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Platonic Interpretive Strategies, and the History of Philosophy, with a Comment on Renaud DEBRA NAILS | 109 As my title moves from species to genus, Platonic Interpretive my paper proceeds in the opposite direction; Strategies, and the thus my contribution to François Renaud’s paper—when I get there—will have been set in History of Philosophy, a broad context. I begin in section I with the with a Comment on very general question of what we historians of philosophy take as our aims and methods, Renaud and what we take ourselves to be doing when we do the history of philosophy. In section II, I provide a derivative account of the extant strands of Platonic interpretation to mini- mize superficial disputes while emphasizing a handful of genuine disagreements about Debra Nails how we should conduct our research efforts. Michigan State University, emerita The review of interpretive strategies serves to [email protected] show how Renaud’s contemporary approach to Plato’s dialogues, section III, represents a sensitive accommodation of the best features of more limited strategies. What he calls the Platonic dialectical requirement that argu- ment and drama be appreciated as operating together provokes me to ask why that is so, and to look for an answer in Plato’s attitude toward music. ABSTRACT I. DOING HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY François Renaud replies to the question of what principles one ought to employ in the study of I begin with a July, 2015, dialectical ex- Plato by arguing , and demonstrating , that how change—conducted without animus between the argument and the drama operate together two accomplished philosophers whose identities successfully in the . In agreement with Gorgias I will later reveal; the two disagree about the Renaud’s approach, I expose some histori- right way to do history of philosophy. I quote cal roots with a review of Platonic interpretive from near the end of their back-and-forth: strategies of the modern period in the context of history of philosophy more generally. I also My opponent is looking for the single try to show argument and drama operate why key to unlock Plato’s philosophy; I am together, an insight I attribute to Plato’s genius skeptical that you can (or should) bring in relation to music. all of Plato’s philosophy back to some- thing as apparently straightforward as the Keywords: Plato, strategies, history of philosophy, theory of forms. I see Plato as a tangle of music. https://doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_16_10 110 | Platonic Interpretive Strategies, and the History of Philosophy, with a Comment on Renaud interconnected commitments that change concerns us all. Why would anyone devote the and evolve from the Apology to the end, better part of a philosophical lifetime to the realized in different and perhaps incom- study of someone else’s philosophy? For one, patible ways in his different writings. My to satisfy a relentless intellectual curiosity. For opponent wants to penetrate beneath the another, to mine the author for purposes of surface of that tangle and try to find what one’s own philosophizing. For a third, to point connects them together in a rigorous way; out what others have missed or misinterpreted. he wants a kind of doctrinal unity, a kind Maybe, but . such generic answers do not of single underlying argument and po- get us very far. There is a vast difference be- sition that pulls things together. I want tween curiosity about the nature of reality and a reading of Plato that is as holistic as truth, or the right way to live, on the one hand, his, but one that preserves the complex and curiosity about what was on the mind of a motivations behind his philosophical dead philosopher and his associates, on the oth- program, and that does not reduce his er. Dan Garber argues that Michael Della Rocca project to a single impulse, indeed, a sin- morphs Spinoza into a superhero, an ideal type, gle impulse that is rigorously metaphysi- who “is not the historical Spinoza who lived cal: working out the consequences of the and worked in the seventeenth-century Dutch theory of forms in all its ramifications. Republic.” Garber calls his own work a “direct This, in a way, is the point of my “super- reading” and avers that Della Rocca “ration- heroes” criticism: taking Plato’s complex ally reconstructs Spinoza’s project”; Della Rocca character and flattening him out, mak- replies that all history of philosophy involves ing his position intelligible by stripping rational reconstruction, a premise with which it of what I see as its depth and complex- I agree, though I will not attempt to defend it ity. Though it might be characterized as separately here1. holistic, my objection is to what strikes The landscape has changed over the last half me as an oversimplified and reductive century. Although I leave entirely aside the re- interpretation. lationship