Abstract
Greek literature prior to Plato featured two conceptions of education. Learning takes place when people encounter “teacher-guides”—educators, mentors, and advisors. But education also occurs outside of a pedagogical relationship between learner and teacher-guide: people learn through painful experience. In composing his dramatic dialogues, Plato appropriated these two conceptions of education, refashioning and fusing them to present a new philosophical conception of learning: Plato’s Socrates is a teacher-guide who causes his interlocutors to learn through suffering. Socrates, however, is not presented straightforwardly as a pedagogical success story. Socrates’ failures are, paradoxically, part of what makes him an ideal literary model for a philosophical teacher-guide. Plato requires his readers to question why Socrates’ interlocutors are not converted to philosophers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The New Platonism is not a unified movement but rather involves a general challenge to treating the dialogues as Plato’s attempt to convey settled doctrines (which can be sorted into different periods of writing). The New Platonism tends to view dramatic and literary elements as constitutive of Plato’s philosophy (2018, p.10).
Zamir (1999) is an exception and undertakes a project similar to mine in that he considers Plato’s use of the learning through suffering proverb. Zamir, however, is primarily interested in how this informed Plato’s use of the dialogue form. In contrast, I focus on how that proverb, as well as the conception of “teacher-guide,” was appropriated and adapted in the conception of philosophical education in Plato’s corpus.
Regardless of the word used to describe them, in the Greek literature preceding Plato, many individuals were recognized to have an important educational influence. My use of “teacher-guide” reflects that the concept was inchoate.
Homer mentions Cheiron as Achilles’ teacher only at Iliad 11.832. Vase paintings survive that depict Achilles and Cheiron together, and literary sources connecting them prior to Plato include, among others, Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, fr. 68, Pindar, Pythian Ode 6. 19 ff & Nemean Ode 3.43 ff. Plato mentions the connection (Republic 391c & Hippias Minor 371d) as does his contemporary Xenophon (On Hunting,1.3-4). Later sources (around the first or second century CE) continued to emphasize the connection. See, for example, Apollodorus, The Library, III.13.6 and Statius’ unfinished Achilleid.
On these advisors, see Shapiro (1994).
Justina Gregory (2018) argues that the teachers of Greek literature offer injunctions, general reflections, and exemplary tales.
That justice leads to learning through suffering was also central to Hesiod’s treatment of the idea in Works and Days (218, mentioned above).
As K. J. Dover’s put it, “Zeus has so constructed the universe (denying man prescience as he once denied him fire) that we cannot understand whether we are taking the right course of action until we have experienced the consequences of that course” (1973, p. 63; emphasis in original).
H.D.F. Kitto opts for this third option and says of Zeus’s new law: “How was this new? We cannot imagine that under his predecessors men learned without suffering; Aeschylus did not believe in a past Golden Age. The only interpretation is that under the earlier gods man suffered but did not learn; nothing came of hard experience. This is what the poet commemorates here; under the reign of Zeus, learning, progress, become possible” (1939/2011, p. 60).
Dionysus’ chastisement Cadmus and Agavē might strike the audience as unfair because, unlike Pentheus, they both welcomed Dionysus and joined the religious rituals that honor him. It seems, however, that they are stand-ins for the general contempt that the city had showed Dionysus’ mother (a Theban) when she claimed that she bore Zeus’ child.
Plato treated the definition of “teacher” as a philosophical question requiring investigation (especially through Socrates’ denial of teaching in Apology and the discussion of what it means to teach and learn in Meno). Plato’s Clitophon recognizes the challenge of describing Socrates’ students. He says they are “contemporaries [hēlikiōtōn] and fellow-desirers [sunepithumētōn] or pupils [hetairōn], or whatever their relationship to him is to be called” (Clitophon, 408c, in Slings, 1999). I discuss the historical context for Socrates’ denial in Mintz (2014).
In the Seventh Letter, Plato writes that Socrates’ fate was one that, “he, of all men, least deserved” (7.325c). Whether Plato authored the Seventh Letter—and Alcibiades I, which I also discuss in this essay—has been the subject of scholarly debate, though I tend to be persuaded by the arguments in favor of authenticity. Translations to works of Plato are from Plato 1997 unless noted otherwise.
Elsewhere, Socrates tells Crito that he is interested in studying with the sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, but that they would not be eager to take old men as pupils. So, Socrates proposes to Crito that they should take his “sons as bait to catch them… their desire to get the boys will make them give us lessons too” (Euthydemus 272d).
Education under Cheiron was not depicted as pleasant by Statius in his unfinished Achilleid. However, he was writing much later (the first century CE) and probably reflects education of his own era, which was routinely portrayed as harsh. Additionally, he may have cast Achilles’ education in such a way to celebrate how he overcame great hardships and challenges (2.96 ff.).
Plato describes testing Syracuse’s tyrant, Dionysius, similarly: “You must picture to such men the extent of the undertaking, describing what sort of inquiry it is, with how many difficulties it is beset, and how much labor it involves” (Letter 7.340b-c).
After he has entered the conversation about justice, Thrasymachus says to Socrates that he can present a better definition of justice than anyone has offered. Thrasymachus then asks, “what would you deserve then [ti axiois pathein]?” Pathein means “deserve” in the legal sense of suffering or incurring a penalty. Socrates responds, “What else than the appropriate penalty [paschein] for one who doesn’t know, namely to learn [mathein] from the one who does know? Therefore, that’s what I deserve.” Thrasymachus responds, “You amuse me, but in addition to learning [mathein], you must pay a fine [apoteison argurion].” James Adam notes that Socrates’ play on the pathein mathein association in this specific judicial sense of mathein is the reason that Thrasymachus says that he’s “amused” by Socrates. See James Adam (1902).
