Translated from Sozialistische Hochschulzeitung #7

Plato:

From the nursery of reason to the old folks home of philosophy

“Plato is one of those world-famed individuals, his philosophy one of those world-renowned creations, whose influence, as regards the culture and development of the mind, has from its commencement down to the present time been all-important.” (Hegel)
“Our present language and conception of the world are permeated throughout by the results of ancient philosophy.” (Windelband)
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” (Whitehead)

Be careful when you praise and honor tradition! Maybe it isn’t all that flattering to broadcast that you haven’t wanted to learn anything new for 2,500 years on principle. Especially since it hasn’t even been established yet what the ancient Greeks generally knew and were able to know and – this is not the same! – what the insights that modern people claim to have derived from them are good for. A sober examination is apparently a violation of good manners in a discipline that has decided to guard its tradition like a treasure – “Plato’s works are undoubtedly one of the most beautiful gifts that fortune has preserved for us from antiquity” – and, due to this higher responsibility, does not even feel ridiculous emitting loud warnings that the jewel will lose its lustre if an unbiased mind casts a critical eye on it. Is it really a pity if a piece of literature is spoiled by that?

Yet this danger does not exist for philosophers. In every lecture, you hear the sigh: “One really has to read him in the original Greek!” It is said much of the meaning is lost in translation. Nobody needs to be able to specify what this meaning consists of and what is supposedly lost in the rather harmless process of translating it into another language. It’s more about declaring in advance that you are incapable of ever sufficiently grasping the purport of a text. This pose implies that there is always more to a text than meets the eye. This basic dogma of interpretation has inspired Plato experts to distinguish between an exoteric and an esoteric philosophy in Plato: exoteric refers to what Plato wrote down and what has been handed down about him – but is not supposed to be his actual philosophy. His actual esoteric philosophy – one wonders what this is supposed to consist of? – is then what he didn’t write down! It’s as if they want to say that they revere Plato much more than he deserves for his writings.

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”Knowledge begins with Plato.” That may well be true. But why is this widespread opinion presented as praise? After all, one can’t expect big groundbreaking insights when a mind that has been preoccupied with imagining a mythological world of gods first begins schooling itself in findings. Rather, it suggests comparison with a childlike mind which doesn’t immediately start talking in print-ready thoughts when it emancipates itself from the ideas of its imagination.

I. Plato and knowledge

In all his dialogues, Plato has his characters search for definitions. In this respect, the art of shipbuilding takes up as much space as the question of what distinguishes humans from animals; the question of what is a statesman is just as interesting as that of the difference between appearance and reality; and of course the good, the beautiful, and the true must not be left out either. And in all these cases, the first thing to ponder is the question of what a definition actually is. What exactly is going on when Socrates, in his duscussions with his pal Theaetetos, who tried to answer the question of what knowledge is by lististing examples (knowledge exists in the art of measuring, in the art of shoemaking, etc.), lectures him in the following way?

“But what we asked was not what there was knowledge of, nor how many kinds of knowledge there were. For we did not ask with the intention of enumerating them, but in order to comprehend knowledge itself, what it might be.”

Or when in the Phaedo – this dialogue is all about beauty – the beautiful words are spoken that “through beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.” Well, the answer to the question of what distinguishes beautiful things really couldn’t be more tautological. Plato apparently still didn’t get any further than the necessity that thinking should be concerned with determining the general nature of a thing. So he was already making a fool of himself among his contemporaries with his definitions. The interlocutors in the Politikos, for example, make a sincere effort to answer the question of what is a human and finally arrive at the conclusion, to everyone’s satisfaction, that a human is “a non-feathered, bipedal creature.” He was looking for a difference between humans and other animals. And he ends up with a plucked chicken, which the joker Diogenes threw over the wall of the academy at Plato’s followers. And that is one of the better cases in which a dialogue ends with a positive result. In most cases, the effort fails, which, as is well known, earned old Socrates his reputation as a great philosopher.

