22 http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk

Practical Philosophy Special Edition Autumn 2007

I. What is Platonism?Most philosophers think Plato was a metaphysicaldogmatist whose aim was to present, develop, and defendthe body of doctrines contained in his philosophicalsystem—however loosely this ‘system’ may have beenconceived—and that the best way to discover this system(or tenuously connected set of doctrines) is to examine thearguments and other claims defended by Socrates or Plato’sother mouthpiece(s) in the dialogues (hereafter the“analytic” view).1 There are many versions of the analyticview, but the shared assumption among analysts is thatPlato’s thought consists of doctrines, especially a doctrineof two worlds, and that these doctrines are attemptsaccurately to represent the ultimate nature of reality.2 Somephilosophers have summarized this theory in abstracttheses in an attempt to define the core of Platonism.(Gerson, 2004, pp. 8-9) This general picture of Platonism asa theory about the nature of reality is the one I will presumewhen I discuss the nature of the analytic view. It wouldtherefore be a mistake for one to deny being an analystmerely because one didn’t think the conclusions of thearguments were the only place to find all of Plato’scommitments. For example, one could be an analyst andbelieve that Plato’s myths were as important as (or evenmore important than) the arguments for filling out thedetails of Plato’s “system.”

Today the analysts face many critics who usually arguethat, because the analytic view requires us to treat Plato’sdialogues as treatises rather than as works of philosophicalliterature, it unjustifiably limits our understanding of theirphilosophical contents, which are as much communicatedby the literary devices as they are by the arguments(hereafter the “holistic” view).3 One professed advantageof the holistic view is that it can analyze what Blondellcalls “the play of character in Plato’s dialogues” alongsidethe arguments about character, and ask to what extent thetwo shed light on, underscore, or even undermine oneanother. For example, Lear argues that Alcibiades’ drunkenand lustful, party-crashing entrance at the end of theSymposium suggests that

what is being dramatized is not merely the undoing ofthe symposium, but the undoing of the Symposium’saccount of love … the point is … to call into question

the very idea of eros as a developmental force. (Lear,1998, p. 149)

Lear wouldn’t have grounds for this thesis if he focusedexclusively on the dialogue’s arguments, treating Diotimaas Plato’s mouthpiece and Diotima’s speech as the solesource of Plato’s views. The holists’ method, therefore,gives them a much broader text to work with than theywould otherwise have if they extracted the arguments fromtheir contexts and situated them in the development ofPlato’s system.

Unfortunately for the credibility of their view, however,the proponents of the holistic view are a bit like the UnitedStates Democratic Party: they are united in opposition totheir opponents and divided against themselves regardinghow best to present their own agenda. Consequently, theiragenda tends to get stuck in the mud, despite all of thegood reasons to support it. And it usually lacks a positivealternative to the system laid out in the analytic view,which exposes the holists to the charge that their viewreduces Platonism to “empty philosophizing.” (Gonzalez1995, pp. 12-13) The most likely reason the holistic viewfails to gain more support among Plato scholars is thatmany of its proponents continue to get over-dazzled by anunhelpful, and in fact self-defeating, hermeneutic principleintroduced by Strauss in 1964, i.e., the claim that we don’tknow what Plato thought because he never speaks in thefirst person.

Plato’s Republic … is not a treatise but a dialogue amongpeople other than Plato. Whereas in reading the Politicswe hear Aristotle all the time, in reading the Republicwe hear Plato never. In none of his dialogues does Platoever say anything. Hence, we cannot know from themwhat Plato thought. If someone quotes a passage fromthe dialogues in order to prove that Plato held such aview, he acts about as reasonably as if he were to assertthat according to Shakespeare life is a tale told by anidiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.(Strauss 1964: 50)

As a more recent version of this argument goes, because“the self-effacement of Plato’s authorial voice is absolute… for simple formal reasons [that is, because of the dialogueform], we are not entitled either to assume the equivalenceof any of Plato’s characters with the voice of the author, orto infer it from the dialogues themselves.” (Blondell 2002,pp. 18-19) Plato’s authorial silence, in other words, isimpenetrable, and our search for Plato’s philosophy,therefore, must begin by evaluating the significance of hisdeliberate authorial silence. So far, so good, but doesanything else follow? It isn’t clear that anything definitecould (without being question-begging) follow from Plato’sauthorial silence. Is the holistic view, therefore, just aninterpretive dead end?

