V. Tejera

An intelligent attempt to rescue Plato from Platonism, September 24, 2004

Tejera is a very intelligent close reader of Plato. He has no patience for the Neoplatonic, Idealist, epistemological or developmental readings of Plato. (He is also, I think, against the wooden `scholarly' treatment that poor Plato so often got in the previous century. Though over the last generation or two this has begun - finally! - to change.) This means that "no part of a dialogue may be given more emphasis than is warranted by its position in relation to just that dialogue in which it occurs, and no part of a dialogue - including the ordinarily isolated and downgraded myths - may be neglected because it is of no "doctrinal" or "epistemological" interest. It has also required attention to the tone of the conversations at all points in their development and attention to the personal interaction between the characters, hitherto dismissed as "byplay" by many commentators."

...I find nothing to object to here. So then, are we to explain the text by the text? Unfortunately, this method of immersion in the text would only be infallible if the commentator were also and only a character in the text. But he is not and we are not. What are the presuppositions and purposes that we interpreters of texts invariably bring to those texts? What are the extra-textual assumptions Tejera brings to the texts of Plato? Tejera has a story to tell, of how the ancient Academicians, Neopythagoreans, Neoplatonists, Idealists and traditionalists (Straussian esotericists) all have conspired, from the time of Plato `til today, to keep the liberal (and liberating) Platonic dialogues from us all.

...But, of course, this story is not exactly found in the texts of Plato. Tejera is aware of this and tries to show that this `second move' on his part is `required' by the texts themselves in order to explain the various misinterpretations that have plagued and continue to plague Plato's texts. ...But every commentator introduces his own prejudices. Tejera wants to show that Socrates is the privileged speaker, the real center of the dialogues.

One suspects, comes to suspect, that Tejera, in the end, doesn't really like Plato; he likes Socrates. And every time that Plato shows us that he (Plato) is not Socrates Tejera recoils in horror. Thus he treats the Eleatic Stranger (or Visitor) that we meet (in Sophist/Statesman) as a sophist and he treats these two dialogues as merely parodies of sophistry; which, of course, in part they are. But if the Stranger is merely a Sophist why does he refuse to discuss the delicate subject of the comparison/definition of (and relations between) the Sophist, Statesman and Philosopher before they (Stranger, Theaetetus, Theodorus, etc.) hook up with Socrates? Don't the Sophists talk about anything? Also, as Stanley Rosen somewhere observed, this notion (Stranger as Sophist) would be "more persuasive if Tejera had faced up to the sophistical component within philosophy."

He also takes the Laws to be a product of the (neopythagorean) academy. A neat trick this - any dialogue that does not fit in with what one wants Plato to stand for is dismissed. ...Not that there aren't textual problems with the Laws! But saying that "when we see that Laws is not by Plato, we can also see what its real importance is: it must be taken, and should be studied, as a major founding document of the "ecumenical," Syrianized, Romanized and anguished Hellenistic age" is to be in danger of tossing out baby with bathwater.

I really should add that to follow Tejera in an adequate fashion, one really should have read either his "Rewriting the History of Ancient Greek Philosophy" or "The City-State Foundations of Western Thought" or "The Return of the King: The Intellectual Warfare Over democratic Athens" - and if one can only get one I would say read the Return of the King. I would also recommend that one also check out Eric Havelock, "Preface to Plato." While I disagree with Tejera most strongly in his treatment of the non-Socratic dialogues I still highly recommend this book. He is always informative, intelligent, provocative and sensitive to the nuances in the text; and he forces us to work our way through the texts (his and Plato's) as we read along with him.… (meer)