Is Philosophy Like Boxing or Chaplaincy?
Socrates, Plato and Agnes Callard
Are two philosophers better than one? Or perhaps too many philosophers spoil the discursive broth?
Agnes Callard notes in her conversation with me that in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates never talks to the same person more than once. Each dialogue features a different interlocutor or set of interlocutors. This is curious. Why not write a series in which Socrates and Gorgias go at it over and over? Why are all Socratic dialogues one-offs? Isn’t real life about building trust over time? How deep can you really go from philosophically speed dating?
Callard’s claim is that Plato’s intent is to describe the birth of philosophy, and that the variety of conversation partners points to Socrates’s virtue in showing how philosophy can be done with anyone—from young to old, slave to celebrity. There are no optimal social conditions for the origin of philosophy, other than a willingness to be put through the Socratic method. Socrates doesn’t say that he can only philosophize with people who are smart, or good, or curious. His power is in drawing philosophy out of others.
In contemporary coaching-speak, we might say that Socrates adopts a “by me” attitude rather than a “to me” one. He does not blame his environment for the lack of philosophy, but instead alters his environment to be in alignment with his own need to philosophize.
Still, I wonder would the Socratic effort be better or worse if Socrates met his intellectual equal or even superior? What would it have looked like for Socrates to talk to Descartes or Kant or Heidegger? Or Aristotle? That Plato does not give us dialogues between Plato and Socrates suggests that, at least from Plato’s point of view, such a meeting of the minds may be less compelling—at least in dialogue form—than Socrates and other non-philosophers. That the more interesting thing is how Socrates handles the poet or the rhetorician than how he handles the acolyte, the person already converted to philosophy.
Another way to think about it is that Plato wrote dialogues in such a way that he concealed himself in each dialogue. Each interlocutor is in fact a kind of Platonic mask and every dialogue really is a dialogue between Socrates and Plato.
In sports, we like watching two excellent people compete. But in other endeavors, like chaplaincy, the notion that a chaplain might only succeed with a patient who is excellent in some way strikes us as absurd. The whole point of chaplaincy is to accompany the suffering person no matter what.
So another way to ask the question: Should philosophy be more like boxing or more like chaplaincy? Do philosophical dialogues get better with greater talent and greater reciprocity? Or is philosophical dialogue, by design, the art of making the other into a philosopher?
P.S.—A very happy 30th birthday to one of my dedicated readers, Alex Duffant. May you grow in your learning and love of thinking.