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William H.F. Altman, The Bogotá Lectures; §4. “The Return to Platonism”

The invitation extended to me by Professor Alfonso Flórez and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana marks the highpoint of my career. For a secondary school teacher who has never taught in a university, the opportunity to present a lecture series is a high honor in itself, and to be able to do so here at this famous old university makes that honor shine all the brighter. My goal in these lectures has been to justify that invitation by not simply summarizing and repeating claims or observations I have already made in print but to break new ground, and illuminate aspects of my work I have never before discussed in public. And in this, the last of four lectures—the one most closely connected to my own work on Plato—that discussion will and must inevitably become even more personal, especially at the end. But I have already suggested in general terms why this must be the case. The notion that there is a meaningful and necessary separation between philosophers and their philosophy—between the “D” of their doctrines and the “P” of their personal circumstances—is, as I have tried to show, profoundly anti-Socratic. Looking back on what Socrates had done, Cicero could identify as “Socratic” Socrates’ own turning away from physics and his calling of philosophy down from the heavens into the city. But Xenophon and Plato were “Socratics” not only in this sense but because for them, preserving the memory of how Socrates lived and died would become the principal result of their philosophical output, something it was not and could not have been for Socrates himself.

Plato’s Phaedo provides the clearest contrast between studying Plato’s dialogues in the order of their composition as opposed to studying them as interconnected parts of the coherent program I call the Reading Order. In the Order of Composition paradigm, Phaedo belongs to Plato’s “middle” period, marking an early stage and perhaps even the point of origin for “the Theory of Forms.” Only later, in Parmenides, will Plato come to reflect critically on that Theory and revise or reject it accordingly. But if Plato’s concern, as a Socratic, is with Socrates, then Phaedo appears in a different light: it is the only possible conclusion to the story of Socrates. And since it is in Phaedo that Socrates identifies philosophy as “preparation for death,”[1] the dialogue becomes the perfect medium of its Socratic message: his Heldentod teaches us how a philosopher dies, the last and arguably the most revealing moment in each of our lives, and in any case an inescapable part of them. In the Order of Composition paradigm, Laws is the last Platonic dialogue, not Phaedo, and indeed stylometry, that paradigm’s scientific basis, does not prove but rather depends in principle on the hypothesis that Laws is the last dialogue Plato wrote. But thanks to Strauss’s discovery that Laws follows Crito—as an alternative ending to it, as it were—it becomes possible to see the sense in which Laws is prior to Phaedo. And the fact that Plato’s Laws begins with a lengthy defense of drinking wine makes perfect sense when we recall that Socrates has already mentioned in Lysis that wine is the specific antidote for hemlock.[2] The fact that Menexenus and Ctesippus—two of the four principal characters in Lysis—are likewise present at the death of Socrates in Phaedo makes this connection more meaningful.

It required some astute detective work to link Laws to Crito but other far more obvious examples of Reading Order relate to Timaeus and Sophist, two dialogues I have often mentioned in these lectures. In both cases, the Order of Composition paradigm tends to separate what Plato has obviously joined. I have used the two parts of Parmenides’ poem to explain the fact that Timaeus immediately follows Republic: having enshrined Being in his equivalent of “Truth,” Plato now places the equivalent of Δόξα, Parmenides’ “deceptive cosmos of words,” in the mouth of a character named “Timaeus.” Despite the evident connection between the two dialogues, Order of Composition conventionally divides a “middle” Republic from a “late” Timaeus and that paradigm’s defenders must therefore ignore the fact that Plato has forced every reader to recognize that the conversation described at the beginning of the latter is merely like the one Socrates has narrated to us in the former. The case of Plato’s Sophist is even clearer: the ending of Theaetetus makes it obvious that Euthyphro takes place between it and Sophist. And since Plato has connected Sophist and Statesman as inseparably as he has connected Timaeus and Critias, we are confronted with two dialogues that both belong to even more clearly defined dyads.

