I’ve been getting back to writing. It’s been a while. But hey, I figured I could share the fitful products of my latest research project.

All ideas are mixed, in flux, and only as thought out as they appear.

Plato is one of the most influential writers in Western thought. Yet scholars seem to have wildly differing opinions on what exactly Plato thought, how and when his thought developed, and how his works should be read and understood. Scholars struggle to agree even on the order in which the dialogues were written. While it shouldn’t be surprising to see variance over the two thousand years of Platonic scholarship, the differences in modern scholarship seem to stem from a fundamental difference in how Plato’s works should be read and interpreted. Is the dialogue form just a particularly quaint and engaging method for Plato to tell the reader exactly what he thinks, or is the form supposed to make the reader doubt and second-guess everything about the work? Can Platonic dialogues be read straightforwardly, or is there more than meets the eye? Does Plato tell us what he believes or not — or does he tell us under veils and misdirections? All of these questions are fundamental to the interpretation of his works. I aim to examine the radically different interpretive paradigms for Plato’s works and determine which seems most reasonable.

The first paradigm is, to my knowledge, the most common in the modern scene. It proceeds from the idea that Plato began his career as simply a student of Socrates, recording the ideas and methods of his mentor even if he wasn’t giving a historical record of actual conversations. Then, over time, his thought developed beyond that of Socrates. He began to develop his unique ideas and doctrines, inclcuding the idea of the Forms, his theories of epistomology and metaphysics they support, and his own philosophical style and interests. Eventually, as his thought matured, he specifically moved away from Socrates’ ideas and refined his own more diverse and varied system. In other words, this paradigm sees a logical development over the course of Plato’s career, moving from a mere student of Socrates to an independent and superior philosopher in his own right. This assumes a certain chronology for the dialogues in order to support the idea of his development. This paradigm also assumes that the primary speaking character, initially Socrates but branching out to other speakers as he develops, is the author’s “mouthpiece.” In other words, in Meno, Socrates is putting forward Plato’s ideas; in Laws the unnamed Athenian is. From these starting points, scholars can see both a change over time in fields of interest and in development of thought.

The second paradigm is less unified and is primarily interested in challenging the assumptions of the first. Some, for example, reject the idea that Plato has an exact “mouthpiece” character. Some propose that we should look to teachings of Plato’s Academy to discover what Plato believed. Some propose that he would never commit his true thoughts to writing. Others ask why, if he was just going to tell us what he thinks, he wouldn’t use the more common contemporary medium of the treatise — why use dialogue at all?

Some scholars reject the “accepted” chronology as speculative and as begging the question. If there is insufficient evidence for the suggesting order of composition, then supporters of the “development” view cannot build their chronology on the assumption that he developed and then use that chronology to prove the develompent. We would need to independently verify the order of composition, which we apparently cannot do. The alternative suggestion is that Plato did not develop over the course of his writings. Rather, he had his system planned out and then proceeded to write dialogues to get at different fragments and angles of the complex system. This Unified Plato would then not be perfectly captured by any one of the dialogue’s speakers, which, they argue, is why Plato himself is never one of them. Apparent contradictions between “Plato’s Thought” in different dialogues would be explained not by change and development but by putting the different ideas in tension against one another and coming to a third, composite, conclusion.

By natural sympathy I tend to favor the second paradigm. Given the chance to suppose that Plato was simple and straigthforward, changing his mind over the course of his writings and sometimes contradicting himself, or to suppose that Plato was clever and wanted his readers to have to think critically about every word he wrote, never taking anything at face value, the latter supposition seems to match what we see in the dialogues. On the hypothesis that everything the main speaker says is Plato’s thought, Plato clearly says that knowledge requires working through it yourself and engaging in the inquiry the dialogues reflect.

My goal, then, is to analyze both the primary texts and the secondary literature from both paradigms in order to determine whether my gut thought is correct- that Plato’s intent was to make you work for every drop of knowledge. Plato cannot be read straightforwardly and honestly at the same time. This is not to say that Plato doesn’t say what he thinks in his works — that would render them useless — but rather that the simplistic and straightforward readings of whatever the main speaker says as “Plato” is unfair to the recognized genius of Plato and is directly contrary to what he fairly clearly does say.

Then I can look at other authors and how they have interpreted Plato, and create a clear picture of the landscape of Platonic scholarship and where my thought fits into that Great Conversation.