Playing With Plato: Lectures available online

Two lectures by College Fellow Professor Malcolm Schofield, which show how the Greeks used ideas about infancy and childhood to discuss human nature, are now available to hear again online.

When Ancient Greek Philosophers wanted to examine the human condition, they often began by contemplating the way in which a young child might see the world, and the toys and games with which they play.

In this year’s Gray lectures at the Faculty of Classics, Malcolm Schofield, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s, explored how and why Greek philosophers found childhood “good to think with”. Together, the two talks, which can be heard below, show how we can get closer to some of the key ideas in Ancient Greek thought by examining problems and analogies about childhood that concerned some of the great Hellenistic philosophers, among them Heraclitus and Plato.

Although the Ancient Greeks are sometimes portrayed as having had a dismissive view of children as smaller and less-satisfactory versions of adults, this is a rather sweeping and misrepresentative judgement. Many thinkers in ancient Greece were concerned with key questions about human nature, such as whether we have a fundamentally ethical orientation  or whether our most powerful motivations are irrational, and this led to different judgements about how such characteristics emerge when we are very young. In his first lecture, Professor Schofield shows how there was considerable debate over how and at what stage babies developed moral judgement, whether this was the design of nature, and whether they were self-aware from the start.

Epicurean thinkers saw it as human nature from the moment a child entered the world to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Stoics, on the other hand, argued that the seeking of pleasure was a spin-off from a more fundamental impulse to self-preservation that suggested even a newborn child was self-aware. Plato had a different view again. He paints a picture of the immortal soul, itself rational and pure, at odds with the disordered body to which it is bound in life. Humanity was, Plato suggested, flawed from the outset – and education and development a means of restoring the soul to its original, controlling function.

Like infancy, childhood and play also fascinated many early Greek thinkers. In his second lecture, Professor Schofield shows how Heraclitus, for instance, presented children’s play as an analogy of the way in which adults, too, lead their lives, suggesting that we retain a capacity to make disordered and unpredictable moves which creates patterns of spontaneity in the adult world similar to those of a children’s game. It is the child within us that is in control of our lives.

In a set of conclusions that almost sound pessimistic, Plato meanwhile saw people as playthings of the Gods. Ultimately, his assessment challenges our presuppositions about what really is important in the adult world by blurring the boundaries between that which is serious and that which is play. Dance and song, above all in worship of the Gods, were Plato’s prime examples. “Most of us engage in activities that share those features of Platonic ‘serious play’,” Schofield suggests; “activities that take us out of ourselves and ordinary human concern, and to something that, so long as we are absorbed in it, has an order and rhythm and alternative focus that is more worthwhile, yet still, in a way, more playful than anything else we do.”

The Gray lectures have run annually since 1928 and are named after the Reverend Joseph Henry Gray, former Vice-President of Queens’ College, honorary canon of Peterborough, and author of several translations of Roman comedies. Gray’s only condition on his endowment of the lecture series was that they should cover topics “not normally lectured on in the Faculty”.

Most Gray lecturers are invited from other Universities, and Professor Schofield was the first since 1983 to give the lectures while a current member of the Faculty at Cambridge itself. He has been a leading figure in Classics for over 40 years, having taught at Cornell, Oxford and Cambridge, and is the author of several books on ancient Greek philosophy. He has been a Fellow of St John’s since 1972, and has served as Praelector, Dean, Tutor and President of the College.