Philosophy Beyond the Text: Rethinking the Way We Approach Plato’s Dialogues

For most scholars, the texts of Plato’s dialogues constitute the unique and supreme source of his philosophy. Affected by a specific prejudice, which could be called “textual addiction,” these scholars are basing their historical and philosophical researches on an (usually) unconscious assumption, namely, that Plato’s philosophy is fully incorporated in his writings. In Wittgenstein’s terms, it’s like confusing the ladder with the destination you want to reach. Or – in my terms – a map with the country (or the place) you want to get to.

According to the mentioned prejudice, in order to find out what the philosopher who founded the school in the grove Academe really thought and what his philosophy was, it would suffice to read and analyze his works. In the terms of the comparison above, Plato’s dialogues provide nothing more than a map towards the destination. To arrive there, however, requires much more than simply reading and interpreting texts.

A “conflict of interpretations,” originating in antiquity and deepening after the discovery of “scientific” methods of exegesis and stylometric research, demonstrates the illusory character of the aforementioned “textual addiction.” In fact, even the texts of the Platonic dialogues are insufficient material to work on if one wishes to rediscover Plato’s philosophy and its ultimate goal. Should this statement, as well as the hermeneutical attitude that it generates, seem hazardous, I would like to specify that it is not at all gratuitous. In his Seventh Epistle, Plato himself acknowledged that the philosophical issues on his mind had never been included in his writings and would never be included in any of them, for that matter “does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge” (341c). Despite his warning, many contemporary scholars – with the exception of some masterminds, for instance the members of the Tübingen School, Hans J. Krämer, Konrad Gaiser, and Thomas A. Szlezak – have been tributary to a type of analysis that has turned the Platonic texts into a bunch of “sophisticated artifacts,” as Patrice Loraux contends.

It would seem that nothing and nobody could dissuade scholars from considering almost unanimously that thoughts can be encapsulated into graphic signs and that the history of philosophical ideas is identical to the history of philosophical texts. However, a few scholars did not share this conviction – and one of them was Ioan Petru Culianu, the eccentric historian of religions from the University of Chicago.  First, he pointed out that “in  history,  transmission  is usually  viewed  as  a  process  in  which  someone  reads  and rereads a text and then repeats it to others, often in a distorted way”; then he surprisingly stated that, notwithstanding all of the above, “sometimes texts never  show up  in  the  transmission  of ideas, even  if  they exist.” Confronted by such a statement, historians of philosophy (and other scholars, too) will ask, how could divine Plato’s philosophical ideas be discovered extra-textually? Moreover, where else, if not in the text of his dialogues, could the much-desired Platonic philosophy be found? My answer is the following: the basis of all knowledge is what Ioan Petru Culianu called “the cultural tradition.”

As we shall see further, the extra-textual sharing of philosophical ideas does not involve negating the value of the texts themselves, but revising the hierarchy of the elements of the framework within which the interpretation is taking place. What is essential is not the text being studied, but the hermeneutical filter used by scholars. This filter structures their intellect (νοῦς), based on a paradigm inherited and handed down by none other than the so-called “cultural tradition.” While the studied text is just a philosophical pre-text, its “earthly” immanent dimension, the real philosophical Text, which is situated in the rarefied atmosphere of Plato’s metaphysics and in his doctrine of the intellect, is “celestial,” transcendental in relation to the philosophical writing. Paradoxically, the Text, which is in effect identical to the thought and utterance of the God revealed by Plato, cannot be uttered or written down, but only reflected and contemplated. It is exactly like the case of a well-designed map: although it faithfully reflects the content of the city or region it charts, it is nothing but a vague, pale, and very distant copy of reality.

Phaedrus

Discussing the title and subtitle of the Phaedrus, Gabriel Liiceanu drew attention to the fact that “ever since ancient times, the debate on the true theme and unity of the dialogue has been a heated one.” Out of the host of hypotheses formulated by Gabriel Liiceanu, I prefer the one holding that the dialogue is peri rhetorikes, that is, “it deals with rhetoric.” In the first pages of his well-known essay entitled Plato’s Pharmacy, Jacques Derrida suggests that the Phaedrus be approached by way of the successful hypothesis of a “rigorous, sure and subtle form”:

This is, in particular, the case – and this will be our supplementary thread – with the whole last section (274b ff.), devoted, as everyone knows, to the origin, history, and the value of writing. That entire hearing of the trial of writing should some day cease to appear as an extraneous mythological fantasy, an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss, have done without. In truth, it is rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other.

