The ancient world gave us lots of things: Democracy, science, literature. It also gave us the columnist. Before Fintan O’Toole there was Simeon Stylites, who preached for more than 30 years from a small platform on top of a pillar outside of Aleppo in what’s now Syria.
But the ancient world also produced an antidote to top-down forms of communication. The life of the original columnist overlapped with that of Socrates who, in nearby Athens, modelled a form of debate that was radical in its day and is arguably more so now.
What became known as Socratic dialogue demands that we not only listen to each other’s views but, also, that we allow people to freely express obnoxious and objectionable opinions. In the modern parlance, no one should be “deplatformed”. The truth emerges not from policing expression but by allowing views to be tested against reality.
This is dangerous stuff at a time when you can get your head bitten off for straying outside your camp, or being seen to indulge a standpoint outside so-called acceptable bounds.
David Horan recalls the shock he experienced when he first read Socrates’s discourse on justice in Plato’s Republic. It had been recommended by a friend but, “with my scientific background, I thought it would be a bit anachronistic,” he says. Instead, “I was riveted and the main thing that kept me going was the absence of dogma ... It’s quite amazing then and now to allow so much space to views that you’re not sympathetic towards.”
Thus began an epic journey for Horan. First a PhD at Trinity College Dublin in Plato’s Parmenides and then the mammoth task of translating all of Plato’s dialogues. It hadn’t been done by a single author since the late 19th century and it took Horan close to 15 years. “It is by any standards a remarkable achievement,” Trinity professor Patrick Geoghegan said at the book launch last week. Not least because the translation is “open to all of us” in a free, online format.
The idea was put in his head by someone he met “at a party in Dublin in 2006”. Horan was working in IT for a pharmaceutical company, getting “good money”, he recalls. “There is much more money working for American multinationals than there is translating the dialogues of Plato.” But, “I said, if I turned it down, I’d be looking back on this in 20 years’ time, I’d have a great pension and I’d be thinking I could have really done something.”
So he gave his notice at work, and a couple of years later started going through the texts. He learned Greek in the process, since he hadn’t much of the language to start with. While it took longer than expected, Horan – who turned 70 this year – “never got discouraged”.
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There is a famous quote that is misattributed to Socrates: “I know only one thing – that I know nothing.” While “you can buy T-shirts in Athens with that written on them ... you won’t find those words in Plato,” Horan points out. What Socrates did say, in the dialogues, is that he feared falling into the “terrible trap” of “thinking you know when you do not know”.
Just as Socrates is sometimes portrayed as ignorant, Plato is sometimes portrayed as a dogmatist, but this too is a distortion, says Horan. Yes, his idea of the “philosopher king” sounds elitist. But “I think you really need to get to the spirit of Plato ... Even if you go to The Laws, his last work, he never stops questioning. He is always open to discuss, and to relook at, any views he has expressed or seems to be committed to”.
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Horan is a member of the Foundation for Platonic Studies, which promotes the philosopher’s work. To those who might think Plato is just for academics, he says: “It’s 100 per cent practical because it awakens our humanity.” The famous book title Plato, Not Prozac! is “spot on”, he adds. “If people awaken their mental facilities they won’t be prey to the negativity which is all over the place in this world. Use Plato to awaken your spirit of inquiry ... because the opposite path is despair and despondency”.
In his famous allegory of The Cave, Plato describes people “like you and me” arguing over shadows of “what justice means to you and what justice means to me – never having known justice itself”. Horan, like Plato, is “no relativist” and believes “there is justice itself”. But, he asks, “could we even discuss that?”
Plato throws down a challenge to us all. And his work poses a specific challenge to the media, or to a columnist such as me. Where is the scope for free and open-ended public debate about the nature of justice in a media landscape of social memes and viral videos? Or where political interviews hop from Gaza to the housing crisis to keepie-uppies to keep our dopamine-addled brains engaged?
If the media, old and new, can’t create the space for Socratic dialogue then we must ask whether it is part of the problem. To echo Plato, via Horan, could we even discuss that?
The Dialogues of Plato, a new translation by David Horan, can be read free online or purchased in a two-volume print edition at platonicfoundation.org
