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5. Gadamer’s Plato
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165 Chapter Five Gadamer’s Plato The last Continental philosopher whose interpretation of Plato I shall address is Hans Georg Gadamer. In addressing his work last, I of course take him out of chronological order as well as out of most conceptual orders that one might imagine. After all, as perhaps Heidegger’s most important student, one would expect that a discussion of his work would follow immediately upon that of Heidegger himself. But I have chosen to consider Gadamer as the conclusion of the book because he represents for me an extremely important object lesson for a continentally oriented reading of Plato, an object lesson, I believe, that makes a consideration of his Plato interpretations an appropriate conclusion to this book. Let me explain. One guiding thrust of my book so far has been critical of most of the Continental interpretations of Plato. The basis of my criticisms is in what I hope is an appropriate sense ad hoc. That is, to take first the most relevant contrast, I find it at once more understandable and less interesting that analytically oriented interpreters of Plato have by and large ignored the significance of the dialogue form in which Plato writes and turned more or less directly to what they take to be the “arguments” in the dialogues. That is understandable because one of 165 w 166 Questioning Platonism the guiding principles of most of analytical philosophy has been, to exaggerate only slightly, that philosophy is argument. Believing this, it is plausible enough that when they turn to the Platonic dialogues, they would find the “philosophy” there only in the arguments—in a quite narrow sense—that occur within the dialogues. However dubious that decision is, however dubious that conception of philosophy might be from the standpoint of this book, it is, it must be said, a plausible inference from this guiding principle of analytic philosophy. The case is very different with so-called continental philosophy, whose leading spokespersons have taken justifiable pride in their greater sensitivity to existential themes, to the emotional, psychological, lived dimensions of human life, and so, not surprisingly, to the way in which literature can sometimes best portray these elements and issues of life. This greater literary sensitivity manifests itself in any number of ways: in the explicit address of literary works on their part, in their own more literary styles of writing, in their sometimes actually writing works of literature, and certainly, in their sensitivity to the literary dimension of those philosophers—one thinks here of Nietzsche especially—who write their philosophy in a more literary style. In this light, one might expect these thinkers first and foremost to overcome the analytic prejudice in favor of narrowly construed arguments and philosophical doctrines, to exhibit an appropriate sensitivity to the literary dimension of the dialogue form and in particular to the philosophic significance of that dimension, of Plato’s choice to write dialogues. It is their failure, too often at least, to do so that has been perhaps the guiding critical theme of this book. The very thinkers who should exhibit the most sensitivity to the literary dimension of Plato’s work have too often fallen back on the analytic principles that in other venues they would strongly reject, and thus have found in the dialogues only or primarily that pile of doctrines that we now know as “Platonism.” Is there then, something about the basic convictions of continental philosophy that, just as in the case of analytic philosophy, somehow prevents them from reading the Platonic dialogues with an appropriate dramatic sensitivity? Or can we find among continental philosophers an exemplar of what I have argued is a superior hermeneutic of the Platonic dialogues? Here is where Gadamer is so important; almost from the beginning, I shall argue in this chapter, we have a Continental philosopher who explicitly, even thematically, exhibits in his work on Plato precisely the kind of sensitivity that I have been espousing in this book. I turn to Gadamer, then, as my positive evidence that such a sensitivity to the literary dimension of the Platonic dialogues is not only possible [3.91.11.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:03 GMT) Gadamer’s Plato 167 but fully in accord with the guiding principles and themes of continental philosophy.1 My consideration of Gadamer’s reading of Plato will thus be less critical than the previous chapters, although I will point to what I take to be some of the limits of...