I've been conducting a sort of guided self-study of Plato. Of course, you can't do "western" philosophy without learning Plato, but I know full well that nothing is a substitute for primary/secondary texts and discussion. So, I've recently read Phaedo, Crito, Apology, Euthyphro and Republic, along with some selections from the Cambridge Companion and Blackwell Guide to Plato.
Nietzsche lampooned Socrates as an "ugly buffoon". On Plato, he was even less ambiguous:
We can begin to understand what those reasons are when we understand the way in which classical Greek scholars treat the figures they study. They do not, as a general rule, accept the common wisdom that moderns are culturally and intellectually "special" in any serious way. As one delves into a study of ancient Greece, one begins to understand why. The situation that Athenian intelletuals faced in Socrates' day is very much like our own. Traditional religions were eroding, scientific naturalists were attempting (with not much success) to construct new moral and metaphysical systems, and a shaky democracy wobbled its way from crisis to crisis, never quite losing its authority. Philosophers had already basically outlined the doctrines of materialism (Democritus) and idealism (Parmenides), the merits of most modern political systems were already well-known and hotly debated, and quite a bit of energy was spent trying to find out exactly what reasoning could do for human beings in general. Sounds familiar, no?
Given that Plato was the most famous and influential figure to emerge from this distant yet strangely familiar maelstrom, we might expect him to display impressive reasoning and correspondingly persuasive philosophical doctrines. Yet, when we dig into his most influential dialogues, we find bizarre errors in reasoning, baldly supressed premises, and a tendency to make Socrates' interlocutors say the strangest things in order to allow the Platonic doctrine to be "established".
For example, In Book I of the Republic, Socrates sets out to refute Theasymachus' suggestion that justice is what is in the interests of the strong, the ruling class. Socrates seems to think that because horsemen take care of horses, doctors take care of patients and ship's captains take care of sailors, there is no such thing as a ruler who rules for his own advantage (342a-e). One wants to scream at the text: "Why not? Why are these arts relevantly similar?", but no answer is forthcoming.
The Phaedo is one of Plato's most pessimistic and even downright disturbing dialogues. Here, Socrates proposes that the soul only attains knowledge when it grasps abstract Ideas, that the soul is immortal, and that the body is therefore a kind of teporary curse that distorts and biases our intellect, obscuring the nature of the pure Ideas. The philosopher, according to this version of Socrates, must welcome bodily death, for it frees us from the body and allows us a chance to grasp Ideas in their purest form and thus attain knowledge.
Socrates "proves" the soul's immortality to Cebes, but only by having Cebes agree to the following theses without argument:
1. The uncompounded may be assumed to be the same and unchanging (denied by Heraclitus).
2. One part of us is body, and the other part is soul (denied by Democritus).
3. The soul must be of the same type or "in affinity" with what it knows (the abstract, timeless Ideas).
4. Hades exists, and is where our souls travel after death (also denied by Democritus, along with many of his contemporary "naturalists" or phusiologoi).
All of these ideas had well-known detractors with whom Plato was intimately familiar, yet they remain wholly undefended in the text. Any genuine philosophical opponent would have demanded a proof for each of them. Yet, as countless others do in the dialogues, Cebes simply plays along, assenting to each statement as though he were under some kind of hypnotic trance.
When we drop the illusion that these Greeks were "innocent" or "naive", and when we correspondingly apply the same kinds of standards to Plato that we would to ourselves, we find that these "arguments" are startlingly bad. It no longer seems strange for Nietzsche to have called them "horribly self-satisfied and childish".
Alexander Nehemas (in The Art of Living) attempts to save Plato from this pessimism by ascribing a kind of ironical stance to him. Plato, Nehemas claims, knows that these are bad arguments, and wants us to dismantle them so that we might critically examine any and all arguments we encounter, including the ones in Plato's dialogues. In this way, Plato intentionally provokes us into the "examined life" that his teacher, Socrates, valued so highly.
