One of the most familiar issues in the study of Plato is the problem of medium: Plato wrote dialogues. This means that the reception of his ideas is marked by an extraordinary hermeneutical challenge. Undertaking to grasp what Plato thought—or at least communicated in writing—therefore leaves the reader vulnerable to the intervention of received opinions and their inevitably social history. The work of groundbreaking scholarship is sometimes to quiet their voices and let Plato’s speak more clearly.
This is the task that Kevin Corrigan takes up in his monograph, which seeks to show us a “less familiar Plato”. According to Corrigan, we have come to associate with Plato a set of interconnected metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical theses. These are, in brief, the doctrine of the Forms as universal and static essences that transcend material reality; the hollowing-out of perception and the privileging of knowledge; finally, the imperative to cultivate virtue, with its antagonism between the divine soul and the material body. Against this picture, Corrigan argues that Forms are “primary” (284) entities that undergird ordinary causality and human cognition, but they are not therefore “essences”, and they cannot, given their transcendent nature, be fully disclosed in our knowledge. (This is part of an overall reading of a more mystical Plato.) At the same time, Corrigan insists on the connectedness of Forms and this world through a kind of aspirational embodiment. This, in turn, allows him to defend the Platonic ethical ideal as a transformative practical agency, which includes the body as a positive contributor: in his view, the body and the soul participate in the same way (though to different degrees) in Forms. He makes a parallel epistemological argument that knowledge for Plato is inherently limited by the transcendent nature of Forms, and yet the sensible world embodies Forms such that perception has positive epistemic value.
This is a lot of ground to cover, to be sure, and Corrigan’s “less familiar Plato” is centrally derived from the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Philebus, with some more limited engagement with Lysis, Alcibiades I, Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Laws; even Plotinus and Aristotle, on occasion. Part I (Chapters 1-2) sets the stage for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 focuses on the Phaedo and argues that the dialogue articulates a form of ethical agency for embodied beings: this agency just is what it means for human beings to participate in Forms. Chapter 2 then defends a novel account of participation, drawing widely from the Platonic corpus, some Aristotle, and the so-called “unwritten teachings”. A core claim of this chapter is that Plato recognizes a distinctively phenomenological dimension of human participation in Forms. This allows Corrigan to grant humans access to Forms while insisting on their irreducible transcendence: to participate in Forms can mean to embody them in experience, yet some experiences are such that we can register, phenomenally, that there is something beyond the very thing we experience. Corrigan develops this account through a novel reading of the Symposium as triggering, in the reader, an experience of love that transcends each of the four speeches, and yet fails to disclose the nature of love completely.
Part II (Chapters 3-6) turns to the Republic, with one chapter on the Philebus. Chapter 3 argues that there are intermediate forms accessible through perception, and that both the proximate goal of the novice and the ultimate ideal found in dialectic are formally the same: we should learn to “see through such forms to the Forms themselves” (108). In other words, the epistemic ideal is to comprehend perceptually accessible forms as images of Forms, and ultimately understand Form and their participants together in a single experience. Chapters 4-5 defend an interpretation of the Form of the Good as “non-hypothetical”: Corrigan’s hermeneutical anchor is the role of the Good as generator of being and knowledge and as “beyond” being in Republic VI. His view is that the Good is beyond cognition but that by aspiring to grasp it non-propositionally (138; he also calls this a “precognitive or para-cognitive” form of divination at 149), the Good generates the being and intelligibility of the other Forms. (Some interesting engagement with Sarah Broadie’s recent monograph here.) Chapter 5 intervenes into an ancient debate about the meaning of the Good as “beyond being”, and Corrigan argues for the Good’s being and being intelligible in itself as distinct from its being and being intelligible in relation to others, which is what Socrates denies in the famous passage (drawing on the Parmenides, to which I will return). Chapter 6 offers a reading of the Philebus in order to argue that it attempts to disclose the non-hypothetical Good in human life, through the “philosophical art” (192).
Part III (Chapters 7-9) argues that erotic desire is the ground from which the epistemic and ethical ideals articulated in Part II can be pursued. To this end, Chapter 7 focuses on the relationship between myth and argument (mythos and logos) to show that both are “forms of representation” (221) which cannot fully contain that which they represent, but that they inspire an erotic desire to go beyond the representation. Chapter 8 turns to an account of loving friendship across several dialogues and argues that they “provide a guide for the perplexed: a ‘Platonic’ ars amatoria, to go alongside the Stoic ars vivendi” (239). Chapter 9 puts the Phaedrus in dialogue with Corrigan’s reading of the Symposium to argue that, while the Symposium attempts to enact a cognitive grasp of love, the critical dimensions of the Phaedrus show the limits of this disclosure. Corrigan offers an interesting account of dialectic as simultaneously, in the dialogue, pointing beyond its own representation.
A conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the book and articulates some more radical implications. For example, if Plato’s ethical ideal is to participate in Forms by embodying them, and embodiment is partially phenomenological, then there is an ethical reason to attend to and be open to experiences. An appendix returns to the issue of intermediation: Corrigan argues that this necessitates a “paradigm of sharp-seeing or epistemic perception” (306) that has otherwise been overlooked in the literature.[1]
This is a rich book with much to offer the student or scholar of Plato or Platonism. Its ethical interpretation of participation as a kind of aspiration to the Form, and its reading of Plato’s epistemological ideal as a “seeing together” of Form and participants cuts against the so-called “Two-Worlds” reading of some dialogues. Methodologically, the book is admirable for its attempt to inhabit Plato’s thinking. Chapter 5 stands out for its tightly argued and historically rich reading of Republic 509. The book’s mystical interpretation of Plato’s epistemology and ethics, while clearly inspired by Neoplatonism, is given more solid grounding in Plato’s texts. Corrigan makes many interesting observations about select passages along the way.
Nonetheless, the book’s methodology is problematic. Core interpretive claims are frequently justified as “minor” and “major” keys in the text; the book sometimes purport to express what is “implicit in the text” (138). This kind of reading is problematic because it is hard to adjudicate. How, for example, are we to disagree with Corrigan’s claim that the Symposium’s four speeches offer a synoptic view of love, such that a transcendent Form comes into (non-cognitive) view, without simply insisting that we do not see what Corrigan sees? How can we adjudicate what Protarchus, in the Philebus, might register “unconsciously” (183)? All we have are the words Plato puts into the mouths of his characters, and in my view it is much safer—and more open to the kind of scholarship that can be disputed and therefore advance a collective understanding—to stick to what the speakers say and what is intelligible within their conversation.[2] Corrigan tends to stake his arguments on claims about what the text as a whole might mean to someone outside of its dramatic framework.
Another methodological issue is that the book’s arguments for intertextual connections sometimes stretch credulity. For example, it argues (34-5) that the hypothetical method of the Phaedo makes implicit reference to the Form of the Good, on the grounds of resonance between our failure/need to grasp the Good “sufficiently” (ἱκανῶς) at Republic 505e-506a and the need to posit hypotheses “until you come to something sufficient” (ἐπί τι ἱκανόν) at Phaedo 101e. But the two texts mean different things with similar Greek. In the Phaedo to come to “something sufficient” means to reach a hypothesis that adequately explains the target phenomenon,[3] rather than a non-hypothetical entity. A similar example is Corrigan’s view that Philebus 64c, on the arrival at the “porch of the good” and its house, is “a hidden reference to Socrates standing lost in contemplation in the porch of one of Agathon’s neighbors in the Symposium” (187). I cannot see any justification for this claim. And I worry that the book is frequently too quick to make inferences of this kind (see also the discussion of Aristotle’s purported citation of Plato, at 71.)
A different type of methodological worry is that the book sometimes obscures issues in individual passages. For example, to advance his own reading of the Good as ‘beyond being’, Corrigan claims that the One of the first Deduction of the Parmenides (137c-142a), which is explicitly denied participation in being and therefore the ability to be named or thought of (141e-142a), “may still be said ‘to be’” (162). To be sure, this passage of the Parmenides is controversial, but we do not get to see that controversy in the book, and instead one reading is leveraged for the book’s argument. (Later, at 288, the book assumes a Neoplatonic reading of this passage, to argue for identifying the Good with the One.) Similarly, Corrigan makes use of a reading of the “in-relation-to” qualifiers at Parmenides 136a-c to defend his account of the Good as “beyond being”, but this issue has been hotly debated in literature on the Parmenides for several decades (stemming from Constance Meinwald’s monograph,[4] which Corrigan does not cite) and it is not at all clear that the relational qualifiers play the role in the later deductions that Corrigan assumes. Yet without this assumption his reading of the Good is in jeopardy.
So, does Corrigan succeed in demonstrating a “less familiar Plato”? On the one hand, I have some suspicions, based on the methodological worries raised above, that this “less familiar” figure is not quite Plato. On the other hand, I am sympathetic to the general thrust of Corrigan’s book. I think he has done the scholarly community a service by taking seriously the transcendent nature of Forms while also insisting on their immersion in human life. In my view, Corrigan’s reading of Plato’s epistemology as struggling with the object/representation problem and of Plato’s ethics as deeply aspirational are also welcome contributions. Whatever its shortcomings, this original and wide-ranging book deserves and rewards careful engagement.
Notes
[1] I would, however, point to Henry Devin, “A Sharp Eye for Kinds: Collection and Division in Plato’s Late Dialogues,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 41 (2011), 229–55.
[2] For an example of what I mean, see Fernando Muniz and George Rudebusch, “Philebus 15b: A Problem Solved,”, Classical Quarterly 54 (2004), 394-405. Their “clairvoyance” condition states that any interpretation of what Socrates says (in this case, at Philebus 15b) must allow that his interlocutor could find it intelligible without needing to know what’s coming later in the dialogue. Incidentally, Corrigan offers a summary of this text (169) without addressing the serious disputes it has generated.
[3] Corrigan reviews some of the criticisms of his reading in footnotes but his response is minimal (also contained to footnotes) and not convincing, in my opinion.
[4] Constance Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides, (Oxford University Press, 1991).