Abstract
As related to our concerns, Dewey (1930), in the essay, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” intimates a unique view of Plato that is, for the most part, foreign to many educators teaching the philosophy of education, philosophical foundations of education, and paradigms of research, namely, those embracing a “traditional or “doctrinal” view of Plato, which amounts to anachronistically conceiving Plato in terms of a contemporary professional philosophy professor and academic. Although Dewey does not develop this “unique” position, he gestures toward an understanding of Plato’s philosophy and view of education, and by extension, Plato’s Socrates, which might be referred to as “non-doctrinal” or “non-systematic” in nature—an “anti-Mouthpiece” interpretation—i.e., a non-formalized view of Plato’s Socrates’ practice of philosophy. This includes a “non-institutionalized” or “anti-programmatic” view of education and learning that is present to the dialogues and developed throughout the three chapters of this book. Dewey refuses to reduce Plato’s vast and inventive thought to an “all-comprehensive and overriding system” (21), and emphatically claims that nothing “would be more helpful to present philosophizing than a ‘Back to Plato’ movement,” which our reading, in its own modest way, seeks to inspire in education literature. This entails our turning “back to the dramatic, restless, co-operatively inquiring Plato of the Dialogues, trying one mode of attack or another to see what it might yield,” and in this move we remain highly skeptical of “the artificial Plato constructed by unimaginative commentators who treat him as the original university professor” (21).
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- 1.
Dewey’s essay was first brought to my attention through the scholarship of Press (1995) who writes on the Platonic notion of truth of the virtues in the dialogues—which Press labels “philosophical enactments” (12)—and not education per se. However, I believe the inclusion of Dewey’s thoughts is apropos considering my focus in this book is on developing a non-formal, non-systematic view of what might be labeled a Socratic “philosophical education”.
- 2.
It is interesting to note that in Peters (2013) pedagogical reading of Later Wittgenstein, which approaches the philosopher from a “literary” perspective, he observes a similar shortcoming in “analytic” interpretations that overlook Wittgenstein’s stylistic choices to communicate his thought and focus only on attempting to extract his system of philosophy, and hence miss the overall thrust of his unique and developing philosophical project: “I believe with many others who have made the point better than me, that the analytic impulse to want to extract a theory or method from Wittgenstein is wrong-headed and that to interpret him as offering a systematic philosophy is to miss the point of his philosophizing entirely” (12).
- 3.
Although I incorporate the term “normative” to describe both the region of Socrates’ inquiry and the form of knowledge that he seeks of the virtues, there is no Greek word in the dialogues that Plato incorporates in relation to Socrates’ philosophy that is the equivalent of the Latin “norma” from which “normative” is derived, concerned with patterns, rules, precepts. In the Greek this is traceable to “νομος” (nomos) expressive of laws, traditions, principles, and rules. However, Socrates is undoubtedly focused on a realm of inquiry concerned with “values” and a manner of expressing and defending values through arguments (logos didonai) structured and communicated via normative statements rather than formal “propositions.” This view I argue avoids the anachronistic fallacy because although Plato does not formulate the issue in terms of Hume’s modern understanding of the fact/value distinction, and although the issue remains “unsaid,” in that the term “normative” is not incorporated to sharply distinguish Socrates’ philosophical pursuit, it is not “unthought” by Plato, despite its lack of formalization. For there are numerous instances that we explore in the dialogues where Socrates acknowledges the marked difference between the knowledge of both techne and episteme and the so-called “understanding” that is unique to the virtues and the register of the ethical as this relates to the issues of teaching and education, posing the question: Is it possible to have (echei) “knowledge” of the virtues in such a way that we can confidently “teach” and pass along that knowledge to others, as from pedagogue to student, master to apprentice? Clearly, Socrates is concerned with “norms” of behavior that are regulative of ethical conduct, concerned with that which should and ought to be done.
- 4.
