1 Plato’s Zoom was born in 2020 during the government-decreed confinement, the origin of so many innovative initiatives aimed at adapting to the unusual situation. It arose among friends with the lack of pretensions typical of companies destined to last. The moment seemed opportune to tackle pending tasks, one of them being the serene reading of books that I had previously consulted only in a hurry.
After finishing The World as Will and Representation, I took Plato’s Republic and mentioned it to a friend, Álvaro Galmés, an architect, who proposed a commented reading. As the domestic confinement had widespread the use of new communication technologies among those confined, it was easy for us to choose a day of connection via Zoom for the weekly telematic commentary: Sunday afternoons. We were soon joined by a friend of both of us, Jorge Brioso, a professor of philosophy and literature at an American university. For four months, every week we connected from both continents to share reading impressions of the fifty or so pages previously assigned.
We were surprised to discover that this hour and a half of philosophical friendship was a source of unparalleled joy for all three of us. So, once The Republic was over, we agreed to maintain this remote reading club and selected new works, now without confinement. After the threat of some modern author, we soon decided to focus on the Ancient Greco-Latins. Ours would be a classic zoom.
Two long years passed like this. Sunday after Sunday, without sparing any, we reread together or read for the first time Iliad, Homeric Hymns, Hesiod, pre-Socratic lyricists and philosophers, testimonies of the Seven Sages, tragic men, sophists, Aristotle, three Hellenistic novels, Theocritus, Cicero, Aeneid, Seneca , Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lucian, Porphyry, Plotinus, Boethius… et alii. Until one day, in one of those debates about future readings, someone thought, with blessed unconsciousness, of Plato’s complete Dialogues.
The classic zoom was put to a severe test with a summit of universal thought that would absorb months of intense concentration. Aware of the plan, Teresa Arsuaga, mediator, joined.
2 To unify the reading, we took the translation of the complete work in nine volumes published by the Gredos publishing house, which we have read in order, dispensing with introductions and notes and facing without mediation the prose overflowing with Plato’s charm. It seemed to us that reading someone’s complete work is the closest thing to knowing them in person, while limiting ourselves to a single title, as we had done before, provides knowledge only through hearsay. Without prejudice to the results of specialized research, after seventy Sunday sessions we believe that no one has to tell us what Plato is like because we know it from experience.
This experience has been shaped by the components and dynamics of the zoom. Its four members are university doctors and authors of essays and this coincidence gave a certain family air to the different analyzes of the text, which, without sparing us discrepancies, delimited the scope of deliberation and, in the middle of a field strewn with enigmas, favored the miracle of a shared conclusion.
Furthermore, an individual reading is not the same as one scheduled via Zoom, weekly, synchronized, continuous and collective, which culminates in an oral debate about the ideas accumulated by each person over the previous six days. When one reads alone to himself, he tends to anticipate a meaning to the text and then, as he progresses, he makes a solitary effort to confirm or qualify it. Reading with a view to a shared discussion is very different: one then reads mentally preparing the argument that one is going to hold aloft on Sunday. In our zoom, in which one explained his position and listened to those of the others, this argument was immersed in a polyphony of interpretations that contrasted his own, relativized it, enriched it and integrated it into the provisional consensus that the zoom woven through the path, invariably superior to the private opinion that each one had brought with him at the beginning.
We left the Sunday Zoom with the conviction that we had participated in an event that, in addition to improving our understanding of the matter, improved ourselves. For my part, I am not exaggerating if I say that Plato’s zoom has been one of the happiest intellectual adventures of my life.
3 Initially, Zoom shared the tradition-borne and apparently common-sense assumption that Plato is a Platonist. Platonism is that philosophical current attributed to Plato that, based on the discovery of Ideas or ideal Forms, interprets the world as a dualism: on the one hand, the higher plane of Ideas or Forms, which, although invisible, are eternal, saturated with being and capable of being captured through the concept; on the other, the lower plane of the things of experience that, although manifest to the senses that perceive them, are ephemeral, changing and deceptive, and, as such, empty for thought. In short, the world is divided into intelligible reality and sensible appearance, and the second only has truth insofar as it is related to the first.
