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Counting and Recounting Plato
| Article
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10251 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
9,872 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
Plato is playful but he plays in many ways. In what may seem to us a most trivial way he plays with words. Wordplay and puns are as common on the dialogues as they are in the plays of Shakespeare, and they are often as labored. Scholars have tended to ignore this, merely remarking that Greek tastes obviously differed, and, by implication, differed from our more refined sensibilities. The Plato of the academics cannot be a punster, or if he is, then he should be excused and read as if he were not.
The objection to Plato's playfulness, however, especially on the grounds of some imagined cultural difference, may obscure a deeper meaning contained within the wordplay and puns.
Anybody who has ever heard anything at all about Plato must have heard that "he believed in ideas" or that "he had a doctrine of forms," and those who inquired further would perhaps have been told that these "ideas" or "forms" represented reality or were reality, the real, what is real, or simply (in Plato's usual terms) what is. These ideas or forms are real, and they must be contrasted with what is not fully real, with appearances which both are and are not.
It has often been remarked (though not universally accepted) that Plato is careful not to develop a technical vocabulary in the dialogues. If the ideas or forms are linguistically confusing to the modern reader without classical Greek, it may be observed that they are equally confusing to the reader with classical Greek. Plato varies his use of terms so that what often appears uniformly in English translation as "idea" may be one of several different Greek words Plato uses variously. This may be difficult at one level if the reader of the dialogues cannot develop the habit of looking for the meaning behind a word that is a member of a group of words. At another level, it suggests to the thoughtful listener or reader the need to see through a metaphorical matrix that Plato provides to the meaning lying beyond.
One of the words Plato is fond of using is the word eidos, usually translated as "idea" or "form." But Plato is playing with the words, with us, and with what is, because the word is derived from the Greek word eidon, which generally means "to see" and in the perfect tense means "to know." It also has a technical meaning in medicine as "symptom." Plato is paradoxically saying that the eidos of something, the form or idea of it, as the translators say, the "whatever it is that makes it what it is and not something else," is not an appearance, not something we see but an un-seeable symptom, an
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