Plato and the English Romantics (RLE: Plato)

E Douka Kabitoglou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135742478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

This book tackles the problematic relationship between Platonic philosophy and Romantic poetry, between the intellect and the emotions. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, especially hermeneutics and deconstruction, the author shows that a dialogue between thinking and poetizing is possible. The volume yields many new insights into both Platonic and Romantic texts and forms an important work for scholars and students of Greek philosophy, Romantic literature and critical theory.

1

THE DIALOGUE FORM

Apollo and Dionysus in Discourse

BEING AND FORMS IN PLATO

Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the Process. Imagination the Laboratory, in which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Psilosopher, i.e. a nominal Ph. without Imagination, is a Coiner – Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass, is his Stuff – and Verbiage the Stamp & Impression. This is but a deaf Metaphor – better say, that he is guilty of Forgery – he presents the same <sort of> Paper as the honest Barterer, but when you carry it to the Bank, it is found to be drawn on – Outis, Esq^re. His Words had deposited no Forms there, payable at Sight – or even at any imaginable Time from the Date of the Draft/ . . .

. . . Λoγoς ab Ente – at once the essential existent Reflection, and the Reflex Act – at once actual and real & therefore, filiation not creation / Thought formed not fixed – the molten Being never cooled into a Thing, tho’ begotten into the vast adequate Thought. Est, Idea, Ideation – Id – inde, HOC et illud. Idea – atio, seu actio = Id: iterum, <Hoc + Id, & then> Id + Ea (i.e. Coadunatio Individui cum Universo per Amorem) = Idea: Idea + actio = Ideatio, seu αγιov πvεvμα, which being transelemented into we are mystically united with the Am – Eιμι –.

(Coleridge 1962: II, 3158; 3159)

The ‘spontaneous overflow’ of Coleridge's thought as manifested in the above passage contains in embryonic form, or rather formlessness, the Romantic endeavour to deal with the epistemological and aesthetic problems and perplexities bequeathed to them by an age-long tradition and controversy, that ‘series of footnotes to Plato’ which constitutes, in A. N. Whitehead's view, western philosophy. Drawing his metaphors from chemistry (or alchemy), minting, banking practice, Coleridge immerses himself into a questionable etymological exploration of the term ‘idea’, to conclude with a twisting (so common of Coleridgean habits in the structuring of his arguments as well as his poems) that terminates intellectual or imaginative tensions by translating them into the accepted dogmas of Christian theology. His reading of ‘ideas’ as energies of thinking rather than mental concepts, in that ‘an idea is deeper than all intelligence’, although retaining the ontological primacy of the term, infuses it with the Romantic dynamics of the ‘will’ and turns its, supposedly, fixed nature into a tensive field of action.

How far is the inherent ‘dynamism’ that Coleridge attributes to the Platonic Ideas, and which seems to contradict traditional views of the Forms as ‘static’ configurations of reality, justified by the use of the term – and the concept – in the Platonic text itself? Or, is the notion of form a constriction and imprisonment of ‘being’, as J. Derrida affirms: ‘It might then be thought that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of form which in its most overt function, and ever since the origin of philosophy, would, with the authority of the is, have assigned to the sense of being the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, or form-presence’ (1973: 127).

The ‘classical’ definition of forms is given in the Parmenides where, after Parmenides’ assertion that a ‘form’ is a thing thought of as being one and always the same, Socrates expands the hermeneutical horizon by adding further details which exemplify the essence and function of forms; very tentatively, induced by his interlocutor,¹ he admits that ‘these forms [εἲδη] are as it were patterns fixed in the nature of things [παϱαδείγματα έστάναι έν τῇ øύσει]’ (132d).² Whatever activity or energy forms are allowed is in their relationship to each other, and their transactions with the sensible world; forms relate to one another, as things in the visible world relate to one another (Parm., 129d–e). A greater amount of dynamism is displayed in the encounter of ‘forms’ and the ‘formless’ receptacle which exists before all shapes and colours and sounds appear, for ‘that which is to receive perpetually and through its whole extent the resemblances of all eternal beings ought to be devoid of any particular form’ (Timaeus, 51a); the universal mould receiving all Ideas, always the ‘same’ and open to impressions,

is stirred and informed by them, and appears different from time to time by reason of them. But the forms which enter into and go out of her are the likenesses of eternal realities modeled after their patterns in a wonderful and mysterious manner, which we will hereafter investigate.

