These are running notes expanded from a talk I gave several years ago. Unedited and without references, they were initially a response to the question of how one should approach the dialogues of Plato...
There is
something very odd about Platonic dialogues. You start to sense this once
you become really acquainted with them. Although it is possible to flatten them
out and remove many of their strange qualities, which means reconstructing them
– either by translation, or by mental shifts in the reader – into a comfortably
modern form. There is a lot of this. A lot of it comes from reading through a
different paradigm. You can recast Homer’s Odyssey as a modern novel, or you
can convert it into that form, mentally, as you read the poem. So also you can
convert a Platonic dialogue into a modern-style philosophical discourse where
you have a whole bunch ancient Greeks standing around saying things relevant to
modern philosophy. But outside of that we quickly become aware that Platonic
dialogues are very different to most modern forms of literature, and
philosophical literature, and so they appear to have certain strange
characteristics. They conform to, are composed within, a different paradigm. I
don’t just mean the fact that they’re dialogues. Theyre much stranger than
that. This type of philosophical text is actually very different than anything
we are familiar with. We can either ignore this fact, overlook it and adjust
the text mentally - they are very rich anyway - or we can try to situate
ourselves within or try to appreciate the paradigm – the conventions, not just
the obvious ones – that formed the dialogues.
In this
respect I appreciate some aspects of the work of Leo Strauss who at least asks
us to read Plato in the understanding that this is a completely different
enterprise – ancient philosophical texts, Platonic texts – than what we know,
and what we typically read and write. Strauss senses that it is a totally
different type of text. Most Platonic scholarship doesn’t do this. Strauss
does, systematically. He realizes that they're peculiar sorts of texts. But his
focus is on political context. He senses that Plato could not put what he
really thought into writing because it was politically dangerous to do so.
After all, the centrepiece of the dialogues is a political execution. Ancient
philosophers were not writing in a context of modern liberalism. They had to be
careful what they say. So Strauss thinks Plato’s dialogues are coded texts. The
important thing is what is between the lines. So, as Strauss says, the
dialogues are “radically ironic.” This is part of their strangeness to modern
readers. Nothing that seems straightforward is ever straightforward in a
Platonic dialogue. You are deliberately placed in a situation, over and again,
where you never know what is serious and what is not. Very often, what is
intended is the opposite of what is said. This effect is pervasive. It’s
disconcerting, and it must be deliberate.
I think that
Strauss is guilty of bringing a modern mind-set to the task, in that
exclusively political lens, in his case a Nietzchean lens that assesses
everything in terms of power. But in any case, Strauss is at least sensitive to
the fact that these are strange texts, and he doesn’t gloss over it. He wants
to understand their strangeness. And he’s right to point out that the texts are
fundamentally ironic, and also 'coded' in the sense that what's presented is
not what's being said.
An important feature of this – something Strauss rightly underlines - is that
nothing appears to be accidental or gratuitous in a Platonic dialogue. They are
very carefully crafted works. That is a distinct impression. They are highly
polished works, carefully designed. This is against the casual effect of the
dialogue form, which is disarming. Casual conversations. Jokes. Interlopers.
Religious duties. Drunken parties. The atmosphere is casual. But every detail
serves a purpose. Even the hiccups of Alcibeades. There is no useless
ornamentation. Typically, though, modern readers filter out these details, skip
over them, and get down to the actual philosophical arguments. No one bothers
too much with why the Republic is set on a certain religious festival that
Socrates wants to witness. It all seems like dramatic padding. We skip it and
go on to Socrates’ actual arguments when we want to do philosophy.
But if we develop a proper acquaintance with the dialogues we soon learn that
maybe these details are not unimportant. Soon we come to appreciate that the
dialogues are very, very crafted, to an unusual degree, and this is in order to
communicate much that is unsaid. What is unsaid is always very important in a
Platonic dialogue. So I don’t think it is wrong to characterize them as
'coded'. There is something like coding going on. But what code and why?
Strauss comes up with the really bizarre idea that Plato was a secret atheist
who’d encoded a proto-Nietzchean nihilism into the dialogues. One narrative in
recent scholarship is that Socrates was executed in a backlash of religious
conservativism against science. But this is such a contemporary frame that I
think we should be wary of it, and in Plato I think the issue is much more
nuanced.
Still, Strauss insists on another interesting observation, which must be true.