The recognition that the SophistStatesman dyad follows Euthyphro and precedes Apology of Socrates has particularly far-reaching consequences. When Socrates adjourns the conversation described in Theaetetus by hurrying off to the King Archon’s—where he will meet Euthyphro, the god-inspired fanatic who is on the verge of prosecuting is own father for murder—in order to meet the charge that will lead to his trial and death, Plato brings together two well-marked sequences. On the one hand, there is the series Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, three dialogues generally regarded as “late” and by any measure, far more complex than the easily accessible Euthyphro. As for Euthyphro, it too belongs to the series that famously continues in Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo, of which the first three are uniformly regarded as “early.” Although Plato was fully aware that one series demands far more advanced readers than the other, and thus would probably agree that if we were to read the two series separately, we should certainly read the easier one “early,” he has in fact made it perfectly clear that he does not intend them to be read separately. It is the proponents of the Order of Composition who must separate them, whereas Plato’s manifest intent was to connect the two series and indeed to interweave them in an instructive way.

The intersection of a complex series of “late” dialogues with a series of apparently “early” ones does more than weaken a separation based on Order of Composition. It provides further evidence for the claim, based on Reading Order, that the Platonic dialogues as a whole culminate with Socrates’ death in Phaedo. The details of the interweaving support this “Socratic” emphasis. Since Euthyphro sets the stage for Socrates’ trial and death, the fact that Sophist takes place the day after Theaetetus—and Statesman the day after that—means that the dialogue that follows the SophistStatesman dyad is the Apology of Socrates. Last night I mentioned Mary Louise Gill’s attempt to reconstruct Plato’s missing dialogue Philosopher but in fact it is not missing at all. Upon meeting the Eleatic Stranger for the first time at the beginning of Sophist, Socrates assigns him three tasks, not only two: after the Stranger has brought to light the sophist and the statesman, he must do the same for the philosopher, an immeasurably more important subject, he points out, than the other two.[3] But Plato does not allow the Stranger to perform the third and most important task, reserving it for the reader to recognize that he has already allowed Socrates to accomplish that task for himself. This is why Socrates repeatedly tells the jury in Apology that they have never seen him behave otherwise than how is telling them now he has behaved; only when his speech is encountered late in the Reading Order does this theme make sense. Commensurate with the complexity of SophistStatesman, the retrospective Apology of Socrates is equally “late.” And by placing it where the missing Philosopher should be, Plato makes his own separation from the Eleatic Stranger manifest while at the same time showing himself to be the Socratic he was and will remain, for we should certainly have known that only Socrates could be Plato’s philosopher.

If we can free ourselves from the twin temptations of adding the prior Theaetetus to complete the otherwise incomplete trilogy begun in SophistStatesman or of assuming that Plato intended to write Philosopher but for some reason never got around to doing it, then we must begin to recognize that it is the dyad, not the trilogy or the tetralogy, that is Plato’s favored means of connecting his dialogues. In order to achieve this interpretive liberation, we need only treat Plato with respect, and read him as we find him. As already mentioned, Timaeus and Critias—like Sophist and Statesman—form an unmistakable dyad, but here again, Plato has challenged us to recognize it as such by suggesting in Timaeus that that there will be a third dialogue in the series, which of course there isn’t: Hermocrates is just as missing as Philosopher. But once we recognize that Plato wrote Sophist and Statesman as a dyad deliberately, the “late” dialogues as a whole take on a different look. With SophistStatesman interpolated between Euthyphro and Apology, we can supplement Strauss’s discovery that Laws creates an alternative ending to Crito by interpolating both Laws and Epinomis—as another dyad—between Crito and Phaedo. And since Hipparchus and Minos form an obvious pair, I have proposed that these two despised dialogues between Socrates and an unnamed youth, both without any indication of dramatic setting, in fact take place in the prison, having been interpolated between Apology of Socrates and Crito, a placement that justifies the obvious connection between Minos and Laws.

