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Conclusion

I began with the question: Was Plato a Platonist? My answer to this question is yes, with what I hope to have shown is a reasonable qualification. ‘Platonism’ refers to any version of a positive construct on the basis of UP. For all soi-disant followers of Plato from the Old Academy onward, Plato’s version takes the crown. Nevertheless, recognition of the superiority of Plato’s version of Platonism did not preclude disagreements—some subtle and some not so subtle—regarding the accounts of the elements of the construct. Nor did it preclude the formulation of responses to the enemies of Platonism that required the application of general principles to the solution to problems hitherto unappreciated or at least underappreciated.

As I have argued, the unification of the elements of UP into a single positive construct was of paramount importance. That is why Platonism is first and foremost a metaphysical doctrine. Without metaphysics, it is no doubt possible to consider the multitude of ethical, political, psychological, and epistemological claims in the dialogues each in some degree of isolation from the rest. Accordingly, the strength or weakness of one argument in one area need not reflect positively or negatively on another argument in another area. For example, it is evident that many proponents of something called ‘Socratic moral philosophy’ are eager to disassociate that from what they take to be unnecessary or even disastrous metaphysical accretions whether actually endorsed by Plato himself or not. I have found not the slightest bit of evidence either in the dialogues or in the indirect tradition that Plato ever contemplated such a disassociation. Indeed, there is no evidence that Plato ever contemplated something like a firewall separating his metaphysics from any of his other philosophical concerns.

The elements of UP—antinominalism, antimaterialism, antimechanism, antirelativism, and antiskepticism—frame Platonism generally. Versions of Platonism, including Plato’s own, are positive constructs based on UP. The unifying element of each positive construct is a ‘first principle of all,’ called in Republic the Idea of the Good, and otherwise named, according to the testimony of Aristotle and others, ‘the One.’ The unification that this first principle was supposed to provide was primarily explanatory. That is, in trying to answer the array of questions formulated in ancient Greek philosophy going back to the earliest Pre-Socratics, the first principle of all was supposed to provide ultimate explanatory adequacy. That is at least in part how the Platonic tradition understood the identification in Republic of the Good as ‘unhypothetical.’ For even Forms—hypothetical entities in Phaedo—do not provide ultimate explanations. It is indeed the case that, say, the Form of Justice is the instrumental cause of the presence of the property of justice in some act or other. There is thus a conditional adequacy in this explanation. But justice is desirable only because justice is good, the explanation for which depends on showing how the being of the Form of Justice is eternally dependent on the first principle, the Good.

The postulation of a first principle of all is not unproblematic. Just to list some of the problems recognized by Platonists themselves, including the dissident Platonist Aristotle, is to provide a topical index to the early history of metaphysics. Here is a list that does not pretend to be exhaustive: How can the first principle of all have being in any sense without having a sort of complexity that undermines its explanatory ultimacy? How does the first principle cause anything else to be, including things that are utterly unlike it? How, again, if it does cause anything else to be, is its absolute simplicity not compromised? How is the first principle cognitively available to us such that it can be explanatorily ultimate in anything more than purely formal terms? Indeed, how does the first principle make anything else cognitively available or intelligible to us? Why is the first principle a normative principle?

Reflection on any one of these questions should make it obvious that virtually any answer is going to appear to be underdetermining. That is, the account given will never preempt variations on itself. That in a nutshell is the explanation for disagreement among the Platonists. It is also the explanation for the fact that opponents of UP, like the Stoics, can produce philosophical doctrines that converge with those taken by Platonists to be entailments of their accounts of first principles. It is, I think, illuminating to see Aristotle’s own response to these questions as within the Platonic tradition, even though they were made explicitly against Plato’s own responses and were rejected by all Platonists up to the advent of Christian theology. The guiding rule for this ongoing dialectical enterprise lasting more than eight hundred years was a commitment to UP. It is worth noting that philosophers like Numenius and Plotinus had no doubt that the ranks of those sharing this commitment included many who were separated by a considerable distance both in space and time from Plato. In this regard, philosophy was also seen to transcend culture.

In addition to the quite general questions listed above, a further seemingly technical question opened up an array of complex new issues. What is the first ‘product’ of the first principle of all? Or is there a first? The question of an ordering of production raises the issue of a hierarchy of being, and insofar as the first principle is a normative principle, that hierarchy has significant ethical import. The possibility that there is no first is evidently a nonstarter among Platonists because such a view would efface the distinction between the eternal and the temporal. Not only would this go directly against the text of Plato, but it would make nonsense of the very idea of an absolutely first and simple principle of all. The easiest answer to the question is: the Forms. Aristotle’s testimony is clear that even if this was at one stage an answer endorsed within the Academy, it was apparently not the considered view of Plato or of his successors. Neither the testimony of Aristotle nor that of any other Platonist up to Plotinus explains why the Indefinite Dyad is the first product. Plotinus argues that the Indefinite Dyad is first because it is minimally complex. This is strictly a logical point. Whether Plotinus learned of this explanation from the oral tradition or whether he himself deduced its necessity is unknown. The critical point is that with the postulation of a second principle that is minimally complex we have a criterion of hierarchization: the less complex, the ‘closer’ to the first principle; the more complex, the further away from it. On the axis simple–complex or, in other terms, unified–dispersed, all things that exist can be arrayed. In addition, the account of desire, logically connected to the Good itself, can be given a more nuanced account and subjected to normative judgment.

