A breath of fresh air. One might expect that I would comment on the shenanigans of the Greek political class this fall, but they cannot be dignified even by a mere mention.
Last night we met with Prof. Schofield at the philosophical library of the Academy of Athens (it sounds much grander than it actually is) to discuss book II of the Laws of Plato. On the face of it a futile exercise, but in fact a veritable life-saving diversion (we will return to the question of futility later, because it cannot be exorcised that easily).
To begin with, here you had a person of immense knowledge and judgment combined with humility and a democratic dialectical ethos. Having spent a quarter of a century navigating the toxic waters of Greek academia, his presence brought back the idealist eagerness of my student days, when however the passion and the devotion was not accompanied either by intellectual depth or existential adequacy. In any case last night I had to stare in the face all these wasted years of wandering through the moral desert in which a misguided sense of duty had landed me so many years ago. Still, these mere two hours were enough to make me experience the inward soaring that genuine noetic groping and exploration do ignite. Here you had a teacher eager to lift you along the surging motion of conceptual discovery that his own guiding comments instigated, and possibly lift you to an even higher orbit of discourse.
I do envy his current students, one of whom, a thoughtful young Greek researcher, I also met last night. He was complaining that hie employment in England is much less secure than ours here. Poor soul! I tried most emphatically to discourage him from thinking in these terms. What he called our "security" is clearly more like hard labor for life in a dank and stinking pit.
And now for the philosophical crux of the matter. Every time one approaches Plato there is a huge, implacable question mark hanging over the proceedings. Can this person really be in earnest, can his interlocutors really be so timid and shallow, and what is the value for us parsing his lines and trying to tease out some sense that one might argue is profitless to contemplate in today's condition? What Plato takes for granted cannot be taken for granted, and if it were taken for granted then all sorts of distasteful consequences would follow. One cannot stand before Plato today dazed and awed -or before any other philosopher for that matter.
One word that kept coming up last night was "charm". Well, I refuse to be "charmed" any more by the "big thoughts" of some divinely inspired individual, simply because there are no divinely inspired individuals and also because on closer inspection their big thoughts are not as big as all that. They are, rather, simple (sometimes even simplistic) assertions, which however it took an immense amount of insight to enunciate.
I am more than eager to be charmed by the beauty of the language, the daring of the intuition, the harmonious wholeness of the alternative universe that Plato is constructing. But I refuse to be convinced of its truth. Truth is a word that drops very easily from Plato's lips every thirty seconds or so. But on account of that we should not for a moment be drugged or intimidated into assuming that he has "truth" or that he can even rationally explain what he is talking about. He is peddling a vision: a mighty, bright, highly adhesive vision surely, but just a vision nevertheless.
I will go out on a limb here. I wonder when we will finally gather the courage to come out and state that quite a lot (even most) of Plato's so-called argumentation is pure mumbo jumbo. And the point here is not, as with Popper, that he is the proponent of the "closed" society. The closed society can be gotten at from a multitude of rational or intuitive paths, so it is unfair to single Plato out in this regard. It could even be that this self-mutilating longing for closedness and finality is a constitutive trait of human nature itself, an indelible blot on its ontology. It would just be too easy to blame a single great thinker for infecting the human condition with it. The human condition would not be infected unless there were an inherent predisposition in it to fall for these grand speculations.
No, the issue is different. It concerns a much more underhanded, and hence dangerous, stratagem undertaken here, namely the effort to induce belief through the sheer power and polish of the combinations of words deployed against the hearer (no matter what the belief might be). Platonists and anti-Platonists are equally prone to this nefarious enterprise.
All this is not meant to detract from Plato's greatness. This is indeed to be admired. But greatness is not the sole, or the greatest, value in life. Smallness can equally be great.
So, all told does it pay today to engage with Plato? The answer is a definite yes, provided that we understand "pay" in a radical new way compared with the fawning meekness in which it was understood in centuries and decades past. Besides, of course, I can think of no better past-time in today's stunted and mangled Greece.
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