Corlett (2005) provides a definition for and critique of the “esoteric” position, stating that it combines elements of both the “Mouthpiece” (doctrinal) and “Anti-Mouthpiece” (non-doctrinal) reading, for the “esoteric” position holds the belief that Plato held fast to philosophical doctrines, but those doctrines are not contained in the Platonic corpus. “Esotericism holds that Plato did have unwritten views that he sought to convey to his followers” (17), but that his “true” philosophy remained excluded from the extant dialogues. The problem with this type of interpretation, as Corlett points out, is that esotericism goes outside the dialogues in order to effectively account for Plato’s philosophy, which is in essence a view that discounts the dialogues as an authentic source for understanding Plato’s philosophy. The only way that esotericism might render a plausible reading is to square the esoteric philosophical doctrines with the dialogues, which esotericism rejects as legitimate sources for Plato’s philosophy; by its nature esotericism demands that the dialogues be overlooked, and hence esotericism, in view of this line of reasoning, is self-defeating (17).
- 5.
The “unitarian” view, as Gonzalez (1995) explains, holds that “Platonic doctrines remain fundamentally the same throughout the dialogues: only the way in which they are presented changes” (5). The “developmentalist” view, expressing a slightly differing chronology, is found in both Guthrie and Vlastos. To provide a brief example of this view let us consider Plato’s so-called “Theory of the Forms”: In Vlastos’ chronology, the Forms as introduced in the “early” dialogue Euth. (5d), are detailed and developed more fully in the “Middle” dialogue Phd. (65d; 74a–c; 106d). Then this view is further put in question and criticized by Plato as his philosophy evolves and changes in the “late-transitional” (from “Middle” to “Late” period”) dialogue Parmenides. (132a–b) when Plato considers the so-called “Third Man” argument, which Aristotle famously criticizes (Met. 990b), i.e., the argument from infinite regress.
- 6.
Jaspers (1962a) also contends that for the ancients who claimed a “Socratic lineage” there were reductive strains of Platonic/Socratic interpretation, which included a narrow focus on one or two particular elements of Socratic philosophy as it emerged through the Platonic dialogues at the exclusion of many other aspects of Socrates’ philosophical practice of care for the soul that clearly resisted systematization: For example, the Megarians adopted logic and eristics (contradiction and negation); the Eleatic School focused on dialectical methodology and investigation (argumentation and its implementation and analysis); the Cynics adopted a view that shunned education, culture, and the communal aspects of self-knowledge, focused exclusively on “self-sufficiency and inner independence” (17). All these views, as related to this reading, ignore the authentic communal aspects of Plato’s Socrates’ practice of philosophy (care for the soul), where self-knowledge and understanding of the virtues is possible only in terms of the radical change or transformation to and attunement of one’s character or disposition (hexis), which occurs through the rigorous and sustained practice of elenchus-dialectic within the (ethical) community of “well-meaning” and “non-competitive” like-minded individuals (Ep. VII 341c; 344b).
- 7.
I employ the term “Cartesian” when referencing an objective epistemology and ontology, however, as Kirkland (2010) points out, we must be careful to use “‘objective reality’ in the sense that it acquires after Descartes in the project that then dominates all of modern philosophy—mending the radical severance of the subject from its object” (187). It must be noted, as both Kirkland and Kenny (1990) observe, technically, based on the medieval distinction between “objective” and “formal” reality, Descartes claims that ideas do indeed possess an “objective” reality, which is dependent on the “formal” reality (and subsequent “grade of reality”) of the things (state-of-affairs) that are the cause of the ideas of those things. For example, the idea of the essence of matter (res extensa), based on its formal reality, has more veracity as an idea than an idea relating exclusively to the properties of matter. This is because properties change; they are mutable. Essences (substances), on the other hand, do not change; they are immutable.
- 8.
