Plato, Part 1

The critical line running from Nietzsche to Derrida charges Plato (c. 426-c. 347 BC) with sending the West on a logocentric wild goose chase for ultimate ends (e.g. Truth, the Good, the Beautiful), as well as with exiling vital artistic energies from the center of human affairs. On the other hand, the mainstream inheritors of the intellectual schools supposedly begun by Plato typically use each of the “habitual categories” of modern thought—“nature, politics or discourse” (Latour, Modern 3)—to denigrate the intellectually impure or irregular quality of Plato’s dialogues. These latter critics see in Plato’s use of shared aesthetic prejudices to explain the structure of matter (Timaeus), linguistic wordplay to support moral reasoning (Republic), and physical evidence to determine correct naming practices (Cratylus) the acts of an undisciplined premodern rhetorician more interested in swaying audiences than in discovering ultimate causes. In the criticism of Plato as a mere rhetorician, however, one sees a possible answer to the Nietzschean charge. Plato, as the head of an Academy that emphasized not only dialectic but mathematics and astronomy, surely was capable of producing the kind of topical, logical treatise associated with Aristotle, yet he deliberately chose the dialogue—a form populated with friendships and rivalries, imprecise terms, and unexpected mythmaking—as his written account of various philosophical issues. The Euthyphro offers a clue to Plato’s curious choice of form:

S: What are the signs of difference that cause hatred and anger? Let us look at it this way. If you and I were to differ about numbers as to which is the greater, would this difference make us enemies and angry with each other, or would we proceed to count and soon resolve our difference about this?

E: We would certainly do so.

S: Again, if we differed about the larger and the smaller, we would turn to measurement and soon cease to differ.

E: That is so.

S: And about the heavier and the lighter, we would resort to weighing and be reconciled.

E: Of course.

S: What subject of difference would make us angry and hostile to each other if we were unable to come to a decision? Perhaps you do not have an answer ready, but examine as I tell you whether these subjects are the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad. Are these not the subjects of difference about which, when we are unable to come to a satisfactory decision, you and I and other men become hostile to each other whenever we do? (7b-d)

For Plato, a highborn Athenian who lived through the wars with Sparta, the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, the restoration of a democratic government, and the execution of the greatest person he ever knew by that same restored democracy, the question of how a society threatened from without and within might best take action was not an abstract one. Could the many—and sometimes conflicting—ultimate realities, values, and myths Plato proposes constitute means to social agreement and action rather than intellectual ends in themselves? If so, then the fact that Plato frequently alights on what moderns would consider aesthetic concerns in his supposed quest for moral-scientific truth suggests that he believed that a myth of reality solidly grounded in or reconciled with our “habitual categories” of nature, society, and language was needed to save Athens from itself. What might Plato’s famously “mixed” dialogues teach us about the myths of reality preserving our own modern world?

(Next week: Cratylus! Republic! Timaeus! Theaetetus!)