The Book I Shouldn’t Have Needed

What I found inside Plato’s complete works at fifteen

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

I started being interested in philosophy when I was a teenager. Because I intended to do things right, I believed it would be best to start at the “beginning” of philosophy itself. So one day, I grabbed some of my pocket money and I bought Plato’s complete works. It was all in a single volume. A big book, impossible to handle and doomed to rest on knees or tables to be read.

The book had everything. It was hardcover, contained every dialogue or piece of writing by Plato, organized in alphabetical order, and contained summaries for every book. It was more than I expected.

With this book my self teaching began. And by the time I read the third book, I started to feel a little angry. And slowly, as I started to move across the volume, I felt like school had failed me.

The Symposium was a tipping point. Isn’t it true that love is a rather universal subject? As a teenager, heartbreak was right around the corner, wasn’t it? So, I thought, why do I have to wait for a random book to have a proper “talk” about the nature of love? Why are we prioritizing organic chemistry and geography essays over a feeling that will create and take lives?

It didn’t fair that the first true form of critical thinking education came from a book that I just randomly picked. It didn’t seem fair that The Republic was the first instance of reflexion about democracy, justice and equality. It didn’t seem just that the book that initiated me to these questions was sitting in numerous libraries, but was gathering dust while students were fed knowledge that felt too random to be useful.

The real failure wasn’t school’s alone. There were questions I wouldn’t have asked my parents either. It’s not that they were unavailable or unwilling th have “the talk”, but because some questions feel too naked to ask the people who are busy seeing you as their child. Love, desire, death, there is a role being played on both sides of that table, and a fifteen year old asking what is Eros, actually punctures something that feels… unbearable to puncture.

The book was safer. It didn’t look back at me.

There was something else. The Symposium is one of the most respectable texts in the western canon. You could leave it on the table. My parents could see it. And yet inside it, men were discussing desire while getting drunk, and with a frankness that nothing had prepared me for. I could read about Eros without the fear of blushing. Everything shifts when desire is not a sin but a something worthy of discussion.

There were men, drinking and talking somewhere 2,000 years ago that were trying to put words on something that was tearing me apart.

I didn’t know then where that door would lead. That years later it would let other authors (among which Georges Bataille) pass through. That the permission Plato gave me, to think about desire, transgression, death as legitimate objects of thought, would eventually extend my desire for knowledge and thought experiments.

Partly because of old Plato, I wasn’t at peace with what school was actually for. I wasn’t fine with the fact that school wasn’t for the trembling, confused, heartbroken person sitting at the desk. School is for producing someone legible to the economy. Someone who can perform tasks, meet deadlines, file things correctly. These are not useless skills by any means. But they are not the skills you need at fifteen when you are trying to understand why people leave each other, why democracies fail, what you owe to the people around you, whether death should change how you live today.

School has a curriculum. The curriculum has goals. The goals have nothing to do with the examined life. It didn’t seem to care about my fear of becoming.

And the strange thing is that everyone knows this. Teachers know it. Parents know it. The students sitting in rows, watching the clock, know it. I should have known it too. There is a collective agreement to pretend that this preparation for legibility is also a preparation for living. That the skills will eventually transfer. That somewhere between the organic chemistry and the geography essay, you will quietly figure out how to be a person.

As if straight A’s and a fancy car detained some mystical inner logic, some sort of automatic enlightenment. As if it made any sense at all that youngsters where contemplating suicide because of a heartbreak while the main focus of a correct education was arithmetics and physics.

But school doesn’t actually have to do anything. Most of us figure it out through other means. Through heartbreak itself, which is a brutal teacher. Through friendships that break and reform. Through books we find on our own, with our own money, for our own reasons, with no one telling us they matter.

The difference is that some of us find Plato first. And Plato, whatever his failures, had the decency to take the questions seriously.

I still have the book.

It sits where all of my big books sit, on top of other books, too unwieldy to file properly, and ironically gathering dust. I have since built serious disagreements with Plato. His politics are authoritarian. His ideal city would have no place for poets. His theory of love, followed to its conclusion, evaporates the body entirely in favor of abstraction. I have spent years reading people who argued against him, around him, despite him.

And yet sometimes I pick it up and read a few pages with something that can only be described as tenderness. Something closer to what you feel toward the person who first took your questions seriously, even if their answers turned out to be wrong.

I’m not angry anymore. I’ve grown. I can’t ask for something to be what I can’t be.

It still strikes me as strange, and a little sad, that the first person to take my questions seriously had been dead for two thousand years.

Thank you for reading.