– The basic elements of reason are characterized by every sign of theoretical helplessness when someone is celebrated for his parables! As if a lack of theoretical rigor couldn’t be taken from this thinking technique! As soon as a finding is required, the imagination is invoked to replace the missing predicate with an appeal to another imagining. So then what is the famous allegory of the cave saying? Direct perception deals with the shadows of things and not with the things themselves. In order to grasp what things are themselves, one must recognize their idea, their general nature. Perceiving and knowing are therefore supposed to be two different things. But this is precisely why it is foolish to imagine knowing with an image that equates it with perception: In knowing, we do not look at the shadows, but at the things themselves, it says. Those who continue thinking along these lines will quickly come up with completely wrong ideas: For them, knowing has nothing to do with the content of perception and does not explain this content, but rather moves in a completely different, separate world. Ideas constitute a realm of their own which has nothing to do with things as they are known through senseory experience. Nevertheless, ideas are supposed to represent the general nature of these things. So a relation must be established: things are one thing and ideas are something completely different. Plato didn’t really know what to make of this either. He says that things “participate” in ideas. To what extent? Fifty percent or what? All this nonsense, incidentally, is Plato’s theory of ideas.

– The shortcomings of this way of thinking, of thinking in images, are quite evident to the participants in the dialogues. In the Theaetetus, for example, the assertion is made: “Knowledge is like a block of wax; the stamp one makes on it is to the impression it leaves as reality is to knowledge.” And while everyone, for a time, continues to elaborate on the metaphor instead of thinking further about knowledge itself, someone finally has the insight: “knowing depends on the difference between true and false – but imprints can’t be true or false.” So knowledge is not, after all, the same as a block of wax. But since none of the participants in the dialog has anything better to offer, the question ultimately remains unanswered.

What is praised as Plato’s dialectic is in fact an indication of this thinker’s bleak state of mind: he wallows in contradictions without being able to resolve them. The dialogues considered particularly profound are precisely of this kind. Take the Parmenides, for example: Someone comes along and asserts: “Everything is Being. Then everything is one and the same – just Being – and all differences, the fact that there are different things in the world, the fact that they sometimes change, are mere appearance, lies, and deception.” And of course the next person comes along and says: “And what is appearance? Non-Being? But then it doesn’t exist at all. So there must be Being after all.” First, everything is lumped together in one category – Being – and then the participants are surprised that they can no longer tell anything apart. Yet another substitute for knowledge. Those who know nothing resort to universals that no longer contain anything specific, but which are supposed to explain everything.

It’s no coincidence that the whole thing is presented in the form of a dialogue. Nor is it exactly a record of scholarship. Not every piece of nonsense should be accepted; what matters is well-established findings. That’s why arguments for and against existing ideas are weighed against each other. But the objective truth of the matter has obviously not yet been revealed – because then the back and forth would finally come to a stop.

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By the way, it doesn’t even matter that the ancient Greeks didn’t know anything. In their slave-owning society, they got along quite well without knowledge. What inspired their first scientific endeavors was not their enormous thirst for knowledge. If that had been the case, they would have had every reason to be dissatisfied with what they had achieved theoretically, and they wouldn’t have considered it an expression of wisdom that old Socrates managed to repeatedly prove that his contemporaries knew just as little about anything as he did. What truly motivated Plato and his followers was rather the need for universal validity. The wise man in the dialogues is not someone who possesses a great deal of knowledge and who others can expect to objectively clarify their questions. The figure of Socrates represents, rather, the imperative: “Come to an agreement on a universally valid definition!” Someone who talks this way doesn’t offer one himself. Establishing agreement through knowledge is not his concern. Socrates intervenes in every dispute in a completely non-objective way: Plato brings the existing views of his time to the table. Socrates confronts them with each other, allows them to contradict each other, and rejects them in this way. He doesn’t examine and criticize any of the views, but instead applies the criterion to them of universal validity: Because and as long as conflicting views atill exist, none of them can claim validity. He doesn’t say: knowledge generates agreement, but rather makes the agreement of those invoved the criterion for knowledge. He doesn’t demand proof of the correctness of the respective view, but rather that its proponent succeed in persuading the opposing parties to abandon their positions. On the one hand, this criterion requires less than knowledge: It is only necessary to win over the opposing parties to one’s own point of view, and this is a skill entirely seperate from the question of whether one’s own view accurately reflects reality. On the other hand, it demands more: The most compelling proof is useless if people clong to false beliefs for reasons entirely unrealted to theoretical considerations. Philosophers invoke a universally present will to agree and are simultaneously its sole representatives. Because this will is not in fact universally present, they mist constantly present it as an imperative. That’s why their whole enterprise is fundamentally dishonest. In the name of a fictitious “we-all-strive-for-the-same-thing,” they deny the right to exist of any viewpoint that is not universally accepted.

