The Friendship Beyond Time | Can You Be Friends With Plato? THE APOSTATE PORJECT (Episode 4)

The Unique Friendship

Plato cannot know you. He cannot miss you, disagree with what you said yesterday or invite you for wine. And yet a dead philosopher can become one of the most intimate intellectual companions of your life.

There are friendships built almost entirely from proximity. You grow up on the same street, work in the same building, drink in the same bar, complain about the same people and slowly accumulate enough shared history that the relationship becomes part of the architecture of your life. Then there are stranger relationships, built less from shared time than from recognition. Someone writes a sentence centuries before you are born, you encounter it at precisely the right moment, and suddenly a person who never knew your name begins to influence what you believe about love, death, courage, politics or yourself.

For years I imagined meeting Plato as one of the great impossible luxuries. I pictured a conversation in Athens, stripped of footnotes and scholarly mediation, where I could finally ask what he actually meant. Was Socrates speaking for him? Did he really believe the Forms existed as literally as later readers sometimes assumed? What did he think happened to the soul? Which of his arguments did he regard as provisional, and which did he consider non-negotiable? The fantasy was partly philosophical and partly childish: somewhere behind the surviving text there must be a person who could settle the ambiguity.

Then the fantasy began to change. I realized that what I valued in Plato was not mainly access to his biography. It was the fact that his questions had already entered my own thinking. I could disagree with him, return to him, become irritated with him, misunderstand him and discover ten years later that I had misunderstood him differently. That is not friendship in the ordinary reciprocal sense. Plato cannot know me. But the relationship is not nothing either.

Perhaps civilization contains a category of companionship for which ordinary vocabulary is too small.

The Friend Who Cannot Answer Back

Friendship normally implies reciprocity. Two people recognize one another, respond, remember shared experiences and can change the relationship through their actions. A dead author cannot do this. Marcus Aurelius cannot be disappointed in you. Dante cannot hear your objection. Plato cannot revise a sentence because you found the argument unconvincing.

This asymmetry matters because romanticizing the relationship too much turns literature into séance.

Yet reciprocity is not the only thing that gives another person a place in one’s life. We are also shaped by people whose influence is uneven, incomplete or temporally impossible. A teacher may transform a student while barely remembering them. An ancestor may influence a family through stories long after death. A composer can become emotionally central to someone born centuries later without ever having imagined that listener.

The relationship is real in consequence even when it is impossible in reciprocity.

Books make this form unusually intense because they preserve not merely facts about an author but organized acts of attention. A serious philosophical work allows us to follow distinctions, doubts, questions and attempts at resolution. We encounter not the mind itself, but traces of how a mind moved.

Over enough years, those traces can become familiar.

You begin to know where Plato will become suspicious of an easy definition. You recognize Marcus Aurelius returning to impermanence. You can almost feel Dante preparing to move a private emotion into a cosmic architecture.

The dead author becomes predictable in the intimate way living friends sometimes do.

What Reading Actually Preserves

It would be too easy to say that books preserve minds.

They do not.

A book preserves language arranged by a mind under particular circumstances. The surviving text is incomplete, edited by form, shaped by genre and separated from everything the writer never recorded. Even a diary is not a human being transferred onto paper.

But the limitation is part of what makes the phenomenon remarkable.

So little survives, and yet sometimes it is enough.

A few hundred pages can create an intellectual relationship lasting decades. A sentence can return at different ages and change meaning because the reader has changed. The same passage encountered at twenty, forty and seventy may become three different conversations.

The author remains fixed.

The friendship moves because the reader moves.

This is perhaps the fundamental difference between ordinary friendship and friendship across time. A living friend changes beside you. A dead thinker becomes a fixed point against which you discover your own changes.

At twenty you argue with Plato.

At forty you realize why he asked the question.

At sixty you may reject the answer for reasons your younger self could not have formulated.

Plato has not moved.

You have.

And somehow the relationship has still developed.

Some People Understand Us Before We Exist

There is a peculiar loneliness in discovering that someone long dead articulated something you had never managed to say yourself.

A sentence from Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius, Simone Weil or Dostoevsky can produce the uncanny feeling of recognition usually associated with friendship: someone else has been here.

The historical distance makes the experience stranger. The person belonged to another economy, another political order, perhaps another religion and another conception of the self. Yet a description of fear, vanity, grief or ambition reaches across those differences with almost embarrassing precision.

This does not prove that human nature is completely unchanged. Culture shapes experience deeply. But certain problems recur often enough that old texts remain emotionally legible.

Mortality has not become obsolete.

Jealousy has not been engineered away.

The desire for recognition still produces ridiculous behavior.

Power still changes people.

Love still creates irrational loyalties.

A dead writer can therefore feel unexpectedly contemporary because the technological environment changed faster than some of the questions carried by the human nervous system.

This may be why certain authors become companions rather than merely historical sources.

They are not useful because they were always right.

They are useful because they continue asking something we have not finished answering.

A Friendship Built From Disagreement

Real friendship is not constant admiration, and intellectual friendship should not be either.

There is a childish way of reading great thinkers in which every old sentence becomes wisdom simply because it survived. That turns the canon into an aristocracy of the dead.

A better relationship permits irritation.

Plato can be brilliant and wrong.

Marcus Aurelius can be useful and limited by his world.

Dante can create extraordinary intellectual architecture while carrying assumptions a modern reader may reject completely.

The ability to disagree may actually make the relationship more intimate.

You no longer approach the author as an oracle.

You approach them as a formidable interlocutor.

This is where the Apostate element matters. An apostate is not merely someone who abandons an old belief. More interestingly, the apostate is someone willing to remain in conversation after obedience has ended.

The intellectual friend does not require discipleship.

Perhaps the best evidence that Plato still matters is not that we repeat him.

It is that we still find him worth arguing with.

FAQ

Can you really be friends with Plato?

Not in the ordinary reciprocal sense. But a long relationship with his work can become a form of intellectual companionship that genuinely shapes a life.

Why does Plato work so well as an example?

Because his dialogues are designed around argument and questioning, making later readers feel less like passive recipients and more like participants in an unfinished conversation.

Can books preserve a person?

They can preserve parts of a person’s language, thought and influence, but not the complete person or demonstrated subjective consciousness.

Could AI make friendship with historical thinkers more realistic?

It could make interaction with their surviving ideas more conversational, but the result would still be a modern reconstruction rather than the historical person.

What is the deeper Transhumation idea?

Perhaps time separates bodies more completely than it separates participation.

The dead cannot become our contemporaries biologically.

But they can still become part of the society of our minds.

And sometimes a person who never knew we existed can nevertheless help us become someone they would have recognized.