Lloyd Gerson's Perspective on the Platonic Tradition

6 November 2023

Lloyd Gerson’s Perspective on the Platonic Tradition

“Plato in his Phaedo takes the decisive step of separating the subject matter of philosophy from natural science by critically examining the explanatory model prevalent among his most illustrious Naturalist predecessors.”

(Lloyd P. Gerson, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2020, page 10, ISBN: 9781501747250)

Lloyd Gerson is a contemporary scholar of the Platonic tradition who is well known and admired.  Gerson also understands contemporary philosophy and its views and is able to write about how those views conflict with the views of the Platonic tradition.  Some of the topics he writes about when contrasting contemporary thought with that of Platonism are subtle and complex, but Gerson is able to write about them with clarity.

Gerson has published four or five books about Platonism, numerous articles, and was the head of the committee that published the most recent translation of the Enneads by Plotinus.

In the “Introduction” to Platonism and Naturalism Gerson outlines the basics of his view as to what Plato was doing and attempting to accomplish.  I always appreciate it when an author tells the reader what their presuppositions are.  And I think Gerson’s short list is illuminating and helpful:

“I have argued in a previous book that Plato was a Platonist.  By this I mean that, according to our best evidence taken from the dialogues, the testimony of Aristotle, and the indirect tradition, Plato had a distinctive systematic philosophical position.  The position was built on the foundation of his rejection or correction of the philosophical positions of most of his predecessors.  On the basis of this rejection, Plato argued, broadly speaking, for radically different answers to the questions that constituted his philosophical inheritance.

“First and foremost, this required the postulation of and argument for a distinct subject matter for philosophy, one that all his Naturalists predecessors either did not recognize or incorrectly conceptualized.  Second, this required a systematization of the postulated subject matter.  At the apex of the system is a superordinate first principle of all, the Idea of the Good, whose essential explanatory role in philosophy is explicitly affirmed by Plato.  The explanatory function of this principle and the difficulties encountered in expressing this are one of the central themes of this book.  Third, although the system did not need a rationale other than that knowledge of it was intrinsically desirable, still indispensable support for the truth of the system had to be sought in its explanatory role in solving this-worldly problems. . .

“The project of constructing Platonism, which Plato probably thought was identical to the project of doing philosophy, was an immense task.”

(Ibid, pages 12 and 13)

1.  Based on this listing, my feeling is that Gerson under-appreciates the otherworldly focus of Platonism.  Or to put it another way, I think Gerson doesn’t appreciate the transcendental focus on the Good, or the One.  What I’m getting at is that I don’t see Platonism as primarily focused on this-worldly problems; rather I think of Platonism as an approach for transcending the material world.

2.  Plato provides us with a method for achieving transcendence; that method is asceticism.  I see asceticism as a primary focus of Phaedo because asceticism as outlined in Phaedo is how a practitioner ascends to the One and the Good.  I see these ascetic practices as part of what Platonism as a philosophical tradition means.

3.  I deeply appreciate Gerson’s writings, his translations, and his insights.  It is a joy to read his analyses and his apologies for Platonism as a specific, identifiable, tradition.  On the other hand, without the teachings on asceticism access to the Good and the One, the actual experience of this transcendental reality, remains unreachable, and for that reason I think of these teachings as foundational.

4.  As I have posted before in other contexts, asceticism in modernity is not viewed as a viable spiritual tool or goal or even as an adjunct to spirituality.  Modernity marginalizes asceticism by reinterpreting its function entirely in negative terms.  This is often done through psychological interpretations of the ‘unconscious motives’ for practicing asceticism, reframing asceticism as a neurosis or worse.  In other words, asceticism is framed as something to overcome rather than an essential commitment for the spiritual journey. 

5.  Notwithstanding this criticism, I think Gerson’s books on Platonism are well worth reading, especially for those who want to place the intellectual content of Platonism in the context of what philosophy has become in modernity.