Favoring the French philosopher’s approach, I shall interpret the discourse on writing set forth in Plato’s Phaedrus without attributing to it any derogatory shade of meaning allegedly originating in some obscure elements of the philosopher’s biography. There is definitely no trace of “mythological fantasy” in Plato’s criticism of writing – only a lot of wisdom.

The meditations of the Athenian philosopher, meant to reveal the value and role of writing, centered on the myth of the god (δαίμων) Theuth, who had invented the letters (γράμματα). In accordance with Socrates’ description, the Egyptian daemon is responsible for several remarkable discoveries, “He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters” (274 cd).

Animated by the desire of popularizing his invention, Theuth presented it to the king Thamus, who ruled Egypt at that time, so that the latter should evaluate it, “But when they came to the letters, ‘This invention, o king,’ said Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered’” (274 e).

The daemon pretends that he has found the best cure (φάρμακον) for oblivion and ignorance – two very serious afflictions of the soul, namely the ability to remember things and wisdom. Despite his enthusiastic plea, the king will observe the demonic “temptation” and just like Socrates, who remained calm when confronted with the Sophists’ deceiving rhetoric, he will prove to be lucid and imperturbable:

Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another ; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters that are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory (μνήμη), but of reminding (ὑπόμνησις); and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise (274 e – 275 b).

We can extract Plato’s main criticism of writing out of king Thamus’ discourse. Firstly, the texts are not a cure against oblivion (λήθη); on the contrary, the writing “will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it” (275 a). Relying on several minute etymological analyses, Andrei Cornea demonstrated that “it was not writing in itself that must have seemed condemnable to him [Plato], but the likelihood that the reminding technique be substituted to the anamnesis technique.” Jacques Derrida makes the same observation, “Insofar as writing lends a hand to hypomnesia and not to live memory, it, too, is foreign to true science, to amnesia in its properly psychic motion, to truth in the process of (its) presentation, to dialectics. Writing can only mime them.”

Through the agency of king Thamus, the great founder and master of the Academus School of Philosophy stated very clearly that, “their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them” (275 a). This phenomenon of depreciation of the anamnesis eliminates the individual effort, i.e., the asceticism involved in the memorization process and in the integration of the studies destined to shaping the soul and initiating it into the mysterious realm of philosophy. Therefore, Plato does not criticize anamnesis (inner reminding), but hypomnesis (reminding based on a support outside the soul).

The second accusation brought to writing concerns its “apparent wisdom” (doxan sophian), which it supposedly offers the readers, turning them into imaginary sages (doxosophoi) (275 a). This statement contains the most essential part of Plato’s concept of writing, being as important as the fragment in which Socrates denounces how “strange” writing is:

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself (275 de).

Plato distinguishes between “true wisdom” and “apparent wisdom,” which pertains to the realm of becoming (to gignomenon) – as the noun doxa indicates too, i.e., to the realm of opinion, being only a mimetic reflection of the “true wisdom” found in the realm of ideas. He who studies by using written texts is a “lover of opinion” (philodoxous), having as objective “the object which partakes equally of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed either, pure and simple” (Politeia, 478 e). On the contrary, the philosopher’s “eye is ever directed towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason” (Politeia, 500 c).

The distinction between the two types of wisdom, “apparent” wisdom and “true” wisdom is necessarily implied in Plato’s epistemology. By evaluating the written text from this perspective and by relating it to the “the living and breathing word of him who knows” (Phaidros, 276 a), we shall discover that it is nothing but an imitation, a mere “idol” (eidolon), which cannot be acquired except from he-who-knows-it. What Plato criticized was the substitution of the spiritual master by the written text – a phenomenon that endangers a disciple’s spiritual growth. Corresponding to the act of live philosophy taking place in the Academus School, which was a religious fellowship based on a mutually and freely accepted relationship between master and disciples, this process is usurped by the philosophical text, which is an inanimate and errant “phantom.”

The Seriousness of Intellectuals

Referring to Plato’s Seventh Epistle, Henri Joly noticed that “out of what has been written about it, nothing can be taken seriously,” since “what is serious is in the most valuable part of the mind” (the Seventh Epistle, 344 c), “there where wisdom shines,” that is, in the intellect. Only thanks to this part of the mind, the true philosopher “employs the dialectic method and plants and sows in a fitting soul intelligent words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, which are not fruitless, but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever, and which make their possessor happy, to the farthest possible limit of human happiness” (Phaedrus, 276 e – 277 a).

