The Compleat Plato
Or why you should consider trying to read all of an author's work
An increasingly public lament has been heard in recent years about the decline of the practice of reading whole books. From the college level down, teachers are assigning fewer books and in many school, only excerpts. There are a variety of of diagnoses offered for the cause for this, ranging from concerns about accessibility, to a declining interest in the classics, to the ubiquitous use of AI for homework and assignments. For the fullest account I’ve yet found of what has happened, look to Adam Walker’s series of articles on the decline of the Humanities.
I happen to teach at a school that is emphatic about assigning whole books, and my students know that they will be expected to read a minimum of 20-30 pages a week in English. A no-cell phone policy and strictly controlled tech use has played a part in allowing this to work, but above all, this amount of reading has been sustained through cultivating commitment in the school to a culture of learning for its own sake.
As an aside, the effects of the cell phone ban have been fascinating to watch. By the end of the first semester, recess had begun to look more like it did a decade ago, with pickup basketball and football games forming in the common areas. By the end of the first year, I saw multiple students reading novels, both assigned and freely chosen, on the lawns.
Reading whole books provides vital nourishment for the soul. The old books are tough, meaty, chewy, and full of bones. Reading them is certainly more likely to cause us to raise our hackles, compared to watered down textbooks or excerpts from texts deemed too challenging for the common reader. Yet this is exactly the benefit they provide— they shake us out of our stupor, reminding us of the prejudices of our own age and others, while asking us to chew through to the enduring, nourishing truths.
I wish to go further than suggesting that we read whole books, which is doubtless an important step. I once had a remarkable professor who urged us all to read at least one author’s complete works, and suggested Keats for this purpose due to his comparatively small oeuvre. There are several reasons for doing this. My professor noted that such an exercise reveals that an author, particularly a “great” author, is inconsistent, and at times downright bad, helping us to overcome any tendency to unhealthy idolization. On the other hand,such a reading is bound to uncover forgotten and overlooked gems. This practice allows for a sense of wholeness unmatched by reading only the most well known pieces.
This year, I finally began to overcome my youthful, scattershot approach to reading which consisted of romping in the fields of literature and indulging intellectual passions in a decidedly dilettantish fashion. I settled on the idea of reading through all of Plato, and began the project in June. I’ve paced myself by keeping the Complete Works by my bedside table and reading a few pages a day, mostly in the evenings. It does not interfere with my other reading, and I do not expect much from the exercise. I’ve been slowly rereading many familiar pieces and I’ve reached Book II of The Republic, which means I’m over halfway through. This is not to brag, but merely to encourage others to try something similar. I hope that by sharing a few observations of things I’ve found, you might be inspired to pick up an author’s complete works.
To that end, here are a few of the things I’ve found:
In Statesman I was surprised to find a condensed summary of the main points of Republic which might serve as a good introduction to Plato’s political thought. I also found myself pondering the reason for why Plato never wrote the third dialogue in the series, which starts with Sophist, and ought to have been titled Philosopher. Perhaps the other Platonic dialogues, with their sustained portrait of Socrates are meant to serve in place of this dialogue, or perhaps it was intentionally omitted and is meant to be reconstructed in outline by the reader.
In Laches, Socrates pursues a definition of manliness and courage while in conversation with a general with whom he marched in retreat during the Peloponesian war, an account that seems to pair with that of Alcibiades at the end of Symposium. It leaves a reader wondering why Socrates is only ever portrayed in war while running away from battle, particularly in a dialogue about courage.
In Cratylus I found Plato’s thoughts on language. A difficult and often neglected dialogue, Cratylus found renewed attention during the early years of analytic philosophy. The dialogue traces many crucial words back to either rhei (ῥεῖ)) which means something like flow and is supremely significant to the philosopher Heraclitus, or ōn (ὤν), meaning being. Socrates speaks in strikingly humorous ways, poking fun at the whole process of using etymology to do philosophy, while, in my view, challenging Pre-Socratic notions of ontology by way of the difficulties raised by language when considering the universe as pure becoming.
As is to be expected, I also read several spurious dialogues, which have had significant historical impact and are included in the Hackett edition of the complete works. Alcibiades, due to its emphasis on self-cultivation, was long esteemed an ideal introduction to philosophy for centuries. It is short, very readable, and only left unread due to the belief since the 19th century that it is not by Plato.
Perhaps most interesting of all was Clitophon, a possibly spurious dialogue in which Socrates is the antagonist. He merely spouts an exhortation to virtue before being thoroughly out-argued by a young man named Clitophon, who has come to dislike Socrates for having been unable to satisfy his craving for virtue. Socrates is accused of being only able to stimulate the desire for it, while being ultimately unable to provide it. According to the scholar D.S. Hutchison, there is a good chance that the dialogue is authentic, which could suggest that Plato ultimately rejected the Socratic path as a dead-end and sided with the rhetoricians.
I hope that these few notes on three seasons worth of reading inspire you to pick an author and read everything they wrote, a little bit at a time.
A typical ancient Greek battle had vastly disproportionate causalities on the losing side, because most of them were inflicted after that side broke, and in the pursuit.
Retreating in good order in the face of superior forces has been called the most difficult maneuver in warfare, and it's particularly hard when the other men have been routed.
One notes that he and his companion got away without trouble when there were two of them, both alert. That alone was enough to dissuade pursuers from attack.
Christopher Alexander, the professor of architecture, has a wonderful line--"making wholes heals the maker." I think something similar must be true of reading. It does something good for the soul, to read the complete works of another human being, to really master his works until you can almost think his thoughts and anticipate what he would say on a given topic and even how he would say it. Though the caveat should probably be added that the person ought to be a wise and righteous man. It might not do to dwell in the complete works of Sartre or Chernyshevsky.