On Ritual and the Platonic Dialogue

What letters come right before P in the alphabet?

You sang it didn’t you? Or else you remembered it by metrical unit. It’s a pentaseme with a strong final syllable, if you want to know. It’s in your head because you learned the alphabet through semi-musical repetition, probably some time from before you have good episodic memory.

We learn by role and repetition. We do something over and over again until we can do it without thinking about each step in isolation. In this way the action itself enters into our body and remakes our sense of who we physically are. As I type this I’m not thinking about where each letter is on the keyboard (except when I misspell something). I’m just typing. I know how to do it.

Social interaction works like this too. When I meet a new person I smile and extend my hand to shake theirs. I ask their name. They do the same.

One of the words we have for this is ritual. Rituals can be highly elaborate, obviously, like the coronation of a new monarch. They can also be simple solitary actions: I make a pot of tea every morning.

It’s a broad category. We use the word itself to describe two big things: the spiritual and sacred actions that express the identity of religious and political communities, and (sometimes pejoratively) the compulsive and repetitive actions people take to regulate their behaviour in the world.

I’m one of those people who likes ritual a lot. I go to church nearly every day. I never skip a chance to sing Happy Birthday or For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. I go a bit crazy if I don’t chant for a few hours every week. I’ve read Robert’s Rules of Order back to back and try to get people to use it with me whenever we work together on a project big enough to justify it.

A good interpersonal ritual has a few characteristics: rote and role.

When we meet a new person we take on a role: I am a friend. I might not be your friend yet, but I am a friend, and I could be yours. I smile and extend my hand. Look, I want us to experience contact! I won’t hurt you.

We repeat it. The ritual of the smile and handshake gives us a script for a minute or so while we get our bearings with each other. We’re less anxious now. I’m a friend. You’re a friend. We could be each other’s friend.

This is the basis of all interpersonal knowledge transfer. We encode the information we want to pass on in some ritual format.

A more complicated way of explaining role and rote in ritual action is through the language of dramaturgy. We re-enact a scene together where each of us plays a character to create a story about what we’re doing. A professor shows up to class and says his lines, the students respond with the action appropriate to the characters they’re playing — they listen attentively, take notes, ask questions, write their papers afterwards.

I’m a playwright. And I’ve been working on a particular ritual approach to theatre that I want to explain in greater depth. But first, some ritual theory.

Émile Durkheim noticed something counterintuitive about ritual: it doesn’t express a community that already exists. Ritual is instead the constructive act of community. When the Aboriginal clans he studied through the reports of Spencer and Gillen gathered for their corroborees, with dancing, ochre, noise, fire, they weren’t celebrating a solidarity that was already in place. The gathering creates the solidarity. The ritual enacted the group into existence, and the signs and symbols it produced carried that enactment forward in time, making it available to be renewed.

He called the emotional peak of these gatherings collective effervescence: a heightened state produced by synchronized bodies doing the same thing at the same time. It tips over into something that feels transcendent, but Durkheim’s claim was flatly sociological: what feels like contact with the divine is contact with the group, which has become, in that moment, larger and more real than any individual member of it. The feeling is not illusory. Something real and social is happening.

The other key Durkheimian distinction is between the sacred and the profane. These are not moral categories: sacred doesn’t mean good, and profane doesn’t mean bad. They’re registers of experience. The sacred is what is set apart, treated differently, approached with a particular quality of attention. The profane is the ordinary, the everyday, the instrumental. Ritual is the technology of the threshold between them: it demarcates a different kind of time and space and signals to participants that what happens here is not quite like what happens out there.

Both of these ideas matter for what I want to argue. A performed dialogue creates collective effervescence — the particular buzz of a room full of people doing something together that requires them to be genuinely present to each other. And it is sacred in Durkheim’s technical sense: it is set apart. We are not having an ordinary conversation. We have entered a different register. The rules are different here. Certain kinds of carelessness are not permitted.

Durkheim’s account, useful as it is, stays at the level of the group. It tells us what ritual does to a community. Thomas Csordas wants to know what it does to a body.

Csordas is an anthropologist who spent decades studying Catholic Charismatic healers in New England. They pray over you in tongues, lay hands on you, cast out spirits, and so on. It’s not an obvious place to develop a general theory of human culture. But what he found there led him to a claim with much wider application: that culture doesn’t just live in our minds, in our beliefs and symbols and interpretive frameworks. It lives in our bodies. It shapes the way we inhabit our own physical existence, the way we attend to the world through our senses, the way we are oriented before we start thinking.

He calls this embodiment as a paradigm. The distinction he draws is between the body — a biological object you can measure and describe from outside — and embodiment, which is the existential condition of being a person at all. You don’t have a body the way you have a car. You are your body, in the sense that everything you experience, you experience from inside a particular physical situation that has been shaped by everything that has ever happened to you. Culture gets into you not primarily through your intellect but through your flesh. It involves doing things over and over in particular ways until those ways become the natural, obvious way.