Namely, sometimes, arguments in Plato are weak, obviously weak and
unsatisfactory, yet elsewhere Plato shows that he’s fully aware of this. Even
arguments to which we think Plato, or Platos Socrates, subscribes. The Theory
of Forms is like this, most especially. Strauss thinks the arguments in its
favor are so thin they can’t be taken seriously. Therefore they must be hiding
something, or serve some other function, because we know that Plato knew the
arguments were thin. We find a writer who we know to be exceedingly intelligent
spouting, or standing behind, arguments he must have known how to dismantle. If
the central doctrine of the whole corpus – the Theory of Forms – is spurious,
and Plato knows it, what is going on?
As a matter of good practice, it’s important not to skip over the
peculiar and the unusual or the confounding just because you don’t understand
it. Things that are odd and unusual and out of place are especially important
in plato. The peculiar and unusual feature. For Strauss, and others, the
pecliar and unusual feature of the dialogues in total is the dead-pan
presentation of the Theory of Forms, and the shocking realisation that Plato is
perfectly aware of its fatal shortcomings.
It's important that Plato doesn’t appear in his dialogues. He does mention
himself, though – and that must be significant. But authorial anonymity is
carefully constructed. Plato is very careful to hide from the reader. This is
so carefully done in fact that it is also disconcerting. We are constantly
wondering where the author stands. Or else we must suspend the question
altogether, and not just provisionally. I think we’re deliberately led into the
feeling that Socrates speaks for Plato, but then that feeling is constantly
undermined. What we call the Socratic Problem is there by design. The effect is
even more pronounced between dialogues than within the dialogues. We simply
don’t know where Plato stands. We can’t really speak of Plato’s philosophy at
all. We do, of course, for convenience. But in fact he worked very hard to
conceal it. Or avoid it. Or perhaps imply it? It’s between the lines? We can
only speak of certain philosophical positions found in the dialogues, or that
we can extract from the dialogues or that are implied in the dialogues. But
none of these might be Plato’s. This is a very deliberate effect.
This is
leaving aside the Seventh Letter. I’m not talking about the Seventh Letter. I
don’t want to bring external testimonies in here. We don’t need the Seventh
Letter for this. I just want to consider the dialogues as prime evidence.
As a body of work. As things in themselves. Leaving aside the letters. Leaving
aside anything Aristotle might have to say too. Just the evidence of the dialogues.
Search for Plato in the dialogues, as an exercise. If the dialogues were all we
had, what would we know about the author? The author is remarkably evasive.
Remarkably slippery. Plato plays with it. Sometimes first person, Socrates.
Sometimes third person. Different forms move the author around. There’s an
aweful lot of play in Plato. One of the fields of play is the authorial
presence, or absence. Where is the author in these coded texts? I think its an
important question. Even if we have to suspend the question in order to make
the dialogues work.
For Strauss this effect has an obvious cause. They killed Socrates. Plato was
very careful not to commit his real position to writing. Putting things in
writing is dangerous. Strauss – influenced by the times in which he lived, the
Cold War - thinks ancient Athens was like Soviet Russia where writers
(philosophers) had to learn to encode and disguise and hide their real views.
Double-think. He thinks there's a type of double-think in Plato. Because philosophy
is dangerous. And it might seem
like that. The strangeness is like that. Strauss senses an atmosphere of
concealment in the dialogues. It's certainly a worthwhile question to ask:
what's revealed and what's concealed? If Plato doesn’t subscribe to any of the
philosophical positions given in the dialogues, what was his position? Or is it
all play?
Actually, I do think it is all play, but a mode of lofty high-functioning play.
A spirit of playfulness is the first virtue required in a reader of Plato. It
is a matter of embarrassment that philosophy - Platonic philosophy, anyway - is
really just a type of play. My final position is that philosophy is a type of
play. Its hard to say that without sounding facetious: but that’s the truth of
it. Without entering into that sense of play you can’t really access sophia. Play
is a type of profound, ambivalent state. It is necessary to engage with the
dialogues in a spirit of play. And moreover, when we engage with the dialogues
correctly, fully, or as best we can, they are also pleasureable. They are
seductive. One senses that the mind of the author is seducing you, and this is
pleasureable. It is distinctly erotic – in the ancient sense. That is, one of
the strangest features of the dialogues, for the modern reader, is that they are
intellectually erotic. They bring a particular type of pleasure. Playful, and
erotic. And also very funny. Humor, play, pleasure: these are integral tools
within Platonic philosophy in ways that are entirely missing in modern
philosophy. These are not minor or trivial aspects of Platonic dialogues.
