Plato as Humanist

The works of Plato have one unifying theme, a dramatic/dynamic between the logical qualifier and quantifier. The qualifier would inform us of the character of things by assigning one to another in a logical proposition. The quantifier would extend this character assignment to other things, as in a syllogism, yet in doing so it loses the character of the qualifier. But that loss is quite unrecognized until the quantifier finds its antecedent character completely missing from its presumptive count of it. But that recognition is an act of personal loss. An act only completely real in the recognition of the worth departed in it.

We cannot complete that realness alone. Our opinions are worthless until we offer them to that moment of recognition. And that means an accounting that cannot be achieved alone. An accounting that is rigorous and extensive enough to complete the loss of its extending or attenuating the aloneness of its originary character. Person (the actor in a world of passive effects) shows its quality in the characterology of its conviction. That is, in the changes to the character of that conviction a rigorous exposition of it elicits. That eliciting of personal realness in a world of passive fact can only be inspired by a critical review of differences between views the Socratic dialectic most explicitly embodies. The disciplined exposition of views is an act that has no correlate in a passive effect. Its only articulation is in terms of the community created among us between that act, of lost conviction, and the recognition of the worth of that loss only its alternative view can bring to it. This process may never settle matters of opinion, but by engaging the human, or personal character of interlocutors between opposing views, in a community as contrary to each other as to the conviction that only passive consequence to cause defines reality, we share in the drama, or the characterology, of our convictions. In this way, though we may always differ in our views, we may yet develop a language by which we understand each other and ourselves, who we most really are, as the dynamism of our convictions.

Human worth, the character of our changing convictions in the face of a formulary of extending those convictions only to an accounting of their conservation, becomes the language, not only of who we find ourselves to be, but of reality itself. Every text of Plato's is meant to demonstrate this. The most explicitly so is his Laws, in which two idiot old men from highly repressive regimes assert their laws are of divine origin. The Athenian Stranger proceeds to explore the merits of this theme, counting out a proposed social system designed on the conviction that only what conserves that conviction can be real. In the end we find that the counting out of that extended conviction can only be resolved in a human characteristic. The worth of lost conviction. Value is human, and number can only prove itself, however divinely inspired, inadequate to that worth.

It will be a tedious business to examine Laws for traces of altered perspectives on the part of the Stranger's companions, but as elusive as their powers of reflection may be, and as entrenched their conviction in the certitude and continuity, even the slightest deviation in them is a sweeping transformation so unrecognized by these stodgy old oligarchs as to constitute a perfect foil to the youthful unsettled and enthusiastic embrace of Socrates's reasoning in Republic. Seen in this light I think it is clear why Plato makes these two works the bookends of his career. The energy of reason to sweep away untenable opinion is limitless in youth, when the terms of those opinions have yet to be calcified in a lifetime of habit, as opposed to the minimal perceived alteration of opinion in the elderly even in the face of an ultimate recognition something unquantifiable is missing from them.

Socrates seems to have a genius for anticipating the arguments that will bring his interlocutor to the moment of recognition without bullying or manipulating his capacity as much for freedom as for reasoning. This may be an expedient employed by Plato, the other biographers portray Socrates as far less eloquent and tactful. But I have found that discussions with others tend to get bogged down in predispositions that stymie any effort to bring a new effort to bear in the work of understanding Plato. The very effort to produce a new lexicon of term and formulary of methods gets diverted into extensive efforts of partners in the discussion to correlate them to prepossessing frames of mind. For this reason I have withdrawn from the community. But, if there is anything in humanity that is not limited to being the effect of a predetermining cause, if we really are free, then the act of being that freedom, the act of being that breach in the causal nexus, requires a response in recognition of the worth the jeopardy of that act is places itself in. That act and that response, together, constitute a transforming moment in which every term and rational formulation, of both, is shown to be but an inhibiting stage setting for the real drama. But the ever-persistent and insistent 'background' creates a limitless distraction. No doubt this is why Plato puts us through such a lot of piffle, it is the fog that so tires us of losing our way that when we emerge into clarity we either hardly notice, or vastly overstate our awakening. I certainly have not got the talent for guiding others through that fog, neither yours nor mine. But if I'm allowed to cut-through it somewhat, and to continue to explain the work I have begun and, hope to fruitfully continue, I might be able to produce something of interest to the other contributors here. In any case, the dialectic is not a unilateral affair, and however successful I may think I have been by working alone, a solitary act is no threat to the causal nexus, no resistance to what would keep us from being free, unless it is given its opportunity for the response complementing its danger of becoming nothing at all with a recognition more its very real worth than anything at all. Anything at all, that is, that is no more real than the effect of a predetermining cause.