The Meaning of Plato

Sometimes eternity reaches down its pointer finger and scoots us in the right direction.

Dr. Maynard Lipcott Lee¹, chair and secretary and sole member of the Liberal and Fine Arts Department at the Louisiana Technical College of the Disciplines², discovered the Meaning of Plato in 1945 while preparing a lecture in his corner office in the basement of Ligament Hall for the third meeting of his customary fall course, “Philosophy and Rhetoric”.

Lee’s discovery did not, at first, seem to concern Plato at all. He had, like many before and since, justified his lack of scholarly publications³ by invoking the criticism of writing in the Phaedrus, but he read Plato rarely and lectured on him only once per year, at the very meeting of “Philosophy and Rhetoric” for which he was preparing. The Discovery emerged when he sat down to review his lecture.

Every learned man east of the Mississippi agrees that the Meaning of Plato is the most interesting and impossible question in philosophy.⁴ There are countless explanations of the argument and action in this or that dialogue or even the argument and action of all the dialogues together, but none of the explanations get at the question of what Plato is doing. The closer a man gets to the parts and whole and Eros and eternity and the indeterminate dyad and the other details of the dialogues, the more Plato evades his grasp.

What Lee discovered is that when faced with an apparently unsolvable philosophical problem, he could produce a poetic solution. That is, he could avoid philosophizing about the problem entirely and write a story in which his character does the philosophizing for him and solves the problem, and then the problem is solved. If for some reason the character can’t figure things out, the character simply follows the same method and writes a story himself. And so on. Every problem in philosophy or mathematics or anything else can thus be solved through the writing of short fictions. So Dr. Maynard Lipcott Lee sat down to write a story about Dr. Grover Grouse, a professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University who writes a book⁵ called Through and Half: End and Ends that in only 173 pages completes the system of German Idealism and begins a new epoch of philosophy, and as he, Dr. Lee, began to write the story he realized that this method of ‘poetic solution’ to philosophical problems is the Meaning of Plato. The dialogues demonstrate the method so clearly and obviously that it was for more than two thousand years hidden from view, but it’s right there.⁶ All confusions and questions fade away in the face of fictional speech and act. A reader who wants to understand Plato need only write a story about a reader who understands Plato or a character who writes a story about a character who understands Plato. The exercises in Parmenides are a writing workshop.

Lee’s story ends with Grouse’s inability to write another book after Through and Half, which he blames on his acceptance of the criticism of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. So rather than write another book, Dr. Grouse begins to write stories about a young woman named Sarah Greene, who learns Ancient Greek at night courses at Temple University and reconstructs Aristotle’s dialogues in a fugue state after being mugged outside her apartment.

Sometimes eternity reaches down its pointer finger and scoots us in the right direction. “Rhythm is being moving through becoming; it is the one moving through the many; it is the singular distended through the plural.” As we all now know, the chief character in Aristotle’s dialogues is Plato. There are no problems anymore, as long as we have pencils and paper.

1. His dissertation on the logic and rhetoric of paradoxes in Kant’s Anthropology lectures is worth reading for his creative use of Kant’s correspondence as an exegetical tool.

2. Now defunct. See pp. 457-467 of Alistair Vlebling’s Fields and Fellows: An Agrarian History of Higher Education in Louisiana and Mississippi for a revisionist account of the College’s founding and demise.

3. At the beginning of his career, he dreamt of writing a work that would be for philosophy what Freud’s Moses and Monotheism was to Judaism. It would demonstrate through careful reading that Plato murdered Socrates and then via reaction formation wrote the dialogues. But he never wrote a word of it, and his dream disappeared into the waters of the Mighty Mississippi.

4. See Emerson: “The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind of Plato, nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world, the world that is not the totality of things but that in terms of which we understand them, that which gives them measure and purpose and validity in our schemes. This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. There is no more sense in speaking of an interpretation when, instead of an interpretation, the "world" is meant to be that which can keep us from seeing, or force us to see, that what we have is one. So it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him.”

5. Implied but unstated: his motivation for writing is spite towards Dr. Voegelin.

6. When I shared Lee’s diaries and Grover Grouse story with Dr. Amirthanayagam David he exclaimed, “Finally, we understand what Strauss’ quip ‘The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things’ means!” I implore you to read Dr. Amirthanayagam’s 2003 homecoming lecture at St. John’s College “The Feminine Abstract and the Neuter Essential Singular and Plural in Ancient Greek”, which expresses more than any other text the mission and method of the Borges Review of Books.