Related to
this, play, is a dimension of the dialogues I think is especially important,
namely that Plato was, just historically speaking but more than that, by
inclination, much, much closer to myth than are we. Myth and symbol and the
language and structures of myth. The
mythopoeic and symbolic modes of thinking. This permeates the dialogues. Much
more than is usually admitted. Plato has a deep, deep acquaintance with and
command of it. As modern readers we demythologize. We systematically and
habitually - and unconsciously - demythologize. We struggle with the mythic
mode. We can’t think mythologically. We can read and write about it – but we
can’t do it. Whereas the dialogues often demand that we do. Sure enough, some
of the dialogues espouse an epistemology in which logic and reason are supreme,
and yet Plato is the writer of myths and mythic tales which he places at
central or culminating locations in his texts. There is always this tension
between myth and logic, muthos and logos. Clearly, reason doesn’t replace myth.
Even in the Republic, which ends with the Myth of Er, the mythic mode gets the
last say. Related to this, Plato is a master of verisimilitude – the grey zone
between fact and fiction. He’s careful to ensure that his fictions might be
fact. He leaves you wondering. A very old Parmenides might conceivably have met
a very young Socrates. But this fact means we cannot trust the dialogues for
elements of historicity – the answer will always be maybe.
Remember,
Plato is a writer who uses his writing to condemn the art of writing, but he is
himself, at the same time, a master of writing, the most eloquent of the
philosophical writers, deeply literate. That’s the sort of writer you’re up
against. He depreciates myth but then writes myths by which to convey
philosophical teachings. The myth of Thoth concerning the invention of writing
is one of the most important in Plato because it reflects upon the very
existence of the text you're reading, the very technology.
More
important, there are mythic structures and mythic contexts that we miss or
dismiss, or don’t understand the function of. It goes beyond just missing
mythic allusions, but it's that as well. This is largely my own approach to the
dialogues. I want to read them sensitive to their mythic elements. Not just the
Platonic myths – but certainly those – but also the broader mythic world.
Especially the mythic world of Athens. Its an exercise in contextualizing. In
order to read the dialogues properly – or better – we need to be sensitive to
their mythic structures and underpinnings. That is, I want to restore the
mythical context of these dialogues and then re-read them, approach them, through
myth, or the frame of myth. It’s an approach to Plato through myth, muthos, if
only because it is the older, underpinning mode.
In my own
case, I studied the Timaeus/Critias ensemble, and almost all of my studies
proceeded from the simple step of reading the dialogues in their festive
context. They are set on the festival of the goddess, the Panathenea. We’re
explicitly told the speeches in the dialogues are appropriate to that festival.
There are certain myths that the festival celebrates. We can track allusions to
those myths, and echoes of those myths, in the speeches. It is a very
productive line of inquiry. Many dialogues are set on religious festivals and
so evoke the mythology celebrated by that festival. These settings are never
unimportant in a Platonic dialogue. I want to read the dialogues through their
festive, religious and mythic context, systematically. Because Plato invites us
to do so. We don’t do so because it’s a mode of thinking largely alien to us. We
can restore the political context, but I want to restore the mythical context –
much more difficult - and give it much greater attention than is usually
allowed. I want to treat muthos as pervasive and implicit, not as decoration.
For example,
the death of Socrates. The Phaedo. The most famous of dialogues probably. We
are given all of these arguments for the immortality of the soul. And yet some
of the arguments are plainly threadbare and certainly unconvincing in
themselves. Why does Plato tease us with this inadequacy? Anyway, the frame of
the dialogue is a key. We are told that Socrates’ execution was delayed because
of the Expedition to Delos. Executions were forbidden during this time. This
seems gratuitous, or is perhaps historical? Or is it just a narrative device to
explain why Socrates had time to sit around meditating on death and chatting
with his friends before he was executed? It’s more than that. It frames the
whole thing with a particular mythology, namely the myths of Theseus. That’s
what the expedition to Delos is about. This gives us a frame in which to read
the dialogue very differently. The upshot of the frame is that – we are to
understand, even though it is in the background – that here Socrates is like
Theseus slaying the minotaur. The minotaur is the fear of death. Socrates leads
his friends through the labyrinth of arguments – each of them a dead end - and
slays the minotaur. That, I want to say, is how to read the Phaedo. It’s a
useful way to read the Phaedo.