The Place of Doctrines in Platonic PhilosophyMark Ralkowski

1 There are innumerable examples of this approach to Plato.For some classic examples, see Vlastos (1970a,1970b, 1991),Irwin (1977), White (1976), and Kraut (1992).

2 Not everyone agrees that Plato remained committed to thedoctrine of two worlds throughout his career. Aristotlethought so (Met. A.6.987a34), but what did he know? There isa long debate here, involving Ryle (1939), Owen (1953), andCherniss (1957), which I must refer to without comment dueto limitations of space.

3 For the best examples of the holistic approach to Plato, seeFriedlander (1958), Blondell (2002) and Gonzalez (1998).

23http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk

It doesn’t need to be. But it will be if we cannot avoid tworelated mistakes, namely, irrelevant and self-refutingcriticisms of the analytic view, such as those inspired byStrauss, and philosophically unappealing alternatives to itthat render Plato’s philosophy “trivial and ridiculous” byemptying it of positive content. (Findlay, 1974, p. 6) Holistsoften suggest, persuasively and perhaps rightly, that thequestion “Why did Plato write dialogues?” is the mostimportant question for the interpreter of Plato. But then,as we saw above, they trap themselves with their inferencesabout the impenetrability of Plato’s authorial silence, whichthey inconsistently assume only trips up the analysts. Ifthe holists are primarily interested in challenging thesystematization of Plato’s philosophy, perhaps they shouldshift their attention from literary form to more substantivequestions, such as why Plato stressed, and in some casesseems to have embraced, non-rational phenomena - e.g.,myth, madness, religious experience, prophecy, charms,incantations, divine dispensation, mystery religions, etc. -in dialogues as different as Ion, Apology, Meno, Gorgias,Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Republic, Phaedo, Timaeus,and Laws. These features of the dialogues, which are rootedin the ineffability of Plato’s ontology, point much moredirectly than literary form alone to an unsystematicphilosophy, and they give us a toehold for closing the gapbetween Plato’s doctrines and artistry. Indeed, this is mystrategy. I shall argue that he dialogue form itself is anexpression of Plato’s ineffable ontology, which cannot begrasped by any system.

II. Plato’s Seventh LetterThe clearest evidence for my thesis is in the Seventh Letter,where Plato criticizes Dionysius II for attempting to writea book about the ultimate principles of reality, the coredoctrines of Plato’s philosophy.4 Plato is thoroughlydissatisfied with Dionysius’ results: the opinions reflectDionysius’ views, mere “half-understood doctrines”(338d2), not the actual thought of Plato (338d2, 341b); Platohimself would not write such a book, because philosophicalknowledge, unlike the knowledge of other sciences, cannotbe put into words (341c6). Philosophical knowledge is theillumination of the mind and a transformation of the self,not the mere transmission of abstract concepts, and it isthe product of a “laborious”, “orderly,” “disciplined” wayof life, “suitable to the subject” pursued, which is “besetby many difficulties” (341c-e).

There is no writing of mine about these matters, norwill there ever be one. For this knowledge is notsomething that can be put into words like othersciences; but after long-continued discussion betweenteacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject,suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled,it is born in the soul and straightaway nourishes itself.(341cd)

To gain access to truth, one must also undergo atransformation in one’s being and engage in good-natured,intensely focused dialectic. “Only … when reason andknowledge are at the very extremity of human effort, canthey illuminate the nature of any object” (344b4-7) - andeven in this case, “it is barely possible for knowledge to beengendered of an object naturally good, in a man naturallygood” (343e1-2). If one has not undergone what Socrateselsewhere calls “purification,” one cannot see the truth.

If … a person’s nature is defective, as for most peoplethe state of the soul with regard to learning and so-called morals is naturally defective (though in somecases this happens through corruption), not even aLynceus could make people in such a state see. In shortsomeone who has no affinity with the subject matterwill not be made [to see] by memory or an ability tolearn, for the principle or source [of knowledge] is notto be found in alien dispositions. (343e2-344a-b)

There is a clear connection with the Phaedo in this passage.The philosophical life is a life of purification, “for it is notpermitted to the impure to attain the pure” (Phaedo 67b).In some places, the language of purification is given anobvious moral connotation: the philosopher must changehis character by purging himself of all vanity andunnecessary desires - this is necessary to quiet the soulenough to practise philosophical contemplation withoutthe distractions of the body and worldly concerns andambitions (64de, 66a). The other sense given to purificationin the Phaedo relates specifically to thinking. As Socratessays, the soul must be separated as far as possible from thebody, and turn toward itself “to gather itself and collectitself out of every part of the body and to dwell by itself asfar as it can both now and in the future, freed, as it were,from the bonds of the body” (67d).

