rereading this morning

Plao’s Theaetetus, just because it’s been too long since the last time.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of recent continental philosophy, and this includes both Heidegger and later French figures, is the extent to which “Platonism” has become a powerful dirty word. Accusing someone of being a Platonist has become a kind of automatic conversation-ending trope.

I’m sick of “reversals of Plato.” Are you?

The Dialogues are also delightfully repetitive in the way that great philosophy is always repetitive (since it feels the need to rebuild its key pillars in every new work, or rebuild its own wheels from scratch each time rather than just keeping them in storage and reusing them).

For instance…

SOCRATES: Take another example. Suppose we were asked about some common obvious thing, for instance, what clay is; it would be absurd to answer: potter’s clay, and ovenmaker’s clay, and brickmaker’s clay.

THEAETETUS: No doubt.

SOCRATES: …You do not suppose a man can understand the name of a thing, when he does not know what the thing is?

THEAETETUS: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: Then, if he has no idea of knowledge, “knowledge about shoes” conveys nothing to him?

THEAETETUS: No.

It is also a fairly complicated and sparkling dialogue in dramatic terms. Among other things, there is a Socrates lookalike (Theaetetus himself) and another character named Socrates. It is a dialogue within a dialogue, since the Megarian philosophers hear that Theatetus is on the verge of death, they recollect a conversation he had with Socrates just before his own demise, and Euclides pulls out his personal reconstruction of that conversation and teasingly tells Terpsion to “read it, boy.”

A possible analogy would be as follows… A dialogue called Agamben, staged between the young Agamben and the elderly Heidegger (they did actually meet). At the beginning of this dialogue, Agamben is near death, Quentin Meillassoux and Simon Critchley are discussing that sad fact, and Critchley pulls out a reconstruction of the Heidegger/Agamben conversation that he received via word-of-mouth sources. Critchley then jauntily tells Meillassoux to read the dialogue aloud (“Read it, boy.”). And Meillassoux obliges. But then in the dialogue it turns out that the young Agamben bears a striking physical resemblance to Heidegger, and oddly enough, Agamben also has a fellow student named Heidegger who listens in on the conversation with the real Heidegger.

If you tried to write something like that now, the absurdity of it would be such that you’d probably be accused of vicious parody. There is a chance that Agamben, Critchley, or Meillassoux might even be offended, assuming that you were making fun of them. But Plato does this sort of thing constantly.

This is what I mean about Plato’s comic genius. When you just read through the dialogues, it sounds like a mishmash of Greek names as to who was present to listen to the conversation, but when you translate it into contemporary terms, the entire staging of every dialogue almost always becomes ludicrous.