His specific contribution to ritual theory is the concept of somatic modes of attention: culturally shaped ways of attending to the world through the body. We don’t all notice the same things. A trained musician hears the room differently. A doctor’s hands know things her eyes can’t see. A dancer feels the floor through her feet in a way that most of us never will. These are differences in how the body itself is oriented toward experience. They are acquired through ritual repetition — and once acquired they are not experienced as second nature but as first. The musician does not hear the overtones as if by instinct; she hears them because her body has been remade by practice into the kind of body that hears them. The acquired capacity has become more fundamental than whatever preceded it.

This is why performance does something that reading cannot. When you read a Platonic dialogue you acquire information about how Socratic conversation works. When you perform one, when you speak the lines aloud in a room with other people who are also speaking their lines, your body learns something. Your mouth learns how to ask a question that stays genuinely open. Your ears learn what it sounds like when an argument is actually moving somewhere. Your nervous system learns the difference between the anxiety of genuine not-knowing and the anxiety of social exposure, because you have to sit with both of them at once and keep going anyway.

Dimitris Xygalatas would want to know if any of that is measurable. He’s a cognitive scientist of religion who has spent his career with a heart rate monitor in one hand and a video camera in the other, watching people do rituals in Mauritius and Spain and Denmark and New Mexico, and asking the blunt empirical question: what is actually happening to these people, physiologically, when they do this?

What he finds, consistently, is synchrony. When people perform ritual together, their bodies begin to move together, their heart rates begin to converge, their physiological arousal aligns. This happens even in low-arousal rituals — a quiet church service, a slow collective chant — not just in the high-arousal spectacles like firewalking or the hook-swinging ceremonies of Thaipusam. The synchrony is real and measurable and it produces something: a heightened sense of social bonding, a reduction in anxiety, an increased willingness to cooperate and sacrifice for the group afterward.

His framework is explicitly functionalist, and he’s honest about it. Rituals are cultural technologies. They work because they work — because groups that developed good ritual practices were more cohesive, more cooperative, better able to coordinate collective action than groups that didn’t. The cosmological beliefs attached to them are, from this angle, not the point. Pre-game locker room rituals and ancient fire festivals operate on the same underlying mechanism.

The most interesting thing Xygalatas establishes for our purposes is the relationship between synchrony and trust. When my body is doing the same thing as your body at the same time — when we are breathing together, moving together, speaking the same words together — something happens to how safe you feel to me and I feel to you. The physiological alignment produces social alignment. We are, briefly and measurably, more open to each other.

The Devil’s benches. That’s what an old priest mentor of mine used to call pews in churches. He was a Ukrainian Catholic academic liturgist by training, and he’d tear them out of every church building in the world if he could. They make you feel claustrophobic, they immobilize you, and set you up to be a passive recipient of the ritual glorification of God. They are, in his account, the architectural expression of a purely vicarious attitude to religion: they do the Mass up there, at the altar, and we sit here and maybe sing along to some stuff once in a while.

The point isn’t the benches.

Romano Guardini was a German Catholic priest and theologian who wrote The Spirit of the Liturgy in 1918, and it remains one of the strangest and clearest things ever written about ritual. His central claim is that the liturgy has no purpose.

He means this carefully. The liturgy is not instrumental — it does not aim at a product outside itself. It is not primarily about producing feelings of devotion, or transmitting theological information, or even, in any direct sense, pleasing God. It is more like play. A child building a sandcastle is not trying to accomplish anything beyond the building itself. The meaning is internal to the activity. To ask what the sandcastle is for is to misunderstand what the child is doing. And Guardini’s claim is that the liturgy is like this: it is purposive action that transcends purpose, activity with an internal logic that is its own justification.

This sounds like it might make the liturgy less serious. It makes it more serious. Play, for Guardini, is not trivial. It is the mode in which the soul is most fully itself, freed from the anxiety of getting something done. The liturgy holds open a space in which the whole person — body, voice, attention, imagination — can be directed toward something without being consumed by the calculus of usefulness. It educates the soul not by instructing it but by exercising it. You don’t learn to pray by being told how to pray. You learn to pray by praying, repeatedly, in the same forms, with your body as well as your mind, until the form has worked its way into you and made you capable of what it points toward.

The pews are a problem because they institutionalize spectatorship. They place you in the position of audience rather than participant. And Guardini’s point is that you cannot receive what the liturgy offers from the position of audience. The whole thing is predicated on your involvement — your voice, your posture, your movement, your physical orientation toward the altar, toward the east, toward the other people in the room with you. Liturgy is not a performance you watch. It is a performance you are inside.