Having just indicated how Hipparchus, Minos, and Epinomis—three dialogues generally regarded as inauthentic—might plausibly be interwoven into a series of Plato’s best known and most frequently read dialogues, I suggest next that it is Plato’s repeated use of dyads that connects the end of the Reading Order to its beginning. Among the most elementary of Plato’s dialogues are two even more obvious pairs: two named after Hippias, and another pair named after Alcibiades. It may possibly be the case that defenders of the two delightful Hippias dialogues, after a long fight that began with Schleiermacher, have finally succeeded in establishing them both as genuine, but it is impossible to imagine they could have done so if Aristotle had not mentioned one of them and plausibly referred to the other. There is far less reason to be so hopeful in the case of the Alcibiades dyad: although there has emerged increased support for Alcibiades Major since the turn of the century,[4] Alcibiades Minor remains in limbo, beyond the pale. But an awareness of Plato’s repeated use of the dyad can not only come to its aid—creating a matched set to the Hippias dyad in the process—but can help to establish the authenticity of Lovers, the dialogue that stands between the two sets of dyads in my reconstruction of the Reading Order. Since I have recently been working on Lovers and have never spoken about it public before coming to Bogotá, I will say more about it in a moment.

But first a few remarks on the so-called “hermeneutic circle,” whose connection with my work I have never fully explained. There is a famously circular relationship between the interpretation of any single work and the author’s works as whole: only in the context of the whole can its parts be understood, but understanding the whole necessarily requires interpreting each of its parts. The relationship between interpreting parts and wholes, always problematic, is further complicated in my case by the fact that dialogues like Epinomis and Alcibiades Minor are not considered to be genuine, and I am using the Reading Order paradigm to establish their authenticity. The Reading Order is a way of interpreting the dialogues as a whole, and it is only on the basis of that whole that I am offering new authenticity arguments for its rejected parts. But it is precisely its rejected parts that constitute the best evidence that Plato’s dialogues constitute the well-integrated and progressive curriculum I call “the Reading Order of Plato’s dialogues.” As I have already confessed in print, without Alcibiades Major in particular—widely recognized in antiquity as the ideal introduction to Plato, and accurately so—I cannot get the Reading Order project off the ground. What I have never before clarified is the question of priority in my own case: am I using dialogues like the Alcibiades dyad to legitimate a Platonic Reading Order or am I using Reading Order to restore a number of presently despised dialogues? And my answer to this question is: I simply don’t know. As far as I can remember, the two were inseparable in my mind from the start.

Plato’s Lovers is named after a pair of rivals, one of whom Socrates calls “wise,” the other “ignorant.”[5] The dialogue’s subject emerges from a disparaging remark about philosophizing by the ignorant lover, who is an athlete, and then takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and his wise rival, who is musical, and who states as his opinion that philosophy is something “beautiful, noble, fine, and admirable,” all possible meanings of the Greek word καλόν. When Socrates states that they cannot know whether something is καλόν until they know what it is, the question at the center of the dialogue becomes: “What is philosophy?” Of course it would have been equally Socratic to point out that we cannot know whether or not philosophy is καλόν until we know what καλόν is, and it turns out that “What is the Beautiful?” is the subject of Hippias Major, the dialogue that follows Lovers in the Reading Order, and the first one with Hippias “the beautiful and wise.”[6] Although Socrates never calls Alcibiades “ignorant” either in Protagoras or in the Alcibiades dyad that precedes Lovers, he does call him simply “the beautiful” in the first,[7] and repeatedly reveals the young man’s ignorance in the second. In this way, a dialogue about a pair of lovers—and “lovers” is the last word of Alcibiades Minor—provides a bridge between the Alcibiades and Hippias dyads. And although Lovers reaches no acceptable account of the kind of knowledge a philosopher must have in order to be more than useless, when Diotima teaches Socrates about philosophers in Symposium, she will claim that they are to be found between the wise and the ignorant.

In working with Plato’s writings as a whole, I have made an interesting discovery about those that are presently considered inauthentic: they fall into three groups of three. Among the “early” dialogues—and for me, that means “early in the Reading Order,” not necessarily written early—are the ones I have just mentioned: Lovers and the pair of Alcibiades dialogues. Constituting one dyad and completing another are the dialogues I have placed “late” in the Reading Order: Hipparchus, Minos, and Epinomis. I therefore find it amazing that the other three—Theages, Cleitophon, and Plato’s Letters—are all closely connected to the Republic, the dialogue that stands in the middle of the Reading Order. Because of this connection, I considered all three in Plato the Teacher, the first book on the dialogues I wrote and published. And here it is necessary to say that Professor Alfonso Flórez is by far and away the world’a most careful and attentive reader of this book, and that it is because of his familiarity with this book, and because he has brought it to the attention of his many fine students, that I am here tonight. Deeply moved by his generosity and familiarity with my book, I will say nothing more about Cleitophon, Theages and Letters except that they are intimately connected to what I call “the crisis” or “turning point” of the Republic. What I will explain instead is why these lectures revolve around the notion of “turning point.”

