RICK BENITEZ'S PAPER ON PLATO
DELIVERED AT THE FORUM
ON SATURDAY 5TH APRIL 2008

RICK BENITEZ IS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Rick Benitez speaking at the Forum

Great Philosophers -- Their Legacy to Us
PLATO
eugenio e benitez

Of all philosophers in Western history, Plato has had the most widespread influence. Yet the very diversity of thinkers influenced by Plato indicates a fundamental difficulty of interpretation. This lecture focuses on the problem of interpreting Plato, with attention to three key issues: (1) Plato's choice of the dialogue form, (2) Plato's use of analogy, metaphor and myth, and (3) Plato's philosophical development. I will argue for a non-doctrinal approach to Plato, in which the dialogue form is primarily propaideutic, in which the use of myth acknowledges the limitation of dogmatic philosophy, and in which the traditional story of Plato's development, which involves a crisis of self-criticism, is called into question.

I. Plato's Dream (from the anonymous commentator on the Theaetetus)

"Plato himself, shortly before his death, had a dream of himself as a swan, darting from tree to tree and causing great trouble to the fowlers, who were unable to catch him. When Simmias the Socratic heard this dream he explained that everyone would endeavour to grasp Plato's meaning; none, however, would succeed, but each would interpret him according to his own views ..."

When you first hear this dream related, it seems positive in some way, especially if you put yourself in the position of the swan, relentlessly pursued, yet always managing to escape. But when you put yourself in the position of the fowler, the dream is more frustrating. It seems strange, too, if this were really Plato's dream, that Simmias should have the right explanation of it. Did Plato think his students were just trying to trap him? Did he think, as a teacher, that it was his job to elude them, so that they could not learn his thought? Simmias' interpretation poses a serious problem: "None shall succeed!"

Nevertheless. the dream was prophetic. Practically everyone who has tried to grasp Plato's meaning, has ended up interpreting him according to his own predispositions. There remains to this day a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty about even the basic directions of Plato's thought.

I want to provide some insight into why this is the case. But I don't want to leave it at that. I want to rescue the dream's positive appearance, and show that it is not such a bad thing, after all, if the swan keeps eluding us. At any rate, I will try to show what it is like to have caught it, and why, having done so, it is best to release it again. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us begin with the difficulties of the hunt.

II. "From Tree to Tree": Difficulties of Interpretation
A. Dialogue Form
Over a period of about fifty years, from about 397 to about 347 BCE, Plato the philosopher composed around 40 works which have come down to us as his "dialogues". Not all are in fact dialogues; one of the best known, the Apology is a direct representation of Socrates' defense against the charge of impiety. And the Timaeus, which begins as a dialogue, is spoken in one continuous voice over approximately nine-tenths of the whole, without ever returning to dialogue at the end. Nevertheless, all of Plato's dialogues (I'll acquiesce in standard usage) are in dramatic form. Apart from the dialogues we have thirteen letters (some of doubtful authenticity) and 20 or so epigrams (some also of doubtful authenticity).

The epigrams need not concern us, and the letters will concern us but little. It is the dialogues that pose the first and greatest difficulty for interpretation. They are mimetic works, belonging to a genre of literature that was once popular, but has largely died out. Literature they are nevertheless, with all the attendant general problems of literary interpretation.

Two of the problems specific to the interpretation of Plato's literary works are: (1) Platonic Anonymity and (2) Platonic Irony.
1. Platonic Anonymity
Plato is neither a speaker in or narrator of any of his dialogues. He is mentioned in the Apology as someone among the jury, who offers to pay a considerable fine on behalf of Socrates. He is mentioned in the Phaedo as being sick on Socrates' last day. That is all. Some scholars say that this so called "anonymity" is of small significance. They say that we can hear Plato's voice in the mouth of his main character. They suppose, as philosophers are wont to do, that whatever argument appears the strongest is Plato's argument. I will say more about this oversimplification later. Right now I want to note a function of Platonic anonymity that undermines even the voice of the main character.

The "say what you think" rule
Throughout the dialogues (e.g. Laches, Meno, Phaedo, Theaetetus) a cardinal rule of conversation is enforced. That rule is that a person must say what he really thinks. He should not agree with an argument for the sake of agreement. He should not take a position because it seems like the easiest one to defend. He should not adopt the most popular view, or the most famous one -- he must say what he thinks, for better or worse (usually worse).

