Chapter 13 - Plato and Lucretius on the Theoretical Subject

Summary

Plato’s writings play a crucial role in bootstrapping the discourses that came to be called metaphysics, which see their task as exploring distinctions between seeming and being, reality and appearance, and what we can sense and what lies beyond our senses. Central to them is the notion of ‘theory’, which, as Andrea Nightingale has argued, Plato develops out of the social institution of theōria: a representative of the city attends a Panhellenic festival, observes what happens, and reports back on what he has seen. This model structures the story (in Republic) of the prisoner leaving the cave, ascending to the light, and reporting back to those he left behind – a structure that Lucretius reprises in the ‘theoretical’ journey of Epicurus across the universe in DRN 1. Plato’s stories are subject to a process of reception Hans Blumenberg has described as ‘re-occupation’ so as to express metaphysical positions that are at odds with Plato’s. This essay explores Lucretius’ re-occupation of a number of Platonic motifs (the cave, the pitfall of Thales in Theaetetus, the representation of Socrates as a thinking subject) to highlight the role that these motifs have played (and continue to play) in the metaphysical tradition.