of aponia and ataraxia,² and people die of it as any other disease.
VIVIAN. Fortunately, thought isn’t catching, though Plato might disagree,³ ruled as you are by the spirited, appetitive parts of the soul. In the Allegory of the Cave, he describes a group of people chained in a cave from birth, facing a blank wall. All they see are the shadows projected across it, which they believe to be reality. The philosopher is a prisoner freed from the cave, understanding that the shadows on the wall are actually not reality at all, futilely persuading the prisoners to see the world for what it is…. But there’s no need for a recitation of every Platonic dialogue, Cyril, considering you, only moments prior, claimed to have no recollection of Plato whatsoever. We know the rest: Crito’s on the social contract theory, and Phædo? The immortality of the soul.
CYRIL. The immortality of the soul! The birth of the mind-body problem! On his last day before death by hemlock, a justification of his decision—what a painting—you can see the desperation of his disciples, of his supreme certainty! A fitting end to a man immortalized forever after. And though not on the trial of Socrates, I quite enjoyed Symposium—such spellbinding speeches, entirely extemporaneous, exalting Eros, vanquishing thanatophobia! Even before I knew anything of Alcibiades’s abysmal performance in the Peloponnesian War, the fellow seemed rather debauched, failing to ascend to the Form of Beauty.
VIVIAN. At last, we can discuss the Republic (a concise title we have Cicero to thank for), that magnum opus of political philosophy. In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell identifies Books I–V as an attempt to define justice, the description of a “utopia,” and the education of its Guardians, Books VI–VII to be on the nature of philosophers, the ideal rulers of the aforementioned kallipolis (“beautiful city”), and Books VIII–X as a comparison of various practical forms of government. One of Plato’s most compelling metaphors is the invisibility ring of Gyges in Book II. Glaucon posits that “all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice,” which Socrates condemns, arguing that justice does not derive from this social construct, and that the man abusing the ring’s powers for injustice has enslaved himself to his appetites.
CYRIL. I’m not sure I, nor most men, could resist! Wasn’t it Plato who famously likened the governance of a city-state to the command of a ship, observing that the true pilot is lambasted by the mass of mutineers deceived by duplicitous demagogues?
VIVIAN. That, he was, but not the first—Alcaeus and Aeschylus preempted him—nor the last—from him borrowed Horace, Longfellow, why, even the Jacobins! And on the matter of Plato’s eugenics: it isn’t nearly as terribly thought out as you’d think—
CYRIL. My dear fellow!
VIVIAN. Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence. Eugenics isn’t nearly as terribly thought out as you’d think, and Plato presents a convincing case for it, although he concedes flaws in his method, namely that parents with “gold souls” may still produce children with “bronze souls.” Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom even raise the question that the Republic might be written ironically, creating not a blueprint for a real city, but a learning exercise for the young men in the dialogue. Marriages of the rulers are called “sacred,” for instance, yet last hardly a night, the result of intoxicated couplings. Can you argue this is entirely serious?
CYRIL. I suppose not. But didn’t Plato’s Academy produce a number of tyrants who seized political power and abandoned city-ruling philosophy? Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea; Chaeron, tyrant of Pellene; Calippus, tyrant of Syracuse… the list goes on.
VIVIAN. Those men would’ve become tyrants—and not in the modern, totalitarian sense of the word, mind you—anyway, for Plato taught an elite student body, some of whom would by birth, and family expectation, end up in the seats of power.
VIVIAN. Regardless of the minutiae of Plato’s less palatable propositions, the Republic remains a classic, you must admit.
CYRIL. But is it not rather recent, written only around 375 B.C?
VIVIAN. Indeed. In spite, or perhaps because of that; I’ve always felt, maybe as a coping mechanism, that it’s easier to innovate, to inspire, to incite, when so little has been discovered. Every author after the Republic has, in one way or another, drawn from Platonic ideas, even if indirectly, or because Plato discusses such resonant themes later thinkers are forced to confront—redefining themselves in terms of, or in opposition to, his ideas. Like Karl Popper, who attacks the “noble lie” Plato proposes, to explain kallipolis’s socially stratified society, as a forerunner of totalitarianism. And Hegel,⁴ who notes that Plato’s “truth-loving mind has recognized and represented the truth of the world in which he lived,” that he was “not the man to dabble in abstract theories and principles.” Or Harold Bloom, who charges Plato with somehow being an inferior poet to Homer and philosopher to Shakespeare, and in portraying the “anguished quarrel between poetry and theology,” being the antecedent to various “ideologies of Resentment.”⁵ Even Aristotle, who declares, “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas,” questioning Plato’s Theory of Forms.
CYRIL. Wilde, too, no? “The Decay of Lying” assails Plato’s mimesis, holding “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” that “the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art.” I feel a strange sense of déjà vu—have we spoken about this?
VIVIAN. Perhaps. But I prefer not to contemplate coincidences which leave one wondering whether he is merely a player on a stage. Let us go then, you and I; rosy-fingered Dawn appears early-born, and the man with “a voice whose sound was like the sea” awaits.⁶ Maybe we shall glimpse the Pleiades “rising thro’ the mellow shade.” Come! We have talked long enough.