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C H A P T E R 1 What Plato Is About: An Overview I argued in Part I that what Plato’s works are about is not simply a content we can describe, but also involves an interventive dimension that we realize (in both senses of the word) by our own thinking, actions, and attitudes. And this interventive dimension will sometimes rightly falsify the descriptive content, including the descriptions I am giving in this chapter. With that in mind, I propose that Plato’s achievement lies in showing how to let things be what they are without any explanation or understanding . Since this is a letting-be of what things are, it is a relation to the truth of things. And as an explicit relation to this truth, it is an understanding. My proposal means, then, that Plato shows how to understand things without understanding them. Now, I have been arguing that Plato’s work makes visible what is really true of truth-seeking thought generally. That is, this understanding without understanding is ultimately what truth-oriented thinking in general achieves, even dry and matter-of-fact scientific thinking. A sort of understanding without understanding is sometimes seen as the work of spiritual insight or of the fine arts. In this chapter I summarize why I think it is also the work of truth-seeking thinking, what it involves, how it makes sense, and, in a general way, how it appears in Plato’s works. In chapters  to , I explore and test this interpretation of Plato in more detail, by looking at the whole of a short dialogue and at details of the overall structure of some long dialogues. In the brief concluding chapter I make some very general remarks about the significance of Plato’s framework. Now I turn to my explanation of what I mean by Plato’s achievement. 1.1. OVERVIEW OF PLATO’S STANDPOINT 1.1.1. Explanation Cancels Itself As I argued in Idea ., one begins thinking with what one sees at first glance. One begins, then, with things that are not yet explained or under-   Truth and Love stood. The purpose of thinking is to move on from the surface where one begins. But it is the surface that one is aiming to explain or understand. It is this surface that must be accounted for at the deepest depths. And, as I argued in Idea , this surface must be grasped as what it is on the surface, so that one explains it and not something else. What one sees at first glance must therefore be retained right through to the deepest depths. This is the principle motivating phenomenology, which is explicitly and deliberately descriptive and not explanatory. It also motivates, I believe, the contemporary emphasis on conceptual analysis in analytic philosophy.1 The deepest explanation or understanding, then, is still an explanation or understanding of the surface thing being explained. And that surface thing is precisely something not explained or understood. The deepest and only adequate explanation therefore explains the thing as it is before it has been explained . Differently put, explanation or the act of gaining knowledge alters or intervenes in its own object, and this intervention must be eliminated in turn before one has adequate knowledge of that object (as I argued in Idea ). We always arrive at things with something like an interpretive framework already, and this involves an understanding or explanation. As Plato constantly emphasizes, the prejudices this framework involves need to be worked away, even if to allow their validity ultimately to be confirmed (that is, to discover whether they are in fact prejudices). Now, it may not be possible to eliminate our initial interpretive framework entirely or even for the most part. But it is also unnecessary and undesirable to eliminate it. It is unnecessary because we can let the thing be unexplained in certain respects only. In fact, absence of explanation itself is meaningful only in the context of a lot of explained features. Otherwise we would not even recognize the thing as a particular thing distinguished or distinguishable from other things. It follows that what it means to let something be unexplained is partly to have a context of a lot of explained features. On the other hand, it is undesirable to eliminate our initial framework entirely. Given that knowledge-seeking overcomes its own intervention by allowing that intervention to carry through to intervening in itself, this framework is also the means...

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