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INTRODUCTION
- Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 73, quoting Goldschmidt, Les Dia-
logues de Platon (Paris, 1947), 3. - See Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? The six schools are Platonism, Aris-
totelianism, Cynicism, Pyrrhonism (Skepticism), Stoicism, and Epicureanism. - Hadot puts the matter this way:
This ethics of the dialogue explains the freedom of thought which, as we
have seen, reigned in the Academy. Speusippus, Xenocrates, Eudoxus, and
Aristotle professed theories which were by no means in accord with those of
Plato, especially on the subject of Ideas. They even disagreed about the defi -
nition of the good, since we know that Eudoxus thought the supreme good
was pleasure. Such intense controversies among the members of the school
left traces not only within Plato’s dialogues and in Aristotle, but throughout
Hellenistic philosophy, if not throughout the entire history of philosophy.
In any event, we may conclude that the Academy was a place for free discus-
sion, and that within it there was neither scholastic orthodoxy nor dogma-
tism. (Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 64– 65)
If this is true, we may wonder what the school’s unity could be based upon. I
think we can say that although Plato and the other teachers at the Academy dis-
agreed on points of doctrine, they nevertheless all accepted, to various degrees,
the choice of the way or form of life which Plato had proposed. It seems that
this choice of life consisted, fi rst, in adhering to the ethics of dialogue of which
we have just spoken. This was a “form of life” (to use J. Mittelstrass’s expression)
which was practiced by the interlocutors; for insofar as, in the act of dialoguing,
they posited themselves as subjects but also transcended themselves, they expe-
rienced the logos which transcends them. Moreover, they also experienced that
love of the good which is presupposed by every attempt at dialogue. From this
perspective, the object of the discussion and its doctrinal content are of second-
ary importance. What counts is the practice of dialogue and the transformation
which it brings. Sometimes the function of dialogue can even be to run into
aporia, and thus to reveal the limits of language—its occasional inability to
communicate moral and existential experience.
- Paul Rabbow, Paidagogia: Die Grundlegung der abendlandischen Erziehung-
eskunst in der Sokratik (Göttingen Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1960), 102.