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The discussion becomes truly philosophically profound when this requirement for agreement no longer has anything to do with a thing that exists separately from it, but only with itself. And this is the case – as in virtually all of Plato’s dialogues – when the subject is truth, goodness, and beauty. In these ideas, the need for universal validity has created its own fictional objects: Plato and all philosophers after him are very preoccupied with truth. So much so that they completely lose sight of the knowledge of anything concrete. They are not concerned with examining whether this or that judgment accurately reflects reality, that is, whether it is true. Nor do they discover any truths about anything; instead, they devote themselves completely to an ideal. What does someone need to know when saying: “I am concerned with truth!”? Zero! But one does convey a message. One is professing one’s commitment to the ideal of unity which exists only on the basis of conflicting opinions. Beyond the objective differences that people present in their opinions; beyond the question of who is right or wrong with which opinion and why; and regardless of any examination of what people are actually trying to achieve when they advocate their positions, one thing is supposed to be certain: that everyone involved wants to honor truth with their thoughts.

In the substantive disagreements and the persistence with which they are maintained, however, something quite different is revealed: That competing interests are talways striving to justify themselves, and in do so remain quite indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood. This is just like philosophers when they declare truth to be a common concern of humanity. – Philosophers have even given a name to their own contradictory premise: The Good is the notion of a final purpose that unites humanity, the ideal of competing interests. These interests so not escape the philosophers’notice, but they do not interest them either. Therefore, beyond the practical differences that cause people to clash, they posit a common ultimate purpose for all purposive action; a common denominator of opposing concerns. Beyond what people actually want, however, they want nothing. So on the one hand the common denominator remains empty, an ideal of commonality without content, because that content is precisely what is in dispute. On the other hand, people are presented by the philosophers with an ultimate purpose for their desires, which confronts them as an obligation. Without even having to examine a single interest for its reasonableness, without having criticized a single concern, philosophers feel called upon to reject them. They only need to measure the interest that bothers them by whether it fits into their fictional community of interests. – This, of course, raises the question of why one should desire goodness if it contradicts one’s own interest. And here too philosophers make their own contradictory assumption explicit: If one must want goodness, then one should also be able to imagine it as the epitome of well-being – as beauty.

In the spirit of these three favorite philosophical ideas and with the self-confidence that the goals that unite all human impulses and aspirations are at stake, the most engaging discussions are then initiated. And it goes like this: there is a drinking bout (in Greek: a symposium) and the participants are discussing love. Of course, everyone has something to say on the subject, especially about who is currently involved with whom. And that’s how Plato’s dialogue begins. But we are dealing with philosophers, so it doesn’t end there. For these noble proponents of goodness, truth, and beauty, the transition to the essential is quickly made: Doesn’t love need beauty? One cannot love what is ugly. Therefore one must love what is beautiful. – Much needed, O Socrates! – And is not what is good also beautiful? – Therefore, what is good too. – And doesn’t knowledge of the good require truth? And so on. It’s all meaningless. The worshippers of the good, the true, and the beautiful pull off a hell of a display of intellectual posturing – shouldn’t we be in favor of the ugly, the bad, the untrue? – namely, to assure each other that they are only concerned with what is best. And with this declaration, they finally successfully talk their young philosophical disciples into bed.

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The invocation of a will to reach agreement that transcends all possible points of contention stems from practical disputes that cannot be resolved objectively; otherwise, an agreement would be reached on the matter at hand and not beyond it. And it promises a dishonest way of dealing with these disputes because it obligates the contending parties to a fictitious common standpoint. The philosophers came up with this when the political situation in ancient Athens had become contentious. The prevailing view on this is that moral values were in disarray at the time, constitutions were constantly changing, uncertainty prevailed, and this gave rise to the need for theoretical clarification – philosophy was born.

