Plato (ΠΛΆΤΩΝ)

PLATO (ΠΛΆΤΩΝ). - Greek philosopher of the 5th-4th century B.C., among the greatest thinkers of humanity.

I. HIS LIFE

Born in Athens in 427 B.C., P. belonged to a noble family which, through his father Ariston, traced its descent from the Athenian king Codrus and, through his mother Perictione, went back to Solon. Noble too were his uncle Charmides and his cousin Critias, involved in the struggles between aristocracy and democracy in the restless political world that received the philosopher's youth: and the struggles of the parties were matched by the struggles of thought, stirred up among Athenian youth by the great sophists (v.) Protagoras and Gorgias and by the dense throng of their followers and imitators. Among these passed Socrates (v.), raising his lofty word of truth, and it was to his school that P. attached himself, at about the age of twenty, after having listened, among the many voices that reached him from the marketplaces and the gymnasia, especially to those of Cratylus, Prodicus and Hippias.

Socrates' inspiring influence, his example of virtue, the heroism of his death determined P.'s vocation, although it cannot be said that he ever merely repeated the master's doctrine, without elaborating it with intimacy of meditation and originality of conquests. After Socrates' death (399 B.C.), P.'s life can be divided into three periods, which are indicated here, without any intention of breaking the continuity of his experience and thought, for the purpose of providing some points of reference for the chronological arrangement of the works. a) The first period, from 399 to 388, from about the philosopher's thirtieth to his fortieth year, saw him first at Megara, with the Socratic Euclid, then perhaps in Egypt and at Cyrene, and then certainly in Magna Graecia and at Syracuse, with Dionysius the Elder, the tyrant of the city, whom P. would have wished to win over to his ideas of political reform. At the Syracusan court, the philosopher met Dion, the tyrant's brother-in-law, and from him received understanding and friendship; he found distrust and hostility, on the other hand, on the part of Dionysius, who had him deported and sold as a slave in the market of Aegina. P. was ransomed by a certain Anniceris of Cyrene and was able to return to Athens, where he founded the Academy. b) The second period, from 387 to 367, comprises twenty years, from his fortieth to his sixtieth, spent by the philosopher in the tranquillity of his school, in the fullness of his powers devoted to the production of the great works of his maturity and to the training of his pupils. His school, an original institution that was to last almost a millennium and was to see other rival schools of rhetoricians and philosophers arise against it, was called the Academy (v. ACCADEMIA, I. L'a. greca) from the gardens of Academus where it arose in the form of a community, gathered in the cult of the Muses and of wisdom. c) The third period, which runs from 366 to his death and extends from his sixty-first to his eightieth year, saw two further journeys of the philosopher to Syracuse, the first in 366, the other in 361: both due to the invitation of Dionysius the Younger, who succeeded his father in 367, they brought P. neither the execution of his political plan by means of the young monarch, nor the attempted reconciliation with the court of Dion, who died in exile. Indeed, during his last stay at Syracuse, the philosopher was detained by the tyrant in a state of veiled imprisonment, from which he was freed through the intercession of Archytas of Tarentum. Restored to Athens in 360, he lived in his city and in his school until his death, which occurred in 347.

II. THE WORKS: AUTHENTICITY AND CHRONOLOGY

The Corpus Platonicum transmitted to us from antiquity comprises, besides the works recognized as authentic, seven brief writings (Eryxias, Alcyon, Sisyphus, Axiochus, Demodocos, De iusto, De virtute), plus a collection of Definitiones, all judged spurious by the ancients and the moderns. Doubts have not been lacking on the part of modern criticism regarding some of the other dialogues; indeed most scholars incline to regard as not authentic also the Alcibiades secundus or minor, the Hipparchus, the Minos, the Theages and the Epinomis (the latter a writing whose attribution to Philip of Opus seems certain). With the possible exception only of the Republic, all the other dialogues have, one after another, been subjected to some reservation on the part of modern hypercriticism; but, on the basis of the intrinsic characteristics of the doctrine and the style, of the documents of tradition and of the testimony of Aristotle, scholars agree on the authenticity of that body of 29 dialogues, a list of which will be given further below, arranged according to their probable chronological succession. Certain Epistolae have also come down to us under the name of P. which, held mostly spurious by the critics of the last century, are now partially or totally admitted among the authentic writings, except for the insistent total denial of Maddalena (P., Lettere, Bari 1948).

