Friday, March 20, 2009
What's it all about?
I've noticed a pattern in reading various commentaries on the so-called late dialogues, that commentators typically mark the central themes of a dialogue in categories (epistemology, aesthetics, politics...) that may be quite anachronistic when applied to Plato. I don't mean just that such terms as 'epistemology' are of late coinage (1820s in this case), but rather that we modern philosophers are only able to speak about one such problem at a time, whereas Plato seems to have thought about them as inseparably intertwined. I find this an ongoing difficulty in reading Plato; perhaps I won't really grasp what he's doing until I can relax some of my rigid modern intellectual distinctions.
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I tend to agree. Recall F. Engels' assertion that the whole sweep of intellectual history reduces to a series of debates between some form of materialism and idealism (what some might reject as overly “reductivist,” may in fact speak to the interrelatedness you describe).
It is difficult for me to tell whether my one and a half years of philosophical training has already given me a bias like this. I believe Plato did not limit his focus to a certain field of philosophy, but sometimes I interpret some of the claims he makes as either epistemological or metaphysical in nature. For example, I could say that the claim “All is one” is a metaphysical claim, which would imply that everything in the universe is one. Or, I could say “All is one” is an epistemological claim, and imply that everything we know is one. Sometimes a claim in one of these categories has consequences in the other, but this is not always the case (except for the, dare I say, “realist”).
Just like trying to classify music into genres, categorizing philosophical claims does not usually provide much insight into the actual claims. It can only serve as a very brief overarching description of the nature of a claim.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any literature on Plato that is not guilty of categorizing his works?
Realists describe themselves in a variety of ways: metaphysical realists, epistemological realists, moral realists, pragmatic realists, internal/external realists, fallibilistic realists, etc. While the hard-core metaphysical realist may see “all is one” as exclusively ontological, the epistemological realist sees it as a knowledge claim first, perhaps derivatively ontological to whatever extent knowledge claims serve as a bridge from words/thoughts to the world. Kant is instructive here: in his system, “all is one” can be understood to imply, given the synthesizing activity of the mind, “I think all is one.”
Categories are tools, better or worse suited to the analysis of a particular body of work, but never entirely dispensable. My concern here is specific to Plato: for quite good pragmatic reasons we distinguish, for example, moral/political from epistemic/metaphysical concerns. Plato himself recognizes these as analytically distinct subject-matters, but he seems to assume the opposite of what we moderns take as self-evident: that we can speak of one without robustly implicating the other (that as insular realms of discourse they do not really need each other).
The great Whitehead scholar Ivor Leclerc, with whom I studied Plato in graduate school, for all his formidable erudition, simply could not see his way clear to treating Plato's metaphysical work as inextricably linked to the moral -- in fact, when I asked him about that, he replied that there simply isn't time to deal with all facets of Plato's thought at once. I'm afraid, however, that Plato would have said there wasn't time not to do so.
By definition, I think, there is no Plato scholarship that does not categorize, but some of the best work, by taking the dialogic form seriously, may avoid the worst of the compartmentalization that concerns me. I'm thinking here of Charles Griswold and some of his ilk.
I find Johnson's comments clarifying and helpful, and I think Plato would agree that ontological claims, as claims, by definition implicate the claimants and their moral communities. As the devastating critique of Protagoras in the Theatetus shows, however, Plato is no relativist about either moral or epistemic matters. That is to say, he does not collapse the content of a claim into the subjectivity of the claimant as a modern idealist would.
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