The Guardians in Action by Altman William H. F

Author:Altman, William H. F.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498517874
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2016-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

If we apply “always” (ἀεί) to “the things that are,” we will elevate the dianoetic Gathering—which merely describes the intrinsically human but unconscious transition from many sense perceptions into the unity of what is λεγόµενον—to “the Forms,” thereby reinstating the Problem on their level; in order to avoid this error, we need to regard the presence of τὰ λεγόµενα here as decisive, applying ἀεί to it: “the things that are always said to be.”142 To put it simply: we are being prompted to remember the Phaedrus Gathering, and that upon which it depends.

It is by recognizing Philebus as the third act of the Dianoetic Drama that the dialogue’s three temptations—to replace the Idea of the Good with “the mixed life,” to describe Mixture as a γένεσις εἰς οὐσίαν, and to treat the One-Many of the Divine Gift as the culmination of “Plato’s late ontology”—become “one.”143 Plato could only solve the Problem of the One and the Many by having located it on a lower level than the Idea of the Good: everything in the world of Becoming is subject to Division and Collection—“the things we are always talking about”—but only an entirely different form of Dialectic opens our access to Being, the Dialectic that treats the structures of διάνοια as merely springboards (R. 511b5) or a propaedeutic prelude (R. 531c9-d7).144 It is the Good that lights up Being and reduces Becoming to Cave. And it was only in the reflected light of the Good that Plato recognized that the One was the most otherworldly of dianoetic constructions, and that it forcibly led the soul away from Becoming toward Being (R. 525c2-d8). As the One is to Becoming, so is the Idea of the Good to Being: the indivisible monad, the infinitely repeatable thought-atom is—despite being merely an intelligible image of the things of this world, and thus ultimately dependent on sense perception—“beyond Becoming,” achieving permanence at the expense of existence. Staged in the context of the Good that is not the true Good, and lured by Pleasure—always the strongest of physical temptations, and once again cast in the role of Siren—Philebus tests whether we will be equally susceptible to the “Hegelian” resolution of the Dianoetic Drama that Plato had learned how to resist. Oppositions are overcome, subsumed, and resolved in the One-Many of Hegel’s synthesis: against the prototype of this kind of synthesis Plato opposed the transcendent Good, the Kluft or χωρισµός between Being and Becoming, and the One that cannot be split.

Read properly—in the context of the five dialogues that precede it in the Reading Order it beginning with Republic—Philebus upholds opposition and division (διάκρισις at Phlb. 23d9-10) against mixture and the One-Many. But it does so only beneath the text’s surface and in the teeth of our own opposition to opposition: it would short-circuit our Drang nach Einheit. Plato could only have written Philebus the way he did because he knows exactly how the rest of us—or rather his smartest students in the Academy, at least those who

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