Reading Plato

The refreshing thing about Leo Strauss is that he resists a merely chronological reading of Plato. Equally, he puts into sharp contrast the general tendencies in modern Platonic scholarship to impose a chronological framework upon the Platonic dialogues. Recently, I borrowed several works by English Platonic scholars, as well as the Cambridge Companion to Plato, and was immediately struck by the pervasive assumptions of chronological reading. It has given me new insights into exactly why I have for so long found the academic study of Plato so utterly irksome. When I was much younger Plato was my passion. I dreamed of going to an academic life and spending my days immersed in Platonic philosophy. The reality turned out to be much different. I found the academic establishment - the classicists - profoundly uninspiring. I wondered how and why it was that so many intelligent people - scholars, and Oxford dons - could turn Plato into such a boring old drudge. Very quickly I recoiled from the prevailing academic discourse and moved into other fields. Now I have a fuller view of why this was and what had caused me to recoil; it was the chronological framework through which virtually all academic scholarship on Plato, at least in the English tradition, is conducted. It is, as I say, refreshing to encounter Strauss because he is not part of that tradition and because he offers new and fertile ways of looking at Plato.

It's a question of how to read the Platonic dialogues. In the English tradition, the first thing you do arrange them in chronological order. Then the game becomes plotting Plato's "evolution"  from his "early" phase, through his "middle" phase to his "late" phase. That is, the English study Plato through time, through the lens of history. The distinction between the early "Socratic" dialogues and the later "Platonic" ones is the mainstay of this framework. But this is not really the practice of philosophy. It is, rather, a "history" of philosophy. The English tradition is pervaded with historical thinking and historical assumptions. It is everywhere in English Platonic scholarship. And it is immensely dull. After a short exposure to it, one never wants to read Plato ever again. This is how I feel about scholars like Vlastos, too (an American). Great erudition, tight scholarship, painstaking study - all to reduce Plato to an historical curiosity of little or no value outside of his time period. I started off loving Plato; if I had followed Vlastos and co. I would have ended up hating the entire endeavour. It is good to discover that others feel the same and that there are alternative ways of reading Plato.

I felt refreshed when I discovered the works of the German scholar Friedlander. Here was a reader of Plato who viewed the dialogues as literary creations, not as signposts on a road of historical "evolution". More recently, I found the writings of Bernard Suzanne. He wants to consider the dialogues as a single edifice and not as a stream of "development". He proposes that the dialogues were written in a much shorter period of time than do the English developmentalists. That strikes me as a wise move. He wants to consider all the dialogues as a single body of work. That is how I always regarded them, and still do. The basic approach is this: the Platonic philosophy, or the Platonic viewpoint, is complete and intact, in toto, right from the beginning - it is then extrapolated and "unpacked" in multiform encounters through the various dialogues. It is not a case that Plato "developed" or "evolved" - he has a single view and it is expanded and exposed through his works. That is, all the dialogues are a singular conception, not a development of ideas from immature to mature.

For me, a very helpful encounter was the works of the great French metaphysician, Rene Guenon. He is a writer - a mathematician - who composes essays and books over some 40 years and yet there is virtually no development in his ideas. His point of view is exactly the same at the end as it was at the beginning, and yet his works are fascinatingly rich explorations of the same viewpoint applied to various religious and philosophical traditions. After reading Guenon I felt more secure in my assumptions about Plato. Plato also is a metaphysician, and a mathematician. Why is it not possible that Plato had a firm position from the outset and that he has explored it in sundry ways and various contexts in his many works? In that case, reading Plato through a historical or chronological lens is as radically wrong as looking for "development" in Guenon. In both cases, whatever "development" there is is hardly the important thing and it is quite wrong to place it at the centre of our studies.

Plato, though, is a more complicated case. This is because the man himself nowhere appears in his writing and because, as Strauss wants to emphasize, the voice through which we might assume Plato speaks - namely Socrates - is not a plain speaker but rather an "ironical man". That is, the above mentioned "firm position" that I suppose Plato held from the outset is not given voice; it is hidden, indeed carefully hidden. I acknowledge all the difficulties this presents, but I don't think that those difficulties are better resolved by a chronological reading. Nor is this to avoid the difficulties posed by the question of historical consciousness in Plato. Clearly, Plato knows himself to be a man on the cusp of history - even his fictions are presented with the semblance of history. It is significant, for example, that there appear to be no fictional characters in the dialogues. The dialogues are not a-temporal but rather seem suspended in a tension between inside and outside of time. No doubt an entirely a-historical reading of Plato would be wrong too.

All the same, I see no compelling reasons to suppose that, for example, the Laws should be regarded as Plato's final work, or even as a late work, or why the Apology should be regarded as the first or an early work. The question of the relationship between dialogues is a complicated one. Disparate dialogues clearly allude to one another (the Timaeus to the Republic, for example) in ways that are altogether confounding. Imposing a chronological structure based on a supposed relationship of the author to Socrates does nothing to resolve such difficulties but it destroys much along the way. It is better to consider the intractable nature of such difficulties as part of the design and to deal with them in that way.

We find an instructive parallel - albeit from a very different tradition - in the Koran. It is a work consisting of visionary narrations from over several decades but it is not arranged chronologically - there is some other ordering principle. The very first move that Western scholars make, however, is to try to rearrange the surahs (chapters) in chronological order on the basis of the Prophet's presumed growing and changing sense of mission. This does violence to the text; it denatures it. This is how I feel about attempts to read Plato chronologically - it denatures the text. The Koranic revelations are thoroughly shuffled. I think that Plato has deliberately shuffled his dialogues and is working to quite different ordering principles. What those principles are is another matter, but we can be sure they go beyond and are much more interesting than flat, prosaic chronology.




- Harper McAlpine Black