Most scholars reject this interpretation, noting that nowhere in Plato (or in any of his contemporaries) do we find mention of such an intention. It is an exceedingly bold thesis, and it allows us to save Plato from some very harsh judgments. Yet, if we reject Nehemas along with the majority, we are faced with a daunting dilemma. Either we must find some way to make Plato's arguments appear more plausible than they are on the surface, or we are led to a Nietzschean condemnation of the father of philosophy. Plato scholarship, I am told, focuses on the former horn of the dilemma, but I suspect that it must be haunted by the latter.
Nietzsche lampooned Socrates as an "ugly buffoon". On Plato, he was even less ambiguous:
For heaven's sake, do not throw Plato at me. I have never been able to join in the admiration for the artist Plato which is customary among scholars... To be attracted by the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers--Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. ("What I Owe to the Ancients")While we might see this as the standard grandoise posturing that we know and love, we must not forget that Nietzsche was given a full professorship at the age of 26 because (in the Birth Of Tragedy) he completely re-made classical greek scholarship, proposing theses and interpretations of Plato that have become, according to Gregory Vlastos, "canonical" today. Nietzsche does not judge casually or lightly, here. He has his reasons.
We can begin to understand what those reasons are when we understand the way in which classical Greek scholars treat the figures they study. They do not, as a general rule, accept the common wisdom that moderns are culturally and intellectually "special" in any serious way. As one delves into a study of ancient Greece, one begins to understand why. The situation that Athenian intelletuals faced in Socrates' day is very much like our own. Traditional religions were eroding, scientific naturalists were attempting (with not much success) to construct new moral and metaphysical systems, and a shaky democracy wobbled its way from crisis to crisis, never quite losing its authority. Philosophers had already basically outlined the doctrines of materialism (Democritus) and idealism (Parmenides), the merits of most modern political systems were already well-known and hotly debated, and quite a bit of energy was spent trying to find out exactly what reasoning could do for human beings in general. Sounds familiar, no?Given that Plato was the most famous and influential figure to emerge from this distant yet strangely familiar maelstrom, we might expect him to display impressive reasoning and correspondingly persuasive philosophical doctrines. Yet, when we dig into his most influential dialogues, we find bizarre errors in reasoning, baldly supressed premises, and a tendency to make Socrates' interlocutors say the strangest things in order to allow the Platonic doctrine to be "established".
For example, In Book I of the Republic, Socrates sets out to refute Theasymachus' suggestion that justice is what is in the interests of the strong, the ruling class. Socrates seems to think that because horsemen take care of horses, doctors take care of patients and ship's captains take care of sailors, there is no such thing as a ruler who rules for his own advantage (342a-e). One wants to scream at the text: "Why not? Why are these arts relevantly similar?", but no answer is forthcoming.
The Phaedo is one of Plato's most pessimistic and even downright disturbing dialogues. Here, Socrates proposes that the soul only attains knowledge when it grasps abstract Ideas, that the soul is immortal, and that the body is therefore a kind of teporary curse that distorts and biases our intellect, obscuring the nature of the pure Ideas. The philosopher, according to this version of Socrates, must welcome bodily death, for it frees us from the body and allows us a chance to grasp Ideas in their purest form and thus attain knowledge.
Socrates "proves" the soul's immortality to Cebes, but only by having Cebes agree to the following theses without argument:
1. The uncompounded may be assumed to be the same and unchanging (denied by Heraclitus).
2. One part of us is body, and the other part is soul (denied by Democritus).
3. The soul must be of the same type or "in affinity" with what it knows (the abstract, timeless Ideas).
4. Hades exists, and is where our souls travel after death (also denied by Democritus, along with many of his contemporary "naturalists" or phusiologoi).
When we drop the illusion that these Greeks were "innocent" or "naive", and when we correspondingly apply the same kinds of standards to Plato that we would to ourselves, we find that these "arguments" are startlingly bad. It no longer seems strange for Nietzsche to have called them "horribly self-satisfied and childish".
