Experience and Authority

I remember being in a college freshmen humanities class where we read some of the 'classics' and stuff by greek and roman philosophers. I remember overhearing a guy saying, with a tone of voice as though he were imparting some great revelatory wisdom upon the rest of us, something like:

You know, actually when you get into it, Plato was actually a pretty smart dude...
I'm not gonna do it justice, but he had basically discovered that if you start reading Plato with the expectation that maybe there was something in there worth paying attention to ( you know, maybe the same things that have been of interest to... all of western philosophy?) then you could find significance to what he was trying to say even if it just looks confusing at first.



Excuse me.
He was a college freshman... and he was going to accept and allow that Plato might have had some good ideas?


Please.



Maybe the confusing stuff was confusing not because Plato was writing popular gibberish but because there is actually something of substance that he just did not understand?

I am not suggesting that all authoritative things be blindly admired. I found myself disagreeing with much of what Plato described. But, when you've got someone with the kind of shaping-western-philosophy clout that Plato had (even if it all came from the Pythagoreans anyway), then there's probably something there worth paying attention to.




I am thinking of this memory because people do this all the time. Not just to Plato.