The distribution of P.'s authentic writings in a chronological succession assumes a particular importance in the case of an author whose thought is in continuous movement and develops from one dialogue to another, almost like a continuous colloquy of the inquiring mind with itself. The arrangement into trilogies or tetralogies, handed down from antiquity, depends on external affinities that give no guarantee as to the real chronological succession. The critics of the first half of the nineteenth century, especially the Germans, had subordinated the presumed succession of the dialogues to the interpretation they gave of Plato's thought tonic; instead, so that the interpretation should not prove arbitrary, criticism gradually oriented itself toward the criterion that subordinates interpretation to the succession, this being ascertained on the basis of arguments extrinsic to the doctrine, that is, on the basis of references in the dialogues to historical facts of certain dating, on the basis of one dialogue's reference to a preceding dialogue, and especially on the basis of the peculiarities of P.'s style prevailing in and characteristic of one or the other period of his literary activity. Great work was done by scholars in collecting these stylistic peculiarities (L. Campbell, W. Dittenberger, D. Peipers, C. Ritter, H. Siebeck, H. v. Arnim, etc.), until at the end of the century W. Lutoslawski (The origin and growth of Plato's logic, London 1807) was able to derive from previous studies as many as 500 stylistic peculiarities ("stylemes") that allowed him to determine the greater or lesser proximity of each dialogue to the Laws, which, by the testimony of Diogenes Laertius (III, 37), is the last work composed by P. The result was a picture of the succession, as reliable as possible, on which the work of interpreters is now normally exercised. To Lutoslawski's criterion, called "stylometric," the present writer has added the criterion derived from passage 392c-396e of the Republic, where P. distinguishes two forms of dialogue, one "dramatic" or "mimetic," in which the speeches of the interlocutors are reported directly, and the other "narrated" or "diegetic," in which the speech of the interlocutors is reported indirectly through the narration of a narrator. In the same passage of the Republic, P. declares that the good man must not adopt the first form, which is that of the authors of tragedies and comedies, while he must adhere to the second form or, at most, to a mixed form. Since some of P.'s dialogues are in "dramatic" form and others in "narrated" form, it is logical to infer that all the dialogues in narrated form must be grouped around the Republic, where the other form is indeed severely condemned. P., in fact, had begun to write in dramatic form, the one most corresponding to his artistic genius, and all the dialogues of the first period are in this form; then, to distinguish himself from the comic authors, at the time of the founding of the Academy, he adopted the narrated form, in which all the dialogues of the mature period are composed, from the Protagoras to the Republic; finally, as the use of the intermediate particles, necessary to reduce direct discourse to indirect discourse, proved extremely cumbersome to him, he abandoned the narrative form, laboriously adopted almost out of academic punctiliousness, and, through an intermediate period of mixed form, returned definitively to the dramatic form. The reason for this return to dramatic dialogue as well is given in passage 143c of the Theaetetus. The succession that results from the new criterion proposed does not contradict, but rather confirms, that of Lutoslawski: it serves only as an element of greater precision for the shorter dialogues, on which the stylometric criterion has very little purchase, and for the dialogues farthest from the Laws, that is, for those of the first period.

The succession, derived with the twofold criterion of stylometry and of book III of the Republic and referred to the three periods indicated in the biographical note, is as follows:

1st period (399-88): the so-called Socratic dialogues, in which, however, P. is already far beyond Socrates, because in them the pupil sets out problems that transcend the master's teaching, on moral rationalism, on the nature of the good, on the unity and multiplicity of the virtues, etc.: Apology of Socrates (an account, subordinated to the vigorous Platonic initiative, of the historic self-defense delivered by Socrates before the popular judges); Crito (Socrates refuses to escape from prison and enumerates the reasons for which he dies in obedience to the laws that condemn him); Gorgias (dialectic, which forms science on the basis of truth, is opposed to the rhetoric of the sophists, which insinuates a superficial belief into the crowds; a life according to pleasure and utility is opposed to a life that obeys the good as a value in itself); Alcibiades I or Major (man knows himself when he knows himself as soul); Laches (against the doctrine that reduces all the virtues to knowledge, an attempt is made, without success, to find the distinguishing mark of courage from knowledge); Hippias II or Minor (if virtue were reduced simply to knowledge, deception too would become virtue, inasmuch as in order to deceive one must know); Hippias I or Major (on beauty, whose concept is sought and not found on the basis of current definitions); Euthyphro (on the basis of traditional religiosity it is not possible to establish the concept of holiness and of worship); Meno (virtue can perhaps be founded on opinion, and opinion is a disconnected knowledge that presupposes the recollection of a total vision had in a life previous to the present one: prelude to the doctrine of ideas); Ion (the debated question is left undecided whether poetic inspiration is a superhuman or subhuman state); Cratylus (the first treatise on linguistics handed down to us from antiquity: the word is not enough to reveal the sense of being: another appeal to the science of ideas).

2nd period (387-67): the dialogues of this period can be divided into three groups: a) dialogues of energetic revision of the principles of Socratism, especially in comparison with the minor Socratic schools of the Megarians, the Cynics (v.) and the Cyrenaics (v.): Protagoras (the question whether virtue is teachable is insoluble both on the basis of sophistic wisdom and on the basis of that Socratic rationalism which the Cynics and Cyrenaics were carrying to repugnant consequences); Lysis (in a utilitarian conception of the moral life there are no grounds for friendship); Euthydemus and Clitophon (critique of the eristics [v. ERIETICA], that is, of the jugglers of the word, and also a negative insistence on an absolute object of knowledge that is lacking in Socratic teaching); Charmides (pure knowledge, which turns upon itself, risks being empty knowledge if it does not open itself to an absolute object: another negative insistence on the doctrine of ideas, still unexpressed); b) great constructive dialogues in which P. defines his doctrine, overcoming the difficulties so far elaborated and exacerbated; Convivium (beyond Eros, the human yearning for beauty, a mixture of knowledge and ignorance, stands the Beautiful in itself, the absolute object of human ascents, defined with all the characteristics proper to absolute intelligibles, that is, to the ideas); Phaedo (a dialogue on the immortality of the soul and a dialogue on the ideas, where the central doctrine of Platonism reaches its clear speculative formulation: the soul is immortal because it is akin to the ideas, which are eternal); Respublica (a great dialogue in ten books on justice, where around the main subject are concentrated the fundamental theses on the ideas and on the different degrees of human knowledge, on the institution of the ideal State and on degenerate States, on the social classes corresponding to the three functions of the soul, on the teachability of virtue and on the educational system of the citizens, on art, on the condition of the soul in the afterlife, etc.); c) dialogues, probably composed between 374, the year in which the speculative effort of the Republic concludes, and 367, the year preceding the second Syracusan journey, in which, besides defining with greater depth P.'s position toward rhetoricians, mathematicians, sophists and Eleatics, Platonism reflects upon itself and upon the internal difficulties of the doctrine of ideas: Phaedrus (dialectic becomes psychagogy, that is, movement of the soul, assuming as its own certain essential elements of sound rhetoric); Menexenus (an example of oratorical exercise, according to the dictates of philosophy); Theaetetus (sensation alone, opinion alone, discourse alone do not account for knowledge, inasmuch as they do not account for error: an in-depth critique of Heracliteanism and a postulation of the ideas); Parmenides (an in-depth critique of Eleaticism [v.], with the reduction to absurdity both of the position and of the negation of absolute unity; a critical revision of the doctrine of ideas and an expression of the further demands to be satisfied by an elaboration of it).

3rd period (366-47): a complex of dialogues, sharply detached from the preceding ones also for formal reasons, constituting what might be called the "cycle of non-being", because of the effort made in them by P. to account for those negative elements, proper to sensible reality and to the human world, which found no justification in the previous formulation of the doctrine of ideas: Sophist (relations are established between the ideas, so as to introduce into them, "from the outside", the dialectical movement of analysis [v.] and synthesis and to account for a certain vitality of the world of thought); Politicus (dissimilarity is the cosmic, political, moral, intellectual principle of decadence and disorder; the imitation of the divine governance of the world is the norm for regeneration); Philebus (the total sense of being results from the opposition between the finite and the infinite, reconciled in the intermediate zone of becoming in which is generated, with a measured tempering, the physical cosmos and the moral cosmos); Timaeus (a great cosmological synthesis concerning the sovereignty of the ideas and the necessity of a material concause of becoming, the origin of the cosmic soul and of the lower divinities, the motions of the celestial bodies and their nature, the intervention of the Demiurge in the finalistic ordering of the whole, the relations between soul and body, the conditions of sensibility and the reasons for psychic and organic disturbances, etc.); Critias (a politico-historical myth personified in the history of Athens, foundress of Mediterranean civilization); Leges (a new great design of political reform, the fruit of the last Syracusan experiences, in which the idealism of the Republic is succeeded by a more realistic view of human constitutions, modeled on an unattainable model, and therefore more or less agitated and convulsed).

