In the Republic, Plato says philosophy education shouldn’t start until age 30. I’ve long worried about Plato’s concern about providing young people with tools that, absent intellectual and moral maturity, can just as well be used for sophistry.
Exegetically, however, I think I was missing an important point: Plato is talking about his utopian society, where one can (supposedly) count on society raising the young person to practice the virtues and live by the truth (except for the noble lie). We do not live in such a society. It could well be the case that in our society, young people need the tools.
We might make a judgment like this. Absent the tools of a philosophical education, an intelligent young person set afloat on the currents of our society maybe is 50% likely to be led astray by these currents. The tools are unreliable especially in the hands of the young: perhaps the tools have a 65% chance of leading to the right and 35% of leading to ill. That’s still better than letting the young person navigate society without the tools. But if our society were better—as Plato thinks is the case in his Republic—then the unreliable tools might be worse than just letting society form one.
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Plato might also be using Socrates’s argument in the Republic as an implicit dialectical point against Callicles. In the Gorgias, Callicles says that he approves of young people engaging in philosophy the same way that he approves of children playing and speaking haltingly. Older men who engage in philosophy should be flogged, just as older men who play and speak haltingly should be flogged (485b–c). (Personally, I would not care to have lunch with someone who finds that argument persuasive.) Insisting that philosophy is dangerous for people under 30 to engage in philosophy could be a way of shocking us out of thinking about philosophy as a kind of game or sparring match.
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