I love Plato—platonically, of course.

Plato could have staked his reputation on being an enormously talented writer, and he would have secured immortal fame. But no, he had to add brilliance to style.

What Plato had that almost all of his successors lacked was a genuine love for the pursuit of knowledge, irrespective of the possibility of its attainment.The Symposium is a perfect monument to this idea. The guests all have different ideas, different styles, and different sensibilities, and all work towards the truth of the matter from different directions. Almost two thousand years later, John Milton summed up this principle rather nicely in his defense of free speech:

“And though the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

Because of the spirit of Socratic enquiry, Plato’s dialogues are valuable even (or especially) when we disagree with his conclusions. At the end of this book, Plato seems to advocate a kind of mysticism that reminds me a bit of Sufi poetry—a sort of erotic love-affair with the divine. But for anyone who has actually been in love, I suspect Aristophanes’s speech will seem much closer to the truth.

Regardless, what Plato does miraculously well is to orient us towards problems of intimidating difficulty and perennial relevance. This is why his dialogues are evergreen. Even if these problems were conclusively solved, it would not do to just give the answer to children like a multiplication table. It is rather like Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the answer (42) is meaningless when you don’t know the steps that lead up to it.

So read, I say. Read, ponder, and pose your own solution.