I love reading Plato. I laugh. I chuckle. I get frustrated. I sit and stare. Occasionally, I nap.
I find Plato so profound and inspiring. I love reading his works so much that I seem to subconsciously try to replicate it. That's a booboo. Plato wrote in such a way that ten lines of his can inspire ten pages and more from each of dozens (and quite probably hundreds) of authors. I aspire to be like that. But is that right of me?
Philosophy has some responsibility to adapt with the society in which it is practised. Ours just doesn't seem to want to dig for wisdom. It wants proofs and explicit statements. Professional philosophy is very estranged from popular society. It is deemed dry, bland, and confusing. The best efforts to make an argument flow logically are thwarted by the need to over explain each term to defend from arguments. And why does it need to?
Are arguments really used to advance the discipline, or to thwart another argument in some grand rat race to be right? I really hope it is the former. I'm not convinced though. So back to Plato: how do we enthral people like he did? How do we write to inspire one-hundred fold the ideas we create?
I do not pretend to know the answer. I do, however, know that there needs to be a reckoning between clarity and form: argumentation and pursuit of wisdom
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