(Tim., 50c)

So forms in a way exhibit a simultaneous dynamic and static quality in sending forth ‘representatives’ that come and go into the maternal mould, while they themselves remain aloof, undisturbed. The manner of interaction between forms and receptacle is given in the Timaeus through the metaphor of ‘visitation’ (forms ‘enter into’ and ‘go out of her’) in what appears to be an open thoroughfare, neither inviting nor detaining them. Plato's ‘formless’ receptacle of forms is the material χώϱα, the space where forms arise and vanish. For, if ‘that which is to receive all forms should have no form’, ‘the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things’, the matrix of creation, ‘is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible’, (50e–51b). It is the ‘marriage’ of ‘form’ and ‘space’ that gives birth to ‘image’ or phenomenal reality observed by the senses; conversely, the formlessness of χώϱα ‘is apprehended, when all sense is absent, by a kind of spurious reason’ and a ‘dreamlike sense’ (52b–c). So ‘image’ (or ‘generation’) is distinguished from ‘space’ (the ‘nurse of generation’), and both are differentiated from ‘idea’, thus forming a triptych of existents. Yet when it comes to that, the metaphysical distinction dominating the Platonic strongly dualistic ontology – the difference between that spiritual ‘place [τóπoν] beyond the heavens’ where ‘true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched’ (Phaedrus, 247c), ‘the form which is always the same . . . invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is granted to intelligence only’ (Tim., 52a), and the sheer materiality of ‘space [χώϱας]’, ‘that must be always called the same’ (Tim., 50b), ‘an invisible and formless being’ (Tim., 51a) – seems to be an extremely subtle noetic, and experiential, operation.

‘Participation’ of things in forms often bears traces of the exercise of violence. In the Phaedo, for instance, the language of the text introduces ‘occupation’ and ‘enforcement’ as conditions that are ‘suffered’ by a thing and resulting from its association with form. Confrontation of ‘form’ and ‘thing’ is not only hierarchical but may lead to unpredictable consequences, as ‘they are things which are compelled by some form which takes possession of them to assume not only its own form but invariably also that of some other form which is an opposite’ (104d). Such an assumption would uncover ‘forms’ to be not mere ‘energies’ but ‘powers’ in the full sense of the word, leading to a ‘political’ rather than ‘scientific’ reading of Platonic cosmology, easily discerning the relationship of oppressor / oppressed in the ontological transactions between the spiritual and the material. A similar observation can be made concerning the central activity in Plato's creation myth in the Timaeus, the famous, or infamous, ‘Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection’ (48a). Since the – anyway ethically ambiguous – technique of persuasion, even in its most innocent form of verbal persuasion or rhetoric, is often condemned by Plato as a misleading and enchanting practice (of which poetry is a type), the proposition perhaps implies that the whole Platonic edifice of a moral universe (the cause ‘endowed with mind’ working out ‘things fair and good’) is based upon misappropriation of power. D. F. Krell attempts to decipher the mechanics of persuasion that brings a ‘cosmos’ out of a ‘chaos’: ‘Timeaus's craftsman’, he contests, ‘possesses only one technē and that one is poiēsis, production. We know nothing about his capacities in wooing and love-making. If he is the logos that cannot be persuaded’, the critic wonders, how can he come to terms with the alogon? ‘If he fears and despises anankē can he bring himself to lie with her – or induce her to lie with him?’ In an attempt to clarify the relationship of ἔϱως and λóγoς, Krell protests: ‘If he cannot be persuaded how will he learn the art of persuasion? Does not persuasion involve the give and take of dialogue and dialectic? Unless he does a bit of wandering himself how can logos persuade the planōmenon?’ (1975: 415).

The activity of Ideas receives a milder presentation in the Republic, in Plato's effort to safeguard, once more, the ‘uniqueness’ and self-identity of each form, while justifying its pluralistic manifestations:

And in respect of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the ideas or forms, the same statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of their communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves everywhere, each as a multiplicity of aspects.