III. THE THOUGHT

P. is the philosopher of the ideal and of the transcendent. The intelligible that the mind grasps, exercising itself on sensible things, does not derive from the things themselves, nor is it in any way confused with them, but stands above them with the characters of incorporeality, self-sufficiency, simplicity, eternity, immutability (Conv., 211 a-b). The intelligible (ἰδέα, εἶδος) is that purest essence of things, that pure being (αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστι: Phaed., 75 d), which may be called at once the cause and the end of their existence, their best way of being, their good. No definition has the strength to embrace and sustain the world, except the good (Phaed., 99 c). The whole of earlier philosophy had prepared this result, but only P. attains it.

There had been talk of ideality and of mind and of the intelligible before P., but the idea had always remained entangled, mythically and pantheistically, in the fullness of sensible representation: the number of Pythagoras was ψῆφος, the λόγος of Heraclitus was fire, the being of Parmenides was the spherical whole, the νοῦς of Anaxagoras was the operative force of nature. P. is the flight of wing that opens before humanity another world, beyond the sensible world, and discovers another dimension of life beyond that which unfolds in time and space: he discovers a "good in itself" which, in order to be absolutely such, beyond all the contingencies of human life, judges life without being judged by it, orients it, decides of its dignity and its merits. P. is the hand that pagan antiquity extends to the new era of history. But what P. sees is not yet what the Christian soul will see: with him it is still a matter of the ideal, not of the spiritual, of the absolute object, not of the absolute subject, of the intelligible, not yet of the intellect and much less of the pure act of the Spirit that understands, wills and loves. Not even the Demiurge of the Timaeus, in which P.'s effort to conceive a good, provident and foreseeing God culminates, succeeds in being the spiritual principle of reality, inasmuch as outside him stand the ideas that he mirrors, and there stands a substratum of generation on which he stamps the schemata of ideality: he is a God constrained between two necessities, that of the ideas, above, and that of matter, below.

The ideas constitute the point of arrest of science and of moral elevation. P. rises to them by fully satisfying the yearning that had carried his people toward the pure forms of artistic beauty, sculpted in the clear sky of vision; the yearning that in the religious mysteries was appeased, after the delirious orgy, in the instant of contemplative ecstasy. The soul that, in the myth of Bk. VII of the Republic, leaves the cave of the senses, where it barely glimpsed the shadows of things, and sets out toward the dazzling light of truth; the lovers of the Phaedrus who, at the summit of erotic mania, glimpse the throne of beauty (254 b), move in the orbit of classical intellectualism, of which P. is the perfect executor. Only the eye of the mind fully sees, because only the mind attains a vision immune from every sensible shadow and grasps being exempt from its contrary. Yet, together with plain intellection, there remains in P. the almost romantic anxiety of infinite searching: there remains in him the spirit of Eros, son of Poros and Penia, wise and ignorant, intent on accumulating acquisitions that always remain defective, in the human condition, with respect to the fullness of being. Here too there is a hand extended by classical antiquity toward our spiritual world. But one must not, even in this connection, superimpose the two planes at the moment when one discerns some correspondence between them. While observing that P.'s thought, rebellious to systematic framing, projects itself over the whole extent of a life that is continuous search (and from the preceding rapid account of the chronological succession of the dialogues the evolution of Platonic thought has already clearly emerged), one cannot make of him the pure problematist, who seeks without ever finding and finds only his own restlessness as the ultimate reason of being. The movement of Platonic σκέψις is formulation of problems, their solution and comparison with the new problems that sprout from the trunk of the truth attained, as doubt sprouts at the foot of the true. Vision and process, νοῦς and διάνοια, alternate in this constructive skepsis, which must in no way be reduced to the narrowness of a skepticism that denies truth. The superimposition in P. of the intellectualist and the searcher, the convergence in him of the twofold noetic and dianoetic impulse, certainly determines difficulties that he did not resolve and perhaps did not even see: but modern thought, instead of attributing to P. its own solutions, must faithfully mirror the situation of Platonic thought, in the conquests effectively realized, and in the problems left unresolved by him to later speculation.