When, in the course of the dialogues, there is a question of interpretation, either of a poem (see Simonides' poem in Protagoras), or a speech (see Lysias' speech in Phaedrus), or a philosophical doctrine (see Protagoras' homo mensura doctrine in the Theaetetus), the discussants invariably and explicitly resort to what they think, since the author is not around to defend his own views. Now, the dialogues either directly present Plato's views or they don't. If they don't they don't. But if they do, then this view, which says that when the author is not around you have to rely on what you think, not on what the author thinks, is Plato's view. Either way, the swan flies, and we are forced think for ourselves.

In this light, I want you to consider the following passage from the Phaedo (91c). Socrates is speaking to Simmias, Cebes and those gathered around at his time of execution. He says:

"As for you, if you will take my advice, you will think very little of Socrates, and much more of the truth. If you think that anything I say is true, you must agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument that you have. You must not allow me, in my enthusiasm, to deceive both myself and you, and leave my sting behind when I fly away."

Now, either Socrates expresses Plato's view or he doesn't. If he doesn't he doesn't. But if he does, then Plato is warning his readers, loudly and clearly, that his own views are of little account compared to the truth. The swan we really want to catch is not Plato. Perhaps, then, we should be on our guard against the decoy.

2. Platonic Irony (w/ examples from Laws, Meno)
One of the things that makes the Plato's Socrates so difficult to pin down is his irony. In the passage just mentioned there is a real possibility that he is deceiving his company and leaving a sting in the tail. In the Phaedo Socrates presents four different arguments for the immortality of the soul. All four of them are appealing to the company, yet all four of them are invalid, and in every case, the source of invalidity can be found in the dialogue itself, if you look for it. The last argument, in fact, explicitly relies on explanations that Socrates calls "clever" explanations, using the term that indicates sophistic.

Socrates is habitually ironic, even when he "leads" an interlocutor towards a conclusion. In the Meno, after enforcing the "say what you think" rule, he asks questions to a slave, about a geometry problem, which lead the slave into repeated errors. The moral is: hunters' dogs should not follow the scent of a red herring. Socrates may intentionally lead you into error, you must learn not to trust him, you must find a way to trust yourself.

Plato would have been exceptionally thick not to have understood this function of Socratic irony. But most philosophers read the dialogues as though they were, on the whole, completely devoid of irony, and specifically devoid of this function of irony. Yet if we look for it, we will find it, and not just in the speeches of Socrates, but in the space between the author and his dialogues. Let me give you a couple of examples, both from the Laws.

The Laws is Plato's last dialogue. It is the only dialogue in which Socrates does not appear. It is thought by most scholars to be dead earnest and deadly dull. An Athenian Stranger, who is the main speaker, is simply taken to be Plato. It is very curious, then, that the first of all the laws that the Athenian proposes for his utopian constitution is that every man must marry between the age of thirty and thirty-five. Curious, because Plato never married. It is curious, too, when the Athenian says that the first, most important thing a state needs is a tyrant, "quick-witted, brave, and of wide comprehension." Curious because these are exactly the characteristics the young tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius II, was said to have, when Plato tried and failed miserably to tutor him in political philosophy. The Laws, of course, is written after that failure.

Now, the Athenian Stranger either is Plato or he is not. If he is not, he is not. But if he is, then we have reason to suspect that he is being ironic in these passages, and many more.

Platonic Anonymity, and Platonic Irony give us reason to suspect that it will be a more difficult job to determine Plato's views than just to read them off the dialogues. And if these devices give us difficulty, there is worse to come. For we possess some comments Plato made which have implications about his own writing.

B. Plato's own comments about writing (letter 7, Phaedrus [ironically])
1. Seventh Letter (341c-d; 344c-d)
One of the letters attributed to Plato, the seventh, describes at length Plato's involvement in the political affairs at Syracuse. These were both protracted and involved, and whoever wrote the letter had inside knowledge of them. Most scholars accept the letter as genuine. In it Plato expresses concern about people composing manuals of his philosophy and claiming to understand his views. He writes:

One statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myself--no matter how they pretend to have acquired it, whether from my instruction or from others or by their own discovery. Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining. (341c-d) ... For this reason no serious man will ever think of writing about serious matters... (344c)

(This is self-effacement at its best. But it is not evidence that the letter is a forgery. Indeed, we may take it as evidence that the ideas expressed here, at least, are authentic: a forger who would say this when it was well known that Plato wrote dialogues, would give the game away, unless there was good reason to believe this was Plato's view.)