Certainly, the
exedition to Delos had a political context. This mythology belongs to the
religion of the polis. It is always political. But we shouldn’t demythologize.
Plato wants us to see such mythic underpinnings. He wants the dialogue to be
pervaded by the context of the expedition to Delos and all that implies.
Actually, I
want to go further, perhaps. And you might think it is a stretch. But the
dialogue invokes the Ship of Theseus. That’s the ship that sails, that delays
the execution. Now this ship had, already by Plato’s time, become proverbial as
an expression of a philosophical problem. Namely, the Athenians had preserved
an ancient ship said to be the ship of Theseus himself, and used it to reenact
the expedition to Delos. But over the years as planks and boards rotted they
were replaced, until there was nothing left of the original. Was it still the
ship of Theseus? It is a problem of samenesses and differences. It was a proverbial
philosophical issue in Athens. To a reader of the dialogue in Plato’s time, I
want to suggest, the mere mention of the Exepedition to Delos brings to mind,
immediately, the Ship of Theseus and undertones of that philosophocal problem.
Now I want to suggest that the arguments of Socrates in the Phaedo need to be
placed in relation to that problem. That’s the frame. That’s the lens. That’s
the problem in the background. That’s what’s being unsaid, whats implied,
alluded to. It supplies a different way to understand those arguments and to
understand what is going on. Otherwise we might have the impression – it’s a
common undergraduate impression - that poor old Socrates gave a few piss weak
arguments that didn’t convince anyone, probably not even himself, and then
drank the poison. The problem with that is the fact Socrates drank the poison
so resolutely guarantees his sincerity and proves that he stands by his
arguments. What are we to conclude? If his arguments aren’t convincing – and
some of them you could drive a truck through, on the face of it – then we are
still left with the question, why was he not afraid to die? I think answers to
these difficulties are supplied or at least assisted by the mythic frame. We
have to understand the full construction of the dialogue. Nothing is
unimportant. The reader should start there. Nothing is unimportant, including
what is suggested but unsaid. They’re totalized texts.
Notice, then,
that what the text demands we do is consider the reasoned arguments – logos –
of Socrates, but within a mythic mind-set. It’s a question of text and context.
And sub-text. The context isn't just historical, or quasi historical. Or
political. We are presented with a mythic context. As it happens there are
allusions to the Theseus mythology elsewhere in the dialogues which supports
this. It is an important mythology to Plato. Plato has a certain mythic
background. The works are framed by certain myths that Plato, was steeped in.
Specifically, myths of Athens. It’s facile to say, yes but no one believed in
those old myths anymore in Plato’s time. They're just traditional. They are an
essential scaffolding of the dialogues.
I think the
modern reader needs to restore or at least appreciate that contextual dimension
of the dialogues. In some dialogues it is crucial, I would say. The Timaeus
cosmology, for instance. You cannot understand the Platonic Demiurge without
understanding that it is rooted in the Athenian cultus of Hephaestus. Such
things account for much of the dialogues strangeness, because these are texts
structured in mythic ways. They retain this feature, I think, from the mode of
the philosopher-poets. You could argue that it is residual from the Presocratic
mind-set. But I think it is more than residual. I think it is more of the
nature of a key to the dialogues. Modern readers tend to strip the text of
exactly this dimension. We demythologize.
Here’s a
simple example of demythologizing. Everybody does it. Plato said, Philosophy
begins in wonder.” Did he? Well, one of his characters did. But even then that
is not what it says. It actually says: Philosophy begins in wonder and Iris is
the daughter of Thaumus.” We habitually strip that statement of its mythic
elements. We don’t understand them or we don’t think they’re important. I think
it’s important that philosophy is analogized to Iris and wonder to Thaumus,
even on the basis of a Greek pun. It’s actually a very revealing analogy. It
seems to be unique to Plato. Iris as the goddess of philosophy. She is not represented
in Greek religious art outside of the Acropolis in Athens. The identification
has many repercussions. If you want to know how philosophy begins in wonder,
you’re referred to the myth of Iris here. Iris is in effect a female
counterpart of Hermes. Like Hermes she moves between the realms of mortals and
immortals. It would be remiss to neglect it. But instead we habitually
demythologize it, we’re so embedded in logos. I don’t think this is Plato’s
fault and it’s not what he wants from us.