The Platonic skepsis has offered the almost unique example of an author who does not hesitate to call himself into question, subjecting to a disconcerting critique, as happens in the Parmenides, the central point of his own thought, that is, the doctrine of ideas. This "crisis" of Platonism does not entail an abandonment of the doctrine itself, but rather a deepening of it, through the problems emerging from its first formulation. The principal problems, derived from this elaboration, concern: a) the vitality of thought; b) the world of becoming.

a) How is one to account, in the face of the static character of the ideas, for the vitality and dynamism of thought? The answer is twofold: 1) in the face of the ideas, principle of being, P. posits the soul (v.), principle of movement, in which the ideas are mirrored. This is the solution of the Phaedrus and of the Timaeus: dualism of souls and ideas in the Phaedrus; dualism of ideas and Demiurge in the Timaeus. 2) The deeper solution of the problem is the one elaborated in the Sophist, where each idea, while remaining itself and unshaken in its nature, establishes "from outside" (ἔξωθεν, 253 d) relations of essential concomitance and of otherness with all the other ideas (e.g., the idea "of being" is endowed with an essential concomitance with all the other ideas, inasmuch as all "are"), so that a community of ideas is established (δύναμις κοινωνίας, 251 b, 251 d, etc.) and thought, which binds them all into a plexus (συμπλοκή, 259 e), moves according to those necessary relations that are proper to an analytic and synthetic dialectic.

b) How is one to account, in the face of the ontological fullness of the ideas, for a world of becoming, mixed of being and non-being? What are the relations between the sensible world and the ideal world? Around the Phaedo and the Republic the methectic answer is concentrated (μέθεξις = "participation" [v.], Phaed., 100 c, 101 c; Conv., 211 b; Resp., V, 476 d, 478 e), according to which the sensible is an appearance (phenomenon) of being that almost degrades, from its resplendent fullness, into shadow and nothing. In the dialogues of the last period, from the Sophist onward, the mimetic answer prevails (μίμησις = "imitation," v. MIMESI), according to which becoming has a consistency of its own, resulting from the ideal schematization of a formless substratum of generation (Soph., 265 a-b; Tim., 52 a-b). In the same dialogues the doctrine of the Demiurge is defined, because of the necessity of establishing the active principle of this plastic and ordering work; and, at the same time, the concept is defined of the other principle on which the external exemplars impose their form, in order to generate the physical cosmos, and the principle is variously named "infinite," "errant cause," "concause of becoming," "the other," "place," "seat," "space" (χώρα).

The twofold methectic or mimetic orientation, in defining the relations between the ideas and becoming, exerts a notable influence on all the other problems which, in the development of the dialogues, are interwoven with the ontological and cosmological one. Thus, as regards the moral problem (v. ETHICS), to the methectic disposition there corresponds a marked ascetic note of the Platonic spirit, through the soul's aspiration to free itself from the "prison" of the body and to win its purity in the world of essences, to which it is akin. "Do not wonder that those who have arrived (at the contemplation of the ideas) are unwilling to attend to human affairs, but that their souls always tend to stay on high" (Resp., VII, 517 c). In the mimetic phase, on the other hand, a naturalistic note takes shape, and in the Philebus, for instance, there prevails a favourable appreciation of a mixed life, in which to the pure pleasures of the mind are added those of the senses, provided everything is wisely proportioned, according to a rhythm of balance and beauty (Phil., 65 a): it is the prelude to Aristotle's "happiness". The moral problem is never neglected by P., not even in the dialogues of the last period; it is noted, however, that in the first dialogues, the closest to Socrates, he applies to the dynamics of the moral life all that interest which in the last dialogues is predominantly devoted to the study of the dynamics of the ideas and of cosmic dynamics. Socrates' moral rationalism, as a tendency to reduce the problem of conduct to a problem of knowledge, is the first difficulty on which P.'s critical spirit exercises itself, oriented towards a conception of virtue that leaves room also for the unfolding of the lower powers of the soul. Thus, whereas Socrates bequeathed to him as an inheritance the doctrine that reduces all the virtues to knowledge ("he said that justice and all the other virtues are nothing but knowledge": Xen., Memor., III, 9, 4), P., after bringing to light in the first negative dialogues all the aporias of this position, arrived in the Republic at articulating the moral life in various ways according to the three faculties of the soul, namely that by which one learns (λογιστικόν), the second by which one wills (θυμός) and the third by which one desires the pleasures of nutrition, generation and the like (ἐπιθυμία), discovering in them the root of the virtues, that is, respectively, of wisdom (σοφία), of courage (ἀνδρεία) and of temperance (σωφροσύνη), reserving to justice (δικαιοσύνη) the task of harmonizing the three faculties under the empire of reason. "One must not allow the faculties of the soul to leave their own province and unfold in disorder; but each one must... accord the three faculties among themselves, as if it were a matter of the notes of the three strings, high, low and middle, and of their intervals" (Resp., IV, 443 d). From a general point of view one may say that P. in the first period devoted himself predominantly to creating a dialectic of the virtues, and in the last to creating a dialectic (v.) of the ideas.