2. Phaedrus (275c-e) Astonishingly, something similar is said by Socrates in Phaedrus:

... anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must really be ignorant ... if he imagines that written words can do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned with. ... You know ... that's the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself. (275c-e)
If we were hoping to read Plato's views directly from the dialogues, we should be absolutely baffled to find the main speaker in a written dialogue confirming that you cannot put any faith in the written word.

III. "Tracks Leading Everywhere"
A. The Variety of Influences and Interpretations
Plato's Anonymity, Irony, and commitment to keeping his most serious views out of the picture practically ensure that he will elude our grasp. The dialogues of Plato have gotten into many hands and have been interpreted in many different ways, both historically and in recent times.

Early leaders in the Academy (Arcesilaus, Carneades) saw him as a skeptic. The Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus, who admired the philosophies of India and the East, saw him as a mystic; St Augustine, who found in Plato solutions to the problems of evil and of sin, saw in him, above all, a religious thinker. Through Alfarabi and Maimonides the political and legal dimensions of Plato's dialogues were given emphasis. The erotic Plato found favour with the Florentine Renaissance. English writers from Chaucer to Milton to Wordsworth to Murdoch fell under the sway of Platonic imagination. Hegel rediscovered the dialectic. Freud and Jung discovered Plato the therapist (though they saw quite different models of therapy in him; Freud in the structure and integration of personality, Jung through the archetypal elements of dreams, myths, and art)

In recent times, we have seen Plato appear as an analytic philosopher (in the hands of Russell), as a hermeneutic philosopher (in the hands of Gadamer), a deconstructionist (in the hands of Derrida), as a spiritualist (in the hands of Rudolf Steiner), as an "arch-theist" (in the hands of Jonathan Barnes), and as a canonical, patriarchal, hegemonic, dichotomising dead white European male (in the hands of some feminist critiques, e.g. Joan Marler, archaeomythologist)

B. Whitehead's Surmise
It should come as no surprise, then, how the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead could state that:

"The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality II.1.1)

You knew I had to say that at some point, didn't you? Ah, but now you are in a position to understand it as you have not understood it before. Why is it safe to characterise the European philosophical tradition as footnotes to Plato? Because of the wealth (read 'abundance' not 'value') of general (read 'not specific') ideas scattered throughout the Platonic dialogues. If Whitehead is right, all the footnotes say the same thing: "Bully for Plato! He said it first; of course, he didn't say it in a coherent or consistent way, as shown by the fact that he was also the first to say everything else." That is, they are acknowledgements only, not really credits to Plato.

III. Platonism
There appears to be only one way out of these difficulties: to "extract" a "systematic scheme of thought" from the dialogues: Plato's Doctrines. Fortunately some very clever and industrious people have been applying the most up to date logical, philological, historical and scientific methods to this problem for the better part of the last one hundred years. The Doctrinalists have made progress. Let me fill you in a little bit on what they say.

A. Tools and Principles
1. Aristotle's authority
The most important tool the Doctrinalists have for extracting Platonism from the dialogues is Aristotle. Aristotle, say the Doctrinalists, is an unimpeachable authority. After all, he was a "student" at the Academy for 20 years, right up to the death of Plato; he knew the man personally. Moreover, he had all the characteristics of a reliable witness: he was intelligent, frank and sympathetic. If he tells us that Plato had doctrines (and it seems he does) we should believe him. If he tells us that a view presented in some particular dialogue is Plato's view (and it seems he does) we should believe him.

"Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas"
For example, in the Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, chapter 6, Aristotle says:

We had perhaps better consider the universal good and discuss thoroughly what is meant by it, although such an inquiry is made repugnant by the fact that the Forms have been introduced by our friends. Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philosophers; for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends.

