Plato Before (And After) Metaphysics

When modern readers think of Plato, they tend to think of Plato in relation to his reception. Plato was received by people who became increasingly focused on metaphysics, on questions of being. But Aristotle is the author of the book called Metaphysics. It is Aristotle who describes metaphysics as “the study of beings in so far as they are beings.” Plato, however, has Socrates say that “everything that comes into being must decay”.¹ Permanence is incompatible with being.

Aristotle nonetheless frames Plato’s forms as a theory of substance, attributing to Plato the claim that there is a substance that cannot be perceived. Inheritors of this view will, whenever Plato is raised, quickly ask “where are the forms?” They will hasten to agree with Aristotle that abstractions are merely dependent entities. There is a sense in which this true, because abstractions come into being in the mind. For Plato, A does not equal A. In positing some particular abstraction, we lose that to which it refers. In conceptualizing an abstraction, we lose it again. And in using a conceptualization, we lose it a third time. Then, the use itself decays over time, giving us a fourth loss.

For instance, if I say Platonism is concerned principally with “the Good,” I have introduced an abstraction. Introducing this abstraction brings what Platonism is concerned with into being by giving it a particular name. This limits the thing that Platonism is concerned with so that it can be held in the mind. Now, if you ask “what is the Good” and I give you an answer, I do this again. And if we then attempt to act on the basis of the answer, the act is the third instance. Then, over time, the limits of the act are revealed, and this prompts us to question the answer and even the name.

In this way, we go down: abstraction, conceptualization, action.

But we also go up: action, conceptualization, abstraction

When asked to explain or justify what we are up to, we tell a story that unites all three. We did the action because we conceptualized the abstraction in some particular way which seemed to imply the action. Sometimes the story convinces, and sometimes it doesn’t. But regardless of whether the story is convincing, a limited attempt was made.

Young people who are starting out must go up before going back down. When we are young, it becomes evident to us that there is something not quite right about our activity. Our discomfort with our activity prompts us to interrogate our concepts. But this interrogation results in new concepts, which we then operate with and find inadequate, forcing us to start again. So, going up leads to going down, and going down leads to going up.

The key here is that even the abstraction has relative being, in that even an abstraction is a name that you can hold in your mind. That means that even names decay. “Up” is never “out.”

So, there can be no transcendence, no “completing the system.” There is just going up and down. How do you know that the abstractions, conceptualizations, and actions you operate with are the right ones? You don’t! You only have provisional, operational understandings, which you are always finding insufficient. It is in this sense that Socrates knows that he knows nothing - he knows that his abstractions, conceptualizations, and acts are limited instantiations of that which cannot be possessed, not even under especially flamboyant names like “God”, “pure idea”, or “absolute.”

This did not satisfy Aristotle. Aristotle wanted a permanent account of beings. That account associated being with permanence (hence it’s a permanent account qua permanent account, being qua being). On the basis of this permanent account, Aristotle constructed a system of logic. Aristotelians then operated with this system. Eventually, it became clear that this activity was inadequate. But Aristotelians could not revise the system of logic, because it was grounded on an account that purported to be permanent. To scrutinize the account was, in an important sense, always already to reject it. This prevented the Aristotelian system from being immanently critiqued. One could publish new scholastic commentaries on the central texts, but it was not possible to do new theory. For Aristotle’s followers, he was not the first philosopher, he was the philosopher. They were merely his interpreters.

Catholicism embraced Christianized iterations of the Aristotelian system in the late Middle Ages. In tethering itself to a permanent account, Catholicism lost its capacity for immanent critique, necessitating that new theory be done from outside.

The enlightenment comes during a period of increasingly rapid change. In such periods, permanent accounts lose plausibility - if everything is changing quickly, then any attempt to give a permanent account and operate with it will immediately seem insufficient. Early modernity is home to many attempts to give new permanent accounts, none of which stick. As it became clear that these accounts would not stick, there was an attempt to give permanent accounts that account for their own apparent impermanence. These accounts seem both permanent and not - they seem both to be instances of metaphysics and to point beyond metaphysical approaches (being qua becoming or becoming qua being?). The most famous account of this type belongs to Hegel. It is because of these features that Hegel can be read both as a metaphysician and as something else. You can read Hegel and focus on the sense in which the account is permanent, or you can read Hegel against himself. The first kind of reading precludes immanent critique, but the second kind of reading permits it. Hegel has a system, but his system permits his readers to generate systems that are genuinely different from his own.

Still, a permanent account of becoming remains a permanent account. It is for this reason that Adorno felt it was not enough to read Hegel against himself. It was necessary to reject the permanent account. Is Negative Dialectics therefore a return to Plato, a making of the pre-metaphysics into a post-metaphysics?

Not consciously so. For Adorno, Plato remains associated with his reception, i.e., with metaphysics. Many interpreters of Adorno have the same associations. So, the interest in Adorno has never culminated in a renewed interest in Plato. It has in places culminated in a renewed interest in the pre-Socratics or in Thucydides, but always on the premise that Plato must be regarded as the stuffy metaphysical guy.²

But I think Adorno allows us to receive Plato again, emancipated from metaphysics. And I think that if we look at Plato again, we can find a way to sustainably motivate Adorno’s via negativa. It cannot subsist on pragmatism alone, but it also cannot rely on metaphysics. Yet the Socratic elenchus was motivated and disciplined, even before it was received as a metaphysics. Contrast this with those who have inherited Adorno, many of whom have become “fond of luxury, incapable of effort either mental or physical, too soft to stand up to pleasures or pains, and idle besides”.³ They have neglected everything except having academic careers, caring no more for emancipation than the tech oligarchs do.

Such an intelligentsia is at the mercy of the other classes, who recognize it as good for nothing and are well on their way to defunding and abolishing it.

1. Rep. 546a. Notice that we’re talking about the Republic here, not one of the early dialogues.

2. See, e.g., Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton UP, 2005)

3. Rep. 556b-c