Another more
substantial and complex example. The Republic. Plato’s masterpiece. As I said,
it is set on a festival that Socrates wants to see. The setting is very
carefully constructed. Every detail. There were going to be horse races at
night, with torches. An innovation. Modern readers – philosophical readers too
– skip all this, or else only see it as literary device. The frame and its
importance – and its impact on how to read the dialogue – is lost entirely. The
upshot here is that the festival in question belongs to a goddess identified by
the Greeks as Hecate, goddess of the dark underworld, more broadly as an aspect
of Artemis. The torch race tells us so, amongst other things. It is a very odd
attribution for such a lofty dialogue, yet it must be for a purpose. I think
the way it frames the dialogue is this: the ascent to the realm of Forms and to
the Vision of the Good, in the Republic, must be understood – at the same time!
– as a descent into the Underworld, into death. The dialogue ends with the
souls in the underworld selecting their new lives. So the frame is paradoxical.
And Heracleitan: the way up is the way down. I think if you don’t appreciate
that dimension of the Republic, and you lift its arguments out of that context,
you are missing something vital. And yet, how do you do it? How do you read up
and down at the same time? In the background here is the contrast – a
mythological symmetry – between Athene and Artemis. To better understand the
Republic we need to better understand that contrast. Socrates Ideal City is an
idealised Athens. Athene rules the polis. In part it’s the contrast between
civilization and wild nature, amongst other things. Plato has encoded that
contrast into the work very carefully, as an undercurrent, by design.
That’s my
answer to someone like Peter Kingsley, say, or the general view that Plato was
somehow the father of reason and he is responsible for misdirecting the Western
philosophical tradition into an arid overemphasis on logos. That is a very
common view. I think it is wrong about Plato, even if it might be right
historically. It might be true of a certain misreading or limited reading of
Plato, a received way of reading Plato, especially via Aristotle. Certain parts
of Plato, out of context. But actually, it's not true of the dialogues when we restore
their mythic context. Not at all. The structure we find equates the Platonic
ascent with the shamanic descent and proposes that they are actually the same
thing. As a general proposition, actually, I like to characterise the Platonic
enterprise as a distinctly Athenian shamanism. Philosophy – that distinctly
Athenian art – as a shamanism. Yet one in which ascent and descent are
interchangeable. Moreover, I think this doctrine – if you want to call it that
– is Parmenidean. I’m struck by the ‘shamanic’ dimension of the texts. Again, Shamanic
is an unhappy word, I don’t want to import all its associations here – just the
notion of ontological descent.
But in any case it is rarely explicit in the texts. Rather
it is a frame that changes the way we read the text. It changes the interplay
between muthos and logos. You have to be very sensitive to that when reading
Plato. My way of reading Plato is to keep the muthos/logos tension central. I
think that’s what these texts require. Don’t undervalue the mythic elements in
the dialogues, or implied in the dialogues. Mytho-political if you like – for
they are the myths of the polis – but they are crucial to a proper reading. A
command of this sense can take a good time to acquire. To read the Timaeus
properly you too have to go along to the festival of the goddess. The act of
reading it is a devotion fitted to that festival and that goddess. We can only
do that in a limited way, since we’re not ancient Greeks, but it’s important to
recognize the place of the reader in the enterprise. It’s important to stand
within the frame.
What is reason
anyway, except a developed cognisance of the ratios and symmetries buried in
the narratives of myth? I’m sure Plato understands that. Are muthos and logos
opposites or complements? What’s the relationship? It’s a pivotal question in
these texts where the author is obviously a master of both.
The
strangeness of the dialogues extends beyond this. The sense that we’re dealing
with a fundamentally different sort of literature that requires a different
mode of engagement extends beyond this. And it's not merely a matter of many of
the dialogues being built upon conventions of Athenian theatre, say, or not in
the sense we might expect. But not just those factors, that are well noted.
