From Plato to Platonism

Lloyd P. Gerson

• Éditeur: Cornell University Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801469176
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato's own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. In From Plato to Platonism, Lloyd P. Gerson argues that the ancients were correct in their assessment. He arrives at this conclusion in an especially ingenious manner, challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato's teachings have come to be understood. Through deft readings of the philosophical principles found in Plato's dialogues and in the Platonic tradition beginning with Aristotle, he shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the seventeenth century was the history of various efforts to find the most consistent and complete version of "anti-naturalism."Gerson contends that the philosophical position of Plato—Plato's own Platonism, so to speak—was produced out of a matrix he calls "Ur-Platonism." According to Gerson, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five "antis" that in total arrive at anti-naturalism: anti-nominalism, anti-mechanism, anti-materialism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Plato's Platonism is an attempt to construct the most consistent and defensible positive system uniting the five "antis." It is also the system that all later Platonists throughout Antiquity attributed to Plato when countering attacks from critics including Peripatetics, Stoics, and Sceptics. In conclusion, Gerson shows that Late Antique philosophers such as Proclus were right in regarding Plotinus as "the great exegete of the Platonic revelation."

PART 1

Plato and His Readers

CHAPTER 1

Was Plato a Platonist?

Was Plato a Platonist? A cheeky question, perhaps. If by “Platonist” we mean “a follower of Plato,” then the question is entirely captious. Plato was no more a Platonist than Jesus was a Christian. The question is only marginally more illuminating if we take it to mean “Would Plato have agreed with one or another of the historical, systematic representations of his philosophy?” Naturally, this question, like all questions about counterfactuals in the history of philosophy, is unanswerable. But if the question means “Do we possess evidence that supports the view that Plato’s own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of one or another soi-disant Platonists?” then, according to many scholars, we are in a relatively good position to give a definite answer to the question. And the answer is unequivocally no, Plato was not a Platonist. In this book, I present the case that the correct answer is more likely to be yes.

The term ‘Platonism’ is used today in roughly three ways. One of these refers to a philosophical position in the philosophy of mathematics and in contemporary metaphysics that is only loosely connected with any historical philosophical view.1 This use of the term I will mostly leave aside. The term ‘Platonism’ is, second, also used to refer loosely to whatever is found in Plato’s dialogues. It is important, as I will explain in a moment, that those who use the term in this way both mean to refer exclusively to the dialogues and do not necessarily make the claim that ‘Platonism’ used in this way refers to one consistent philosophical position. Thus, ‘Platonism’ is the label for whatever Plato said or can be gleaned to have meant through the use of his literary characters—Socrates and the rest. Those who use the term ‘Platonism’ in this way divide over whether Plato’s views ever changed or “developed” throughout the course of his literary career. Those who claim to discern some development are, typically, referred to as ‘developmentalists,’ and those who deny that there is any or any substantial development are called ‘unitarians.’ I will have a good deal more to say about these two positions and their common use of the term ‘Platonism’ in the next chapter. For now, it is sufficient to distinguish this use of the term from another. In its third use, ‘Platonism’ refers to a consistent or at least comprehensive philosophical position maintained by followers of Plato, or ‘Platonists.’ Followers of Plato perhaps started declaring themselves to be Platonists—or were so designated by others—beginning in the first century BCE.2 By the first century CE, the self-designation was not uncommon. But even prior to the first century BCE, the absence of the term ‘Platonist’ (Πλατωνικὀς) certainly does not indicate that there were no followers of Plato who embraced ‘Platonism’ in this sense. What distinguishes this use of the term from the previous use is, among other things, the belief that Platonism extends beyond the dialogues. That is, elements of Platonism can be found in the testimony of Plato’s disciples—especially Aristotle—and also possibly within an oral tradition handed down from Plato himself through a chain of Academy members or “heads.”3

The use of the term ‘Platonism’ in this third sense is not in itself especially contentious. Contention immediately arises, however, if it is claimed that Platonism in this sense has anything to do with Platonism in the second sense. For to claim that the self-declared Platonists of antiquity embraced a philosophical position that is in essence the position that Plato himself embraced is to immediately open oneself to a barrage of criticisms. Though it may be conceded that ‘Platonism’ thus used may be inspired by or in some way have its roots in the Platonism of the dialogues, the idea that these are identical or nearly so seems far-fetched. In fact, the basically vacuous term ‘Middle Platonism’ and the originally pejorative term ‘Neoplatonism’ were coined to mark the putative difference between Plato’s own Platonism and what his disciples made out of that.4 It is perhaps worth stressing, though not with the intention of special pleading, that Plato’s disciples grouped under these two labels did not think of themselves as innovative or revolutionary or revisionist; they thought that they were articulating and defending and perhaps applying to new philosophical and religious challenges the philosophy found in the dialogues and, as indicated above, beyond the dialogues as well.

A not unreasonable response to this observation is that what these disciples thought they were doing need not impede us in a correct assessment of what they were actually doing, which is, from one perspective, something quite different from providing an exposition and defense of the pure stream of Plato’s thought. Indeed, we may plausibly add that in antiquity innovation was not especially valued; on the contrary, it was often held suspect. Accordingly, what may in fact have been innovative may either not have appeared so to proponents of the innovation or, if it did, there was motivation enough to conceal this. Nevertheless, if we could arrive at a perspicuous articulation of the Platonism of the disciples, we might be in a better position to see exactly where they went off the rails, so to speak. But, of course, to express the task in this way makes evident the obvious problem, namely, how do we articulate the “authentic” version of Plato’s philosophy found in the dialogues for the purposes of comparison?

One view has it that there are no philosophical position in the dialogues—at least none that reflect the beliefs of their author—and on this view, it would be vain to seek for Platonism there.5 That this view is, prima facie, an extreme one hardly counts against it. Perhaps it only appears to be extreme in comparison with views that only seem (incorrectly) reasonable or moderate. Though I will argue in the next chapter that this view is in fact untenable and incoherent, it does at any rate intensify the force of the challenge to show that there is any one philosophical position in the dialogues. By contrast, the developmentalists and the unitarians are in principle congenial to hearing an exposition of Plato’s philosophy (or, in the former case, perhaps we should say “iterations of Plato’s philosophy”), though they are more than a little resistant to the idea that this exposition will turn up something that is identical to a position held by philosophers some fifty or two hundred or five hundred or even eight hundred years later.6

I want to distinguish the above challenge from the challenge that developmentalists and unitarians set for themselves in offering expositions of Plato’s philosophy. For when they refer to ‘Platonism’ they typically mean something that, by definition, can be found only in the dialogues. According to the other use of the term, Platonism is indeed found in the dialogues, but these dialogues are a record or expression of Platonism understood more broadly; Platonism is not an inductive generalization from the data of the dialogues. This makes a considerable difference, as we will see. The claim that “Plato’s philosophy” is just the “sum” of what we find in the dialogues is fundamentally different from the claim that the dialogues are the best evidence we have for Plato’s philosophy. It is my contention in this book that the former claim is false and the latter is true. In addition, if Platonism is the philosophical position that Plato expressed, it does not follow that Plato was even the first to express it or that all subsequent expressions come from him or that he expressed it best (though I know of no Platonists who ...

Table des matières

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1. Plato and His Readers
• Part 2. The Continuing Creation of Platonism
• Part 3. Plotinus: “Exegete of the Platonic Revelation”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography