The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

necessarily sympathetic to his philosophy (DSB, 1981: 11:22–23). We take it
for granted that Plato was “Platonic,” just as we take it as part of his essential
qualities that he was Socrates’ star pupil. But this view is the result of many
generations of filtering. Let us try to reverse the angle of perspective in time.
Instead of taking “Plato” as a reified thing whose attributes we already know,
let us place ourselves in the crowded network, amid its streams of cultural
capital and its eddies of emotional energies as they would have existed in the
early 300s b.c.e.
What we see in Figure 3.4 that distinguishes him from his rivals among the
fellow pupils of Socrates is Plato’s wide-ranging network contacts. Plato was
not the only one to build on the mathematical heritage of the Pythagoreans;
and on the metaphysical side, the Elis school and in a different way the
Megarians continued the elevated Being of Parmenides. We moderns think of
Plato’s eminence as above all his raising the level of epistemological reflection;
but such epistemological acuteness was very high in the Megarian school, and
indeed was carried on more in the next generations by Eubulides and Stilpo
than by Plato’s own successors. The fact that their texts do not survive, but
Plato’s have, is not merely a historical accident; rather it is the result of
structural domination over a period of generations, which selected which texts
were to be elevated above the others. In an important sense, Aristotle’s split
helped constitute “Plato” in the long run as we have come to think of him.
The division of the school into Speusippus’ line, which elevated mathematics
as a transcendent ideal of all knowledge and being, and Aristotle’s line, which
reduced this ideal to a part in a larger synthesis, crystallized out “Platonism”
as one pole in an opposition. In view of the history of the next eight genera-
tions—which turned over the Academy first to religions of star worship and
mystical numerology, and then to a very un-Idealist skepticism—we may even
say that Aristotle’s school was crucial in carrying along the memory of the
ideal-type Platonism as a foil during the time when it no longer had an active
home base.
The key to Aristotle’s success was his explicit focus on the problem posed
by the diversity of schools of his day, and his reflective awareness of how this
grew out of the prior history of philosophical schools. Rival schools were also
aware of this development; Aristotle’s contemporary Pyrrho took the disagree-
ment of the schools as explicit warrant for relativism. Aristotle was anchored
in conflict with the dialecticians, such as his disputes with Eubulides the
Megarian. Aristotle’s distinctiveness became the opposite intellectual strategy:
to reduce disagreements by synthesis. The tools that he forged in this process
are his long-enduring contribution to philosophy.
It is not surprising that Aristotle and his school produced the first historical
treatments of philosophy. These not only occur as a specialized genre but also


Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^101
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