Platonism provided metaphysical foundation to the worldview in force throughout premodernity. When modern subjectivism, starting in the 18th century, replaced the previous interpretation of the world with its own, it continued to consider the surpassed stage of culture as Platonic and Plato as its source. Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Ortega and Heidegger, among many others, confirm this identification of premodernity with Platonism and of this with Plato.
The person who first made Plato a Platonist was a disciple of his, a student at his Academy for twenty years and author of the first history of philosophy: Aristotle. He always alludes to the teacher as the inventor of the doctrine of Ideas, triggering an ontological dualism. This dualism is fueled above all by three famous dialogues: Phaedo, Republic and Timaeus. The first two complement each other: Phaedo is an eschatological dialogue and places the Ideas on the other side of the world, beyond death, while Republic, an ontological-political utopia, places the Ideas as the foundation of this same world.
Despite this difference, in both the two planes of dualism oppose each other as contradictory poles – one represents truth, the other falsehood – whose conflictive relationship is illustrated with the metaphor of light and shadow (thus the myth of the cavern). On the other hand, Timaeus, which corresponds to a later stage of thought, draws the image of a cosmos where these two planes maintain a harmonious relationship, in which the sensible participates by imitation of the intelligible: “Time – we read there – is imitation of eternity.”
In a conflictive or harmonious way, the fact is that the three dialogues equally practice ontological dualism and, being the favorites of philosophical reception, they transmit to posterity a Platonic version of Plato.
4 I confess that the zoom was launched with that image in mind. But reading one dialogue after another denied it, giving us infinite perplexities.
From the beginning Plato chooses a literary genre – dialogue – to which he remains faithful until old age. Why this strange literary allegiance? Platonic dialogue, which imitates the vividness of oral dialogue, shapes the form of his thought. The characters’ interventions are usually not too long and are conditioned, as in theater, by the idiosyncrasies of the speakers and the specific situations. The reasoning is syncopated, abundant in logical leaps and fallacies, more persuasive than rigorous, capricious like a real talk. The dialogue seems to advance without a fixed plan, open to the chance that diverts it, guided by the humor of the moment and, most of the time, with an open ending, interrupted rather than finished.
It would seem that Plato writes according to the inspiration of each hour, as if he were thinking aloud about the subject, allowing himself to be carried away by free improvisation and sparkling digression, rambling prolixly on transcendental questions with cheerful superficiality, without correcting regrets and behaving in everything like a dilettante more interested in playing with an intellectual exercise than in developing a systematic corpus. As if that were not enough, Plato, with great mastery of art, recreates a staging at the beginning of each dialogue that, sometimes with complicated combinations, introduces the characters, explains the occasion and the topic discussed, and prepares the reader’s mood.
Surprisingly, the twenty-seven dialogues ignore each other. Each one makes a start, they do not take advantage of the conclusions of the previous ones, theirs are not taken into account in the following ones. In Plato, as in literature and unlike science, knowledge does not progress or accumulate and his works are as autonomous as Shakespeare’s tragedies, which is why he allows himself to incur wonderful inconsistencies. Phaedo and Symposium belong to the same period and how do we reconcile the exhortation of the first dialogue to die as soon as possible with the group of drunks who in the second celebrate spicy love? Plato doesn’t bother to explain it.
There is no way to know what Plato thinks because he never speaks in his own name but rather through a third party, a Socrates of changing ages, a paradigm of a person who emanates respect and practices it. There is talk of the irony of Socrates, but greater is that of a Plato who, despite his devotion to his teacher and talisman, allows himself to be shaken and ridiculed by the sophists, often more attractive, worldly and cosmopolitan than the poor, localist philosopher. and street. Plato’s hospitality with other philosophical doctrines other than his own is admirable, to which he gives ample space in his work, and in a display of generosity he goes so far as to attribute the invention of his own theory of Ideas to the young Socrates. Socrates represents reason, but paradoxically his speech is filled with innumerable irrational elements – inner god, muses, fortune tellers, oracles, dreams, myths, fury, erotic mania -, in addition to the fact that in life he is particularly prone to ecstasy and self-absorption. .