It’s not just that we need to acknowldge that the dialogues are works of
literature and approach them that way. Rather, I think the problem here is that
the Platonic dialogues are what I call, for want of better descriptions, -
another unhappy word - mantic texts. As in iatromantic. That is, they have a
mantic dimension, an archaic and also arcane dimension, that modern readers
don’t appreciate and have great difficulty accessing and understanding. This is
the same mantic characteristic we find in Parmenides’ poem, for example, the
basis of Professor Kingsley’s work. These are writers still close to the
magickal roots of writing. Plato has a great command of this. That is, they are
texts that are calculated to have an effect upon the soul. That’s a good
definition of a proper way to read the dialogues. Modern readers only read
information. We take information from the texts. But these texts are much more
than that. They are designed to be a set of soul experiences. Soul in the Greek
sense. On the level of information the dialogues are very slippery,
deliberately evasive. They require a much more engaged, open and attentive
reading. You can't be too attentive.
It’s probably
not going far enough to say they are philosophical exercises. They are
certainly that. They are not treatises. They lend themselves to useful
philosophical exercises. Is that what they are? A set of exercises?
Philosophical crossfit? It’s probably not entirely unimportant that Plato was a
wrestler, after all. And many dialogues feature Socrates loitering around the
wrestling schools. It’s a viable analogy. But if they are mantic texts then
they are written not just to convey information, and not just as a way of
building mental muscle, but to have a transforming, or perhaps initiatory, or
preparatory, or perhaps spiritual, or deep psychology impact. Vehicles of an
inner transformation, anyway. Spiritual is a misleading word, though.
Certainly, deep. In a way that is totally uncharacteristic of modern texts. I
don’t think we really appreciate what this means. I don’t think even a writer
like Pierre Hadot – who at least appreciates that the practice of philosophy
was a very different thing in the ancient world. I don’t think he appreciates
just how different. Of course scholars do address this. Plato’s use of Orphic
language. Plato’s allusions to the Mysteries. Philosophy as a type of
initiation. In order to bring this out I tend to exaggerate it, but the fact of
it is still true.
Again, I don’t
think we need to appeal to the Seventh Letter and where it says Platonic
philosophy is not like other studies. Where it says its real content is not
like other studies. A proper engagement with the dialogues as mantic texts
reveals that. There is another study – of a completely different type - going
on at the same time. The dialogues confirm what the Seventh Letter says. We can
discover it without the Seventh Letter. Personally, I’m agnostic
about the Seventh Letter, even though it would suit my case - I
suspect it’s derivative - but it's not necessary here. What’s more important is
giving up Aristotle.
* * *
The most
obvious cases of mantic devices in the dialogues is in so-called aporetic
dialogues, where the interlocutors – and the readers – are left in a state of
aporia at the end. Socrates leads his victim (or his patient) into a state of
confusion, or at least unknowing. They start by thinking they know something.
Then Socrates examines them – dialectic - and dismantles their certainty.
(Actually what he does is show them that the opposing view is implicit in their
view and that if they believe one they must believe the other.) But he provides
no alternative. He leaves them not knowing. Whole dialogues are devoted to
this. The reader too is typically left in a state of aporia, not knowing.
Modern readers find it disconcerting to be left hanging in the air like that.
People will say – it’s a cliché – that the dialogues give no answers but they
ask the right questions. Maybe so. But there is more to it surely. Socrates
tells us that wisdom consists in knowing that we don’t know. So he is training
people in wisdom. Aporia instills wisdom, sophia. But surely there is more to
wisdom than intellectual humility? What is this ‘unknowing’ that Socrates has
and wants to lead others towards? How does it constitute wisdom? What sort of
skill is it?
It is an old
suggestion that Plato’s dialogues are designed to continue Socrates’ work after
his death, so they have an effect like the man himself, or similar. The
aporetic dialogues must certainly be like that. They don’t just, or even,
convey information: they induce a state of aporia. I suggest that this is
designed to be transforming in certain ways – maybe not just intellectually or
superficially - and also needs to be placed in a wider context. I suggest that
this state of unknowing has that shamanic dimension. There is much more to be
said about aporia and aporetic texts in Plato. But that’s only one device. I’m
never happy with the word shamanic, but you know what I mean. Perhaps we should say
iatromantic, if we’re applying a therapeutic metaphor, where aporia is
apparently intended to be therapeutic for a sick soul.
The frame of a
dialogue is its central fact. It recontextualizes everything. So never dive
into the arguments straight away. They are framed by a setting. In the
Republic, for instance, the fact the dialogue is ruled over – so to speak – by
Hecate – the dialogue takes place on her festival – adds layers of extra paradox
to the allegory of the Cave. It is important that the Allegory of the Cave is
in a dialogue ruled by a goddess of the underworld, even if it is difficult to
reconcile.
