From Plato to Platonism

Conclusion

Conclusion I began with the question: Was Plato a Platonist? My answer to this question is yes, with what I hope to have shown is a reasonable qualification. ‘Platonism’ refers to any version of a positive construct on the basis of UP. For all soi-disant followers of Plato from the Old Academy onward, Plato’s version takes the crown. Nevertheless, recognition of the superiority of Plato’s version of Platonism did not preclude disagreements—some subtle and some not so subtle—regarding the accounts of the elements of the construct. Nor did it preclude the formulation of responses to the enemies of Platonism that required the application of general principles to the solution to problems hitherto unappreciated or at least underappreciated. As I have argued, the unification of the elements of UP into a single positive construct was of paramount importance. That is why Platonism is first and foremost a metaphysical doctrine. Without metaphysics, it is no doubt possible to consider the multitude of ethical, political, psychological, and epistemological claims in the dialogues each in some degree of isolation from the rest. Accordingly, the strength or weakness of one argument in one area need not reflect positively or negatively on another argument in another area. For example, it is evident that many proponents of something called ‘Socratic moral philosophy’ are eager to disassociate that from what they take to be unnecessary or even disastrous metaphysical accretions whether actually endorsed by Plato himself or not. I have found not the slightest bit of evidence either in the dialogues or in the indirect tradition that Plato ever contemplated such a disassociation. Indeed, there is no evidence that Plato ever contemplated something like a firewall separating his metaphysics from any of his other philosophical concerns. 306 Conclusion The elements of UP—antinominalism, antimaterialism, antimechanism, antirelativism, and antiskepticism—frame Platonism generally. Versions of Platonism, including Plato’s own, are positive constructs based on UP. The unifying element of each positive construct is a ‘first principle of all,’ called in Republic the Idea of the Good, and otherwise named, according to the testimony of Aristotle and others, ‘the One.’ The unification that this first principle was supposed to provide was primarily explanatory. That is, in trying to answer the array of questions formulated in ancient Greek philosophy going back to the earliest Pre-Socratics, the first principle of all was supposed to provide ultimate explanatory adequacy. That is at least in part how the Platonic tradition understood the identification in Republic of the Good as ‘unhypothetical.’ For even Forms—hypothetical entities in Phaedo—do not provide ultimate explanations. It is indeed the case that, say, the Form of Justice is the instrumental cause of the presence of the property of justice in some act or other. There is thus a conditional adequacy in this explanation. But justice is desirable only because justice is good, the explanation for which depends on showing how the being of the Form of Justice is eternally dependent on the first principle, the Good. The postulation of a first principle of all is not unproblematic. Just to list some of the problems recognized by Platonists themselves, including the dissident Platonist Aristotle, is to provide a topical index to the early history of metaphysics. Here is a list that does not pretend to be exhaustive: How can the first principle of all have being in any sense without having a sort of complexity that undermines its explanatory ultimacy? How does the first principle cause anything else to be, including things that are utterly unlike it? How, again, if it does cause anything else to be, is its absolute simplicity not compromised? How is the first principle cognitively available to us such that it can be explanatorily ultimate in anything more than purely formal terms? Indeed, how does the first principle make anything else cognitively available or intelligible to us? Why is the first principle a normative principle? Reflection on any one of these questions should make it obvious that virtually any answer is going to appear to be underdetermining. That is, the account given will never preempt variations on itself. That in a nutshell is the explanation for disagreement among the Platonists. It is also the explanation for the fact that opponents of UP, like the Stoics, can produce philosophical doctrines that converge with those taken by Platonists to be entailments of their accounts of first principles. It is, I think, illuminating to see Aristotle’s own response to these questions...