In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Plato as Artist
  • David Jarraway (bio)
Jan Zwicky. Plato as Artist. Gaspereau Press. 2009. 110. $25.95

With her attention trained solely on the Meno in Plato’s dialogical canon, award-winning poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky makes plain her purpose at the outset: ‘to record my astonishment at the beauty of this made thing . . . and to attempt to clarify, for myself, what continues to perplex me . . . now that there is no one who speaks Plato’s Greek as fluently as he.’ Moving agilely among a bevy of standard translations of the work (Lamb, Grube, Hackforth, Tredennick et al.), Zwicky is mostly awed and perplexed by the dialogue’s mystery – a mystery not uncharacteristic of Plato’s own ‘strange’ metaphysics but one that also may be imparted to ‘many contemporary North American philosophers’ revolving ‘knowledge [as] justified true belief’ today.

‘Wisdom’ perhaps is the better term here, flanked on one side by a teachable repertoire of facts and data under the general rubric of ‘empiricist science’ and on the other side by the unteachable recollection of human Virtue whose ‘things of the soul,’ according to Socrates, push genuine understanding beyond the mere seeing-as-believing stance of his feckless interlocutor, Meno. The dialogue thus becomes classed as [End Page 666] one of Plato’s ‘“early” aporetic works’ only because it places Virtue ultimately at the centre of wisdom’s ‘blank’ as, in Zwicky’s awestruck formulation, ‘the only thing that always accompanies / follows / comes after __________.’ With that notable lacuna installed at Virtue’s core, Zwicky perhaps reaches back to a key moment in her landmark prose meditation on Wisdom & Metaphor (2003) that she extrapolates from another Canadian philosopher, Tim Lilburn (and referenced in the ‘Acknowledgements’ here): to wit, ‘The mysterium of the physical world is a theophany of what is not there, that is beyond the calibrations that erect “thereness.”’

Underwriting Meno’s experience of ‘classic aporia’ – not exactly an ‘epiphany,’ Zwicky concludes, since as Elmer Fudd to Socrates’s Bugs Bunny in her playful characterization, ‘Meno has not understood’ it fully by the end –is human desire itself: ‘a longing to know what we now realize we don’t know.’ And it is that desire that carries us to the very centre of Plato’s artistry foregrounded in Zwicky’s title. ‘For it is the feeling for necessary truth that was,’ so Zwicky contends, ‘the litmus of philosophical talent for Plato’ and that ‘twisting like steel under the dialogue’s verbal skin’ elsewhere constitutes ‘the conceptual DNA of Plato’s most deeply held views.’ From this viewpoint, Plato can be seen as our contemporary once again. For in his ability to ‘draw the desire for goodness to the surface in all of us’ as Socrates does, Zwicky compellingly demonstrates the close relationship between Platonic philosophy yesterday and Freudian psychotherapy today as ‘the fundamental rôle of eros’ in the latter comes to the fore. Unlike Plato, however, Freud is no optimist. As Zwicky shrewdly differentiates the two projects, ‘Freud believes that the disciplining of eros is the root of human unhappiness not the foundation of enlightenment.’

Quite likely, this brief excursus on the psychology of Freud will leave readers to ponder what other modern thinkers Plato might be compared to. Zwicky’s ‘many contemporary North American philosophers’ alluded to previously in the context of an aporetic wisdom, and accessed especially by ‘doing,’ would surely enlist a lively cohort of American pragmatists, from William James via John Dewey to Richard Rorty last century, and their corporate dedication to an ‘Ever not quite’ first espoused by James’s A Pluralistic Universe (1909). Arguably writing out of that same tradition, American poet Mark Doty more recently would appear to parrot Zwicky’s Plato almost word-for-word two centuries later. In his recent The Art of Description: World into Word (2010), Doty writes, ‘I want to say instead “the ____________ of the geese,” and allow that space to include . . . a kind of discourse about something altogether mysterious, talking in the sky.’ Up to the present moment then, uncannily, Plato’s artistry ‘breathes in the space between unreflective [End Page 667] acceptance of dogma and the dizzy paralysis of skepticism...

pdf

Share