Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato

Introduction

Introduction Imagine that you are Plato. Quite impossible, I know, but I have in mind a much more focused image. Imagine that you are Plato deciding , presumably after long reflection and against the practice and probably the strong advice of your mentor, Socrates, to write in the light of philosophy. I say “in the light of philosophy,” not “write your philosophy,” because, if the Seventh Letter can be believed, you decided early on that you would not “write your philosophy” because philosophy “cannot be put into words like other studies” (Letter VII, 341c). In any case, you come to the long and no doubt complicated decision to go ahead with it and risk the old man’s displeasure. Now the question becomes, how to write? The first thing we should note is that modern, and especially contemporary, philosophers almost never have to confront that question seriously. By the time we are sufficiently educated in our discipline that we decide to write philosophically, it quite literally usually goes without saying how we shall write. If it’s philosophy we’re going to write, it will be in the form of treatises, whether of article or book length, in which we develop our arguments for whatever philosophic view we want to espouse, or at least as often, want to refute. It is important to recognize that the dominance of this format is closely tied to what philosophy has become. Since philosophy is now widely regarded as a matter of asserting ones convictions about this or that issue and presenting ones arguments for them, or presenting the views of others and the arguments as to why those views are wrong, it is clear that in almost all cases the best way to accomplish those goals is in a treatise format. (As will soon become obvious, this book will take that very form, hopefully and at least in part sous rature.) For reasons such as these the treatise form has become, again quite literally, the canonical format in which philosophic writing is done today. Present company not excluded. 1 2 Questioning Platonism Not so with the young Plato. Having decided to write, he must have thought long and hard about the writing of the philosophers previous to him and perhaps been daunted by the amazingly rich palette before him. Would he write “concerning nature” treatises, as some of the earliest philosophers had done? The treatise format for presenting philosophy was clearly already an option. Or philosophical poems, like Parmenides and Empedocles (this must have been a special temptation for the young, poetically inclined thinker)? Or perhaps write aphoristically, in the style of Heraclitus? The point is, the young— and later, the old—Plato had a decision to make in a way that few of us writing philosophically today do. He had to consciously and conscientiously decide which among a variety of writing formats would best accomplish what he wanted to accomplish in writing in the light of his philosophy. Which means, in turn, that his fateful choice of a writing format simply must have been a more reflective, careful decision than most of us ever have to make. And so, as we know, he chose to write dialogues. But these reflections force us to ask, what might he have thought he would accomplish best by writing in the dialogue form? Suppose that Plato, against the teaching of the Seventh Letter but like the majority of the philosophers after him, had as his primary objective something like this: to express his own philosophic views as clearly and persuasively as possible. Would he, could he, have chosen the dialogue form, have thought that writing in a dialogical form (and moreover, one in which no character named “Plato” ever speaks and so no clear “mouthpiece” for his own views was presented), would best present his own views? That is hardly possible. Surely, if that were his intention, the treatise format, already before him in the case of the concerning nature treatises, would have been the best choice, as it has been, by and large, ever since. Even in the case of the utterly fragmentary remains we have of those pre-Socratic concerning nature treatises, we at least know that, for instance, Thales wanted to espouse the view that the arche of all things is water. Can we therefore conclude anything else than that whatever were Plato’s intentions in choosing to write dialogues, he could not have been motivated primarily by the guiding one of most philosophical...