The eidos is a constantly developing determination of an experience never completed. Yet they can do so because for them, as Kim writes, “Objects are constructed and generated, not given” (82) and “can be no more than a goal or task ( Aufgabe) of the understanding” (82). If Plato sometimes suggests that the eidê are themselves given in intuition and can therefore be objects of experience, that is the fault of a dogmatism still in need of critique.ĤThe Neo-Kantians depart from Kant’s reading in an important way: rejecting the notion of a thing-in-itself as well as sensible intuition (following in this respect German Idealism), they interpret the Platonic eidê not as ideals beyond experience, but as categories determining experience (see 80, 97, 115).
Yet these Ideas are never objects of experience, but only ideals that demand the most complete application of the categories to the sensible manifold alone given to us in intuition they are thus limit-concepts known only symbolically (24, 30-31). The Ideas are needed according to Kant because the categories cannot supply us with standards or an ‘ought’ (37). Kant saw his own Ideas of reason as capturing the true insight behind the Platonic eidê. After all, are there readings of Plato that are not, at least implicitly, Kantian or Heideggerian or Analytic or Existential, etc.?ĢThe fundamental split in the philosophical interpretations considered in the present book is indeed one that can be seen to divide all Platonic scholarship as such: 1) are the Platonic eidê literally objects of intuition or are they methodological principles? (A question that can be seen to go back to Aristotle’s polemical question of whether they are substances or universals) 2) correspondingly, does Platonic dialectic represent a purely discursive conception of knowledge, or does it prepare for some sort of intuition that cannot be expressed discursively? What is the relation here between logos and intuition? As Kim states it at one point, the question is “whether for Plato dialectic is inherent in or merely preliminary to the ‘vision of the forms’” (171).ģFully on one side of this divide are Kant and the Neo-Kantians. If traditional scholarship is needed to correct the errors and distortions to which this philosophical approach is prone, it can also be said to be derivative in the sense of guided by the possibilities opened up by one philosophical reading or another.
#Platonic dialectic how to
In struggling with the philosophical significance and implications of Plato’s ontology and epistemology, the German philosophers considered by Alan Kim could be said to offer us a model of how to engage with Plato’s thought at the deepest level. Given the suggestiveness and elusiveness of Plato’s treatment, a ‘literal’ and ‘objective’ interpretation risks being only an unthinking and unilluminating interpretation. However, the present book shows the value, and perhaps even the necessity, of interpreting philosophically, i.e., creatively and with a focus on the matter itself, the Platonic eidê and the Platonic dialectic that corresponds to them. Some indeed might see an opposition between these two terms, insisting that interpreting Plato and making philosophical use of Plato are two completely and even incompatible projects. Therefore, a central question raised by the book, as Kim notes near the beginning, is what constitutes a ‘philosophical interpretation’ (19). This qualification is needed since the focus is not Plato scholarship, but rather the way in which eminent German philosophers interpreted Plato as an essential part of their own philosophical projects.
1The subject of this important and much-needed study is the philosophical interpretation of Plato in Germany.
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