Dionysius had learned nothing of this (338e). He was mostlikely a participant in the Sicily Plato distrusted anddespised, which was characterized by the “happy life - alife filled with Italian and Syracusan banquets, with mengorging themselves twice a day and never sleeping aloneat night, and following all the other customs that go withthis way of living … no man under heaven who hascultivated such practices from his youth could possiblygrow up to be wise … or become temperate, or indeedacquire any other part of virtue” (Ep. VII 326b4-c4). Herein the letter, then, we are informed of just how difficult theepistemological problem is for Plato: names, definitions,and images are the only available instruments ofknowledge (342a5-6), but they themselves are intrinsicallyincapable of conveying the non-conceptual content ofphilosophical understanding. And even if they couldconvey such content, non-philosophers, not being pure,wouldn’t be capable of grasping them. Dionysius’ book onPlato’s philosophy, therefore, was an attempt to do theimpossible. For Plato, the book itself indicated Dionysius’ignorance of Plato’s thought about the ultimate nature ofreality (342e-344d) because Dionysius didn’t understandthat philosophy is a life characterized by self-transformation and the illuminating activity of dialectic,not merely a set of discursively transmittable doctrines(338e).

4 Most scholars who write about the Seventh Letter focus on theargument about the poverty of language. Due to limitationsof space, I can only give a brief sketch of Plato’s view. For thedetails and the compatibility of the letter with Plato’sdialogues, see Gonzalez (1998) and Sayre (1988). The point Iwant to underscore, which other scholars ignore, is theconnection between the argument about language, Plato’sattitude toward his doctrines, and philosophy as a way oflife.

The Place of Doctrines in Platonic Philosophy Mark Ralkowski

24 http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk

Practical Philosophy Special Edition Autumn 2007

III. Philosophy as a Way of LifePierre Hadot suggests that the rise of Christianity markeda turning point in the history of philosophy. Clement ofAlexandria, Origen, and Augustine began the gradualprocess of absorbing philosophy’s spiritual practices intothe domain of theology, which was then sharplydistinguished from philosophy by the medieval Scholasticsas the queen of the sciences. Afterwards, philosophybecame theology’s handmaiden whose sole purpose wasto supply conceptual clarity for the productive logic oftheology. Theology, not philosophy, sought the truth andprovided the spiritual means for seeking it. Eventually“philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises which,from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism andethics,” and “philosophy’s role was henceforth to furnishtheology with conceptual - and hence purely theoretical -material.” As the Enlightenment dawned, philosophyrecovered its autonomy, but it still bore the mark ofChristianity’s influence. “In particular, it maintained itspurely theoretical character, which even evolved in thedirection of a more and more thorough systematization.”It isn’t until one gets to Nietzsche, Bergson, and theexistentialists, Hadot argues, that philosophy explicitlyrecovers its direct relation to life by consciously returningto “being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing theworld.” (Hadot, 1995, pp. 107-8, emphasis added) Nietzscheand the existentialists have their own story to tell aboutthe price we’ve paid for the Christianization of philosophy.Hadot’s concern is that the contemporary focus on theoryhas prevented us from fully appreciating the nature ofancient Greek philosophy as it was practised andunderstood by the Greeks.

What specifically have we failed to appreciate? Brieflystated, we no longer recognize the place of doctrines in thepractice of ancient philosophy. On Hadot’s view, doctrineswere used primarily as tools in spiritual exercises, not asdoctrines intended correctly to represent the ultimatenature of reality. Taken seriously, Hadot’s view has radicalimplications. He argues that if we look beneath the“apparent diversity” among the ancient schools of thought-Platonism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism,Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, etc. - we can discover a“profound unity, both in the means employed and theends pursued.” Despite their manifest methodological anddoctrinal differences, each of the schools employed rhetoricdesigned to transform and master one’s “inner dialogueand mental concentration.” And while the different schoolshad different conceptions of the good life, each pursuedsome form of “self-realization and improvement.” (Hadot,1995, pp. 101-2) To illustrate, he has us consider the Stoics.

