Platonism and Naturalism

The Possibility of Philosophy

Lloyd P. Gerson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501747274
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

In his third and concluding volume, Lloyd P. Gerson presents an innovative account of Platonism, the central tradition in the history of philosophy, in conjunction with Naturalism, the "anti-Platonism" in antiquity and contemporary philosophy.

Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism. From Aristotle to Plotinus to Proclus, Gerson clearly links the construction of the Platonic system well beyond simply Plato's dialogues, providing strong evidence of the vast impact of Platonism on philosophy throughout history. Platonism and Naturalism concludes that attempts to seek a rapprochement between Platonism and Naturalism are unstable and likely indefensible.

PART 1 Plato’s Rejection of Naturalism

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Some forty years ago, the late Richard Rorty wrote a provocative book titled Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.1 In that book, and in many subsequent books and essays, Rorty advanced the astonishing thesis that Platonism and philosophy are more or less identical. The point of insisting on this identification is the edifying inference Rorty thinks is to be drawn from it: If you find Platonism unacceptable, then you ought to abandon philosophy or, to put it slightly less starkly, you ought to abandon philosophy as it has been practiced for some 2,500 years. This is not, of course, to say that those trained in philosophy have nothing to contribute to our culture or society. It is just that they have no specific knowledge to contribute, knowledge of a distinct subject matter. What I and many others initially found to be incredible about the thesis that Platonism and philosophy are identical is that almost all critics of Plato and Platonism, from Aristotle onward, made their criticisms from a philosophical perspective. For example, to reject Plato’s Forms was to do so on the basis of another, putatively superior, account of predication. How, then, could Rorty maintain that the rejection of Platonism is necessarily at the same time the rejection of philosophy? Rorty’s insightful response to this question is that those who rejected Platonism did so from what we ought to recognize as a fundamentally Platonic perspective. That is, they shared with Plato basic assumptions or principles, the questioning of which was never the starting point of any objection. According to Rorty’s approach, Platonism should not, therefore, be identified with a particular philosophical position that is taken to follow from these principles, but more generally with the principles themselves. Hence, a rejection of Platonism is really a rejection of the principles shared by most philosophers up to the present. It is from these principles, Rorty thought, that numerous pernicious distinctions arose. As he puts it in the introduction to his collection of essays entitled Philosophy and Social Hope (published in 2000), “Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie my social hopes—hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society—with my antagonism towards Platonism.” By “Platonism” Rorty means the “set of philosophical distinctions (appearance/reality, matter/mind, made/found, sensible/intellectual, etc.)” that he thinks continue to bedevil the thinking of philosophers as well as those who look to philosophy for some proprietary knowledge. Other important Platonic dualisms elsewhere rejected by Rorty are knowledge/belief, cognitional/volitional, and subject/object. These distinctions (among others) are the consequences inferred from the principles that together constitute Platonism.

Rorty maintained that the fundamental divide between Platonists (whether self-declared or not) and anti-Platonists is that the former believe that it is possible to represent truth in language and thought whereas the latter do not.2 Rorty’s antirepresentationalism thus extends far beyond a putative subject matter for philosophy. It leads him to reject the possibility of achieving the goal of truthful representations in the natural and social sciences generally.3 Hence, his argument is basically an epistemological one, or anti-epistemological, if you will. The manner in which Rorty has posed the problem facing any anti-antirepresentationalist makes its solution impossible—for Plato or for anyone else. If all our encounters with the putative external reality are representational—whether these representations be conceptual or linguistic—then there is no neutral, nonrelativistic conceptual or linguistic perspective from which to ascertain the accuracy of our original representations. Rorty is so confident that the entire history of epistemology is wedded to some form of representationalism thus construed that he thinks that the unsolvable problem for representationalism can provide an inscription for epistemology’s tombstone.4 On Rorty’s account, the differences among philosophers (and scientists) are far less significant than their shared commitment to representationalism. Hence, to identify Platonism and philosophy is not to fail to acknowledge that there are people who have called themselves philosophers and anti- or non-Platonists. It is, rather, to claim that what binds them together is a shared error in principle, an error that is most egregiously and fundamentally found in Plato and all those who follow in his path. Overcoming this error is tantamount to overcoming the enchantment of Platonism, that is, of philosophy.

Rorty’s rejection of all types of representationalism does not permit him to distinguish the sciences from philosophy in any clear way. But his insistence on the dualisms that bedevil Platonism does suggest a subject matter for philosophy, broadly speaking. By “philosophy” Rorty means “systematic” thought as opposed to what he calls “edifying” thought.5 The manner in which Rorty uses the word “systematic” is broader than the use according to which one might say that Hegel is a systematic philosopher and Hume is not. By “systematic” he means “having a distinct content or subject matter.” Thus, anyone who thinks that it is possible for a philosopher to discover a single truth about the world requiring one or more of the above dualisms is embracing a distinctive or special type of error. She is entrapped by the lure of the systematic, that is, of a distinctive content or subject matter for philosophy.