The problem of education receives the benefit of the moral dynamics discovered by P.: for, whereas according to Socrates' moral rationalism education resolved itself into simple instruction, that is, into the transmission of knowledge ("he who knows what is just is just": Gorg., 460 c), the conception of the life of the soul, elaborated by the disciple, demands of education an action upon all the energies of the soul so that they may collaborate in the good. The educational doctrine of Book VII of the Republic (518 c-519 b) may be summarized thus: those who maintain that education has the power to infuse science into a soul that lacks it are wrong; they are wrong as one who claimed to give sight to the blind. All have innate and perpetual capacity to see the good, but not all see it, because their gaze is turned elsewhere and intent upon the objects of vice. As the eye of the body cannot be turned away from the darkness and guided towards the light, unless the whole person effects a conversion (περιαγωγή, 518 d) towards the light; so the eye of the soul does not look upon the good, unless the whole soul turns to it, educating by habit and exercise (ἔθεσι τε καὶ ἀσκήσεσιν, 518 e) the lower capacities, which are not innate but acquired. The educational design of the Republic, which contemplates an ordered application to the various disciplines, from gymnastics to mathematics, in the integral formation of the citizen, is the corollary of the principle elaborated by P. in the study of the human soul.

The aesthetic problem takes a different shape under the influence of the methectic vision and of the mimetic one: for, after having introduced imitation into the ontological and cosmic order, and having defined by it the rhythm according to which the power of the Demiurge unfolds in the world and flows back in the world from part to part, down to man, P. was also led to justify the imitative art which, on the contrary, by reason of that very character, had been condemned in the preceding dialogues. The distrust shown to the poet in the Republic, as a "maker of images" (εἰδώλων δημιουργός: X, 599 d), is converted into a very different appreciation in the Sophist (266 ff.), where human art, as a producer of images (εἰδωλοποιικόν), is placed on the same level as the divine art, which generates images in the world and in man. So that in the dialogues after the Sophist and especially in the Laws (II, 667 d-668 b), not only is imitative art not condemned, but it is required that art "render exactly, in quantity and in quality, the model imitated". But, more than such a rehabilitation of artistic mimesis, what the Symposium has revealed about spiritual parturition (τόκος, 206 e) and about the sense of liberation (ἀπόλυσις, ibid.) that accompanies it is of value for the understanding of nature, of beauty and of poetry, and so is what the Phaedrus has left written about the corporeity of the idea of beauty and about the passionate raptus that it determines (251 a; 245 a; v. AESTHETICS).

The political problem too undergoes the influence of the development of Platonic thought: for, whereas to the methectic period there corresponded the political utopia of the Republic (the earthly city resolved itself entirely into the perfect constitution, as the world of shadows into the world of essences), to the mimetic period there corresponds a political realism that takes account of all the human causes of imperfection, and yet aspires to improve or to regenerate corrupted reality, measuring it upon the archetype of a "first State" (Leges, V, 739 a-e), which not man but God can constitute. The ideal sinks into prehistory and into myth, and there remains in the foreground the new mediocre politeia, where evil is not conquered but barely attenuated, and the right to possess is limited, not suppressed, and the arbitrary will of the monarch is corrected by the authority of the law, and powers check powers so that no one may exceed his own attributions. Laws are imposed as a corrective of tyranny; or, where laws are lacking, democracy is preferable, so that power, not entangled by superior norms, dividing itself and as it were breaking into fragments among the multiplicity of public offices and the multitudes invested with political authority, may lose the vigour that would be ruinous when concentrated entirely in the unaccountable arbitrary will of the despot (Polit., 291 d-292 a; 302 b-303 b). The restlessness of inquiry is synchronous with the restlessness of the multitudes and of history, torn between the demand for a definitive arrangement in perfect institutional forms and the impossibility of the complete reproduction of the model in the contingencies of events and in the complexity of the elements. Political exemplarism thus suggests to the philosopher of the ideas the doctrine most sensitive to the claims of facts and of history: adhering to the real without corrupting itself in empiricism, attracted by the ideal without losing itself in utopia (v. SOCIETY).

