Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern (review)

This far-ranging collection of essays represents a conference of the same name held at Emory University in conjunction with a meeting of the “Rethinking Plato’s Parmenides” seminar sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature.

In embracing authors as diverse as Plato himself, Epictetus, Ralph Cudworth, Yeats, and Levinas, to name a few of the Platonists identified herein, the volume clearly and deliberately stretches the meaning of this rubric to its outer limits. This review will reprise some of the articles from each of the book’s sections—Ancient, Late Antique, Renaissance and Modern, and Post-modern Platonisms—in an effort to help readers gauge the argument of the book, which may or may not be endorsed by each of the individual contributors. The editors, at least in compiling this anthology, do so in the belief that Platonism might better be considered “as an inexhaustible mine of possible trajectories each of which helps us to see the richness of Platonic texts,” rather than “as a series of determinate doctrines” (5).

Thomas Slezak opens the volume with a rehearsal of his programmatic way of reading Plato’s dialogues, involving two possibly competing claims: what Plato means by philosophy is not contained within the dialogues, since dialectic cannot be written down, although its elements can be enumerated. This un-writable dialectic involves a doctrine of forms and a separate doctrine of higher, mutually opposing principles that must be synthesized, the traversal of a complete series of theorems to arrive at a transcendent vision, all of which culminates in the experience of eudaimonia, a kind of euphoric realization. Proponents of Plato’s unwritten doctrines, of whom Slezak is one, evidently have no trouble at all writing about these doctrines.

The remaining essays in the volume explore how, e.g., Pythagoreans, Gnostics, Idealists, and Romantics applied their own methods of reading the dialogues. Turner and Strange reveal the labyrinthine complexities of late antique interpretation. The latter deftly elaborates how a group of Sethian Gnostic treatises from the Nag Hammadi Codices already display the metaphysical or ontological structure usually thought to originate with Plotinus: three principles that express different aspects of what is ultimately a unified reality. Turner’s essay explores key issues in the history of Parmenides interpretation, including the origins of apophatic theology already in the second century and the relationship between Gnosticism and mainstream philosophical Platonism.

The essays on Renaissance and Modern philosophy are of wide compass, treating themes as diverse as Descartes’s opposition of vera mathesis and mathesis universalis against Academic notions of metaphysical mathematics (Bechtle) and the Cartesian conception of res cogitans and related constructions, such as Husserl’s self-consciousness (Berchman). The degree of virtuosity on display here in the history of metaphysics is astonishing; as readings of Plato or even as Platonisms, they perhaps strain credibility. If anything, they serve as correctives, to remind us how much the enterprise of metaphysics has changed since the time of late antiquity. As Berchman writes, early modern thinkers use ‘idea’ in ways that “have no equivalent in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus” (181).

Dillon’s essay, by contrast, presents a plausible reading of an influential book, Natorp’s 1903 Platons Ideenlehre (now translated into English by Politis and Connolly). Natorp’s neo-Kantian understanding of the meaning of Plato’s ideas as “structuring principles of knowledge . . . possessing objective reality, but nonetheless acquiring their full realization through the activity of the human mind,” that is, as gesetze, might be taken as describing, for example, the cosmic Intellect of the Timaeus, “holding within itself a system of patterns (or ‘laws’) of all things” (201). In the end, claims Dillon, perhaps Natorp’s Platonic ideas are not that far off from how Plato’s immediate successors in the Academy understood the so-called theory of ideas.

The volume ends with two essays on post-structuralism, which haunts the modern academy rather than, as it once did, actually...