They do so for one reason only: because Professor Flórez has recognized that my work on Plato turns on Plato’s Republic and the “turning point” at its center. It is the philosopher’s return to the Cave that is the great “turning point” in Plato and which creates the intellectual “adventures” that follow from pursuing the Longer Way. It is in relation to this that Professor Flórez has encouraged me to construct these lectures, and it is necessary for me to explain now how the Return to the Cave, although seldom mentioned before tonight, has really been my subject all along. In discussing Raphael’s painting, for example, I pointed out the one-sidedness of picturing Plato with Timaeus and Aristotle with Ethics, for it was the philosopher’s way of life, and not cosmology, which was his principal concern. And when I corroborated Most and Laks in identifying Cicero as the discoverer of “Presocratic philosophy,” I emphasized that it was only because he was a Socratic that he could have discovered it. It was in full knowledge of the Socratic necessity of returning from celestial contemplation to an active concern for the good of others—a return Cicero imaged perfectly in “the Dream of Scipio” at the end of his own Republic—that Cicero could write that Socrates “called philosophy down from heaven and located it in the cities, and introduced it into our homes and forced it to enquire about life, and morals, and about things both good and bad.”[8]

Explaining why he saw fit to juxtapose it with “the later written Laws,” Aristotle read Plato’s Republic as a proposal—one Aristotle found wildly impractical—for actualizing an ideal city. The tradition has for the most part followed him in this misreading, and I think it is safe to say that what attracted Professor Flórez’s attention to my work was that I tried to provide a coherent explanation of why this was in fact a misreading, and thus to make a plausible connection between justice—which Plato’s text makes crystal clear is the subject of his Republic—and the lengthy and famous discussion of the city that Aristotle regarded as Plato’s deeply flawed ideal. It was by emphasizing the distinction between the Longer and the Shorter Way that I was able to make a case for restoring Justice, not the City, to the center of Plato’s Republic in a way that can explain how the construction of a City helps Plato, through Socrates, to explain what Justice is and to persuade his audience to prefer it to Injustice, no matter how advantageous to ourselves injustice may be. The basis of that explanation was, I argued, the distinction between the Shorter Way, that explains justice inadequately and solely in relation to a City that must compel the philosophers it trains to go back down into the Cave, and a Longer Way which alone makes Justice possible because there is no City to compel the philosopher to practice Justice and who therefore does the right thing for the intrinsic moral beauty and nobility of doing it. In the City, says Socrates, the well-trained and brainwashed philosophers do not return to the Cave because it is καλόν;[9] it is only Plato’s true Guardians who will do so because it is.

In gratitude to Professor Flórez and his students, I want to explain the origins of this way of understanding Plato’s Republic and even more importantly to elucidate some of the philosophical consequences—consequences of which I was entirely ignorant at the start—of the insight that had originally made this way of understanding possible. The insight in question is the connection between the Shorter Way and the Second Part of the Divided Line—the part that depends on hypothesized objects and can only discourse about them by means of images—and the Line’s highest part, where dialectic takes us beyond sensible things or their images entirely and culminates in a vision of the transcendent Idea of the Good. It was in the dialectic between Plato and the reader that I discovered Justice on the Longer Way, when he writes—presumably speaking as Socrates to the hypothetical City’s imaginary Guardians—“down you must go.”[10] But it was in relation to the Line’s second highest part that I made all of the most important discoveries subsequently, and of those, by far the most important was the discovery that the reason Socrates uses arithmetic and geometry as his examples while describing this part of the Line is that its primordial hypothesis, and the intelligible image of what every single sensible object would be if it were not an indefinite plurality of infinitely multiplying or divisible parts, is the One, the one thing that cannot possibly be Many, and therefore does not exist in the visible world.