Alexander Nehemas (in The Art of Living) attempts to save Plato from this pessimism by ascribing a kind of ironical stance to him. Plato, Nehemas claims, knows that these are bad arguments, and wants us to dismantle them so that we might critically examine any and all arguments we encounter, including the ones in Plato's dialogues. In this way, Plato intentionally provokes us into the "examined life" that his teacher, Socrates, valued so highly.
Most scholars reject this interpretation, noting that nowhere in Plato (or in any of his contemporaries) do we find mention of such an intention. It is an exceedingly bold thesis, and it allows us to save Plato from some very harsh judgments. Yet, if we reject Nehemas along with the majority, we are faced with a daunting dilemma. Either we must find some way to make Plato's arguments appear more plausible than they are on the surface, or we are led to a Nietzschean condemnation of the father of philosophy. Plato scholarship, I am told, focuses on the former horn of the dilemma, but I suspect that it must be haunted by the latter.
6 comments:
I'm with Nehemas here, more or less. Not that I think Plato is giving us bad arguments just to provoke us; he's sculpting and balancing one kind of argument against another. I certainly don't think Plato (or Socrates) really held to the sorts of express doctrines presented in the Phaedo, at least not for the reasons adduced there. I think he means to get us to come to insight; doubtless he also held (at least tentatively) some express doctrines, but (I'm guessing, but I hope informedly) always as approximations in discourse of what was ultimately more than could be said. Pace the scholars you refer to, I think there is plenty of evidence suggesting the plausibility of this view. (Granted, I take the Seventh Letter as legit., most days of the week). Incidentally, I also think Nietzsche did the same thing. There's a reason he called his view inverted platonism.
Thanks Skh. Further study has revealed that many share your opinion on the Phaedo. And I think that the anti-textual speech in the Phaedrus gives us plenty of reason to think that Plato did not want to formulate a Complete Theory of Everything. That being said, it is an extra step to say, with Nehemas, that Plato's dischordance, his mood swings and his contradictions, were self-conscious attempts to induce the kind of insight we're talking about. That attributes far more to Plato than the evidence suggests. As you're no doubt aware, Nehemas performs the same problematic magic trick on Nietzche ("Life as Literature"), attributing the wild inconsistency of the German to a kind of intentionally ironic meta-strategy. All other things being equal, there simply isn't enough biographical evidence for such a strategy in either thinker,.
And I am no scholar on this, so forgive me if I'm missing something. I do understand that much hinges on the authenticity of the Seventh Letter, and as far as I can tell the majority of scholars reject its authenticity. Perhaps this is just one of those interpretive issues that is not ever going to go away.
Far be it from me to assert that either P or N could not have been merely inconsistent at times. After all, a lifetime is a good long while and there's plenty of time to change one's mind, forget what one said before, or even to not notice that one's assertion in one place has implications that contradict what one says later-- sometimes even a few pages later. But I for one cannot help but see (or, if you like, "project") a unity upon each man's work that makes me struggle to see coherence, or to read incoherence as a marker pointing beyond itself. And since I believe that Plato was not a fool, and probably read himself far more carefully than I read him, my guess is that he saw the majority of what I see and a lot else, and anything that has occurred to me at least could occur to him. This risks a little anachronism, of course, and I do not think that one must find Plato a fool to believe he nodded sometimes. But yes, this debate will likely not ever be resolved (compare the debate over Aristotle's testimonia on Plato's agrapha dogmata)-- and indeed, the very fact of its longevity is testimony to P's success. I wish Nietzsche the same.
anyway, frequent reader, infrequent commenter. Nice to dialogue w/ you.
I recently re-read a whole bunch of the dialogs for my prelims in August. Here's to fingers-crossed.
I ask with hesitation why it is that we find the Phaedo to have bad arguments and why that should be our ONLY strategy for doing philosophy? If we're charitable, we find the Phaedo argument to Cebes is valid, a disjunctive syllabus. The continual permanence of one's mental states is conceptual evidence for the division between soul and body. It's a good premise for the Greeks. It is not a good premise for us, but why should we let the judgment it is a bad premise for us now guide how we should react to Plato's writings.
