Shortly before his death, Plato dreamt of himself as a swan, darting from tree to tree, causing great trouble to the hunters who were unable to catch him. Plato’s early interpreters saw an image of the future in this dream: try as men would to grasp Plato’s philosophy, “none would succeed, but each would interpret him according to his own views, whether in a metaphysical or physical or any other sense” (Anon. Prol. I, 29-31). These dreams could not have been more prescient. Nearly two thousand years later, the hunt for Plato the swan rages on.
The elusiveness of Plato’s philosophy is probably its least debated characteristic. The Republic, for example, has been interpreted both as a defense of democracy and as a blueprint for the modern fascist state. To some extent, of course, interpretive disagreements like this are a characteristic of philosophy in general, not just Plato’s dialogues — in fact, for some, such disagreements are a defining characteristic of philosophy.
<poesie>If you would like to watch philosophers squirm — and who wouldn’t? — pose this tough question: Suppose you may either a) solve a major philosophical problem so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history); or b) write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required-reading list for centuries to come. Which would you choose? Many philosophers will reluctantly admit that they would go for option b). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than right. (Dennett 1999: 88)But as others have observed, the interpretive challenge with Plato is unusually pronounced.1 The problem is not that Plato was a bad writer, or that he was a technical philosopher whose concepts and arguments are themselves difficult to understand. Teenagers often read Plato’s early and middle dialogues with pleasure (Tigerstedt 1977: 13-18). The interpretive challenge with Plato seems to have two primary causes. First, he never told us what he [5] thinks, at least not directly. And second, his writings never establish closure on the philosophical questions they discuss. In some cases they even seem directly opposed to closure, as if they are self-consciously incomplete and intended, by their form, their open-endedness and symbolism, to suggest that philosophers like Dennett are wrong to assume that closure is the only respectable goal of philosophy.
Due to Plato’s use of the dialogue, we are still puzzled about extremely basic questions, such as whether the dialogues really are vehicles for his philosophy, or which philosophy they are intended to present.
<poesie>Was Plato a dogmatist or a skeptic, an un-systematical questioner or a rigid system-builder, a fervid mystic or a cool dialectician, a noble extoller of the freedom of the human spirit or a sinister herald of the totalitarian state? Are his thoughts to be found in his writings, open to every fair-minded and careful reader, or are they hidden behind the work, a secret doctrine, to be extracted painfully from hints in him and other writers? (Tigerstedt 1977: 13)- Schleiermacher observed, “For of all philosophers who have ever lived, none have had so good a right as Plato . . . to [complain] of being misunderstood, or even not understood at all” (1973: 4).[↩]