"I became thoroughly disgusted when one day he came into class, sat down, and asked, 'Now what would Plato have said about the train strike?' How fatuous! And Vlastos was his student, but he put an end to that sort of thing. He changed the field, and, with Gwil Owen, brought in English and European standards, so that it became completely unacceptable even to say that sort of thing."
Thus remarked once my teacher, Burton Dreben, about Raphael Demos. (I think I remember it correctly.) Which raises the question: Is it ever appropriate, and if so when, to consider 'What would Socrates (or Plato, or Aristotle) say?'
Dreben apparently thought never. But I wonder: was he consistent? (Did he equally disapprove of Martha Nussbaum's applications of ancient philosophy to contemporary politics? I don't know.)
And Vlastos certainly did not engage in ancient philosophy without serious ethical aims, at least. (I don't know his politics.) But if you allow ethical applications, why not political ones?
Moreover, don't all of us--perhaps especially when we are caught up in some philological or logical technicality--think that ancient philosophy should lead to something good, some good change (in ourselves, in society), besides being inherently worth thinking about, as it surely is? But if we allow in some general way that it should lead to some good, why not try to figure out how, more particularly, it might do so?
And Dreben had no difficulty with Rawls' political idealizations. Now suppose Rawls were to confess: "My theory of justice is entirely the result of thinking about how Kant would respond to contemporary questions of justice." (He did not say that: but he might have.) What's the difference between speculating in this way about Kant (or Mill, or Hume) and about Plato?
Your thoughts appreciated.
23 July 2005
The Troubling Mix of Scholarship and Politics
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2 comments:
One line of inquiry I found my students very responsive to as we read the later books of the Republic was to ask : do we have anything in the moderm world that Plato would recognize as a democracy? Does Switzerland, for example, and esp some of the eastern cantons, could close enough? If Plato would say we live in plutocratic oligarchies, do any of his diagnoses in Rep VIII-IX seem to hit home? Is it possible, for example, for the average citizen to flourish under such a political regime?
We should not of course as teachers pose these questions with any hidden political agendas of our own, but with the aim of provoking critical thinking. The results of taking students into these issues can be very surprising, as I'm sure many others reading this can also attest.
If we are not just doing intellectual history and scholarship, why not invite our students to try to look at our society from the perspective of Plato & Aristotle?
Maybe Dreben thinks there's an important difference between asking (1) "what would Plato think about x?" and asking (2) "are those who endorse Plato's arguments committed to a view about x?" For what it's worth, the first question seems pointless to me, but the second doesn't: Plato enthusiasts should try to figure out whether their endorsement of Plato's (political, ethical, metaphysical, etc.) views would make them fools or worse.
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