the greatest Platonic dialogue?

Having been on a renewed Plato kick lately, one of the questions I’ve been asking myself is which dialogue should count as the greatest of them all. One way to look at this question is to ask: “if only one Platonic dialogue had survived, and we had no other indirect testimony about Plato’s philosophy, which single dialogue would be most likely to maintain Plato’s reputation as a giant in the field?”

I think this question would rule out, say, the Apology. It’s obviously a fine piece of work, but too little of Plato’s philosophy is there for it to count as his greatest dialogue. That is the work that might do the most for the reputation of Socrates, not that of Plato.

The safest answer would surely be the Republic. It gives us plenty of Plato, and also contains some of his finest passages– it would be hard to imagine Western philosophy without the myth of the cave, for instance. But the Republic is longer than it should be, in my opinion. There are lengthy passages of the work where I feel the need as a reader to force myself through.

Levinas chose the Phaedrus, and his judgment is both solid and underrated. The Phaedrus is not a bad choice.

Discerning connoisseurs of Plato often choose the Sophist, much as King Lear often gets the vote of discerning Shakespeareans (and my vote as well– King Lear, I mean).

Once in awhile you meet a Gorgias fan. And it’s a good read, but I find Socrates particularly hateful and bitter in that dialogue.

And the Parmenides is certainly intriguing, but perhaps much of that is the novelty value of seeing the teenaged Socrates go up against two of the more colorful pre-Socratics.

While reserving the right to change my mind later (and I mean that), my instincts still lead me to choose the Meno. It’s certainly not his greatest literary masterpiece (that would probably be the Phaedrus). But I can’t think of another dialogue where all of the most powerful Platonic weaponry is deployed so successfully, and so economically, against anti-philosophy.

I also wonder if the same method couldn’t be employed to ask other such questions. If we ask “what was the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century?”, it wouldn’t be a bad standard to ask, again: “if only one philosophical work of the century were to survive nuclear holocaust, which one would have the best chance of making the 20th century look like a good century for philosophy?” Opinions may vary, but personally I would award first place to Being and Time, and second place to Process and Reality.

It becomes much tougher if you ask something like: “the greatest philosophical work of the past 20 years?” We surely need a bit more distance to be able to answer that.

However, if someone were to use the same standard and ask: “who are the two greatest philosophers of all time?”, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer Plato and Aristotle. Though I’m obviously not one of those “ancients vs. moderns” antiquarians who views all of modernity as a degeneration, total mastery of the complete works of Plato and Aristotle would be a better philosophical training than anything else I can imagine.

Heidegger’s view (though I guess it’s really Nietzsche’s view) that Plato marks a step down from the pre-Socratics strikes me as one of the most fateful errors one could make in assessing the history of Western philosophy. I love the pre-Socratics, but none of them is in Plato’s league.

Increasingly, whenever I feel myself starting to lose a handle on what philosophy is supposed to be, I find myself turning to the Meno. After all these years of teaching, it is now surely the one philosophical work that I have read the most often, and it always seems to survive my frequent syllabus revolutions. I’ve never wanted my students to miss the Meno.

By the way, that would be another survey question I would most like to ask all philosophers: which philosophical work have you read the most times? It is now the Meno for me, but in my student years it was definitely Descartes’s Discourse on Method. What appealed to me most about that particular work of Descartes was its rare combination of methodological boldness and autobiographical lucidity, which is perhaps the same reason that I remain a great fan of Watson’s The Double Helix. I have never accepted the split between person and idea; ideas always grow from a specific life, and so it is false to say that all that matters about a statement is the truth or falsity of its propositional content. The same statement does not mean the same thing coming from different mouths. For instance, “all is one” can be profound coming from some minds and a platitude from others. Whitehead explains why: the verbal content of a proposition is always a hopeless abstraction from the full meaning of the proposition. But now I haven’t read the Discourse in perhaps half a decade; I’ve slipped toward the Meditations whenever doing Descartes.

You could also ask which work by a particular author people have read the most times. For many Heideggerians, “On the Essence of Truth” may be the most frequently read piece, though I often find it unbearable: a bridge to nowhere, or at least to a decade for which I don’t much care.

For even more Heideggerians, “What is Metaphysics?” is probably the most frequently read essay. It’s short, poetic, powerful, and fairly central to what Heidegger is doing.

In my own case, it was an oddball selection: “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” or “On the Essence of Ground,” the sister text to “What is Metaphysics?” In fact, in some ways I’ve done nothing more since 1988 than try to find a way to make that work more detailed, and to strip it of its Dasein-centrism.

I first discovered that work in the old Northwestern Univ. Press translation by Terrence Malick, later famous as the director of “The Thin Red Line” and other films; oddly, he was also the Harvard undergraduate roommate of John Gerhart, the late President of the American University in Cairo, who was still in office when I arrived here. After spending a good deal of time building up some fascination for this work, I discovered while still at St. John’s that the library there had a first edition German copy of “Vom Wesen des Grundes.” The name of Jakob Klein was pencilled in on the front cover, so it was obviously Klein’s personal copy, purchased while still in Freiburg. That was a nice physical connection to have with Heidegger himself. (Was I good or bad for telling St. John’s to pull it from the stacks and put it in the Rare Books Room? I just couldn’t bear the thought of someone checking it out and taking it for bagels and coffee and spilling juice all over it.)

Gratton told us recently on his blog that he’s an Of Grammatology man when it comes to Derrida. Though I’m not a Derrida fan myself, I do love “Plato’s Pharmacy”; others prefer “White Mythology” (my most loathed work by Derrida).

At some point I’m going to take another crack at my “20 Greatest Western Philosophers of All Time” list (and to repeat, Islamic philosophy obviously has to count as Western philosophy). It’s a worthwhile project if only because it would stir up weeks of interesting discussion in the blogosphere. And while it is hard even to come up with a valid method for such a ranking –you have to invent the method as you go along– it would probably be something along the lines of the one used at the top of this post. Namely, which philosophers are most qualified to serve as “sole survivors”?

I think if only the works of Plato and Aristotle survived, though much would be lost, less would be lost than under any other permutation. And I’m still pretty sure that Kant belongs at #3. After that it becomes trickier.