Having reached this point, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Plato did not reject writing in itself – and the presence of his work is the best proof of it. What he did reject was textual and autarchic sufficiency or narrow-mindedness, which in the end turns into textual addiction (or “textual idolatry”). Having made this observation, I have already covered half of the distance to our destination and I only need to clarify the function of the text in the Academus School of Philosophy. Let us turn now to a statement in Phaidros, which provides an adequate explanation:

The gardens of letters he [the philosopher] will, it seems, plant for amusement, and will write, when he writes, to treasure up reminders for himself, when he comes to the forgetfulness of old age, and for others who follow the same path (276 cd).

We have, therefore, two motivations here: the first is a playful one, and the second is a “hypomnesic” one – to our great surprise. If Plato rejects “hypomnesis,” as Andrei Cornea and Jacques Derrida maintain, how is it possible that the text be appreciated positively as a place of storage for memories (hypomnemata)? By finding the correct answer to this question, I shall also help reveal the place and function of the philosophical text in the Academus School.

The Theater of Ideas

Diogenes Laertius told us that when Plato was a young man, before he met his master, Socrates, he had prepared for writing tragedies. The episode could have passed as a trivial, unimportant one, if J. Andrieu and other modern scholars had not attracted attention to the information connected to scenery included in Plato’s dialogues. Analyzing the theatrical dimension of the dialogues, Mario Vegetti maintains that it was aimed at turning the readers of the Platonic texts into spectators of true shows. Furthermore, Albert Rivaud considers that the great Athenian philosopher was the father of “the drama of ideas,” while Alexander Koyré reminds us that in Cicero’s time Roman intellectuals performed the dialogues as if they were parts of a dramatic play and staged them as carefully as possible. Gilbert Ryle developed the most spectacular theory related to that, attempting to demonstrate that the dialogues were in fact recited in a performance in which Plato played the part of Socrates himself. Taking into account all that, we shall point out a common idea expressed by the aforementioned scholars: the members of the Academus School participated in a performance that was “directed” based on the texts of the dialogues themselves. Although I cannot be certain the dialogues had been intended to be “staged,” as well as read, I believe that they do contain dramatic elements pertaining to a theatrical performance.

In the Politeia, when Glaucon states that those who watch religious performances featured on the occasion of the feasts of Dionysius are philosophers, Socrates rejects the idea showing that true philosophers “are lovers of the vision of truth” (475 e) and of “absolute beauty” (476 d) – not lovers of the shadows of ideas projected by the light of the Good in the realm of “becoming.” To increase the relevance of Socrates’ statement, here is a fragment that highlights the purely contemplative nature of a Platonic philosopher:

For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed up on true being, has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform himself (Republic, 500 bc).

Therefore, the “performance” that philosophers were contemplating was “true being.”

Consequently, I will join Andrei Cornea in saying that, “in effect, a scientific and philosophical activity in its moments of maximum tension and blessing, as it is described to us in some of Plato’s dialogues, should be pictured being close to the conditions and the profound data of a dramatic performance.” It is clear that the reference is to a performance, to an intellectual “performance” addressing the intellect of the Academus members, which could be contemplated because of that “clear [inner] pattern,” (Politeia, 484 c) which “Homer calls the form and likeness of God” (Politeia, 501 b).

Plato, who used the text of his dialogues as a script in a “philosophical theater” (as Mario Vegetti put it), had in view the contemplation of this type of performance, made possible by the activation of the intellect. Indeed, that is the justification of writing as a storehouse of memories; guided by he-who-knows, the disciples embarked on the path and practiced what Socrates called “he periagoges techne” (Politeia, 518 d). It was that “power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being” (518 c); “not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth” (518 d).

“The art of conversion,” which was practiced in the Academus School, pertained to a “way of life” that Pierre Hadot called mode de vie in his works and that Anton Dumitriu clearly summed up as follows:

Therefore, a philosophical school in Greece was a community organized by a certain more or less rigorous interior order in which philosophy was studied not only to accumulate knowledge, but also to ‘conquer’ certain truths together. As the Greek term hairesis points out, this conquest was not just a means of accumulating knowledge, but also a means of reaching certain human steps, which on the outside looked like a means of achieving a certain wisdom.