IV. OTHER INTERPRETATIONS OF THOUGHT

As regards antiquity, rather than interpretations of P., one can speak of particular ways of reliving and reworking his doctrine, with no critical concern and with a very relative historical objectivity. Neoplatonism (v.) derived from the cosmology of the Timaeus a procession of grades or hypotheses that unfold from the supreme principle, remaining joined to it by a participative or mimetic bond; it accentuated the mystical-ascetic character of original Platonism and from certain passages of P. derived the sense of the inaccessibility of the One, towering above all human resources of thought and will. The negative or apophatic theology of Neoplatonism passed over to Christianity, variously integrated by a positive or cataphatic theology; and the philosophy of Christianity met with the Platonic inspiration especially through the two fundamental motifs of identity and transcendence. The world of the Platonic ideas was raised to the consubstantial and personal Logos of revealed theology. The Platonic Eros continued to kindle the ascents of the mind with a warm emotional tone, especially in the Augustinian-Franciscan school and in Renaissance philosophy. When, in the early nineteenth century, scholars turned to P. with properly critical intentions, they often yielded to the spirit of "system" and sometimes erred by subjecting the interpretation of P. to the taste of the prevailing ideologies. The "dynamic" or "genetic" method, which follows the Platonic doctrine in its development from dialogue to dialogue, with all the alternatives, difficulties and perplexities to which the inquiry gives rise, began to be applied, against the "systematic" method, by K. F. Hermann (Gesch. und System der plat. Philosophie, Heidelberg 1839) and spread gradually as, with the study of the chronology of the dialogues and the discovery of the stylometric criterion, criticism was offered a relatively secure and objective basis for determining the succession of Plato's works. The first example of reducing P.'s thought to the frameworks of modern ideologies was given by the monistic-pantheistic interpretation of G. Hegel, for whom, e.g., the God of the Timaeus, "insofar as he is considered as subject, generates the world as his son, realizes himself in this reality, appears there as another while remaining identical with himself... and thus becomes spirit" (Sämtliche Werke, XVIII, Stuttgart 1928, p. 253). An analogous reduction, to the advantage of Kantian criticism, was carried out by the Marburg school (H. Cohen, A. Auffarth, P. Natorp [v.]), for which the ideas, rather than realities subsisting over against thought, would be mental syntheses or hypotheses, which science uses to coordinate and interpret experience (v.); the good (v.), without any ontological reality, would be nothing other than the ethical imperative that leads us to transcend the empirical conditions of existence in order to actualize its value. The Oxford school (J. Burnet, A. E. Taylor), though free of Kantian or Hegelian presuppositions, put forward a radically innovative thesis concerning the pre-existence of the doctrine of ideas before P., reducing the philosopher's originality to the dialectical dialogues of the last period, subsequent to a "crisis" that would have arisen in his thought; but it is difficult to validate this revolutionary thesis, if for no other reason than that the methodical exploration of the dialogues, in their chronological succession, offers the possibility of an experimental investigation of the genesis of the doctrine of ideas, internal to P.'s thought. Every hour that passes on the dial of history marks, with the succession of philosophical systems, the course of the interpretations of P. that superimpose the meaning of new ideologies upon the text to be recalled and commented upon. Just as there has been no lack of "requisitions" of Platonism on behalf of one or another political current that has succeeded one another in recent times, so too there is no lack of interpretations in a phenomenological or problematist or existentialist sense. But discerning criticism fulfils its task by adhering to a criterion of rigorous historical objectivity, on the principle that an author of the past cannot become contemporary, nor can he shed light on present problems and interests, unless he is first of all re-examined in his authenticity and is kept in the place that exactly belongs to him in the historical perspective. V. PLATONISMO.