How to read Plato

Plato is often presented as recommending a turning-away from the world of emotions, the body, time and physical space. Indeed, his enthronement of the Divided Line in the Republic would seem to support such a presentation, with its placing of unsullied Nous (reason) at its highest point. However, this interpretation of Plato does not explain many instances in the dialogues where Socrates appears to offer a more complex negotiation of the role of human emotions, physicality and life within time in the practice of philosophy. Interpretations of Plato have tended to ignore these instances or them to the lesser sphere of the literary as opposed to the true philosophy of Plato. relegate

However, if one tries to put these literary aspects together with the philosophical, one finds a coherent philosophical recommendation which goes to the heart of concerns such as: how do we know the highest realities? What is the status of human desire? Does our life in time ta ke us away from the way of life of the philosopher? In his dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus, Plato makes a subjective emotional dimension for cognition a crucial aspect of his argument for the possibility of objective knowledge. That might seem paradoxical, for surely objective knowledge by definition has no recourse to the promptings of human desire? Yet for Plato, if stable truths can only exist beyond the vicissitudes of time and space, our access to them must be via desire. Even by desiring such truths, we attain a dim intimation of their reality. It is this consideration that gives rise to his famous doctrine of the recollection of the forms. So it is the notion of desire that mediates the cognitive tension between the unknown which one seeks to know, and fully realised understanding. Robert Harrison has described this kind of Plato as the other Plato, at odds with the terminal Plato of Vernant, Detienne, Derrida and LacoueLabarthe, on the one hand, and the epistemological Plato of anglo-saxon analytic philosophy, on the other. For both these schools, despite their differences, Plato sets running an unbroken lineage of rationalist metaphysics which eschewed bodily and emotional mediations, culminating in the enthronement of an indifferent supra-linguistic logos by Cartesian metaphysics. Robert Harrison suggests that a critical and literary attention to the primary sources can yield a rather different approximation of Platonic metaphysics. From this perspective one finds not a neutral philosophical gaze, but a presentation of philosophy as a kind of terrible and physical anguish which yearns to see again and again intimations of the highest reality within material and beloved reality. In the Phaedrus, for

example, recollection triggered by material encounters in time induce physical pain as Socrates describes the sprouting of the feathers of the soul's wings (Phaedrus 251b-e), and far from philosophical speculation enthroning a detached model of knowledge as vision, eros (desire) is described as a liquid pouring into the eyes and overflowing into others (255c-d). One might also mention here the apparent significance in the Phaedo of Socrates' bodily disposition, the exact orientation of feet and hands and his bodily composure in the face of death, as informed by philosophy as a particular way of life (Phaedo 59d-60c, 115b). In these instances, the passions of the philosopher are unambiguously linked to the body, and as such seem to be closely related to the philosophical process and attainment to the highest realities. If to desire to know implies an obscure pre-understanding, then, inversely, desire itself may be regarded as an obscure mode of comprehension. Far from adulating merely abstract truths (and perhaps he regarded even mathematical entities as ethereal concretions), Plato, by appealing to the forms, invokes a primarily unknown, hidden eternal concreteness of cognitive being. The mediative detours via the beloved individual and beautiful material particulars which we take in the course of seeking to recollect the forms do not stand in a hostile relation to the reality of those forms in which they participate. For it is eros which conjoins our affinity with limited particulars with our affinity with the specificity of the Forms themselves. One might suggest that our distance from, and motion towards material particulars is correlated with our distance from the transcendent Forms. For if the Forms are the true realities of material things, and yet the latter are not pure illusions, then a knowledge of the Forms does not simply lead us away from the realities which participate in those Forms. Rather, it gives us these realities, since they are, in themselves and without remainder, participations. Moreover, since our souls cannot fully divest themselves of embodiment for Plato, it is only a loving, attentive concern for particulars - whether beautiful material things or persons, or the specificity of dialectical conversation - which opens our souls to recollection (Phaedrus, Lysis, Symposium). So there is a mutually confirming circle here, for all the admitted priority of the intellectual realm. The other Plato involves an interlinked attention to three things; first, to the literary idioms of the dialogues: to the dialogue form itself, to the patterns of imagery and metaphor and to the deployment of myth and reference to ritual; secondly, to the religious ba ckground that is constantly invoked, as well as to the revisions of religious practice that are recommended. In general, it is the irreducibility of the literary that signals the equal irreducibility of the religious. Because this dimension involves concrete images and bodily ritual practices, it turns out - perhaps counterintuitively - that insistence on the religious dimension in Plato encourages,

in the third place, a more positive view of his understanding of the material realm than is often ascribed to him. This is because it is material pictures and practices that are seen to play a vital mediating role in terms of ascent to the forms. At the same time, the latter tend to become more apophatically transcendent: since we are never entirely be yond mediation while in the body, the Forms are seen to exceed our mental capacities as presently constituted and also to contain in an 'eminent' fashion all of what we find in material things but to a partly unknown and excessive degree. Together these two emphases place methexis (participation) more firmly centre-stage than some accounts allow. We have to pass through participatory means as triggers of recollection; but what is recollected is but dimly apprehended. Thus the merely intellectual is outflanked for the other Plato both from the material and from the spiritual side. This model stands in opposition to three inherited readings. First, the neoKantian reading which tends to reduce the forms to a priori structures of understanding which are seen as both immanent to our minds and as fully comprehensible. Secondly, for the analytic reading, Plato is seen as posing genuine problems of epistemology but as proposing implausible solutions in terms of the doctrine of the Forms. There is some continuity with the neoKantian reading here insofar as Phaedo and Meno tend to be read as trying to explain innate knowledge, rather than as trying to explain how we can have the impulse to search for that which we do not yet know. In the first case, one has a supposed fact which is then seen as explained excessively in terms of transcendence where either Humean naturalist immanence or Kantian transcendentalism would do; in the second case, one has an aporia (conundrum) which cannot be reduced but which can be religiously resolved in terms of the myths of pre -existence of the soul and recollection of this estate. The third way of reading Plato is the post-modern way of regarding him asterminal in the sense of offering a closed account of a replete presence accessible to intellectual sight. This interpretative route also makes the mistake of projecting back Cartesian and Kantian attitudes of certainty and of eliding the religious dimension. It is the association of intellectual sight with domineering grasp which ignores both spiritual mystery and the need for material mediation in order to approach it.

Further reading:

Plato, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno, Symposium