The written text came last in the hierarchical structure of Plato’s School of Philosophy. It was the “libretto” offering the disciple the opportunity to interiorize the memories (hypomnemata) written down in the dialogues, followed by the anamnesis supervised by he-who-knows. As Plato put it in his concise and clear manner, in the absence of a master the text loses its value:

And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself (Phaidros, 275 de).

Mystica Magna

Following several heated debates, scholars have finally unanimously accepted the authenticity of the Seventh Epistle in the past decades. Undoubtedly, no other Platonic epistle has stirred so many polemical controversies. What could have been the reason? Plato himself tells us, “thus much, at least, I can say about all writers, [c] past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge” (341 bc).

These statements prove that Plato questioned the entire work that he had handed down to posterity, shaking the textual premises representing the very foundations of modern hermeneutics. Moreover, if those who were close to the Master could not have understood his philosophy because he had not put anything in writing, how could a scholar have access to it, two millenniums later? This dilemma does not accept any easy solutions – particularly as the very status of philosophy is being questioned. However, H.J. Kramer and K. Gaiser have come up with a possible solution, i.e., with the so-called theory of the “unwritten doctrine” (agrapha dogmata). Of the theory that they have developed, I accept only the premise forming the basis of their hermeneutic argument, i.e., the texts of Plato’s dialogues do not exhibit his philosophy; as they are definitely not the ultimate expression of his thoughts.

According to the idea that Plato set forth in his Phaidros, true wisdom cannot be imparted by means of a written text; only the master can convey it to philo-sophers (lovers of wisdom, in a literal translation) – from one intellect to another, by means of the uttered word, which is the only vehicle apt for it. Obviously, Plato belonged to the family of “the masters of the truth” (Marcel Detienne), advocating the use of powerful words in opposition to the deceiving words used by the sophists.

However, as I have already stated, powerful words can only be uttered by he-who-knows-it. I cannot accept the hypothesis of an esoteric philosophical system, which, as Plato put it, “does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge” (therefore, what Plato had to say could not have been uttered, not even in an initiate-type context or in an esoteric context, as it is also called). We should look elsewhere for the “key” to reading his dialogues. Consequently, our interpretation will rest on the following quotation extracted from the Seventh Epistle:

But after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from an other, [d] and thereafter sustains itself (341 cd).

The photonic terms that Plato used when referring to “the matter itself” that was worrying him – and could not have been written down – urges us to formulate another hypothesis, different from the esoteric one: consistent with Plato’s contemplative life, we are actually dealing here with the finality of philosophical contemplation, later on theorized in a unique manner by Plotinus, namely, mystical ecstasy (= epopteía). Since such an experience is inexpressible and indescribable, the most “orthodox” mental attitude that could correspond to it is apophasis. In effect, the Seventh Epistle is not the only piece of writing in which one encounters Plato’s apophasis; we also encounter them in the Politeia, in which Socrates refuses to speak about the Good, due to the same reasons as those invoked in Plato’s Seventh Epistle.

A Hermeneutical Premise

After having established the theory developed by Plato regarding the place of writing and the part that it plays, I can formulate a premise of an oncoming hermeneutics of his dialogues: the principles of his philosophy are extratextual. This premise may be called “Platonizing,” since I have extracted it from the innermost area of the universe of Plato’s thinking.

The text cannot be used as a source and supreme authority. In other words, for Platonic scholars, the text can constitute only a field that offers them the opportunity to “tune” their hermeneutic filters – the ones that had been achieved via the intellect – thus coming up with different interpretations in the realm of the possible. That does not mean that I am proclaiming an “epistemic anarchism (or Dadaism)” similar to the one professed by Paul Feyerabend. I just wish to draw attention to the context of the real source of Plato’s philosophy, i.e., to the Platonic and Neo-Platonist tradition. Only by restoring a close connection with this tradition shall hermeneutists choose the truly valuable interpretations.

Certainly, nowadays that tradition does no longer exist in its initial form – but it has been assimilated into the great intellectual tradition, still active and functional to this day, i.e., the Christian tradition. Establishing the “invariants” or “principles” that have been transmitted from Platonism through Neo-Platonism to the Christian tradition of thought is a task to which, through this essay, I have established a starting point: the correct hermeneutical attitude toward the texts of the dialogues.

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