between “History of Philosophy and History of Ideas,” the title of Paul Kristeller’s There may not be an answer to which is 1964 paper2, I’ll repeat from that classic a few the right way of doing the history of phi- methodological points about doing history of losophy. For different figures, the answer philosophy that required a substantial defense might be different; there is no reason why in his time but are no longer controversial: The every philosopher has to be the same. In- historian of philosophy must have (i) “adequate sofar as my opponent and I disagree in training... in philosophy and its basic prob- this case, the disagreement may be over lems”; (ii) the goal of truth, attained only in bits whether one way or the other is the ap- and pieces; and (iii) a “certain amount of philo- propriate way of approaching Plato. logical and scholarly training.” It is necessary (iv) to read the philosophers in their original I start out so very far into the future from languages—not rely on secondary sources or Plato—and in our recent past—because the translations. Kristeller adds a fifth that could problem of the right way to proceed as a his- be discussed further, though I think his inten- torian of philosophy is a living issue that rightly tion is clear: (v) one’s “objective interpretation” DEBRA NAILS | 111 of a thinker should be kept distinct from one’s claimed direct descent from Plato’s Socrates. One “critical analysis,” which relies on one’s own can see in that period the origin of what has come philosophical assumptions and opinions. At to be thought of as a dispute over whether Plato least the first four points are in the background was skeptical, as the Skeptics held, or doctrinal of the Garber-Della Rocca exchange, and taken (with Cynics, Cyrenaics, and Stoics quarreling for granted; part of Garber’s beef, however, is over what the doctrines were). Another of the that Della Rocca’s Spinoza sides with Parme- contemporary preoccupations that was already nides and Plato, and jousts with twenty-first a matter of ancient dispute was whether Plato century metaphysicians. reserved certain doctrines for his closest asso- ciates—that is, whether there was an esoteric doctrine, often associated with Plato’s Pythago- II. SCHOOLS OF PLATONIC3 rean leanings, that was required to elaborate his INTERPRETATION exoteric dialogues. The contemporary stage was set in the late I turn now, however, to big-picture back- eighteenth century in the heyday of German ground considerations: something of a whistle- critical philology, idealism, and romanticism; stop tour of varieties of Platonic interpreta- and in the shadow of Hegel, whose grand and tion, past to present. The reason I consider impenetrable system—a priori and unified— this worth doing is that different schools of was considered the quintessence of greatness interpretation can have strikingly different in philosophy. Plato was the darling of the Ger- assumptions about Plato and — as with the man schoolroom, and everyone read him in branching of the evolutionary tree — can pro- Greek. The question was, How can Plato be the duce skin-deep resemblances or agreements great and systematic philosopher we know him that mask contrary or contradictory presup- to be when the dialogues go this way and that, positions that emerge in the conduct of further taking one position here and another there? research. Just as often, an apparent divergence There were—there are—answers aplenty. Wil- of views, when taken in context, turns out to be helm Gottlieb Tennemann (1794) achieved an nothing more than a semantic squabble easily elegant systematic philosophy by rejecting all resolved. Rosamond Sprague objects to what but a handful of supposedly genuine dialogues; she calls “magpie Platonists” who pick up shiny and he also held that Plato deliberately con- bits from here and there to make a nest that is cealed the connections among his doctrines as a hodgepodge of unreflective claims. Renaud a precaution, offering them only to intimates is no magpie. (Zeller 1876, 87). If the connections were not Starting all the way back with the first schol- obvious, later athetists thought, then perhaps archs in the Academy, there was no sense that Tennemann’s collection was still too large. Au- Plato needed to be interpreted by Speusippus and gust Krohn, by 1876, had whittled the few to Xenocrates, just amplified. That did not last long. one, the Republic. Aristotle raised the question of the relationship of Friedrich Schleiermacher (German 1804, mathematicals to Plato’s forms and to the forms English 1836) presented Plato as a deliberate of the platonists, a controversy with us still. Fa- and painstaking author whose dialogues were mously, after the death of Aristotle, all except written in the very order that perfectly reflect- the Epicureans among the Hellenistic Schools ed his secure, basic principles.
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