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SO_SUE_ME

                                             March 13, 2022

From the golden age of "crookedtimber.org",
in Febrary 2016...

http://crookedtimber.org/2016/02/09/socrates-as-mary-sue/#comment-658419

Belle Warring, in "Socrates as Mary Sue":                MARY_SUE

    "Socrates is a giant Mary Sue philosopher
    character for Plato. Lucky in his choice of
    interlocutors, pleasantly unsurprised when he
    elicits geometry from slave boys, the object of
    unreturned sexual affection from the hottest
    guy in Athens, an initiate into a variety of
    mysteries he can only allude to because
    reasons... like I say, he's a dream come
    true. A dream Plato can conveniently claim came
    true in such a way as to validate everything
    Plato believes? Like many a young philosopher I
    turned away from philosophy as an undergraduate
    just because Socrates was so damn annoying."


Neville Morley on February 9, 2016:

    "My reading, of Walton, Plato, Xenophon and
    Renault, is that the wish-fulfillment is to be
    acknowledged as a close companion, to get to
    discuss philosophy with Socrates rather than to
    be Socrates, to be allowed to travel with
    him. Socrates is actually Gandalf."


burritoboy steps up to the defense on February 10,2016:

    "What this discussion shows is that Plato has
    a different conception of philosophy than
    analytic philosophers do. Worse, the analytic
    philosophers don't understand that they are
    themselves making a lot of assumptions about
    what philosophy is. Many of the respondents
    here don't seem to realize what your
    assumptions are, and are faulting Plato (more
    broadly, you guys are in truth faulting all
    of, or much of, of classical philosophy)
    without working to understand what philosophic
    dialogues might be up to."

That makes a lot of assumptions of it's own.

That analytic philosophers are unaware of
their assumptions seems like a stretch, and
that the audience at crookedtimber is
unwilling to engage seriously with Plato
little more than an empty insult.

But the idea that there's some non-analytic
point to Plato I've missed sounds worth
pursuing so I perservered with "burritoboy":

    Plato was writing something new: the dialogues
    are something like plays, but at the same time
    they are not plays.

Well, yeah.

    That is, Plato's dialogues (and the rest of
    the dialogue writers of the early Socratic
    circle like Xenophon and Aeschines of
    Sphettus) inhabit some sort of genre we still
    really don't have a conception for.

Except that we've all read a bunch of Plato, and
our name for this genre is "philosophic dialog".

    What this seems to indicate is that how
    a Platonic dialogue operates is--
    intentionally-- entirely different from
    how a treatise or essay operates.

    That most (but not all) of Socrates'
    interlocutors advance mediocre to bad
    arguments isn't Plato loading the deck
    for Socrates. Much of the time Socrates
    doesn't "win" anything, and only
    sometimes offers a concrete conclusion
    of his own.

Well yeah.  Myself I find Socrates so slippery
he doesn't seem to have *said* very much.
And when he *does* present conclusions they
often seem ridiculous on the face of it.           But then, maybe I'm
                                                   missing the funny part.
Then burritoboy goes on to remind that
Socrates faces a tragic end, unlike the
stereotypical Mary Sue. Further:

    The intellectual weakness of many of Socrates'
    interlocutors isn't, I think, a stacking of the
    deck against them. Their intellectual weakness
    usually points to problems or flaws within
    their own psychologies and characters that
    prevent them from being stronger adversaries.

    The point of many of the dialogues seems much
    less to convince us of some particular
    conclusion but rather to guide us into doing
    the work of philosophy ourselves alongside of
    the written work. Lots of people have made this
    point before, but: the dialogue form forces the
    reader to think in ways that are different than
    the treatise or essay.

    Dialogues where two philosophers (or let's just
    say, two extremely adept thinkers) converse
    would be beside the point ...

I think you could argue this the other way, that
Socrates is like a prize-fighter continually set-up
against little kids, a gun fighter firing on plough
boys.

In his defense, burritoboy looks at things
from the viewpoint of a Plato, trying to keep
the memory of Socrates alive--

That is another point that seems to undercut
the defense: Plato is indulging in
hero-worship, which may very well incline him
to "stacking the deck".



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