Plato and Platonism

From the time immediately following Plato, there has been disagreement about the meaning of his dialogues. From Antiquity to the present day, we see divergent doctrines claiming to be his inspiration; at the time of Cicero, for example, some attached to the name of Plato a dogmatism similar to that of the Stoics, others saw in him a supporter of doubt and the suspension of judgment. A little later, from the first century, the mystics and the renovators of Pythagoreanism seized upon the name and writings of Plato; and Platonism became synonymous with a doctrine which elevates the soul above thought and being, and unites it to a Good which is loved and tasted rather than known. On the other hand, we see in the 19th century a tendency, still very strong today, to make Plato a pure rationalist who identifies true reality with the object of intelligence and teaches to determine this object by a reasoned discussion, the type of which is borrowed from mathematics. (2)

Such a divergence between interpreters is explained not only by the exceptional richness of his thought, of which it is perhaps impossible and, in any case, very difficult to grasp all the aspects as a whole, but by the literary form that it takes. Let us first insist on this second point. The Platonic dialogue has nothing of these didactic treatises, for which the Ionian philosophers and the doctors of the Hippocratic collection already provided the model. Only in the works of old age do we see something similar: all the physiological considerations of the end of the Timaeus and a good part of the Laws are simple expositions; but these are works to which Plato did not give, except in certain parts, their definitive form. With these exceptions, Plato’s works have an aspect which sets them apart entirely; for, if, in the Socratic schools, roughly contemporary with Plato, dialogues were written, this form of exposition was almost completely abandoned in Antiquity, despite the few sporadic examples which can be given, such as those of Cicero or Plutarch; it is particularly significant that the neo-Platonists of the end of Antiquity never imitate the literary procedures of the master and strive by all means to rediscover in the dialogue the dogmatic substance, and it is all the more important to seek to appreciate the literary form of Platonic thought, insofar as it concerns the interpretation of his philosophy.

(2) Cicéron, Derniers académiques, 1,15-18 ; Apulée, DuDieu deSocraie; Natorp, Platos Ideenlehre, 1903.

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