The aporetic
structures, I point out, are typically chironic. That is an extremely important
structure in the Platonic dialogues. Chironic structures. Not ironic, but
chironic. Which is to say in the shape of the letter chi, or an X. It is an
extremely important device in the dialogues of Plato. The text begins wide in
scope, narrows to a middle point, a turning point, and then expands out again.
The aporetic dialogues are typically like that. The Cratylus, for example. In
that case we are given one position at the beginning, regarding the nature of
names. Then there’s a middle discourse, a ctalaogue of weird etymologies. Then,
in the end, we are given another position counter to the first one. So we are
left wondering. Aporia. The narrative structure is chironic. The centre of the
Chi is important. “Crucial” as we say. In the very centre of the Cratylus we
are given a spurious etymology of justice where it means “passing through
everything.” That’s a pronounced effect in the Platonic dialogues, where
everything passes through everything, as it does in a well-constructed poem,
where every detail illuminates every other detail in every direction. The
dialogues are like that. That’s what I mean by totalized, optimumized.
Chironic
structures are the simplest, and they are pervasive in Plato on many levels,
not just as the structure of Socratic dialectic. For instance, on the mythic
level. There are chironic interactions, on the mythic level, between the
Timaeus and the Parmenides, for example, which is the mythic tension between
Athene and Poseidon. Chironic structures play with inversions. Plato thinks
like this in minute detail. Complex interrelations which are signaled in the
texts often in encoded ways, or seemingly so. When you become familiar with the
dialogues you become aware that some are connected to others, in whole or in
part, some passages connected to – and very often in opposition to – others,
often in dialogues supposedly remote in sequence or time. The dialogues are
remarkably intertextual. This is a further dimension. Text. Context, Subtext.
Intertext. Even a strange text like the Menexenus – which is an odd man out
among Plato’s works – is replete with intertextuality. It is hard to say what
it’s purpose is, but it connects with important motifs and themes across a wide
number of dialogues. The corpus wouldn’t be complete without it.
We tend to
underplay the cross-dialogue connections, and be insensitive to them, largely
because of modern preoccupations with chronology. To appreciate intertextuality
in Plato you need to put aside the suppositions implicit in the modern distinction
between early, middle and late dialogues, and supposed developments in Plato’s
thought. Readings typical of say, Gregory Vlastos. Instead, the dialogues
invite us to consider them all of a piece, and without development. Let us
suppose that Plato’s position never changed from start to finish and that the
dialogues, in all their diversity, constitute a single project. And resist any
attempt to put them in chronological order. As it is, the supposed chronology
is already paradoxical: the earliest dialogues concern Socrates last days. And
yet the Parmenides, supposedly one of the last works, features a very young
Socrates. Do the dialogues work backwards through the life of Socrates,
starting with his death? The narrative chronology seems counter to the chronology
of the works. But its useful to put aside all questions of textual chronology
and to explore the intertexuality of the dialogues from a sort of timeless
position. Remove the element of time. It is very revealing. Notice how the Laws
– a late work, they say, in which Socrates doesn’t even appear – is so
carefully interwoven with the early Socratic dialogues. The dialogues are
mutually supporting, calculated to work together – often against each other –
stretching the reader one way or another. The conclusion is inescapable that
the dialogues are designed like this. This is part of their strangeness to
modern readers. The reader can be haunted by the suspicion of such designs.
Actually, I
want to say that there is a deliberate effect of recollection between
dialogues. It concerns the careful prompting of memory by the author through a
host of devices such as allusion, repetition, paradox, inversion, contradiction,
imagery. Modern readers are not accustomed to such highly textured, interwoven
works. Woven, I think, is exactly the right analogy. Woven texts.
The works of
Plato are forged and woven at the same time. It’s good to think of them like
that. It’s a mythological construction. The goddess Athene, in a very obvious
way, presides over the entire enterprise. Along with Hephaestus. The two chief
deities of the Acropolis. The weaver and the blacksmith. The dialogues are full
of such craft analogies. Philosophy is conceived to be a craft, not essentially
different to any other. How deep does that analogy go? It extends all the way
into the textures and structures of Plato’s dialogues. The entire depiction of
Socrates as a midwife and his method as midwifery – such a peculiar anaology - is
forged in and woven from this distinctly Athenian mythology. Modern readers,
who are not craftsman by and large, are not well placed to really understand
this dimension of these works. We don’t go about philosophy as a craft and we
don’t really take that analogy seriously. The industrial reader will struggle
to appreciate the perfections of such crafted texts.