I discuss Plato’s educational images at greater length in Mintz (2018).
In this quote, I translated philosophia logōn as “philosophical discourse” rather than “by philosophy.”
Since Plato describes the distress Socrates causes his interlocutors as painful and analogous to women’s pains of labor, I use “pain” and “suffering” to describe the range of adverse emotional experiences that Socrates’ interlocutors undergo in conversation with him. I make the case elsewhere (Mintz 2017) that educational theorists have too often failed to recognize a broad array of students’ unpleasant experiences as painful and that such dismissal can be detrimental to students.
Zamir writes: “For the souls of future humans, pain is, therefore, always around: it initially motivates the ascent, is continuously felt during the climb, and is only momentarily relieved during the soul’s encounter with knowledge” (1999, p. 84).
See Nails (2002) for an overview of the characters I describe in this paragraph and related sources.
On Glaucon’s likely association with the Thirty, see Howland (2018).
I gratefully acknowledge the reports of the anonymous reviewers of this paper, one of whom offered several pages of both substantive and minor challenges. Addressing those challenges helped me improve this paper immensely.
References
Adam, James. 1902. The Republic of Plato. Cambridge University Press.
Aeschylus. 2008. Aeschylus: Vols 1 & 2. Trans. A.H. Sommerstein. Harvard University Press.
Blondell, Ruby. 2002. The play of character in Plato’s dialogues. Cambridge University Press.
Cannatella, H. J. 2006. Plato and Aristotle’s educational lessons from the Iliad. Paideusis 15 (2): 5–13.
Corey, David D. 2015. The Sophists in Plato’s dialogues. SUNY Press.
Dover, K. J. 1973. Some Neglected Aspects of Agamemnon’s Dilemma. The Journal of Hellenic Studies 93: 58–69.
Euripides. 2002. Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus. Ed. And trans. David Kovacs. Harvard University Press.
Gregory, Justina. 2018. Cheiron’s Way: Youthful Education in Homer and Tragedy. Oxford University Press.
Homer. 1999. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray and revised by William, F. Wyatt. The Loeb classical library, Vol. 1 & 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Howland, Jacob. 2008. Plato’s ‘Apology’ as Tragedy. The Review of Politics 70 (4): 519–546.
Howland, Jacob. 2018. Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books.
Hunter, Richard. 2012. Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: The Silent Stream. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jaeger, Werner. 1945. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. I, 2nd ed. Trans. G Highet. Oxford University Press.
Janaway, Christopher. 1998. Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts. Oxford University Press.
Kamtekar, Rachana. 2008. Plato on education and art. In The Oxford Handbook of Plato (ed. Gail Fine), 336 – 59.
Kitto, H. D. F. 1939/2011. Greek Tragedy: A literary study. (NY: Routledge.
McCoy, Marina. 2007. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge University Press.
Mintz, Avi I. 2010. “Chalepa Ta Kala,” “Fine Things are Difficult”: Socrates’ Insights into the Psychology of Teaching and Learning. Studies in Philosophy of Education, 29 (3), 287–299.
Mintz, Avi I. 2011. “Four Educators in Plato's Theaetetus.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45 (4), 657–673.
Mintz, Avi I. 2014. Why did Socrates Deny that he was a Teacher? Locating Socrates among the new educators and the traditional education in Plato’s Apology of Socrates. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46 (7), 735–747.
Mintz, Avi I. 2017. Pain and education. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, (pp. 344–353). Ed. Jennifer Corns. Routledge.
Mintz, Avi I. 2018. Plato: Images, aims, and practices of education. Springer.
Nails, Debra. 2002. The people of Plato: a prosopography of Plato and other Socratics. Hackett Publishing.
Nails, Debra. 2015. Five Platonic Characters. In Plato’s Styles and Characters, Gabriele Cornelli, ed. (pp, 297–316). De Gruyter.
Nightingale, Andrea. 1995. Genres in dialogue: Plato and the construct of philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
Nightingale, Andrea. 2021. Philosophy and Religion in Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge University Press.
Ovid. 2005. Metamorphoses. Trans. C. Martin. W. W. Norton.
Plato. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Eds. J. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. Hackett.
Press, Gerald A. 2018. The State of the Question in the Study of Plato: Twenty Year Update. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56 (1): 9–35.
Scolnicov, Samuel. 1988. Plato's Metaphysics of Education. London and New York: Routledge.
Sophocles. 1994. Sophocles I & Sophocles II. Trans. & ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Loeb Classical Library Vols. 20 & 21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shapiro, Susan O. 1994. Learning through Suffering: Human Wisdom in Herodotus. The Classical Journal 89 (4): 349–355.
Slings, S. R. 1999. Plato: Clitophon, Edited with Introduction, Translation and Commentary. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, (37).
Smith, Richard. 2018. The Ancient Quarrel and the Dream of Writing. Journal of Philosophy of Education 52: 592–608.
Xenophon. 2014. Memorabilia. Trans. Amy L. Bonnette. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Zamir, Tzachi. 1999. The Face of Truth. Metaphilosophy 30 (1/2): 79–94.
Zuckert, Catherine. H. 2009. Plato’s philosophers: the coherence of the dialogues. University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mintz, A.I. Plato, the Poets, and the Philosophical Turn in the Relationship Between Teaching, Learning, and Suffering. Stud Philos Educ 41, 259–271 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09823-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09823-x