Rethinking Plato and Platonism

4 Characteristics Of Platonic Love: A Relationship Of A Different Kind

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He also shows that the very same objections Aristotle poses to Plato apply to the Aristotelian doctrine of Eidos. I am not commenting on that. By the way, Heidegger is one of those who say that we must approach Plato by way of Aristotle. BAI: Another possible objection to your reading is this: some one may say that the orthodox reading of Plato has been held for over years.

For years people believed in the Bible. How does that happen? No, arguments of that sort, I think, carry no power whatsoever. First of all, there is no unanimity in the tradition of reading Plato. I told you that what passed for orthodoxy is no longer orthodox. The same analysts who made fun of Leo Strauss and me and his other students, today are copying us, but with no acknowledgment.

They are copying the Straussian methods, but not as well. Leo Strauss is a much more careful reader and a more imaginative reader, and I certainly am as well. You get these inferior, inferior versions of the same methods they criticized ten years ago. Even if it did, it would show nothing.

Orthodoxy is always wrong. Neo-Platonists, people like Porphyry wrote interpretations, which sometimes we would call mythical, you know, taking very, very seriously all of this literary, rhetorical, and allegorical aspects of the dialogues. Some of the Renaissance Platonists like Ficino also read Plato in this way. The medieval Arabs and Jews, of course, all read Plato in this way. Strauss was also influenced by people like Al Farabi in the Arabian tradition, and Maimonides in the Jewish tradition.

And the character of the interpretations is influenced by the dominant philosophical presuppositions of the school to which the interpreter belongs. The 18 th century tradition, and in particular that of the 19 th century, is in the main a tradition of philology as a science; it reflects theoretical presuppositions of the Enlightenment. Philological Plato scholarship is largely the product of the 18 th and 19 th centuries. BAI: I think one possible difficulty with a Straussian reading is that the Classical Greek era is regarded as the childhood of philosophy.

How could a child, Plato, be so tricky and complicated? Homer, Aeschylus and Euripides all lived long ago.

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These men are fascinating to the contemporary reader. First of all, Hegel himself spent much of his time reading and commenting on Greek philosophy. The assumption that you are referring to is actually a prejudice of the Enlightenment, namely, a prejudice that holds that progress of philosophy comes as philosophy is replaced by science. We have to read it for ourselves to see whether one can make a case for it. We cannot do this that as long as we are paralyzed by superstitious veneration of science and the Enlightenment.

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ROSEN: As I told you in the beginning in the interview, there is no such thing as the true reading of the Platonic dialogues because dialogues are not like a secret message encoded. I myself might today write totally, not totally, but quite different books about the Symposium than one I wrote many years ago. Now, does that mean there are no views, no doctrines, no opinions, no beliefs in Plato?

Of course not, there are many such things. But they are open to interrogation. What I am saying is that the question is open. One can understand those symbols. When I say that the interpretation is open, I meant with respect to the foundations, the fundamental questions: are there Ideas? What is their nature if there are any?

That is the kind of questions that is always impossible to answer completely. But the difficulty lies in the nature of things, not in our historical or subjective perspective. Those are questions on which one can argue forever. They are problems that are coeval with the human race. There is no progress in philosophy as there is in aeronautical engineering.

BAI: Then, are you suggesting through this complicated reading of the Platonic dialogue, that somehow, the history of philosophy is a falling away from Plato? You are critical of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel because they somehow missed the important. I think myself that the way in which we explain this is to say that the Platonic dialogues invent philosophy, they show how philosophy originates, and they give us an experience, like exercising in the gymnasium with weights.

If we exercise with the Platonic dialogues, we know how difficult philosophy is and what it is like. And the various subsequent books by philosophers are all their attempts to wrestle with the questions that are contained in their most universal and most human form in the Platonic dialogues. There has been that deterioration. Of course there has been progress in logic, there has been progress in philosophy of science as science itself is progressing. There has been progress in various technical modalities of reasoning.

But you pay a price for that progress. This is the same situation that obtains in the history of modern capitalism: the more sophisticated become the means of production, the more the workers become the extensions of their tools, or their production process, and the more they are brutalized by this, and so on, and so forth. I mean, there are lots of parallels one can draw up. There is no such thing as unmitigated progress, as pure progress.

There is no such thing as pure progress.

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Life is such that you pay a price for every advance. An extraordinary nature of the Platonic dialogues is that they give rise to the infinity of the interpretations without dissolving the unity of the quest, namely philosophy, without dissolving the clarity of the questions.

Is that better? BAI: Of course. Finally, are there any differences between how Strauss and the Straussians read the dialogues and your approach? Some critics say that Strauss neglects the arguments, and only pays attention to the part fitting for his interpretation. Strauss would reply that there are no arguments in the Platonic dialogues. They are conversations.

I mean, Socrates asks a question, and you give an answer. I understand that there are some arguments, but there are many fewer arguments than people claim there are. Let me put it in this way. Whatever Strauss may do, when I write a book about the Platonic dialogue, if there are arguments in the text, then I consider them. But I consider these arguments in the context of my commentary on the dialogue, not as though they existed in a vacuum, or as in a course on logic, where you can write problems on a blackboard, in absolute abstraction from everything else in the world.

Now look, I spent five years in the study of mathematical logic, and I once knew more about logic than most of the Plato scholars in America.

Rethinking Recollection and Plato’s Theory of Forms

And my own study took place 25 years ago. But I have some training in the subject and try to keep up with it. Most Plato scholars know little if anything about logic. Well, fine, you have to have an argument in the sense of a topic of discussion or disagreement, so that dialectical progress, or even political progress, can be made.

Secondly, in a dialogue, exactly as in a play by Shakespeare, to repeat my earlier point, you have to see the argument in the context that it is made. That would be stupid, right? I deal with the details of different dialogues. I pay more attention to the so-called metaphysical problems, and Strauss was more concrete and was more interested in politics.

Strauss is interested in them, but is much better in concrete details. I developed different kinds of considerations.

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