I was recently reading an essay by Lucius Outlaw which was attempting to lay the foundations for a classification of Africana Philosophy and in it he said, "The greater the historical distance from objects being ordered the more our tools are used for order." This is in reference to trying to analyze very traditional African thought but I think it also holds an application for thinkers like Plato.
Are we so far from him historically that all our attempts to put his work into some kind of order (in the sense of coherence) fail due to improper tools. Which is to say wouldn't a true and most useful analysis require a frame of mind that is centered on the ancient greek way of thinking?
Whenever possible, we must indeed attempt to understand Plato in light of his own assumptions and situation. This is of course difficult at this remove, and as we are not trained classicists we have to proceed somewhat piecemeal in the effort.
ReplyDeleteOur purpose is somewhat broader than that of the dedicated classicist, however. Having made our best good-faith effort to read Plato as he intended, and as his contemporaries might have done, we then hope to take away something of use in our own teaching and learning. Thus at a certain point we relax the question of authenticity, and ask "supposing we are reading Plato rightly, what if anything can we learn from him?"
I met Lucius Outlaw at a conference once. He's a good philosopher and a great guy, and in my opinion he has one of the coolest names in the discipline (right up there with John Wisdom and J.J.C. Smart).
I might wonder if we do still retain some of the ancient Greek tools. Though I have not seen proof for this, what I've heard again and again is that ancient Greek thought is the basis for rationality in the Western world. So perhaps we don't have *all* the same tools of Plato's time, but possibly we share enough in common?
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned in class the other day, that particular master-narrative of European development runs up against awkward facts of history, and was only made up in the late medieval period after they recovered some of the "foundational" texts they had forgotten all about.
ReplyDeleteSo I don't think we can make a linear connection to Plato's time, though it is nonetheless true that we have lots of tools and sources for making sense of the ancient world.
I thought she was referring to the widespread cultural influence from the Greeks that much of Europe had. Of course, it was there among many other influences, but surely not all of it died, especially considering that much of Rome was built after the Greeks.
ReplyDeleteRome was very well developed before encountering the Greeks, but the Romans had the good sense to realize that they had conquered a more sophisticated culture, and borrowed much of its language and many of its ideas.
ReplyDeleteAlas, almost all of that died away with the Empire, too, and had to be reintroduced -- and re-imagined as the glorious heritage of Europe -- much later.
One reason for my insistence on this is that I suspect Europe, and cultures of European descent, owe as much to Arabic/Islamic culture (in terms of intellectual development and the practice of religious tolerance, for example) as to the Greeks. The reductive stories we tell about our origins can thus be dangerous, reinforcing unconscious bigotries.
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