ACASTOS nodding, softly

Yes.

ANTAGORAS

I never heard such high–minded rubbish! And I don’t like this talk about ‘the soul’!

PLATO

Well, the psyche then, a perfectly good Greek word!

ANTAGORAS

You mean we stop being individual people and vanish into a golden haze?

PLATO

No! We become individual people, and stop being self–absorbed mucky dreamers!

ACASTOS

Mucky dreamers –

PLATO

We become more real –

TIMONAX

You say ‘love good’. How do we find out what is good?

PLATO

All truth–seeking teaches that, everybody knows something about it really –

SOCRATES

You connect goodness with truth–seeking and knowledge. But mightn’t we just be idle spectators of what we know, why should it affect what we do?

PLATO

That’s where love and desire come in, what Acastos left out. Think of what learning something is like, something difficult like mathematics. You know how that feels when you’re trying so hard to see something which isn’t yourself, something else. You forget yourself. All your being and emotions are involved in trying to understand, and that’s the sort of desire that actions come out of too, when you can’t help responding because you really care.

SOCRATES

You choose an intellectual example, but it needn’t be intellectual learning, it could be a craft.

PLATO

Almost anything – like carpentry – when the carpenter begins to understand, to see, to learn some mathematics. [ turning to Antagoras ]That’s deep.

SOCRATES

Or learning about other people, you do what’s right when you’ve forgotten yourself and really understand them.

PLATO

Learning other people, that’s much harder. What’s easiest is – is beauty – when you see beautiful things and just want them to exist outside, in themselves, so that you can love them and understand them. Beauty is a clue, it’s the nearest thing, it’s the only spiritual thing we love by instinct –

ANTAGORAS

What’s all this got to do with religion?

PLATO

It is religion and it’s happening all the time. If it’s not everywhere, in the air we breathe, it isn’t what I mean. If it’s something whose non–existence is possible it isn’t what I mean! It’s to do with life being a whole and not a lot of random choices. Religion must be proved by the whole of life, it isn’t a sort of oddity or side issue or one choice among others, it isn’t weird like magic. If it’s anything it must be everything, it must be proved by loving people and learning things and looking at things. It’s not abstract, it’s all here. It’s not retiring from the world, it’s knowing the world, the real world, this world as it really is, in all its – details –

TIMONAX

You mean everything, bits of hair, and mud, and dirt, and fleas and – ?

PLATO [ after a moment ] Yes.

SOCRATES

But what about this ‘learning other people’, which is so difficult, and so important?

PLATO

Yes, we seem to be naturally good about beauty and bad about people