The hypothesis that the first and second principles of all—the One and the Indefinite Dyad—yield to a mathematical account of the intelligibility of all that there is seems to have been on the Academic table, so to speak, right up until Plato’s death. It also appears that most later Platonists approached this hypothesis with less than unbounded enthusiasm. The evidence here is sketchy to say the least, which is after all what we would expect if there were in fact no definitive word by Plato himself on how to reduce Form to Numbers. The precise role of mathematics in the positive construct remains the great unfinished research project within Platonism.

The philosophical position that is the precise contradiction of UP is the matrix out of which are built various forms of what is today called ‘naturalism.’ Examples of ‘pure’ Platonism and ‘pure’ naturalism are rare in the history of philosophy since the seventeenth century. Most of philosophy since then may be usefully seen as efforts by naturalists to accommodate one or another of the claims of Platonists and vice versa. I offer by way of a speculative conclusion that many, if not most, of the philosophical disputes today can be traced to one side or the other supposing that the elements of UP and of their contradictions are radically independent of each other, and therefore that, for example, it is possible to eschew relativism or skepticism at the same time as one embraces nominalism or materialism. Most of the Platonists of antiquity resisted the allure of a rapprochement with various forms of naturalism; indeed, the exceptions, like Antiochus of Ascalon and perhaps Philo of Larissa, stand out by their negligible influence. For contemporary Platonists—most of whom today are in fact found among religious believers—the challenge remains exactly the same as it was for Plato: provide a compelling, integrated, positive construct on the basis of UP. For naturalists, the challenge is equally clear: show how acceptance of any one of the contradictories of the elements of UP entails all the rest. Visionary philosophers like the late Richard Rorty could see plainly that a recognition of the unbridgeable gap between pure Platonism and pure naturalism ought to frame or at least inform all nontrivial philosophical debate.1

I have argued in this book that Proclus’s praise of Plotinus as leading the way in the exegesis of the Platonic revelation is essentially correct. Although this is a view shared by scholars of Platonism and by Platonists, too, well into the nineteenth century, it is a view that is today, especially in the English-speaking world, mostly either ridiculed or ignored. Surely, one main reason for this dramatic change is the hermeneutical approach to the dialogues initiated by Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After Schleiermacher, scholarly focus has gradually shifted from Platonism as a philosophical system or worldview to the dialogues themselves. This shift has come to seem so salutary because it is, of course, true that a careful reading of each dialogue in its dramatic context is a good thing. No doubt, the bad odor left by nineteenth-century idealistic system building in the twentieth century also contributed to a wish to pursue a more enlightened or perhaps less grandiose approach to Plato. Yet from the perspective of ancient Platonists, the flaw in this procedure is obvious: no single dialogue can be adequately understood as philosophical writing without drawing support from elsewhere, especially from other dialogues. Some few scholars have inferred from this fact that the dialogues must therefore not be philosophical writings after all, that is, there must be no doctrine in them that the author intends to communicate to anyone in any way. The radical nature of this interpretation does not in itself disqualify it. What disqualifies it is the fact that by using all the dialogues for the purpose of interpreting any one it is possible to discern in the dialogues philosophical doctrine as well as, we must admit, philosophical doubt.

Rejecting the arbitrary philosophical atomizing of the dialogues, we can avail ourselves of the indirect evidence. The utility of this evidence from Aristotle onward is immense. Not only does it fill out the picture of Platonism in the dialogues, but it reinforces the claim that Platonism is not primarily what we might term a ‘dialogic artifact.’ It was primarily a way of life. And the focus of that way of life, at least within the Academy, was the positive construction of a theoretical framework on the foundation of UP. This does not make the dialogues irrelevant; it makes them what all Platonists took them to be, namely, λόγοι of that way of life. Altering our optic from the dialogues to Platonism as a way of life enables us to give both developmentalists and unitarians their due. Indeed, it also enables us to account for the privileged position of Socrates in the dialogues and even the connection between the dialogic Socrates and the historical one. Socrates, we could say, was taken by his admirers to have had an anima platonica naturaliter, even if as a matter of historical fact he never attained to the theoretical basis for this.

Plotinus was the inheritor of some six hundred years of Platonic exegesis when he resolved, late in his own life, to present his understanding of Platonism. Some of the salient features of that exegesis have been treated in the third part of this book. Plotinus would have no doubt been mortified to hear the charge that he was doing something other than accurately representing and setting forth in a systematic fashion what Plato himself taught. But as Plotinus himself recognizes, there are loose ends in the Platonic construct and there are obscurities that are as often as not likely to be the result of doubt over the correct resolution of an issue. All the more reason, Plotinus probably held, that a systematic expression of Platonism was desirable precisely so that these loose ends could be tied up and these obscurities eliminated. In evaluating the cogency of this systematic expression we should not lose sight of these six hundred years that separated him from Plato and that naturally resulted in a philosophical climate different from the one found in the middle of the fourth century BCE in Athens. Nevertheless, we should really acquit Plotinus of the charge of deviating from Plato solely on the grounds of this six-hundred-year gap. To suppose that Plotinus simply must be the product of something called philosophical ‘development’ is, I maintain, to underestimate the philosophical acumen both of him and of his master.