In their view, philosophy did not consist in teaching anabstract theory - much less in the exegesis of texts - butrather in the art of living. It is a concrete attitude anddeterminate life-style, which engages the whole ofexistence. The philosophical act is not situated merelyon the cognitive level, but on that of the self and ofbeing. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully,and makes us better…It raises the individual from aninauthentic condition of life, darkened byunconsciousness and harassed by worry, to anauthentic state of life, in which he attains self-

consciousness, an exact vision of the world, inner peace,and freedom.

Later in the same chapter, Hadot discusses the doctrinalimplications of this conception of ancient philosophy, andhis observations are extraordinary. If he is right, we shouldfundamentally change the way we approach ancientphilosophical texts.

As for philosophical theories, they were either placedexplicitly in the service of spiritual practice…or elsethey were taken as the objects of…a contemplative lifewhich…was itself nothing other than a spiritualexercise. It is impossible to understand thephilosophical theories of antiquity without taking intoaccount this concrete perspective, since this is whatgives them their true meaning.

What should we make of this? If we look closely at Hadot’sgloss on the nature of philosophy as a way of life in thesetwo passages, we can extract at least two principles: onemust undergo transformations of character and cognitionin order to have access to truth, which is a way of being asmuch as or more than it is an object of cognition (hereafterthe “self-transformation” principle), and this changes theway we ought to understand the positive metaphysicalclaims in the ancient texts (hereafter the “non-dogmatism”principle), which were “objects of a contemplative life,”not abstract representations of the deep structure of reality.

Michel Foucault has explained the self-transformationprinciple as well as anyone. As he says in his Hermeneuticsof the Subject, philosophy in Antiquity both asked “what itis that enables the subject to have access to truth” and was“the search, practice, and experience through which thesubject carries out the necessary transformations on himselfin order to have access to the truth.” (Foucault, 2001, 15)The different schools worked with different metaphysicaldoctrines, but each of these schools postulated that,

truth is never given to the subject by right … for thesubject to have right of access to the truth he must bechanged, transformed, shifted, and become, to someextent and up to a certain point, other than himself.The truth is only given to the subject at a price thatbrings the subject’s being into play. For as he is, thesubject is not capable of truth. (Foucault, 2001, 15)

How does this relate to the interpretation of Plato?Philosophers often observe the self-transformationprinciple, and they even acknowledge Hadot’s point thatphilosophers in the ancient world, including Plato,generally were less interested in building systems ofphilosophical doctrines than they were in living a radicallytransformative kind of life. But in the case of Plato, withvery few exceptions, philosophers do not see that the non-dogmatism principle follows from the self-transformationprinciple when it is coupled with the epistemic humility ofthe Seventh Letter: if Plato believed that ordinary cognitionis incapable of accessing ontological truth, that evenheightened cognition is incapable of overcoming its inbuiltlimitations and finitude, and that ontological truth cannotbe exhaustively and directly expressed in words, then hemust not have believed that his doctrines accurately

25http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk

expressed ontological truth. Or, if he did, he’d be guilty ofa straightforward contradiction, because he argued in theSeventh Letter that things literally are not and cannot be theway any doctrine says they are.

IV. ConclusionAt this point it should be clear that both the analysts andthe holists are committed to untenable views. Neither theanalysts nor the holists fully appreciate the ontologicalsignificance of the view articulated in the Seventh Letter.While the holists are correct to stress the unsystematiccharacter of Plato’s philosophy, and they are also correctto be suspicious about attributing positive metaphysicalviews to Plato, they are nevertheless wrong to argue thatPlato’s philosophy and method are not grounded in hisineffable ontology. The problem with the analytic view isthat it fails to understand why Plato did ontology. Theanalysts are not wrong to think the details of the argumentsin the dialogues are important. Plato clearly cared aboutthese ideas enough to think about them very carefully andwrite about them throughout his life. Their mistake issomething more fundamental. As Foucault has argued,the ancients were not committed to the development ofknowledge in the same way contemporary analyticphilosophers are. In fact, as long as we assume this, weapproach Plato anachronistically and we miss the essenceof Platonism.