I am familiar with the objection of how contrived the arguments seem in Plato as nothing more than an attempt to establish Plato's doctrine, and so we should rather think of philosophy starting with someone else like Aristotle. Aristotle looks to carve up the ontology of the world and show relationships between basic categories that obtain due to logical evidence. At least, these are the attitudes commonly found when I discuss the Ancients outside my little Illinois island.
But look at Plato another way. The Phaedo raises concerns in the context of ordinary life where philosophy has some bite. It's not the type of philosophy in which we worry about the semantic content of speech fits with our ontology of the world, or any other analytic-journal problem met in abstraction. It's more than that. Socrates is facing death, and as a reflective human being, the discussion comes up how one ought to face death. This is an issue felt in our lived-experience on a visceral level and Plato's attempt to situate arguments in these discussions isn't as much as a contrivance as it is putting those issues we face front and center in our concrete everyday experience of the world.
Secondly, where a text is silent, this is the space in which the text invites us to philosophize, not shrink away from the fact that Plato is unclear at 342e in the Republic about craft analogies as an answer to Thrasymachus. Why would Plato make a great deal about craft analogies? A suggestion (certainly not the only plausible interpretation): it is an expression or glint of the lifeworld of ancient Greece in which they believed that things generally were accorded proportion and place in the cosmos, even down to the fact that doctors function to make others healthy. We might be inclined to think of that as a statement of fact corresponding to what doctors do, but this expression of the implicit proportion can be a suitable piece of evidence if I am right that much of the dialogs reveal glimpses of the Greek lifeworld. Thus, any reasoning one might find in the arguments from today's standards are met with an almost factual disposition, but reasoning for Plato also met figuring the sense of proportion in a particular problem, giving the "logos" expression.
Hence, I am rejecting your dilemma. It is a false dilemma that we should only read Plato as a series of questionable arguments, or Plato as a completely clever meta-strategist who uses irony and wit to cover up something else. These two disjuncts do not reveal anything about Plato, but the implicit problems with our (or more precisely your) relationship to him. Instead, we should look at the revealing character of these texts in light of the hermeneutic encounter in which we are as honest with our biases/pre-judgments as the text conceals in its unstated assumptions.
Chasmite~~ I agree it's a false dichotomy, though I think neither Nick nor I (nor Nehemas) sets it out in stark either-or terms. As I read Plato, he means for all his arguments to have a degree of plausibility, including Thrasymachus' and Callicles', or the "bad" arguments for immortality. You have to follow them for a while to meet the point where they trip you by falling short. Your point about certain moments affording us a glimpse into ancient life is also very good. I've held for a while that Plato and others could sense (perhaps dimly, but enough) that certain features of their experience were going into eclipse (I think we see this in the Phaedrus, for instance, when Plato seems to be warning about the loss of some aspects of oral culture). As to your point about the human setting of the Phaedo (Socrates' death), I can't add anything but only say Amen.
Please forgive me for my basic level of criticism, but it does seem a little far-fetched to me to read into Plato's writings any interpretations which cannot be supported with anything but further interpretation. We can hypothesize, for instance, that Plato intended to record ancient Greek assumptions about the world (assumptions which might have made the craft analogies, say, perfectly acceptable); we can theorize that Plato pursued a meta-strategy of provoking his readers into the "examined life". However, the fact that Plato has been a source of philosophical inspiration for millennia appears to lend such immense authority to his writings that today we seems to unjustifiably shy away from asking a rather simple question: Is it possible, even conceivable, that Plato has erred - on various points?
Furthermore, should we not examine the value of studying Plato (and thus possibly re-establish this value) from time to time? And if we did do so - if we "question authority" - would we indeed be able to justify the significance of Plato, using the tools of basic logic to test his arguments and the arguments of those inspired by him? I doubt it.
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