Plato by George Kimball Plochmann, and: The Unity of the Platonic Dialogue by Rodolf H. Weingartner (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 798 whaling and incidentals like premature tragedy and unforeseen good fortune. And finally, if the thrust toward wholing is the supraordinate dynamic in life, the subordinate dynamics must somehow be related to it: tension discharge, unfolding, adaptation, homeostasis, personal fulfillment. It would be unfair to demand that the author engage in the discussion of all these issues in a book that purposes to limit itself to one vital issue, but it is fair to point out that they exist and must be considered eventually. What Dr. Llamzon does is simpler. After an introductory chapter pressing home the depth of the obscurity of the mystery of the meaning of life, he argues to the conclusions that the heart of man is the free, reflexive will, and the meaning of life is the whaling process of love. He touches briefly on Greek and Medieval ideas of love as whaling, and then, more extensively, on Christian love as purely altruistic (Bishop Anders Nygren) and Christian love as both self-and other-centered (Martin D'Arcy, S. J.), with additional insights from Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. He enlarges the concept with contributions from depth psychology (Freud), and existentialism (Marcel), and finally, to bring all the preceding into focus and to indicate where his own preferences lie, he presents Jules Toner's theory of radical love. In the last three chapters of the book he applies his conclusions of love to friendship, to love in marriage, and to love and death. In sum, Dr. Llamzon has presented the results of his own earnest study of the meaning of self and self's meaning in life, not to end but further the search. St. Stephen's Priory Dover, Mass. MICHAEL STOCK 0. P. Plato. By GEORGE KIMBALL PLOCHMANN. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1973. Pp. 543. $1.95. The Unity of the Platonic Dialogue. By RoDOLF H. WEINGARTNER. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1973. Pp. 215. $2.95. Despite the different aims of these two books there is a common ground: their authors share a conviction that interpretation of Plato must take into consideration the wholeness and unity of the Platonic writings. Indeed the authors see their task as partly the rescue of Plato from the hands of contemporary philosophers who persist in dissecting his writings into short passages and subject them to analysis, apart from the context of his dialogues. 794 BOOK REVIEWS Thus Weingartner is critical of approaches to Plato that tend to isolate and interpret independently parts of what Plato wrote from the context of the whole dialogue, and also of those scholars who take the pronouncements of the participants of the dialogues to be in a sense beyond the dialogue in which they occur, to be contributions to a Platonic doctrine. He sums up this approach-which he calls the "doctrinal view "-as follows: Whatever the variations, however, the distinctive mark of this approach to Plato's work is the dual assumption that some personages in his dialogues are merely masks for their creator and that the words they speak may be removed from their dialogic context and then conjoined to make up a continuous exposition of the Platonic doctrine. (p. 2) He is also critical of the approach whereby Particular arguments, conceptions, or myths, as well as passages that contain more or less elaborated philosophic principles, are detached from their contexts and subjected to detailed scrutiny. That Plato wrote dialogues is more often than not ignored: the words are taken as if they were asserted by their author; no attention is paid to the fact that they are spoken by one of the characters of his creation. (p. 3) Weingartner insists that, despite the fact that the extraction of Platonic doctrines and the scrutiny of individual passages might produce important philosophical insights, these approaches are inadequate for understanding Plato and most probably will lead to distortions of his thought and intentions. What Plato said cannot be understood without considering the whole of which isolated passages, arguments or speeches are parts: Plato wrote dialogues. The dramatic context of a particular argument or speech may have important bearing on its meaning; to consider a speech or argument...