(V, 476a)

Moving in a reverse process, man must understand the language of forms, passing from a plurality of perceptions to a unity gathered together by thinking; the vision of forms presupposes, as is often stressed by Plato, a prior ‘unification’ and ‘collectedness’. This highest stage, the final θεωςία, is prepared for by the preliminary phases of the dialectical process, which effect an ‘intellectual’ purification that cleanses the mind from preconceptions, opinions, conditioning (as well as an ‘ethical’ one that kills the pride of intellect) and allows a ‘naked’ contact of the soul with reality as it is (τò ὄντoς ὄν), the original state of what is ‘there’ – or ‘here’. Seen from within the perspective of the dialectical method, the Idea (Ideas) is that which is before we project our concepts (ὑπoθέoεις) onto it. And although such a view tends to de-transcendentalize traditional interpretations concerning the nature of Platonic forms, I agree with the suggestion supporting the ‘this-worldliness’ of Plato's attitude rather than his so-called ‘escapism’, the view expressed by L. A. Cosman that ‘the luminous world of forms is this world seen aright. That seeing (itself fugitive) is accomplished by a katharsis which makes appearance transparent, which allows the world itself to shine through its appearances’ (1976: 67). One could even go as far as making paradoxical statements of the nature that Ideas can only be reached by a mind free from ‘ideas’. Such subtle interplay of terms would be made meaningful if we turn to the root signification of the Greek word ìδέα which is ‘to observe, to see’; the implication might be that one refuses to see reality as it is by making an abstraction out of it, turning it into an ‘idea’ or ‘picture’ – in the sense the term is used by later philosophers.

Plato does not actually refer to Ideas as living powers but reserves the notion of ‘dynamism’ for the idea of ‘being’ – ὄν or oύσία (deriving from oὖσα, participle feminine of εἰμí / am). The most thorough and extensive argument about the ‘empowered’ nature of the real appears in the Sophist where the definition (λóγoς) of ‘being’, whether in an embodied or bodiless state, is set down as ‘power’ (δύναμις): ‘I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing but power’ (247e). This ‘power’ that constitutes the essence of ‘being’ is further defined as power to ‘affect’ (πoιεĩν) or ‘be affected’ (πάσχειν). Having established the characteristic mark of reality as ‘the presence in a thing of the power of being acted upon or of acting’ (248c), the ‘dramatis personae’, the Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus, carry on the discussion which was actually initiated earlier, by bringing face to face the two diametrically opposite positions concerning the nature of the real – that of the materialists (the exponents of flux) and that of the so-called idealists (the ‘friends of forms’).³ In his usual philosophical practice Plato literally ‘throws’ on the ground the binary opposition and, like an interested but detached observer, follows the undulatory motion of the argument wherever it leads – which is usually ‘nowhere’.

Beginning with the assumption that ‘reality is just as hard to define as unreality’, he sets down the basic premises of the parties involved in this ‘quarrel about reality’ like ‘a battle of gods and giants’. The hypotheses of both contestants, materialists and idealists, receive due attention and presentation – in their most extremist positions (246a–249c). The task facing the Stranger and his interlocutor is to challenge each party in turn, Theaetetus undertaking to act as their spokesman. The seeming deadlock into which the either / or dialectical process ultimately corners itself is miraculously resolved by Plato (in the persona of the Stranger) offering not only one but two possible solutions: (a) the neither, and (b) the both / and:

On these grounds, then, it seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and the rest above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions either of the one or of the many forms the doctrine that all reality is changeless, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party who represent reality as everywhere changing. Like a child begging for ‘both,’ he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once – all that is unchangeable and all that is in change.

(249c–d)

The acceptance of both ‘unchangeability’, i.e. rest, and ‘...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. THE DIALOGUE FORM: APOLLO AND DIONYSUS IN DISCOURSE
• 2. EROS IN LOGOS: SYMPOSIA ANCIENT AND MODERN
• 3. TRANS-FORM-ATION: THE DIALECTICS OF ПAΘOΣ AND ПOIHΣIΣ
• 4. ПAΘHMA AND ПOIHMA: BEING IN THE ROMANTIC TEXTS
• 5. ON RE-COLLECTION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index