Most of those who would reject a distinct subject matter for philosophy do not share Rorty’s disdain for the sciences as a locus of truth about the world. The terms “Naturalist” and “Naturalism” are today embraced mainly by those who in general have no compunctions or guilt feelings about their promotion of certain representations over others, especially in the natural sciences. But self-declared Naturalists divide over whether philosophy has a distinct subject matter. Nevertheless, even among those Naturalists who insist that philosophy is not replaceable by the natural sciences, there is no one who thinks that this subject matter is as Plato conceives of it.6 Plato tells us in his Republic in a clear and unambiguous way that the subject matter of philosophy is “that which is perfectly or completely real (τò παντελῶς ὄν),” that is, the intelligible world and all that it contains, namely, immaterial Forms or essences, souls, intellect, and a superordinate first principle of all, the Idea of the Good.7 If Rorty is right, then the denial of the existence of this content is the rejection of philosophy.8 Any form of Naturalism that does not endorse Rorty’s strictures against representationalism is still going to insist that if there is, indeed, a subject matter for philosophy, it cannot be Plato’s. In fact, the most consistent form of Naturalism in my opinion will hold that with the abandonment of the Platonic subject matter must go the abandonment of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Indicative of what is at least the unclear putative non-Platonic subject matter for philosophy is the fact that there is virtually no agreement about its identity. How can there be a real subject matter for philosophy if no one agrees on exactly what it is? Even if, for example, one maintains that metaphysics—Naturalistically conceived—has a subject matter, it is doubtful that, say, any moral or political philosopher would identify philosophy with that. The disunity of subject matters among those who believe that philosophy has a subject matter but that it is not Plato’s is, as I will try to show below, one reason for thinking, with Rorty, that there is no real non-Platonic subject matter for philosophy and so no subject about which philosophers strive to acquire knowledge.

The inclination to dismiss this view is, one might suppose, easily supported by adducing, for example, the philosophy of physics or of biology. There is, it will be said, nothing necessarily Platonic about their content, though the content is distinctly philosophical. The use of the word “philosophy” for the theoretical foundation of a natural science in fact goes back to Aristotle. He distinguishes “first philosophy (πρωτὴ φιλοσοφία)” and (implicitly) “second philosophy.” The former is in line with Plato’s position regarding knowledge of the intelligible world, the latter with the theoretical foundation of natural science.9 Aristotle argues that the science of immovable being is the science of being qua being, that is, the science of all being. How exactly this is so remains a fundamental crux in Aristotelian scholarship. Here, I only wish to emphasize that Aristotle does not seem to suppose that the distinctness of the subject matter of first philosophy, namely, immobile being, means that the science of immobile being will have nothing to say about mobile being, among other things. In this, Aristotle is following Plato in his sketch of what philosophy is. Plato says that not only is the philosopher devoted to the intelligible world or to perfect being, but he is also able to see the things that participate in it for what they are.10 I take it that this is just an application of the general principle ubiquitous throughout the dialogues that philosophy is relevant to our understanding of the sensible world, even though it is a different sort of study (µάθησις) with a different subject matter.

Stoicism provides an illuminating perspective on the Aristotelian claim. Since Stoics deny in principle the existence of anything not composed by physical nature, they would have to face the Aristotelian challenge that, for them, physics must be first philosophy. And though Stoics conceive of the principles of physics differently from Aristotle, it is indeed the case that they do not recognize a science distinct from the science of nature. Stoic metaphysics is just Stoic physics; they do not recognize a science of being qua being or of the intelligible as opposed to natural world. Is Stoicism, then, merely edifying philosophy? I would say that the history of Stoicism divides between those who, like the early Stoics, examined the principles of nature and those who, like the Roman Stoics, aimed to be edifying. The former were in principle doing nothing different from the theoreticians of early natural science like Aristoxenus and Eratosthenes and the latter were doing nothing different from psychotherapy. These are not intended to be pejorative comparisons. I aim only to offer some confirmation for Rorty’s hypothesis that Platonism is philosophy and anti-Platonism is antiphilosophy. This ultrasharp division will have its most interesting results, I think, when, keeping it in mind, we consider various attempts by half-hearted Platonists to make strategic concessions to Naturalism and, mostly in our times, attempts by half-hearted Naturalists to make strategic concessions to Platonism.

Rorty’s division of philosophy into the systematic and the edifying is, accordingly, a useful one so long as we understand that only the former claims to have a distinct subject matter. Edifying philosophy as methodological or substantive criticism refers to something entirely different both from what Plato and Platonists had in mind and from what Naturalists who reject Platonism have in mind, too.

Rorty’s rejection of Platonism, identified with systematic philosophy, rests firmly upon his antirepresentationalist stance. He takes the contrast between antirepresentationalism and representationalism as even more fundamental than that between antirealism and realism, a contrast, he adds, that only arises for the representationalist.11 What the antirepresentationalist “denies is that it is explanatorily useful to pick out and choose among the contents of our minds or our language and say that this or that item ‘corresponds to’ or ‘represents’ the environment in a way that some other item does not.”12 The reason for insisting on the uselessness or explanatory irrelevance of such supposed representations is evidently that, in order for representations to be of any help, we must be able to understand what it means for them to be good, accurate, or true representations. For a putatively useful representation is not just any representation, but one that successfully represents. Yet, as Rorty argues, there is “no way of formulating an independent test of the accuracy of representation—of reference or correspondence to an ‘antecedently determinant’ reality—no test distinct from the success which is supposedly explained by this accuracy.”13 Once the futility of laying down criteria for accurate representation is recognized, the tendency to postulate a form of antirealism as an antidote to the pseudo-problems of realism is rendered nugatory. Antirepresentationalism is thus not to be thought of as a form of antirealism or idealism in disguise but as a way of seeing why the whole debate between realism and antirealism has been utterly fruitless.

It would be facile in the extreme to maintain that Plato’s epistemology is nonrepresentationalist and that therefore Rorty’s criticisms do not touch it. Linguistic and conceptual representations in fact play a central role in Plato’s thinking about cognition in general. Indeed, it is not too far off the mark to say that not only is Plato’s epistemology in some sense representationalist but that his metaphysics is representationalist as well. What I aim to show, however, is that his metaphysical representationalism rests upon a nonrepresen...