Now, when Aristotle goes on the criticise the Form of the Good, his criticisms fit rather well to the remarks made by the character Socrates in Plato's Republic, book VI.506-509. It seems, then, that Plato's Doctrine of the Good, attested by Aristotle, is the one expressed in the Republic.

Another example, again from the Nicomachean Ethics. In book I.3 Aristotle says:
... moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of pain that we abstain from noble ones. Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education.

And this statement is virtually a quote of Plato's Laws 653, where the Athenian says:
A child's first infant consciousness is that of pleasure and pain; this is the domain wherein the soul first acquires virtue or vice. ... By education, then, I mean goodness in the form in which it is first acquired by a child. ... if you consider the one factor in it, the rightly disciplined state of pleasures and pains whereby a man, from his first beginnings on, will abhor what he should abhor and relish what he should relish--if you isolate this factor and call it education, you will be giving it its true name.

Now, Aristotle doesn't say quite enough about Plato's views for us to construct Plato's doctrines from his testimony alone. But the correspondences between what Aristotle says Plato thought and what the dialogues say (and there are many of them, enough to fill about 30 pages of references), give us confidence that we can extract Plato's doctrines from the dialogues ourselves. In fact, they do more than that: they provide the key.

2. Plato's mouthpiece
For, despite all the talk about anonymity and irony, Aristotle straightforwardly takes the main speaker of the dialogues to be presenting Plato's views. And he, if anyone, ought to know. Indeed, when quoting from the dialogues, Aristotle is incautious about using the name "Socrates" or "Plato" in just the same way that the Doctrinalists are, and for just the same reason: it doesn't matter. (In fact, he once speaks about what Socrates says in the Laws, which is incredible, because Socrates is not a character in the Laws). For Aristotle, the main speaker simply presents Plato's views; they are interchangeable.

3. Chronology
Now, there is one more important tool used by Doctrinalists. Obviously, the dialogues were not written in a day. Some were written earlier, some later. History has seen many different arrangements of the dialogues, and, as you might expect, when they are read in a different order, a different Plato seems to emerge from them. If we could nail down the right order of the dialogues, it would be a great help extracting Plato's doctrines. At the outset, only a few assumptions seem safe: the Laws was unfinished at Plato's death; the long dialogues like Republic, Gorgias, Timaeus, and Phaedo were not written first. But very few other assumptions could be made. Most importantly, since the aim of having a chronology is to establish Plato's doctrines, a hypothesis about what those doctrines are cannot be used to establish a chronology. We need an independent way of ordering the dialogues. Enter "Stylometry", the science of determining the chronological order of an author's works by statistical measurement of stylistic features, some of them conscious (e.g. the avoidance of hiatus), some of them unconscious (e.g. the measurements of the last five syllables of every sentence). In recent times, many careful stylometric studies of Plato's dialogues have been made, to the satisfaction of the Doctrinalists, who are now confident (with the exception of one or two dialogues) of the order of composition.
4. Developmental Story: Early, middle, late
Now, armed with the testimony of Aristotle, the principle that the main speaker of a dialogue is always Plato's mouthpiece, and the chronological order of the dialogues a very complex, interesting and philosophically robust story begins to emerge. It is the story of Plato's philosophical development. You see, it turns out that the main reason for all the diversity of interpretations was that Plato didn't have a single consistent set of doctrines across his whole career. No, he began philosophical life as a Socratic, took "the long deep plunge into mathematics" (Vlastos) after meeting the Pythagoreans, and then, after a mid-life intellectual crisis, he finished up as an Eleatic dialectician.

B. The Thing Extracted: metaphysical theories
The Plato that gets extracted from the dialogues this way will be more or less familiar, and that is comforting. I cannot show you the whole developmental picture, but I can show you it's main line. In the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle says:

Socrates ... was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions; Plato accepted his teaching, but held that the problem applied not to any sensible thing but to entities of another kind--for this reason, that the common definition could not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing. Things of this other sort, then, he called Ideas, and sensible things, he said, were apart from these, and were all called after these; for the multitude of things which have the same name as the Form are by participation in it. Only the name 'participation' was new; for the Pythagoreans say that things are by imitation ... and Plato says they are by participation, changing the name.

Let us look at how this statement is reflected in Plato's philosophical development.

