Platos Antipaideia: Perplexity for the Guided :: Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Plato's Antipaideia: Perplexity for the Guided ABSTRACT: ‘Paideia’ connotes the handing down and preservation of tradition and culture, even civilization, through education. Plato’s education of philosophers in the Academy is inimical to such an essentially conservative notion. His dialectical method is inherently dynamic and open-ended: not only are such conclusions as are reached in the dialogues subject to further criticism, so are the assumptions on which those conclusions are based. In these and other ways explored in this paper, Plato demonstrates that paideia has no harbor within philosophy. Jaeger declares in his massive Paideia that civilization, culture, tradition, literature, and education are all merely aspects of what the Greeks meant by their term `paideia', and that these five "cannot take in the same field as the Greek concept unless we employ them all together." I will argue, pace Jaeger, that Plato's unique contribution was no perfection of sophistic humanism, no "reincarnation of the religious spirit of earlier Greek education, from Homer to the tragedians," but with its philosophical context properly restored an utter rejection of the authority of those institutions at the basis of what Greeks understood paideia to be. Without resorting to skepticism, Plato problematized the ordinary; without straining logic, he declared every premise and every conclusion radically open to further discussion and refutation and all this not only without dogmatism, but against dogma. For Plato, education was more fundamental than tradition or literature or civilization or culture, for education determined how all the others were to be acquired, appreciated, and criticized. Indeed, education and philosophy were, as they are now, intimately linked. The practice of philosophy in Plato's time as in ours, the business of philosophy, was teaching far more than it was system-building. In fact, if Plato was the author of a system of philosophy, by which we are to understand a coherent set of interrelated axioms and their mutual implications, then Plato was a profoundly unsuccessful philosopher. For Plato makes such a variety of different and incompatible statements about so many topics that more than two thousand years of scholarship has thus far failed to produce anything like the consensus about his so-called system that one finds among Aristotelians, for example, or even Marxists. It is for this reason that I shall turn from the content of the dialogues to the method or methods exhibited there. In those, I will argue, we have a better model for the contemporary conduct of philosophy than is usually suspected.