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Plato as Poet: a Critical Interpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
In my previous paper I endeavoured to illustrate the different ways in which Plato used poetry for philosophical purposes, and it now remains to attempt a final appraisal of the success or failure of Plato considered specifically as a poetic philosopher. But before I embark on what will prove a somewhat complicated task it is necessary for me to refer briefly to certain theories concerning Plato's use of myth, since they vitally affect (though in different ways) the philosophical significance of his poetic method—and it is this philosophical significance which is our principal problem in any final evaluation.
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References
1 The Myths of Plato, London 1905.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., Introduction, pp. 20 sqq.
3 Ibid., pp. 42–3.
page 132 note 1 These particular inconsistencies can be summed up by saying that Stewart cannot both claim to find Plato the poet divorced from Plato the dialectician and include as mythical passages where the dialectician is very obviously at work.
page 133 note 1 Provided of course we can believe with Stewart something like this: “Philosophy is not what finally satisfies—or surfeits—the intellect: it is the organic play of all the human powers and functions—it is Human Life... eager and hopeful, and successful in proportion to its hope— its hope being naturally visualized in dreams of a future state. These dreams the human race will never outgrow,—so the Platonist holds,—will never ultimately cast aside as untrue; (hence) the Philosophy of an epoch must be largely judged by the way in which it ‘represents’ them” (op. cit., p. 70, first italics mine).
page 133 note 2 Plato's Method of Dialectic, pp. viii, 3 and passim.
page 133 note 3 Ibid., pp. 14, 13.
page 134 note 1 At times Stenzel's hypothesis introduces considerable complications from the specific point of view of our own enquiry. Thus the discourse of Diotima— which for Stewart is (subsequent to the Birth of Eros allegory) a true Myth setting forth in impassioned language the “Transcendental Idea of the Soul”— is for Stenzel an artistic device which allows Plato to indicate his own doctrine concerning the substantial Being of the Ideas (op. cit., pp. 4–5). But—and this is vital for us here—although it is equally poetic before and after 209E, it is only at this point (where Diotima tells Socrates she is now going to discuss matters “beyond” his grasp) that Plato is held to enter the scene and that the genuinely Platonic Ideal theory is propounded. Thus it is the device rather than the poetry which counts.
page 135 note 1 Les Mythes de Platon, Paris 1930, pp. 180sqq.Google Scholar
page 135 note 2 The function of the genetico-symbolic Myth is held to be as follows. It enables Plato to unroll a given object's imaginary history, which exhibits one after the other, and each in its due place in the hierarchy of concepts, the multiple characters whose simultaneous presence constitutes its proper nature.
page 135 note 3 Ibid., p. 36.
page 135 note 4 Ibid., p. 267.
page 137 note 1 Although here too we have to discriminate. For myth, as we have seen, cuts across poetry: not all the so-called Myths are uniformly poetic, and some are hardly poetic at all. But we may perhaps say that they all, to a greater or lesser extent, represent a poetic method of philosophizing.
page 137 note 2 Op. cit., p. 225.
page 138 note 1 Op. cit., p. 269.
page 138 note 2 In the Atlantis Myth for instance, we are not certain whether, as Taylor holds, Plato is merely concerned to enforce a simple moral, or whether, as Frutiger claims, his object is to “fournir une apparence de réalité au plan de l’état idéal.” Perhaps he had both ends in view.
page 139 note 1 Cf. Phaedr. 85C-D, 107A-B; Phaedr. 246A; Tim. 29C-D, 72D.
page 140 note 1 E.g. by Hirzel, Teichmüller and Couturat.
page 140 note 2 For indications of this pragmatic streak cf. Men. 81D-E, 86B-C; Phaedr. 114C; Gorg. 526D-527E; Rep. 621B-D.
page 140 note 3 Cf. Phaedr. 114D.
page 140 note 4 It will be seen, therefore, that I do not hold with Stewart's classification of the main portion of Diotima's speech as a “true Myth.”
page 141 note 1 In his Moralists.
page 141 note 2 Cf. History of Western Philosophy, pp. 144–5.