II. Plato and the state

In ancient Athens there was a struggle for power and participation in it. The situation was not so clear-cut that political power coincided with the interest of the respective ruler who held it. Through the wars they waged, they had made themselves dependent on previously subordinate estates. And these estates, as their importance for power grew, made demands on them. Practical questions were thus on the agenda such as whether power and warfare should serve the wealth of the rulers and their families, or whether the wealth of the rulers should serve warfare. This question was anything but theoretical. The contending parties had been happily bashing in each other’s head in order to resolve it in their favor. – And then came Plato: He intervened in this dispute with the strange assertion: “We are all concerned with the same thing, namely the good. So let’s clarify what is good and thus resolve the dispute objectively.” This opening of the dialogue, called Gorgias, is, however, anything but objective. The supposed common ground is a shared interest of the disputing parties. But such a common interest does not exist. It is precisely a conflict of interests that they are engaging in; but what that conflict consists of is of no interest to Plato. An aristocrat, Callicles, speaks up and insists on maintaining the old order: “The good is what benefits the powerful.” Such an honest answer would have deserved an honest reply: “That’s good for you, but bad for me.” And that would have been the end of the conversation. But we are among philosophers, so the conversation takes a different turn. Socrates presses his interlocutor on his question and demands that he prove that what is good for Callicles is universally good. If Callicles had been a little brighter, he would have said: “My friend, you are introducing a point of view here that denies all self-interest. What is universally good? Even shoemaking only produces shoes, not goodness itself. The good is incompatible with any self-interest; it is not good for anything in itself. Why then should one adopt this point of view?” He could have continued: “It seems to me that you are asking me to be a hypercrit. Of course, I could have replied: ‘Happy rulers are good for everyone because then they don’t take their bad moods out on their subjects.’ But hypocrisy is not my business, but yours. You intervene in a debate, but not honestly, by explaining what you disagree with, but by appealing to a fictitious universal interest.” But Callicles allows himself to be humiliated and, as always when a simpleton in Plato’s dialogues is at a loss for words, this is considered proof of how right Socrates is. And that’s why Socrates is allowed to explain what is meant by the good: A point of view that negates every particular interest and only accepts what can be conceived as a service and functional component of an imagined universal, higher interest. His opponents are thus forced by Socrates to confront the question: “What’s your benefit good for?” and through the general observation that benefit is essentially good for nothing in itself, Socrates finally arrives at the predetermined conclusion that the good consists in what each person is good for; that everyone, in the position they find themselves in, proves themselves as a functional element of the state as a whole: the slave as a slave, the statesman as a statesman, the builder as a builder, and so on. This is the ancient conception of justice. It insists on a radical separation of right and benefit precisely because right coincides with the benefit of the aristocrats; that is why, for those in a subordinate position, only service matters. The ancient doctrine of virtue is the corresponding racism of estates. Virtue is what one is competent at; and one is competent as one’s social estate demands: courage for the warrior estate; prudence, namely the art of restraining one’s desires, for the estate that produces wealth; and for the rulers, the wisdom needed to prevent the contributions of the different estates from being confused.

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With the Platonic ideal of the state, philosophy in the very first chapter of its history produced one of the greatest absurdities of Western intellectual life. On the one hand, it reflects the practically valid perspective of a Greek aristocrat who, starting from the self-evident premise that his particular interest is the reason of state, accepts no other particular interest and regards the society under his rule as a functional whole which exists to increase his private power and is structured according to the services necessary for this purpose. On the other hand, Plato does not relate all these services to this decisive interest, which is their sole justification, but rather to a general interest that did not exist in the Greek state and in the struggle for power within it. Plato’s point of view is: philosopher kingship. The aristocrats are supposed to wield political power, but not in their own interest, but for the sake of a philosophical idea. To this end, he wanted to turn them into philosophy enthusiasts, educate them with music and mathematics – which would even have been possible – but, above all, forbid them from having their own property and wives in order to prevent them from pursuing their own interests and thus from engaging in conflict; yet they would retain their power. For what purpose, exactly? Instead of using their power for themselves, they should use it to impose a viewpoint that denies their own interests. And all of this simply to help the idea of goodness attain power.

