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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Plato scholarship often tends to lead us in the direction of a very general choice about the nature of philosophical inquiry. The choice – which can emerge, for example, from thinking about the contrasts between the Republic and the Euthydemus – is one between two very different conceptions of what should be the product of the best philosophical activity: a choice, as we might crudely put it, between conversion and conversation.
No one (Richard Rorty and some other postmodernists possibly excepted) will deny that philosophy aims at the prizes of truth, understanding and wisdom. But there is a choice between conceptions of these ideals – a choice which not just the student of Plato, but anyone who wants to do philosophy, will apparently need to make.
The Phaedrus, the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Meno (at times) and above all, of course, the Republic present the conversional conception of the aim of philosophy. Republic 518C–D, for instance, is a passage that might have created the very concept of conversion:
‘But what our present argument shows,’ I said, ‘is that this inherent power in the soul of each of us, this instrument by means of which each of us learns, is like an eye that cannot turn from the darkness to light unless the whole body turns as well. In just that way, our power of understanding, and the entire soul with it, must have its whole scene shifted (periakteon einai, a studiedly theatrical image), to the point where the understanding becomes able steadily to contemplate Being and the utmost radiance of Being (tou ontos to phanotaton); and this, we say, is The Good.’
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