When I discovered, solely on the basis of what Plato had written in his Republic, that both the use and the language of “hypothesis” and “image,” eventually explained in the Divided Line, had already been employed in constructing of the City, I knew absolutely nothing about Aristotle’s claim—no doubt I had read it, but it had meant nothing to me or to my teachers—that Plato regarded mathematical objects as “intermediate” between the Ideas and sensible objects. Although incomplete as a description of the full “Scope of the Intermediates” (as I now call the central question in Plato’s ontology), Aristotle was absolutely right: his only error was to think that these “intermediates” were confined to Socrates’ examples of such things: arithmetic and geometry. Instead, the hypothesized units that can only be conceived by means of a mental image are what the tradition, beginning with Aristotle, has regarded Plato’s “Forms,” as in the One-over Many Form of couch to which the craftsman looks in Republic 10,[11] and to which the Demiurge will look in Timaeus while fashioning sensible things out of, in, or on the χώρα. Far from being a transcendent Idea like Beauty, Justice, or the Good, the “Forms” of Couch, Man, or Mud are merely abstract images of the one thing that all couches, men, and instances of mud must be. The reason why the second part of Plato’s Parmenides is a discussion of the One is because it is a defense of the transcendent Ideas that make the Socratic life of moral excellence possible, not a critique of them. Parmenides points to a radical separation between the One and its progeny, on the one hand, and goodness, beauty, and the just on the other.

When I was teaching high school, I used to tell my students the following joke: “I cannot give you a number of reasons that the Greeks did not regard One as a Number, I can only give you one of them, and I just did.” Little did I know then that it was not “the Greeks” in general who had discovered the One that cannot by many but only Plato who had done so. When Plato’s Parmenides calls the One “my hypothesis,”[12] his creator mixes truth and falsehood in an amusing way: while the One is certainly an hypothesis, the “my” in question is true only of Plato himself, for it was unchanging Being that was the un-hypothetical theme of Parmenides’ “Truth,” and also the ultimate goal of dialectic in Plato’s Republic. As I discovered as a teacher, every student, if properly taught, can see that a number like “six” consists of six units, and that the “one” that six would be as a whole, is really many. Having grasped that—and Plato devotes the arithmetic lesson in Republic 7 to teaching it—any student can spot the fallacy known as “the Problem of the One and the Many” in expressions like “one having come into being from many”[13] or “having taken these three existent things, he mixed all of them into one idea.”[14] And since it is the Demiurge in Timaeus who is said to accomplish this last act of mixing, Plato begins our testing immediately. The difficult ontological puzzles in Philebus melt away if we attend to the difference between all of the various mixed “unities” with which that dialogue abounds and the true monad Plato allows Socrates to describe there as well.[15] And let’s not miss the cosmological forest for Plato’s individual trees: the purpose of cosmology, Presocratic or otherwise, is to bring a specious unity to what is inescapably plural.

If I had been allowed to publish my books in the form I would have preferred, they would have appeared as a five-volume study called Plato the Teacher. In English, the word “teacher” is inadequate to capture the lofty prestige that alone makes one of us “a professor,” and therefore Spanish words like “professor” or even “maestro” don’t manage to capture its deliberately elementary aspect. Having taught high school for more than thirty years, I am a teacher, and it is no doubt my experience of what it is to teach that has caused me to imagine Plato not as a university professor—for this is how university professors generally imagine him—but as a high school teacher himself. Other than mentioning the probable age of impetuous Hippocrates in Protagoras, the references to Persian princes beginning their education in virtue at fourteen in Alcibiades Major,[16] a dialogue in which Alcibiades himself is nineteen, and the biographical fact that Aristotle began his studies at the Academy at seventeen—and note that our sources express no judgment as to whether this made him older or younger than Plato’s other students—I will remark only that pedagogical shortcuts like the Problem of the One and the Many make studying even his most difficult dialogues considerably easier than they might seem. I want to describe a number of other examples of Plato’s pedagogical generosity that are consistent with my hypothesis that Plato’s Academy was more like a high school than a university, and that the vastly entertaining dialogues he wrote—once arranged in an order that advances from the childishly simple to the increasingly complex—constituted his school’s curriculum.

