577 - Platonism in Recent Religious Thought

Platonism in Recent Religious Thought
By William D. Geoghegan
200 pp. New York, Columbia University Press, 1958. $4.00.

Therapeia; Plato's Conception of Philosophy
By Robert E. Cushman
322 pp. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1958. $6.00.

Each of these books makes a real contribution to Platonic studies, though Dr. Cushman's is a fuller and more concentrated work than Dr. Geoghegan's in which we have six short studies of recent British and American philosophers who can in some sense be termed Platonists. His work is therefore more predigested than Dr. Cushman's; and lest this fact make it over-attractive to theologians in a hurry, one would plead for the bestowing of time and patience to assimilate also what Dr. Cushman has to say; for he is working at one remove only from Plato while Dr. Geoghegan, necessarily, is working at two removes.

Criticism of a purely external kind seems called for. Why transliterate so many Greek words and phrases? Dr. Cushman is allowed Greek font but seems generally to think he makes a Greek word more intelligible by writing it in Roman script. Dr. Geoghegan is presumably forbidden Greek font but transliterates Greek phrases in a way that can only bemuse the Greekless. What will they get from hate gar tes physeos hapases suggenous ouses (p.85)? If they think it means what follows in the text,-"the kinship of mind with Nature (and God)," which was Temple's postulate, many questions will have been begged. Moreover, the Grecian will ask "Why physeos but suggenous?" Apparently because psyche and physis are already familiar, but hupodoche, for instance, is not. ¹ But we cannot pass "the paradeigma were metaphysically prior to deity" (p. 21). To make matters worse, we learn on page 64 that Dr. Geoghegan knows better. In this case voluntary error is not preferable! However, his language is relatively simple while Dr. Cushman not only uses novelties (to the reviewer, at least) like "encapsuled," but has various technicalities of expression that require mastering-especially "axiological consciousness." This refers to our awareness of aesthetic and moral elements (as well as truth of fact) which are involved in Reality in such a way that Reality is choice-demanding. This is really the basis of Dr. Cushman's interpretation of Plato, a thesis likely to be of interest to any kind of "existentialist" and, one hopes, to theologians generally whether they profess "existentialism" or not.

Turning to the books separately, we may consider Dr. Geoghegan's first. He examines Inge, Paul Elmer More, A. E. Taylor, Temple, Whitehead,

¹ Surely it is best to translate (with inverted commas if required) and then give the Greek term in brackets if it illuminates at all-thus, for example: " 'art' (Ä­ÇÅ·), or else "rational design (techne)."

578 - Platonism in Recent Religious Thought

and Santayana. After brief biographical and bibliographical notices he considers first their interpretation of Plato, then their wider "Christian Platonism"; finally he offers his own criticisms both of their efficiency as reporters of Plato and of the effectiveness of their personal philosophical contributions. In all this he is at times like an examiner awarding "alpha minus" and "beta plus" with the usual basic assumption that the examiner knows all that there is to know and has the infallible criteria by which to decide on alphas and betas. Those who knew Taylor as a stupendously learned supervisor in Edinburgh will be amused as well as shocked at finding his various "essays" marked in this fashion. Even so, the study here of Taylor and the one of Whitehead are penetrating and valuable-the one of a devoted Platonic scholar, the other of an original philosopher who sat more loosely than he supposed to the Platonic tradition. Inge and Temple represented (very differently) an honorable tradition in the Church of England that one hopes has only gone underground for a time; but (with all due respect to Inge's serious and careful work on Plotinus) they are not as important to the Platonic tradition as Taylor and Paul Elmer More. Santayana, though teaching the need to recognize contingency and uniformity in nature in a way that interprets the passing in terms of the permanent, is only a very limited sense indeed a Platonist. His "matter" is nothing like the "receptacle" of the Timaeus, which is all that we are entitled to call "matter" for Plato. In general, one finds in this book Bergson looming in the backgroundeven in the frein vital of More which negates Bergson's élan vital.

Yet it would not be just to say that the Platonism (here epitomized and anatomized) is only secondary in the thought of these six men. To put it in fashionable terms, all six have encountered Plato: to put it in unfashionable terms, only More and Taylor have embraced him. Of these two, Taylor was probably the more vigorous disciple, because he did believe in the philosophia perennis and honored Plotinus as well as the Fathers. So short a book raises these and other great issues.

Dr. Cushman's book is a much more ambitious attempt to interpret the whole Platonic corpus in terms of epistemology and soteriology at once. Man has a primal affection which is perverted but can be retrieved if he is "turned round" to true knowledge. This "turning" involves Socratic therapy: to this belongs persuasion, substitution of true for false opinion and conformation of subject to object by the effectual triumph of the "higher madness" of the Phaedrus. Professor Wild built his interpretation of Plato around the single conception of anatrope of man in his present state as "upside down." Dr. Cushman is less readily intelligible, but his valiant attempt to focus the meaning of Platonic "con-

579 - Platonism in Recent Religious Thought

version" deserves praise and the most careful study. The Platonic scholar will probably be most interested in his approach to "true opinion" and "recollection"; but the theologian might do best to read first the treatment of "the human plight," "virtue and knowledge," "the role of love in knowledge" and "the true rhetorical and persuasive art"-this is particularly of interest to those who ask what preaching is.

A detailed criticism is not possible here. In general, Dr. Cushman is perhaps too concerned to "harmonize" the dialogues and assume a system-this is the Shorey legacy. There is a "unity of Plato's thought," but it is not a system. Partly because of this, there is less sureness of touch where the later critical and reconstructive dialogues are treated: their distinct nature needs clearer emphasis. Plato, it is true, keeps the teleology of Phaedo intact in the Timiaeus, but he brings in a new I cosmic emphasis: Soul, but not Mansoul exclusively, is the source of all movement of body. The Politicus myth suggest God's dealing with the Universe as something fundamental carrying along with it his dealing with individuals. This is far from Socrates "buttonholing" his neighbors. Yet it is all essentially one-the fusion of metaphysics, ethics, and physics which irritates the purely intellectual but helps those for whom right and wrong are a fundamental part of what exists.

Dr. Cushman is a little too receptive of the views of others. Professor Untersteiner's interpretation of Protagoras, for instance, has not won general acceptance and caution is required at this point. More fundai mentally, Erich Frank's denial that Plato understood "free will" is too readily accepted. There is something much closer to Augustinian voluntas in Plato than there is in Aristotle's Àpoa½pµÃ¹s. "The good that I would I do not" is not as foreign to Plato as a shallow understanding of "No one willingly does amiss" might lead one to think. Euripides indeed anticipated Ovid's video meliora proboque: deteriora sequor, presumably criticising Socrates; but Plato, as Dr. Cushman shows, saw that the restoration of the true will was precisely the precondition of the vision of all reality and so of true moral initiative.

In the last resort, Plato must be said to be primarily a metaphysician-an assertor of the ultimate reality betokened by phenomena and moral judgments. But his concern with man and with the means of turning him to the light is the mainspring of his politics and his ethics-indeed, Plato politicus is inseparable from Plato metaphysicus, and Dr. Cushman is to be thanked for making this so clear.

J.B. Skemp
University of Durham
Durham, England