Countless times during more than thirty years of reading, I have encountered a quote attributed to Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), which seems to suggest that all of Western philosophy is a perpetual footnote to Plato’s dialogues. Indeed, in a lecture delivered in 1927 at the University of Edinburgh and published in the volume Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, the British thinker makes the following statement:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Here, Whitehead is not referring to how Plato resolved certain theoretical issues but to the fundamental ideas and major themes upon which both he and numerous other philosophers have reflected over the centuries. In any case, his suggestion is clear. Whether we accept or not the specific orientation of his doctrine, Plato has been, is, and will remain one of the key thinkers for anyone aspiring to the title of ‘philosopher.’
In the context of classical Greek culture, Plato is the first author to provide us, directly or indirectly, with an extensive description of both the concept of ‘philosophy’ and a portrait of the one dedicated to the ‘love of wisdom,’ the ‘philosopher.’ His vision is so comprehensive that there are authors, such as Karl Albert, who have written special studies exclusively dedicated to these Platonic concepts. This is not by chance, because Plato has (at least) two remarkable qualities. The first arises from the richness of the subjects he addresses and the fact that these subjects are treated in different writings from different perspectives. Thus, we can form a broad and relatively precise idea of how Plato understood a certain subject. The second quality refers not so much to the extent of his writings but to the fact that they have been preserved in their entirety. In this essay, I will limit myself to a very specific subject: how the Athenian thinker understood the notion of ‘philosophy’ (and implicitly, that of ‘philosopher’) in one of his most important dialogues, Politeia (usually, and inadequately, translated as The Republic).
If some Western exegetes misunderstand Platonic philosophy, then it is primarily due to the differences between the ancient meanings of the respective concept and those it received in modernity, under the triple influence of Cartesianism, Kantianism, and the scientific positivism that influenced both analytic philosophy and various currents grouped under the broad umbrella of what in the English-speaking world is called ‘Philosophy of Mind.’
Unlike Plato, most modern authors and their schools of thought no longer practice (or even admit the existence of) a specific philosophical ‘way of life.’ I am not the first to point this out. Anton Dumitriu, Karl Albert, Giovanni Reale, and Pierre Hadot have analyzed the Platonic meanings of philosophy while also revealing a portrait of the philosopher that closely resembles the image of the seven sages mentioned in ancient doxographic sources. Perhaps to reinforce their statements once again, in this short text I will show that the dialogue Politeia describes in detail the main traits of the ‘philosopher’ of the Akademia. Reading it carefully, we observe, above all, the presence of an indisputable contemplative dimension of the love of wisdom, a dimension that alone establishes the authenticity of the act of philosophizing from a Platonic perspective.
In the discussion between Socrates and Glaucon on the governance of the city, the discourse presented by Socrates in Politeia contains a statement that emphasizes what could rightly be called the ‘elitism’ of Plato’s conception of the philosopher:
We should define … whom we mean by the philosophers, who we dare to say ought to be our rulers. … to them by their very nature belong the study of philosophy and political leadership, while it befits the other sort to let philosophy alone and to follow their leader.
In the spirit of the same ‘elitism,’ according to which philosophy should be accessible primarily (or especially) to political leaders, a massive section of the dialogue is dedicated to enumerating the qualities of the soul fit for philosophy, which prove the necessity of carefully selecting lovers of wisdom. The specific qualities that such an individual should possess are:
a) The philosopher steadfastly loves the teachings that would offer knowledge of that unchanging essence through birth or destruction;
b) He avoids and even hates falsehood;
c) He desires to deal with pleasures related to the soul itself, forsaking bodily pleasures;
d) He is temperate and free from avarice;
e) He is characterized by the generosity of the soul and mind;
f) He is not afraid of death;
g) He is just and gentle;
h) He has good memory; and,
i) He possesses the measure and grace of intelligence, which his own nature can easily elevate towards the Idea of each ‘reality-that-is.’
Going through this impressive list of qualities of the ‘philosophical nature,’ we can only exclaim together with Glaucon: “Momus [i.e., the god of censure] himself could not find fault with such a combination!”