Corresponding to the fallacy of the pluralized One and the unified Many in the post-Republic or “late” dialogues is an easily identified equivocation that appears repeatedly in the pre-Republic or “early” ones. It is based on the Greek expression εὖ πράττειν. Literally, these words mean: “to do well,” and would seem to imply an object, as in “to do [something] well.” But although Plato frequently uses εὖ πράττειν in this sense, he is fully aware of what even any modern student of ancient Greek must be: it is a colloquial expression that never implies an object but means “to fare well” and is synonymous with “to be happy.” For all the difficulties that teachers from the United States must face in teaching the Problem of the One and the Many—for all of us have been trained to regard the plural “states” as ungrammatically singular when we say “the United States is”—we are in a great position to teach what I call “the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy.” In colloquial English, when you ask someone: “How are you doing” (although it is more colloquial to ask: “How ya doin’?”) the grammatically incorrect but nevertheless colloquial answer is: “I’m doin’ good.” This does not mean that I’m a philanthropic person who is presently doing good things; it simply means: “I’m fine,” just as in the Greek “to fare well.” Although Plato expects us to discover the Shorter Way’s methodological shortcomings, the simplest way to deconstruct it is the realization that Socrates’ argument for justice boils down to the claim, already unmasked as based on an equivocation in a series of easier dialogues, that by doing well—in this case by being just—we will inevitably fare well.

There is, of course, nothing morally objectionable about teaching your children and your students that “justice pays,” and given the demands that Glaucon and Adeimantus place on Socrates, it is perfectly understandable why he tried to show that being just is not, as Thrasymachus insists, “someone else’s good,”[17] but rather something that is good for you, is to your advantage, benefits you, makes your life better, and indeed makes the life of the just man seven-hundred and twenty-nine times more pleasant than the life of the unjust man.[18] Such is the teaching of the Shorter Way, and it derives from the fallacy that allows Socrates to slide from “to do well” to “to be happy.” Lest there be any doubt that this is conscious on Plato’s part, the first time Socrates executes this “slide” is in Alcibiades Major, where Alcibiades hesitates to equate the Beautiful with the Good on the following basis: he regards suffering death and wounds in war by coming to the aid of your comrades to be Beautiful—and of course that really means here “noble” and “admirable”—but not Good, for death is Bad.[19] Socrates does not produce the arguments of the Apology, Crito, or Phaedo in response—on my account, he could not, for the student will encounter them only at the end—but proceeds as follows: whoever comes to the aid of comrades in this way does beautifully, to do beautifully is the same thing as to do well, and those who are doing well—sliding now to “to fare well”—are happy.[20] In context, this enables Socrates to prove that Justice—which Alcibiades regards as Beautiful but not advantageous, and thus not Good—is both good and advantageous.

In writing the last two volumes on the pre-Republic dialogues, the most important discovery I have made is also the simplest. Plato can say so little about the Idea of the Good because by that point in the Reading Order, he need only clarify that it is not what is merely “good for me.” Thanks to the heroes of Marathon and Plataea, every Athenian schoolboy knew that dying in battle for others was καλόν, and Plato exploits this kind of recollection in the dialogues leading up to Symposium like Alcibiades Major, Lovers, Hippias Major, and Menexenus. The reason that a volume on “Ascent to the Good” follows “Ascent to the Beautiful” is because “the Good” remains ambiguous until Plato’s Republic. On the basis of Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides, Vlastos’s most radical followers identity the Idea of the Good with Happiness. But the problem that bedevils the attempt to prove that Plato is a eudaemonist is that the same passage in Euthydemus that begins “all men desire to εὖ πράττειν”[21] is not only vitiated by the equivocating “slide,”[22] but uses it to reach the claim that wisdom is the only good and ignorance the only bad.[23] In addition to clashing with the Diotima’s account of philosophy as between wisdom and ignorance—repeated by Socrates in Lysis[24]—the problem with a eudaemonist reading of these dialogues is that it construes Happiness, not the knowledge that attains it, as “the first friend.”[25] It is this circularity, identified as such in Republic 6,[26] that prepares the reader for the final ascent to the transcendent Good, where Plato challenges the philosopher, despite the proofs Socrates offers along the Shorter Way, to prefer what is actually good to what is good for me.