Thomson (2010) is another interpreter detailing Heidegger’s influence on both deconstruction and postmodern thought, and ultimately he aligns Heidegger with postmodernism. It must also be acknowledged that Fried (2006) makes the case that it is “Platonism” that is the target of Heidegger’s critique rather than Plato himself—i.e., Platonism as a product of the tradition’s reading of Plato in the history that follows from and builds on his thought. Gonzalez (2009) holds a different view, arguing that for Heidegger Plato is Platonism and it is within Heidegger’s philosophy, e.g., the late essay, “The Task of Thinking and the End of Philosophy,” that a radical distinction is made between Plato and Plato’s Socrates, the latter represented as instantiating a “non-doctrinal” view of philosophy, a view that is in tune with the very “truth of Being” that Plato’s error in misunderstanding and hence mis-categorizing aletheia (primordial unconcealment) as orthotes (correctness) obscures. Although Heidegger offers a doctrinal reading of Plato—as Platonism moving through the history of Western metaphysics—Heidegger does adopt a view of “Socrates” that is strikingly similar to that of Jaspers (1962a, b), and in Gonzales’ (2009) analysis, one of the only scholars touching on this crucial issue, the issue of what we might call “Heidegger’s Socrates” is addressed in terms of an “original” thinker who was apparently aligned with the truth of Being’s unfolding and understood the necessity of holding himself of the “draft” of its sway or unfolding—i.e., questioning relentlessly attuned to this truth directing his life and philosophy.
- 9.
The traditional rendering of katharsis is linked with the “purgation” of the emotions found in readings of the Poetics, where Aristotle, within the tragic experience of fear (phobos) and pity (eleos), refers to the kathartic purging of the spectators’ emotions. Tragedy arouses the emotions “through fear and pity” and then accomplishes “the purification [katharsis] of such emotions” (Poet. 49b). However, according to Pappas (2001), tragedy also allows for the “clarification” of the emotions and “teaches how fear and pity feel and where they are appropriate” (17), it teaches us to hold ourselves, as “embodied” existents, within a mode of comportment that necessitates the renewed and continued “clarification” of the emotions we experience, and we also find a similar interpretation in Nussbaum (1986). As Pappas (2001) contends, “katharsis was used in several different contexts before Aristotle, and those contexts [e.g., the medical context] slanted the word’s central meaning of a ‘cleaning’” (17). Katharsis in a more “neutral context meant simply a clean-up or clarification” (17). This understanding of katharsis can be related intimately to our understanding of Socrates’ philosophical education for it is possible to read katharsis in terms of “training” by means of perpetually clarifying the emotions in ways that instantiate “habitual practices” (ethos) that are crucial to understanding the Socratic project of care for the soul, which is always about the lifelong improvement in both feeling and judgment, in terms of an ethical education that is irreducible to a purely theoretical and detached intellectual exercise.
- 10.
Interpreting Plato from what Gonzalez (2017) terms the view of “perspectivism”—a form of “Third Way” scholarship—he acknowledges the “trepidation” he experiences when approaching Plato’s dialogues in the manner I have described and, it must be noted, it is a methodological approach that he also adopts. According to Gonzalez, “Interpreting a particular dialogue and having the aptness of one’s methodology assessed by its specific results is probably a much more fruitful way of contributing to the debate on how to read Plato that publishing books [as Gonzalez himself has done] proclaiming a ‘new paradigm’ or a ‘third way’ in Platonic studies” (32). However, in selecting my strategy and method for interpretation, I am working toward a potentially “positive” outcome that such a reading might achieve, namely, the advantage that such a reading has to emphasize “the irreducible diversity of the dialogues and [the] refusal to assimilate them to one narrative, whether it be a developmentalist or unitarian one” (32, my emphasis).
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Magrini, J.M. (2018). Introduction: Doctrinal and Non-doctrinal Interpretations of Plato and Plato’s Socrates. In: Plato’s Socrates, Philosophy and Education. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71356-4_1
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