1. "Socrates was busying himself about ethical matters"
According to our developmental story, in the beginning Plato was a Socratic. And Aristotle confirms this: "Plato accepted his teaching". So we should expect to find Plato, in his earliest dialogues, busying himself about ethical matters. Stylometry tells us that the earliest dialogues include: Lysis, Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito. What is the business of these dialogues? Friendship, Courage, Temperance, Piety, and Justice --i.e. "ethical matters".

2. "fixed ... on definitions"
The next stage comes when Aristotle tells us that Socrates "neglected nature" and "was fixed on definitions." Again the early dialogues confirm this fixation. What does Socrates (or Plato) do in them but ask, again and again, "What is Friendship?", "What is Courage?", "What is Piety?" This fixation is the hinge in Plato's development, because, instead of remaining busy with ethical matters, he became interested in definitions per se. In the Meno, which comes at the end of Plato's "Socratic" period, we see, for the first time, explicit discussion of the conditions for adequate philosophical definition. In terms of these conditions, which involve both mathematics and metaphysics, we are shown why the earlier attempts at definition led nowhere. Armed with his new theory of definition, Plato begins to develop his Theory of Forms.

3. "Ideas" and "Forms"
And this is just what Aristotle tells us: Plato came to believe that "sensible things" couldn't be defined, because they "were always changing." So, definition must "apply to entities of another kind," namely "Ideas," or "Forms," which are "apart" from sensible things. Sensible things are "called after" the Forms and are "by participation" in them. If we look at the dialogues of Plato's middle period (Symposium, Republic, and especially Phaedo), we find a rather dogmatic Socrates saying this sort of thing all the time. In fact, in the Phaedo he uses exactly these terms: he insists that each Form--Justice, Virtue, Beauty, and so on--exists "just by itself", "separate" from sensible things. He declares that

4. The Crisis
Aristotle doesn't tell us what happens next, but we can finish the story for ourselves. In a dialogue called Parmenides Plato subjects the Theory of Forms, and particularly the relation of "participation" to comprehensive criticism. All avenues are pursued to make sense of the theory, and all avenues end in absurdity. The Theory of Forms cannot survive. And, lo and behold, if we look at those dialogues which stylometry tells us come after the Parmenides the Theory of Forms does not appear. We find very penetrating skepticism in the Theaetetus, a renewed interest in Presocratic metaphysics in the Sophist, a set-theoretical classification of things in the Philebus, but no Theory of Forms. Neither in the Statesman, nor in the Laws. What we find in the late dialogues is a "post-critical" Plato, once again searching for answers. And there are flashes of brilliance here too, but Plato is aging now, his powers of intellect are failing, and he is encumbered by his past. The late dialogues are the home of scattered general ideas, without any systematic doctrine. Or so the story goes.

C. Problems
1. objections
There are, of course, many objections to the developmental view. One is that Aristotle is hardly a disinterested historian; he has his own purposes for describing Plato the way he does. Another concerns the mouthpiece principle. Even if the main speaker is, in a sense, Plato himself, scholars must be selective about which of the things he says form his doctrines and which don't. Bits of the dialogues do not come with a tag that says "I am important for philosophical purposes". And finally, there are both technical and philosophical problems about stylometry. But all these objections, though they have been developed with great care and force, we may let pass. The Doctrinalists are so sure that they have captured Plato, that they guard his cage day and night. No one is even allowed to see him who does not first swear allegiance, and there is no debate about these matters.

2. consequences
Instead of debating the Doctrinalists, we should observe the consequences of their approach. There is one positive consequence. The doctrinal Plato is useful for the classroom, or the lecture hall, where there is a need for focus and a question of time. Plato's philosophy wasn't meant, I don't think, for these kinds of situations; nevertheless, to focus on specific doctrines reduces an otherwise bewildering array of topics to somewhat manageable size. But there is a danger in doing this, if it is not made clear that the doctrines are constructions. Our job is to shed light, not to master. Other consequences are more serious. Let me mention three of them.