This is the distinction I want to bring to the Platonic dialogue. There is a way of approaching the dialogues as an audience — sitting back, reading, admiring the arguments, evaluating Socrates from a comfortable distance. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. You will learn things. But there is another way of approaching them, which is to get inside them, to speak the lines, to let your body take on the role, to discover what it feels like from the inside to be the person asking the question or the person being asked. That is not the same experience. It cannot be had at a distance. And what you learn there — what your body learns — is not available any other way.

So what happens when we actually do it — when we put the dialogue on its feet and walk inside it?

Plato has a theory about this, and it’s in the Theaetetus. Socrates is explaining why people seem to get smarter around him, and he reaches for the image of his mother’s profession. Phaenarete was a midwife, and Socrates says he has inherited her art, with one difference: she delivered bodies, and he delivers minds. He doesn’t put anything into people. He can’t, because he doesn’t have anything to put in — he famously knows nothing. What he does is create the conditions under which people can give birth to what is already in them. The mechanism is proximity. You come into the field of his attention and his questioning, and something becomes possible for you that wasn’t possible before you got there.

It’s worth taking that claim seriously rather than treating it as a charming metaphor. Socrates isn’t saying he’s a good teacher who explains things clearly. He’s saying that being near him, being subject to the particular quality of his attention, does something to a person. The transformation isn’t transmitted, like information. It’s induced, like a change of state.

Csordas would recognise this immediately. It’s exactly what he found in the charismatic healing sessions — that the ritual created a field of heightened somatic attention, and that being inside that field, with your body in that room, produced changes in the self that couldn’t be produced by reading about the session afterward. The healer doesn’t transfer something to you. The shared ritual space becomes the condition of your transformation. Proximity is the mechanism.

When we perform a Platonic dialogue, we are not illustrating this process from the outside. We are, if we do it with any seriousness, actually inside it. The person playing Socrates is not pretending to have that quality of attention — they are practicing it, exercising it, discovering in their own body what it feels like to hold a question open instead of closing it, to follow an argument where it goes instead of where you want it to go. And the person playing Theaetetus is not pretending to be questioned. They are being questioned. They are in the position — with their actual nervous system, their actual social anxiety, their actual uncertainty — of having to think in real time with someone who will not let them off the hook.

The roles distribute the work. Not everyone can be Socrates at once, and in any given performance most people won’t be. But Durkheim’s point about collective effervescence applies here: the ritual doesn’t only do something to the people playing the central roles. It does something to the room. The people watching a well-performed dialogue are not in the same position as someone reading it alone. They are inside Xygalatas’s synchrony field, physiologically aligned with the people in front of them, their attention sharpened by the liveness of what is happening. And when you rotate the roles — when the person who played Theaetetus last time plays Socrates this time — the learning compounds. You have been on both sides of the midwifery. Your body knows both parts.

This is what I mean by a ritual approach to performing Plato. It isn’t primarily about theatrical quality, though a good production is more effective than a bad one for the same reasons a well-celebrated liturgy is more effective than a slipshod one. It’s about using the repetition and the role structure of performance to train people in the somatic habits of genuine philosophical conversation: the habits that Plato, in the dialogues themselves, shows us Socrates practicing. We are not studying the master from a distance. We are, in some mysterious and recoverable way, in the room with him.

None of this works if you treat it as a seminar with costumes. The ritual has to be entered into genuinely, which means you have to be willing to not know the answer, to follow the argument somewhere uncomfortable, to play the sophist with real commitment even when you recognize yourself in him a little too clearly. The dialogues will not do anything to you if you stay safely outside them. That’s what the pews are for.

What I’m describing is not a method I invented. Plato invented it, and then Western education spent about two thousand years gradually converting it into a lecture format. The transformation was so complete that we now think of the dialogues primarily as texts to be interpreted rather than scripts to be performed, which is roughly like thinking of the Mass as a theological document to be analyzed rather than a liturgy to be celebrated. The form is the point. The form is where the philosophy lives.

The practical bar to entry is low. You need a text, a room, and people willing to speak out loud together. You don’t need training in classics or philosophy. You need the willingness to take the ritual seriously, which is a different kind of requirement — it asks something of your body and your attention and your willingness to be changed, rather than your credentials. That’s a higher bar for some people and a lower one for others, and I think that’s exactly right. Socrates didn’t run a seminar. He went to the agora. The project takes different forms depending on context — sometimes a living room reading, sometimes a full theatrical production, sometimes a short film. The aim is always the same: to point people toward the practice, and to make it easy to take it home. A film should send you back to the text. A performance at a theatre should end with an argument over dinner. The ritual doesn’t stop when the lights come up.

The habit of genuine philosophical conversation is not a luxury or an academic exercise. It is one of the things human beings most need and most consistently fail to practice, and its absence does damage that is hard to name but easy to recognize. We are drowning in information and opinions and very short on the kind of thinking that can do anything with either of them. Plato diagnosed this twenty-four centuries ago and built a ritual technology for addressing it. The technology still works. It is sitting on the shelf, freely available, in the form of scripts that were always meant to be performed. We should take them down and use them.