In the end, it is unclear whether the Good, Beauty, and Justice are three distinct Ideas or all the same. As the exemplar of Justice, the philosopher’s other-benefitting return to the Cave is a beautiful, noble, fine, and admirable action, but it is also only made possible by the philosopher’s awareness that the absolute Good, not simply our own, is the north star of ethical conduct, itself the sole concern of the true Socratic. Thanks to Platonism, we can see that the Ideas are radically transcendent, and that it is their ontological otherness that makes altruism and self-sacrifice for others possible. The only possible Socrates must die in prison, and thanks to their writings, both Xenophon and Plato ensured that his death would benefit us. It is in the context of Plato’s soaring ethical idealism that I first made contact with Professor Flórez through one of his students, with whom I spoke through Skype. The first question Brian Diaz asked me was about the section in Plato the Teacher called “The Perfectly Bearable Lightness of Being,” and from that I knew that my message had been received. It is the autonomous “self” whose image we se see in the mirror every morning that is the mere hypothesis of life in the Cave.

Obviously my Reading Order project has involved putting things in order, and it is on the basis of the pedagogical brilliance of his ordering that I can celebrate Plato the Teacher. But where effective pedagogical order is concerned, even Plato cannot match the perfect simplicity that led Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, to construct the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. After the perfect slides that join each of the four truths to the next, the connections between the eight parts of the path are even more elegant, and I regard the most perfect of them as the fifth, “right livelihood,” for once one has chosen the right profession, it remains only to practice it with effort guided by meditative mindfulness. With due regard for nurses and firemen, I regard the teacher’s livelihood as the best choice for anyone who loves books, and enthusiastically recommend the schoolteacher’s life to the young people in the audience. Students who have reached university are not those most in need of education. There were many in my family who regarded my career choice as an error, and there were times that I did as well. The fact that I published my first article at fifty-two and only earned the doctorate at fifty-five will be, I hope, a reminder to anyone who has ever considered themselves a failure because they have not yet written the book they believe they have inside them that the race is not to the swift.

In reviewing my own education, it was not the formal study of Plato or Philosophy generally that had the greatest impact, and there is no doubt in my mind that reading Plato for myself—along with Shakespeare and the Bible—was the most important part of my education. But undergraduate training in “Intellectual History” or the history of ideas has had a profound effect on the way I write about Plato, and the influence of that training is visible in the series of lectures I am concluding tonight. It is not Raphael’s harmonious but static image of Ancient Philosophy that attracts me but rather the history of Platonic scholarship unfolding in time, the clash of ideas passed from one often misguided teacher to an often even more misguided student. With a tolerably firm sense of what was unchangeably Platonic from the start, the dance of misconceptions not only interested me but also helped me to see Platonism itself ever more clearly. The attention I gave Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Strauss in last night’s lecture is a good although by no means exhaustive example. And it has probably been reading Plato’s enemies with care that has made it possible to read Plato himself with a more open mind, and to find in TimaeusCritias, ParmenidesPhilebus, SophistStatesman, and LawsEpinomis something very different from what others have found there.

Of course education begins at home, and I will make a few personal observations about mine. My father was Jewish and my mother was a mystical monist, last of an impressive line of ancestors who believed themselves to have found “the god within.” My namesake and great-great grandfather, William Henry Furness, was deeply influenced by German Romanticism and along with his lifelong friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, he championed the transcendence of nature. By that I mean the opposite of what those words now mean to me as a Platonist. Culminating in Heidegger—and I for one do not regard his commitment to “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism[27] to be even in the tiniest degree epiphenomenal—“the transcendence of Dasein” means the exact opposite of what I mean by “the self as hypothesis.” By the time that an immanent transcendent is being theologized by atheists, Jews will soon be making a one-way trip to Auschwitz. As proud as I am of the accomplishments of my mother’s side of the family, I thank G-d that my father was Jewish, for it is the antithesis between my parents that has made me a Platonist. And even though my father, who died when I was thirteen, never mentioned his Judaism, his decision to take me to a big-screen theater to see the whole of “Ben-Hur” when I was only five (and I begged him to leave when the slave screams: “we’re going to be rammed”), his reading aloud the end of Phaedo to me when I was eight, the pilgrimage we made to Verdun when I was ten, and the example he set by crying whenever he saw something truly beautiful, these were educational enough.

