CHRISTOPHER P. LONGsion of the good, the beautiful, and the just into the human community
by engaging in dialogue with others. Here philosophy emerges not as
an abstract obsession with a set of metaphysical problems divorced from
the human world, but as a fundamentally political activity that seeks to
nudge this world in the direction of the good by combining the demand
for rational responsibility with an erotic passion for truth and justice.
The methodological approach operating in the Symposium and
Republic itself supports this substantive vision of philosophy. The dis-
tancing strategy provokes critical refl ection and the heightened pres-
ence of mind such a conception of philosophy requires. The grounding
strategy anchors philosophy fi rmly in the contingent world of human
community and mitigates against the tendency to divorce ideas from
the concrete contexts in which they arise. For its part, the demonstra-
tive strategy models the complex process by which the good, the beau-
tiful, and the just are translated into this world without falling into a
dangerous, unrefl ective dogmatism. And although we have only traced
this method in two dialogues, its path is discernible throughout Plato’s
writings. In the Phaedo, for example, the distancing strategy appears in
the way the dialogue is received through the voice of Phaedo as he tells
it to Echecrates, in its use of myth, and in the Pythagorean atmosphere
in which it is situated; the grounding strategy is found in the decisive po-
litical and human context that surrounds the death of Socrates; and the
demonstrative strategy is manifest in the way the failures of the rational
arguments for the immortality of the soul are themselves negated by the
earthly immortality that the spirit of Socrates wins in the telling and re-
telling of the story itself. To one degree or another these strategies can
be seen operating in all the dialogues; for they are part of a method that
substantively determines the philosophical stance Plato seeks to inspire.
Method for Plato is not, as it is for the moderns, designed to divorce phi-
losophy from the very real contingencies of human existence so as to set
it on the pure path of science. Rather, it embraces madness by allowing
this contingency to animate the very life of philosophy. Though this be
method, yet there is madness in it.
Notes
- Phaedrus 265b, in Plato, Platonis Opera, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1901). The central importance of madness—and specifi cally the dis-
tinction between divine and human madness—to our understanding of how
the Platonic method provokes philosophical refl ection on the beautiful and
the good has been well articulated by David McNeill. See David McNeill, “Hu-