All of this is
entirely separate to whatever might be lost in translation. I’m not talking
about that. Reading the original Greek obviously restores important dimensions
of the works, but even without that, any reasonable translation conveys these
difficulties and features. What we lack is not a better command of Greek but a
better command of a different type of literacy, a literacy of myth and symbol,
for a start, and a literacy open to the mantic dimensions of the works. That is
the arcane dimensions of the texts. Because that’s what it amounts to. Plato is
still rooted in earlier (preliterate) modes. He’s not Aristotle. All of that is
gone in Aristotle. There is no mantic dimension to Aristotle, nor even that
mentality. None. The habit of reading Plato in the shadow of Aristotle - which we all carry with us far more than we realise - is a
malformation and it prevents us from seeing Plato correctly, or seeing these
dimensions of Plato.
In general,
the better acquainted we are with the mode of the philosopher poets – where
philosophy is embedded in tight incantatory poetic structures, where everything
passes through everything – the better we will be able to understand the works of
Plato. We think of Plato as a departure from that mythopoeic world of discourse
– that’s why we call that world Pre- Socratic. I think he’s much more deeply
rooted in that world, and its way of thinking and writing, than we usually
appreciate. Socrates famously expels the poets from the Republic. But Plato is a
poet. In the etymological sense as well. A maker. A poet in the ancient demiurgic sense. Perhaps that's what it amounts
to finally. To bring the tools we’d bring to reading an archaic poem to reading Plato’s
prose, and think of the dialogues as like one very dense, structured, expanded
poem. We should think of Plato as the maturity of that tradition, being brought
into a distinctly Athenian form, Parmenides and Heraclietus reconciled, and amongst
other things embedded in Athenian mythical structures, or mytho-political
structures if you prefer.
Another very
useful idea lifted from Strauss. Approach the dialogues as a unity. And, more
specifically, more correctly, as a kosmos. This is the ultimate structure. The
dialogues constitute a kosmos, in the Greek sense. The dialogues are multiform
because the world is multiform. It is a calculated cosmological effect. The
dialogues are a universe woven out of samenesses and differences. Writing,
here, is consciously demiurgic. The mind of Plato is the demiurge that forges
and weaves this kosmos. We need to think of these as more than just empty
metaphors but as crucial factors in a deep engagement with the dialogues. This
is the real starting point. The dialogues understood as a kosmos.
* * *
It occurred to
me once that there must be a key to Plato. A master key to these puzzling
texts. Perhaps it was Plato's maths? His mathematical problems? Perhaps there’s
some mathematical matrix? People have tried it before. Plato presents
mathematical puzzles. They must be important. They are at least not idle and
trivial. Then I asked where he might put such a key, and I reasoned that he
would not let Socrates die without revealing it. So I read over the final hours
of Socrates again,and sure enough Socrates gives us the key. What I take to be
the key. It’s the formula where he says: Opposites from opposites wherever
there are opposites. This is like Socrates’ guide to how to navigate through
the labyrinth. Opposites from opposites wherever there are opposites. It’s like
a formula giving instructions on how to get through the maze. It’s as close to
a key as you’re gonna get. It’s the operative principle that generates irony.
As a geometrical figure it’s the Chi – opposites give birth to their opposite.
It’s the tactic of Socratic dialectic: draw out the implicit opposite, the inner
contradiction. If you cling to a position, Socrates will show you that it is
protean and will readily transform into its contrary. It already contains its
contradiction. Aporia is a non-attachment. The calculated effect is that you
have to read with a type of non-attachment. The texts themselves promote this
non-attachment. That is why the author is hidden, not as a device to escape political persecution, but as a calculated device that won't permit you to become attached to any single viewpoint.
Ultimately, what
this amounts to is being rooted or grounded in Being itself. That’s the point
of all the pious Athenian autochthony myths that are mentioned or alluded to so
often in the dialogues. The mythos of the Acropolis. The dialogues emerge as a
profound exploration or exposition of the mythos of the Acropolis and the place
of sophia in the Athene cultus. But it’s not a question of the new science
replacing the old myths, which is the lens through which the modern
Enlightenment mentality tends to view it. There’s a very different and more
complex tension of muthos and logos.
* * *
R. Blackhirst