Thanks to the combination of a boyhood fascination with soldiers and a stronger than usual interest in classical music, nineteenth century novels, and history books, I knew by the age of nine—the fiftieth anniversary of 1914—that the world into which I was born just ten years after World War Two had ended had not yet recovered from World War One. I believe that continues to be true today, and I want to make it perfectly clear that despite a heartfelt enthusiasm for Plato, and the evident delight I take in studying his dialogues and teaching about them, it hasn’t been easy. Behind the breezy overview of intellectual history and the resulting classifications and criticisms I have leveled at the giants of Plato’s modern reception, I can only liken my actual experience as a scholar to an isolated man with a machete in the midst of the dense jungle that has overgrown an ancient temple; each step I manage to advance results in branches swinging back and hitting me in the face. Aside from the discoveries I have only made through dialogue with Plato’s enemies, there is not a single discovery I have made without them that has not forced me to fight with still others who have already undercut it in print. The obvious examples are the various battles to establish a despised dialogue’s authenticity, but their number is legion. It is therefore the warm reception Alfonso and his students have given me here in Colombia that have made this visit an oasis of joy for which I am deeply grateful.

It is therefore necessary to conclude by mentioning my lifelong and unwavering faith in G-d. Despite experiencing the spiritual temptation to find god within in the aftermath of my father’s death—and I believe Hegel was right that every true philosopher must at least once have been a Spinozist—I quickly outgrew it, finding my spiritual home first in Judaism and then in a synthetically Jewish Christianity, obviously mediated and informed by Platonism. As evidence that I was a child of dark times, my first encounter with the German word Kluft was in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, and that book likewise strengthened immeasurably my interest in studying Ancient Philosophy. The fact that I encountered the Kluft or χωρισμός in a book whose author regarded it as “the darkening of Being” points once again to the kind of “turning-point” that is the theme of these lectures, for there is nothing of which I am more certain than of the reality of the Platonic plateau that separates what we call “reality” from what alone is truly real. And therefore, I will end exactly where I began. If you will only be kind enough to imagine that it is no longer Plato’s Timaeus that I am carrying in my other hand, I would be delighted if you would remember my message as being fully expressed by his other hand, pointing aloft to what can only be found on the other side of the Kluft.

 

Notes

[1] Plato, Phaedo, 67e5-6.

[2] Plato, Lysis, 219e2-4.

[3] Plato, Statesman, 257b2-4.

[4] Thanks especially to Nicholas Denyer (ed.), Plato, Alcibiades (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[5] Plato, Lovers, 139a6-7.

[6] Plato, Hippias Major, 281a1.

[7] Plato, Protagoras, 316a4.

[8] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.10.

[9] Plato, Republic, 540b4-5. I am grateful to Pedro Baratieri for asking me about this passage.

[10] Plato, Republic, 519c1 (Paul Shorey translation).

[11] Plato, Republic, 596a6-11.

[12] Plato, Parmenides, 137b2-3.

[13] Plato, Republic, 443c1-2.

[14] Plato, Timaeus, 35a6-7.

[15] Plato, Philebus, 56d9-e3.

[16] Plato, Alcibiades Major, 121e3-122a1.

[17] Plato, Republic, 343c3.

[18] Plato, Republic, 587e1-2.

[19] Plato, Alcibiades Major, 115a9-b10.

[20] Plato, Alcibiades Major, 116b2-5.

[21] Plato, Euthydemus, 278e3; cf. 280b6.

[22] Cf. Plato, Euthydemus, 279d8-e2 and 281b2-4.

[23] Plato, Euthydemus, 281e3-5.

[24] Plato, Lysis, 218a2-b3.

[25] Plato, Lysis, 219c7-d1.

[26] Plato, Republic, 505b8-11.

[27] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 213.

 

Also see “§1. Plato and Aristotle”; “§2. “Plato and the ‘Presocratics’”; and “§3. Plato and ‘Plato.’

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William H.F. Altman is a retired public high school teacher of history and the humanities generally who is the author of published monographs about Nietzsche, Heidegger, Leo Strauss, and Cicero. He is presently finishing his five-volume study of "the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues,” a project that began with Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington Books, 2012).

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