The most strange thing of all: Plato never expounds in length and order the theory of Ideas, the core of Platonism. He alludes to her thousands of times in passing, but he never dedicates more than two pages to her in a row, as if he took her for granted. He is not even a peaceful doctrine: in one dialogue he criticizes the Ideas, in another he makes them disappear, in a third he subordinates them to the One-Good. Even knowing them is problematic, in line with the aroma of skepticism that perfumes the dialogues. Platonism is the son of Parmenides, but Plato is close to Heraclitus because in his work the flow of changing and multiple things prevails over the firm and secure certainties of the Ideas. In the late dialogues, dualism even loses its reason for being because the intelligible, no longer transcendent, mixes with the sensible in the form of a mathematical number.
5 Who is Plato? We were reaching the end and it had become clear to us that the philosopher, shrouded in a halo of mystery, was unlike anyone else. What do his inscrutable dialogues mean? After multiple perplexities, we arrived at Letter VII, considered authentic by the majority of experts. There Plato speaks for the first time. When his voice sounded directly and without mediators, the zoom believed it heard from the philosopher two confidences that were decisive for the understanding of his complete work.
In Plato we never set foot on solid ground because what his characters say in one place they deny in the other. All in all, Zoom found a constant – perhaps the only one – that remains unchanged from the first to the last of his dialogues: his repudiation of the sophist. He censures this figure because it represents the corruption of the supreme purpose of his writing: the just society. From a young age, he tells the Letter, he wanted to dedicate himself to politics and later compensated for the practical impossibility of doing so with a monumental literary construction. The scandal over the unjust death of two just men – Socrates in 399 and Dion in 354 – frames the entirety of his work, which tirelessly strives to establish the theoretical conditions of an ideal society where such injustices could never occur.
His thesis, which permeates every line he wrote and guides his actions in Syracuse with Dionysus, is that a just society depends on its politicians knowing the truth, that is, on studying philosophy. The entire Platonic philosophy, including his theory of Ideas, is subordinated to a political program. His thoughts turn again and again on the integrative figure of a political philosopher, opposed to that of the sophist.
This first confidence about the content of his philosophy led to the second about the procedure to exercise it. How do we know the truth? Through a double coexistence. First, coexistence with other people who, like him, have reformed their lives for the love of virtue; and long and constant coexistence, second, with the philosophical problem. The latter requires a waste of time lost in aimless thinking, wandering in circles, philosophical frequenting; Once intimate with the problem after much effort, much work and constant coming and going, “suddenly, like the light that leaps from a spark, the truth arises in the soul and grows spontaneously.”
Philosophy is not logical content that can be written down, but rather a procedure that induces a collective mood favorable to divine inspiration. The truth is known as a sudden flash of lightning in the course of an endless and repetitive conversation held by a virtuous community. Plato is describing the workings of the symposia of his Academy. What, in the end, are those disconcerting dialogues of his? Written imitations – therefore, secondary representations – of the double personal and mental coexistence practiced in the Academy. Nothing to do with the treatises that have been so abundant in philosophy. Nothing to do with Platonism.
The zoom concluded that Plato is not a Platonist and that he not infrequently conducts himself as a consummate anti-Platonist.
6 After the murder of Dion in Sicily, Plato wrote his funeral epigram: “Just when you were receiving praise for your beautiful deeds / the gods dashed your great hopes. / Now you lie on the soil of your country, honor of your citizens, / Dion, you who made my heart go crazy with love.”
Old, disappointed and unloved, Plato spends the last seven years of his life writing The Laws, an essay on civic education filled with subtle intuitions but lacking in genius. Faithful to his youthful vision, he spends his last breath designing a just society, but now he tries to do so by changing philosophy for sociology: Socrates leaves the scene, replaced by an anonymous Athenian, and with him disappears the mystery Plato that had enthralled him. the four so many months and that we already ardently missed.
So, in the last zoom session, one of us suggested the possibility of reading his complete work a second time. He sounded like another of those unpretentious lightnesses called to endure.
Javier Gomá Lanzón (Bilbao, 1965) is a philosopher and playwright, especially recognized for his ‘Tetralogy of Exemplarity’. His last published book is ‘Universal Concrete’ (Taurus).
