Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides For The Perplexed)

249 Pages·2007·0.87 MB·English

by  Gerald A. Press

PLATO: A GUIDE FOR
THE PERPLEXED
GUIDES FOR THE PERPLEXED AVAILABLE
FROM CONTINUUM:
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Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, Claire Colebrook
Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen Earnshaw
Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed, Claire Colebrook
Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, Chris Lawn
Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed, David James
Hobbes: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen J. Finn
Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed, Angela Coventry
Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matheson Russell
Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed, TK Seung
Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed, Clare Carlisle
Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed, Franklin Perkins
Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, B. C. Hutchens
Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed, Martin McIvor
Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed, Eric Matthews
Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed, R. Kevin Hill
Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Kemp
Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed, David Pellauer
Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matthew Simpson
Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Cox
Spinoza: A Guide for the Perplexed, Charles Jarrett
Wittgenstein: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mark Addis
PLATO: A GUIDE FOR
THE PERPLEXED
GERALD A. PRESS
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
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www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © Gerald A. Press 2007
First published 2007
Reprinted 2009, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 9780826491770
PB: 9780826491763
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and Pbroinutnedd bayn dM bPoGun Bdo ionk Gs Lretadt, BBroitdaminin, Cornwall
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Perplexity, doubt and the quest for wisdom
and happiness 1
Part I. Background
1. Plato’s life and works 13
2. The contexts for interpreting Plato’s dialogues 23
Part II. Sources of perplexity: Change
3. A brief history of Platonism and Plato interpretation 39
4. Dialogue form 55
5. Arguments and ideas, vision and doctrines 75
6. Fables, myths and stories 92
7. Irony and other forms of humour 106
8. Play and seriousness 118
9. Paradox 130
Part III. Plato’s philosophy: Permanence
10. Platonic anonymity and the nature of Plato’s philosophy 146
11. Persistent themes and Plato’s vision 159
12. The Platonic path to wisdom 172
Part IV. Help in reading and understanding Plato’s dialogues
and philosophy
13. How to read a Platonic dialogue 185
14. Summaries of the dialogues 209
v
CONTENTS
Glossary of Greek terms 221
Bibliography 231
Index of dialogues, persons and subjects 235
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book offers, in summary form, a way of reading and under-
standing Plato’s dialogues that has been slowly growing in the
shadow of older and rather different orientations for nearly a cen-
tury. Its foundations are a few simple principles that I have thought
were true since before I knew their names: contextualism (interpret-
ing texts within their original linguistic, historical and intellectual
contexts), holism (interpreting texts in their entireties rather than
piecemeal), and organicism (treating passages and details of texts as
parts of wholes organized by their authors in just this way). The
chapters that follow synthesize not only my own work, but also,
more importantly, work done by many scholars over many years. I
wish to acknowledge them briefly here because the book is primarily
intended for non-specialist readers for whom extensive footnotes and
bibliographies are confusing rather than clarifying.
From my own teachers – Jason Saunders, Richard Popkin, Herbert
Marcuse and Paul Henry, S.J. – and the teachers of my teachers –
Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall, Jr and Frederick J. E.
Woodbridge – I learned close attention to the texts in their original
languages as well as sensitivity to textual types and nuances. I
also learned from them the necessity of scholarship and the ground-
ing of interpretation in historical context, the significance of drama
in Plato, and the importance of challenging inherited modes of
interpretation. I have also learned a great deal from scholars of
places and times further removed from my own experience: Paul
Shorey, Paul Friedländer, Luigi Stefanini, E. N. Tigerstedt, René
Schaerer, Antonio Capizzi, Richard McKeon, Harold Cherniss
and Jacob Klein. I have learned, too, from scholars of my generation
whom I have not known – Rudolf Weingartner, Kenneth Sayre,
Herman Sinaiko and Michael Stokes – and from those I have been
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
fortunate to meet or to know – Robert S. Brumbaugh, Rosamond
Kent Sprague, H. S. Thayer, Victorino Tejera, James Arieti, Francisco
Gonzalez, Hayden Ausland, Thomas Schmid, Samuel Scolnicov,
Mitchell Miller, Lloyd Gerson, Debra Nails, Ruby Blondell, Chris-
topher Rowe, Harold Tarrant and Thomas Alexander Szlezák.
Above all, over 40 years, from reading his publications and from
personal interactions at conferences, by letter, and by email, and
despite the points on which I remain in disagreement with him, I
have learned from Holger Thesleff, to whom I dedicate this – as he
would say – protreptic. His universality of scholarship, depth of
textual knowledge, openness to new approaches, and flexibility in
bringing a variety of approaches and points of view to bear on
particular issues are ideals of humane learning and the opposite of
the sycophancy, ideology and demagoguery that plague our times.
March 2007
viii
INTRODUCTION: PERPLEXITY, DOUBT AND
THE QUEST FOR WISDOM AND HAPPINESS
THE BEGINNING READER’S EXPERIENCE
Plato is one of the greatest and most influential of all Western philo-
sophers, but reading Plato is a puzzling experience for many begin-
ning readers. His dialogues seem much more approachable, more
reader-friendly than the treatises, essays, disquisitions and medita-
tions written by some of the other classic philosophers. For one
thing, they read like stories; and the stories and characters are often
interesting and entertaining even though the dialogues include a
good deal of argumentation that can be fairly complex. For another,
Plato’s language is rich, often beautiful, and uses a wealth of literary
devices that elicit, maintain, restore and reward the reader’s interest
in ways paralleled by only a few of the great Western philosophers.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the best-known and most recent
examples of highly ‘literary’ philosophers and, as with Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche – each of whom had a special relation to Plato – it
is very difficult for the beginner to figure out what the ‘philosophy’
is exactly. It may be even difficult to recognize what teachers or
books say the philosophy is, or the reader may find that the phil-
osophy they say is there, while recognizable, seems wrong, offensive
or unnecessarily complex.
An overall cause of reader perplexity about Plato is the contrast
between what appears on the surface and what seems to exist, but
obscurely, beneath the surface. The dialogues are characterized by
many interesting details that change both within each dialogue and
from one dialogue to another: dramatis personae, framing, setting,
tone and subject. Behind or beneath these superficial differences,
however, but difficult to articulate clearly, there seems to be a stable
set of views about what is true and what is important, about what is
1