In another substantial fragment, new qualities of the philosophical nature are added: sharpness of mind, lack of hesitation, and perseverance. Considering such a tableau of virtues embodied in a single person, it is only natural that the formation of a philosopher, as Socrates informs us, should last at least thirty years. Plato provides reasons for this ‘elitism,’ which seems more suitable for an ascetic: the lover of wisdom is that noble being, entirely different by nature from other people, whose central concern is the knowledge of the Idea of the Good, a knowledge considered by the founder of the Academy as “the greatest thing to learn.”
Platonic epistemology is radically different from modern theories about knowledge in that it has as its main object the ‘noetic cosmos’ (i.e., the ‘world of ideas’). This fact demonstrates that, according to the conception of the entire Greek Antiquity, philosophy directs the search of those who practice it towards the unseen world. That world is spiritual, and is considered ‘more true’ than the world of becoming in which we find ourselves, for reasons that are difficult to explain. At the level of the cognitive subject, contemplation is the modality of the subject who is aiming to achieve philosophical knowledge and transcend this world. In furtherance of this point, I provide this significant fragment that highlights the contemplative nature of the philosopher:
The man whose mind is truly fixed on eternal realities has no leisure to turn his eyes downward upon the petty affairs of men, and so engaging in strife with them to be filled with envy and hate, but he fixes his gaze upon the things of the eternal and unchanging order, and seeing that they neither wrong nor are wronged by one another, but all abide in harmony as reason bids, he will endeavor to imitate them and, as far as may be, to fashion himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them.
The act of gazing at those unchanging, eternal realities has been and is commonly designated by the word contemplation. Derived from the Latin noun con-templatio, our term has as its primary reference the noun templum. The meanings of this term are the ones that will reveal the original significance of contemplation. From the etymological dictionary of the Latin language compiled by Antoine Meillet, we learn that templum is a specific term in the Latin religious language, which referred to a consecrated perimeter (con-sacrum, i.e., together with the sacred), a ‘sacred space.’
Taking into account these brief etymological considerations, we may understand that contemplatio indicates the ‘placement in the templum.’ According to the Platonic conception of the human being, such a consecrated space is found at the very core of the human being, where it is “that likeness of humanity which Homer too called when it appeared in men ‘the image and likeness of God.’”
Knowledge of the Ideas, of Being (to on in Greek), presupposes the repositioning of the knower through what Pierre Hadot calls the “spiritual exercises” at the center of his intellect, in the ‘temple’ of his deepest being—an act made possible through the practice of what Plato calls “the art of conversion of the soul.” In Plato’s vision, and as Martin Heidegger showed in Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, this ‘conversion of the soul’ is fulfilled at the very foundation of its essence, with its profound nature akin to light. Speaking in his writings about the ‘natural light of reason,’ Saint Thomas Aquinas reflected the same doctrine of Platonic origin about the intellect (or ‘reason’) as the ‘light of the soul.’
Plato conceived of this re-orientation of the soul towards the world of essences by asserting that it can be achieved through a complex process that involves a very careful and laborious purification (katarsis in Greek). The Phaedo explains that this process consists “in separating, so far as possible, the soul from the body, and teaching the soul the habit of collecting and bringing itself together from all parts of the body, and living, so far as it can, both now and hereafter, alone by itself, freed from the body as from fetters.”
Here we encounter Plato’s famous description of philosophy as “preparation for death and the passage of the soul to the state that follows.” In the works of most modern authors, this dimension of philosophy is entirely absent. Heidegger’s persistent reflections on death and man as ‘being-toward-death’ were, of course, an attempt by the German philosopher to address this major gap. In any case, considering both the eminently contemplative nature of philosophy and its ultimate purpose—death and the passage into the ‘world beyond’—the significances of Platonic ‘elitism’ are evident, justified by a conception of the love of wisdom that confirms Anton Dumitriu’s appreciation that, “From the first Greek thinkers to the rationalist Aristotle, philosophy is considered to be something different from in modern times.” For this reason, there is great merit in the project of recalling and reconsidering what philosophy was for those timeless thinkers who first described the philosopher and the philosophical life.