a. The first is: Asthenia
The Doctrinal Plato is skin and bones. Effectively, in the hands of the Doctrinalists, only Plato's arguments are of any importance. His doctrines are in the conclusions, and his philosophy is in the premises. Everything about the drama--setting, characterisation, and action--is left to one side. This includes the opening scenes of dialouges and the speeches of interlocutors. (To doctrinalists, these are just feathers and fluff, and some leave them out of the translation altogether; Cornford.) It includes myths and stories. (In their commentaries, doctrinalists often make no mention of them; Bostok.) It includes comparisons and metaphors, allegories and similies. (To the extent that these are discussed at all, they are glossed in terms of more exact propositions; Fine.)
b. The second is: Sclerosis
In their quest to understand exactly what Plato means, the Doctrinalists have employed very strong medicine: the medicine of formalisation. You see, what the main speaker in a dialogue means isn't always quite clear. The Doctrinalist's job is to render it clear. If you pick up a contemporary scholarly book on Plato, say from Oxford University Press, or Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, you will soon find out that Plato held, for example, the Priority of Definition Principle (PD), The Dialectical Requirement (DR), The Dependency Thesis (DT), and so on. These principles, or requirements, or theses are then given a very exact statement, often in formal terms. For example:

(PD): "For any predicate F, some individual a's knowing what F is, is a sufficient condition for a's knowing whether that predicate is true of some subject." (Dancy, PIF)

(DT): "G is a dependent good if and only if G is good for a just or good person and G is bad for an unjust or bad person." (Bobonich, PUR)

I sometimes laugh at how simple-minded I am not to see these principles in the dialogues. I have to tell my students, "Well, Plato doesn't actually write: 'I Plato have a principle I call the Priority of Definition Principle or PD, according to which ...'", but I worry that I can't see what everybody else sees. The trouble with the hardening of Plato into principles is that it leaves no room for thought.

c. The third and most dire consequence of doctrinalism is: Rigor Mortis
Inevitably there will be a point at which the doctrine is exact, and the development complete. Indeed, we are at that point now, or very nearly at it. The only thing left to do then is to consign Plato to the history of philosophy. The autopsy has already begun: The doctrinalists speak respectfully, but freely, about Plato's mistakes, Plato's confusions, Plato's naiveté. Alas for the theory of recollection; Alas for the theory of forms. Alas for the doctrinalists, who will turn themselves out of living.

IV. Plato's Dream (Reprise)
We cannot learn so much from capturing Plato's doctrines as we can from living with his dialogues. When we extract the doctrines we extract everything that is solid, but not everything that is important. After all, isn't Plato, even the doctrinalist's Plato, the philosopher of the in-visible? The genius of Plato, what makes him so enduring, is that he has endowed his creations with a soul, like the statues of Daedalus.* They are made like living beings (he says so in the Phaedrus!)-with a head, a body, and appendages-and, in most cases, they were given names of living beings. Some are lovely at first sight, some have their beauty deep inside. Like persons, knowing them is not the same thing as analysing them.

That is something the docrtinalists completely miss: the importance of the activity over and above the content. If I may return to Plato's dream. We felt sympathetic with the plight of the fowlers, but maybe we didn't pause long enough to think about what they do. Perhaps they would begin by just making a net; something to throw over anything in hopes of catching it. Failing at that they might go in for traps; setting them in the places where a swan would be likely to land. Failing again, they would turn to lures, and then mimics, and all along they would be learning as much about the swan as they possibly could. They would have it in their minds day and night, yearning and hoping to discover its secrets. Perhaps they never will catch it; there is still a sense in which they are already bound together: the "hunter is captured by the game." And, if they are ever so fortunate, and do catch it, they must set it free right away, esle it die.

Plato's philosophy is like that. You get to know it by living with it, questioning it, trying it this way and that, giving up the frontal attack and taking the long way around, tracking it down by stealth, and so on. We should take heart. As the Athenian Stranger says in the Laws: "Nothing a man has is more naturally disposed (euphuesteron) to escape evil than his soul, nor [does he have] anything [so well-disposed as his soul] to track down and capture the best of all things, and having captured it, to live in communion with it for the rest of his life."

*Some might say that this allusion to the Meno [97d], where Socrates says that true opinions, like the statues of Daedalus, are useful only when they are tied down, shows that Plato himself would have approved of the doctrinal approach: our quarry is to be captured and kept on the leash. How poorly they understand. The tether is what binds us to our object, not our object to us.

The audience in the Blackheath Public School hall