Faith & Spirit Quote by Plato

Thinking gets demoted from lightning-bolt genius to something closer to private conversation, and that’s Plato’s point. “The talking of the soul with itself” frames thought as dialogue, not download: a back-and-forth where claims are tested, revised, and sometimes embarrassed into retreat. Plato is the philosopher of staged argument - the Socratic method as performance - so it’s no accident that even inner life gets cast as a debate. If the mind is a courtroom, thinking isn’t a verdict; it’s cross-examination.

The intent is quietly polemical. Plato is pushing against the idea that knowledge is just sensation or memorized information. The soul “talking” suggests an active, self-governing rational faculty, one that can interrogate appearances and ask what something really is. Subtext: if you’re not internally questioning yourself, you’re not thinking; you’re rehearsing. The line smuggles in a standard of intellectual integrity - thought as accountability, even when no one is watching.

Context matters because Plato builds philosophy around speech. In dialogues like the Theaetetus and Sophist, thinking is linked to logos (reasoned discourse) and truth is something you approach through structured questioning. The “soul” is not a sentimental flourish; it’s the seat of reason that can, ideally, align itself with the Forms - stable realities behind messy experience.

There’s also an ethical edge. If the soul is your inner interlocutor, you can’t outsource judgment to the crowd. Thinking becomes an inward practice of citizenship: learning to disagree with yourself before you let the city do it for you.