Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed by Gerald A. Press;

Author:Gerald A. Press; [Press;, Gerald A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441104861
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-12-18T06:00:00+00:00

THE DIALOGUES AS PLAY

Besides discussions of play and Socrates’ enacted playfulness in the dialogues, in thinking about what Plato is doing remember that the dialogues are plays, plays that Plato has put on for us. No matter how much it may seem a mere formality in some cases, each dialogue is a direct or an indirectly narrated play, in which characters interact with each other in ways dominated by talk. Thus the term ‘play’ as applied to Plato’s dialogues, like the term ‘perplexity’ discussed in the Introduction, is a double entendre. Each one is playful and each one imitates philosophy – fictively and dramatically – with the intention of revealing to the audience the truth about philosophy and inducing philosophy in them. The play doesn’t so much tell us as show us this truth.

Then, too, play is a way to practise and learn to do serious things –as we know that the play of children is their work, in which they learn the social and physical skills they will need in order to develop into adulthood. Similarly, Plato’s plays, the dialogues, involve us, readers and students, in the true philosophic activities of logical argument, organized reason–giving, careful analysis, critical and rational reflection on matters that are the most serious for human beings and citizens. When we work to understand the arguments Socrates and his interlocutors put forward, we are at the same time actively thinking through the issues. This thinking–through for ourselves is philosophizing, in Plato’s sense of the term. Thus, the play is serious, since, like children’s play, through it we develop skills and habits that we can then better utilize in non–play situations. It’s like practising a sport or a musical instrument in order to perform better in competition. Studying Plato’s dialogues is practice for the real–life philosophizing that he calls on us to do about the moral, political, scientific and religious realities of our own time and place.

Thus, in making the dialogues playful in the multitude of ways he has done, Plato indirectly overturns and inverts our ordinary ideas about play and seriousness, as he also does our ordinary valuations of various adult occupations, such as the practices of law, politics and philosophy. The ordinary contrast between play and seriousness turns out, on reflection, to be too simple. There is what might be called mere play, morally unserious play, frivolity. Mere play can be opposed to mere seriousness, unreflective. And then, transcending both of these categories, there is another category, serious play, of which true philosophy is, for Plato, the perfect example.

Finally, Socrates’ playful seriousness suggests that it is philosophically serious to maintain a playful attitude towards even the most serious things, even in the face of death. The pseudo–Platonic Epinomis (992b) rightly says, ‘The most truly wise man is playful and serious at the same time.’

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