But that was too much for the rulers! For all their love of philosophy – the noble and powerful figures of those times adorned themselves with the trappings of intellectualism, the princes often harbored philosophical ambitions themselves, for entertainment, of course, and to glorify their own interests in the light of goodness, truth, and beauty, and to portray the violence they wielded as the statesmanship which only the wise are supposedly capable of – this relationship between power and the mind, in which the mind exalts power and gives it the appearance of intellectualism, is, after all, something quite different than when the false appearance is turned into reality, namely when the intellect is the determining factor of power and when the philosophers should take power themselves. Plato, who was from a noble family himself and had a philosophical friendship with Dion, the scion of the Sicilian ruling family, went so far as to draft a constitution for the Sicilian king in which he incorporated the political ideas he had developed in his Republic. This constitution, however, never came into effect. The wise king simply couldn’t bring himself to accept the idea.

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Scene change: As if they all wanted to say “We are not responsible for our thinking,” modern thinkers draw on tradition to invoke historical “sources” to which their ideas supposedly owe their exustence. At the same time, they act with remarkable independence from the historical necessity which they claim to be subject to. They themselves, with their own critieria, ultimately decide which point of view Plato “founded” and is considered valid today. And they jealously guard it against any “false prophets” appropriating their intellectual ancestor.

III. The moderns and Plato

Appeals to a representative of the ancient slave-owning society apparently ennobles today’s democratic order as much as the scholarship that is dedicated to them. No one simply wants to offer a more or less useful idea of their own, but rather to partake in the imagined dignity of a 2,500 year old Western tradition. Of course, certain differences are also noticed between this tradition and what democratic thinking today considers responsible thought. Then a deep longing emerges for the lost innocence of philosophy. How one still today would like to invoke the unity of truth, goodness, and beauty with the same “naiveté” and impartially as back then! How beautiful were the ideas that knowledge = virtue and mind = power! But alas: the times in which one could philosophize like this are over.

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Ever since the emergence of real science, philosophers have felt compelled to engage in polemics against knowledge. The idea is that no one should imagine that their insights or knowledge will still be relevant when it comes to the question “What should I do?” This gives rise to a strange phenomenon. Alongside and apart from the actual sciences yet institutionalized as an independent discipline, there exists at the universities a group of people who, as if the very idea of science still needed to be invented, are still fixated on the question “What is knowledge?” And with all their efforts, they ultimately always arrive at the aporia attributed to the ancient Socrates: that one can know nothing except that one can know nothing. And this is in the nuclear age! This makes the confession of ignorance somewhat dishonest. There is a difference between an ancient Greek acknowledging his own lack of knowledge and that of his contemporaries, and confusing the appeal to insight in moral questions with science, and someone today who elevates ignorance into makes a law of humanity and makes skepticism a duty in the face of existing science compulsory. When someone today comes along and advocates dialogue as a method of finding truth, he is committing the use of reason to keeping theoretical questions open.

This polemic against knowledge invokes Plato, but just as easily constitutes a rejection of Plato – which show what moderns are willing to accept from their venerated ancestors: whatever suits their agenda. So Plato shows up in a book about “the enemies of the open society” who the philosopher of science Popper apparently considers his duty to expose. According to Popper, Plato with his “perfect eternal ideas” fostered the misconception that science could answer the question of what principles to follow in practical matters. And he identifies this as an undemocratic attitude. This certainly doesn’t say anything about Plato who, after all, couldn’t have been familiar with the Western democracies of our time and their intellectual lives. But it is an interesting clarification of the self-understanding of a modern philosopher of science: He doesn’t need to have any understanding of democracy or even take a closer look at a single Platonic idea in order to unerringly sniff out any thinking that claims to be based on knowledge as an undemocratic attitude. Because of his preference for democratic conditions, in which really no one may make anything dependent on his insights, he propagates ignorance as a virtue of the mind.

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Because of their love for the spirit of subordination, the philosophers’ criticism of the equation knowledge = virtue should also not be misunderstood as a criticism of the program of virtue itself. They still want to claim that morality is rational and should prevail. The moderns “deduce” morality quite simply from their own skepticism: “Because knowledge does not provide certainty, we therefore need ethical foundations.” Or: Because knowledge does not provide certainty, ignorance therefore provides the necessary moral certainty. Completely dogmatically, these sceptics then arrive at all the old nonsense – about the good one must do, about prudence and honor, about gratitude and friendship – which is then presented as a duty, the fulfillment of which is not a matter of better insight. That’s why modern philosophers only accept the equation mind = power in its inverse form: They consider power to be very rational because ultimately someone has to cope with the irrational, with evil, with those endowed with will and comprehension.