…When the subject’s being is not put in question bythe necessity of having access to truth, I think we haveentered a different age of the history of relationsbetween subjectivity and truth. And the consequence…is that access to truth, whose sole condition ishenceforth knowledge, will find reward and fulfillmentin nothing else but the development of knowledge.(Foucault 2001, p. 18)

In other words, the analysts don’t fully appreciate thatPlato’s doctrines, like his dialogues more generally, wereintended to be transformative, not informative. They werenot advertisements to “empty philosophizing”—a mereplaying around with notions and arguments, as Findlaysays—but they also weren’t meant to be treated as treatiseswhose aim was to approach the truth disinterestedly, andwhose most basic assumption was that the truth could befully captured theoretically. This model of the relationshipbetween subjectivity and truth (hereafter the “modernview”) is blind to what Foucault calls the ‘rebound effect’in Platonic philosophy.

The point of enlightenment and fulfillment, the momentof the subject’s transfiguration by the ‘rebound effect’on himself of the truth he knows, and which passesthrough, permeates, and transfigures his being, can nolonger exist [on the modern view]. We can no longerthink that access to the truth will complete in thesubject, like a crowning or a reward, the work or thesacrifice, the price paid to arrive at it. Knowledge willsimply open out onto the indefinite dimension ofprogress… (Foucault 2001, pp. 18-19)

This is by no means a trivial point for our understandingof Plato. What is the Being of the Forms? Plato’s ultimate

view is that we cannot answer this question satisfactorily.What we can do is bring the mind into contact with themystery of Being and, through practising dialectic, engagein an activity that allows us to transform our vision of theworld and our place in it. Philosophy was a way of life forPlato, and his doctrines, it seems, were like Wittgenstein’sladder. They were meant to be used “like rising stairs”(Symp. 211c) until one is turned to “the great sea of beauty,and, gazing upon this, [one] gives birth to many gloriouslybeautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom…” (Symp. 210d).

Works CitedBlondell, R. (2002) The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cherniss, H.F. (1957) “The Relation of the Timaeus to Plato’sLater Dialogues,” in Allen (1965). Originally in AmericanJournal of Philology 75 (1954): 113-30.

Findlay, J.N. (1974) Plato: The Written and UnwrittenDoctrines. London: Humanities Press.

Foucault, M. (2001) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lecturesat the College de France 1981-82. Translated by A. Davidson.New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Friedlander, Paul ([1958]1964) Plato. Translated by H.Meyerhoff, vol 1, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Gerson, L.P. (2004) “What is Platonism?” Forthcoming inJournal of the History of Philosophy.

Gonzalez, F. (1998) Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice ofPhilosophical Inquiry. Evanston, IL: NorthwesternUniversity Press.

Hadot, P. (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life. Massachusetts:Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Irwin, T. (1977) Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and MiddleDialogues. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kraut, R. (ed.) (1992) The Cambridge Companion to Plato.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lear, J. (1988) Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of theSoul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Owen, G.E.L. (1953) “The Place of the Timaeus in Plato’sDialogues,” in Allen (1965): 313-38. Originally in ClassicalQuarterly (1953) 3: 79-95

Ryle, G. (1965) “Plato’s Parmenides,” in Allen 1965: 97-147. Originally in Mind 48 (1939): 129-51, 302-25

Sayre, Kenneth M. (1988) “Plato’s Dialogues in Light ofthe Seventh Letter,” in Griswold 1988: 93-110.

Strauss, L. (1964) The City and Man. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

The Place of Doctrines in Platonic Philosophy Mark Ralkowski

26 http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk

Practical Philosophy Special Edition Autumn 2007

Vlastos, G., ed. (1970a) Plato, A Collection of Critical EssaysI: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Garden City, New York:Anchor Books, Double Day.

———. (ed.) (1970b) Plato, A Collection of Critical Essays II:Ethics, Politics, Art and Religion. Garen City, New York:Anchor Books, Double Day.

———. (ed.) (1991) Socrates: Ironist and Moral PhilosopherIthaca: Cornell University Press.

White, N. (1976) Plato on Knowledge and Reality.Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Mark Ralkowski is finishing a dissertation on Heidegger’sPlatonism at the University of New Mexico, where he alsoworks as a lecturer in the philosophy department. He haspublished several book review articles and edited Timeand Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, by Carol J. White.His research interests include ancient Greek philosophy(esp. Plato), 20th century continental philosophy (esp.Heidegger), Nietzsche, ethics, and political philosophy. Inthe near future he intends to begin work on a book aboutPlato and Alcibiades.