Plato
One may go further. In Plato, the dialogue form itself is the open-ended, manyvoiced medium of discovery in which different genres come together in a new form of mutual address.
Prayer is one of those genres: the prayer of Socrates to Pan at the end of the Phaedrus, for instance, is inseparable from the overall conception of the dialogue, not least because it draws together the numinous quality of the landscape throughout and the image of the lover of wisdom at the conclusion (278c-d) in the representation of a logos that can come to its own aid and that can “in reality be written in the soul of the listener” (278a): “Pan and all you other gods in this place, grant me to become beautiful inside, and as for what I possess outside, may it be friendly with what is inside me. May I count the wise man wealthy, and may my stock of gold be such as only the moderate person could take away and carry” (279b8-c3). Whatever the ambiguity of address here, this represents the classic view of the efficacious prayer of the wise or moderate person (sophron) to be found also in the Laws (e.g. 3.687cl-688cl; 4.716cl-718a6; 7.801a8-e40).At the same time, there is also a sense in which dialectic itself is a highly nuanced, novel form of meditative practice, arousing the mind from its uncritical slumber into thought and leading interlocutors together, always in a state of relative uncertainty, subject to well-meaning refutations, to the unsayable and the unthinkable, being lifted in some sense by the unthinkable itself.
For this unthinkable, Plato presents many different trajectories: the mathema of the good in Republic 6-7, the Seventh Letter, and the ladder of ascent in the Symposium. In the Symposium, the Beautiful comes itself uncompelled at the highest level of the ladder of ascent. Like Parmenides/the kouros in the proem to the Way of Being (see Kingsley 1999), Socrates is a recipient and learns from a goddess-like woman, Diotima.
In all these images, whether in Parmenides’ poem or Plato’s dialogues, there is a decisive movement in the birth of philosophy: a movement towards creative recipience, that is, transformative reception; or as the Phaedrus (274e-275e) puts it, “for the sake of speaking and acting not to human beings, but for the sake of speaking and doing everything pleasing to the gods”. Dialogues such as the Republic or the Laws unfold or represent in story form (mythos), together with all the other genres they include, the image-dimensions of a more comprehensive divine wisdom; and these dimensions, namely, godreverence, love of honour, desire for fairness of soul, are, the Athenian stranger asserts in the Laws (8.841c), “like... prayers”. They are dialectical and they help, on our part, to bridge the gap between human dialogue and conversation with the gods.If philosophy in this sense, then, is a form of lived community experience that reconnects one to the divine, then philosophy’s modes or forms are conversations (dialogue/dialectic), walking together (peripatetos): a methodos, a way of being on the path (“two going together”; Symposium 174d; Iliad 10.222-6) that opens up an entirely new intermediate space for thinking and practice. Such a methodos casts into doubt familiar categories and representations of divinity. It provides a critique of stories about the immoral doings of the gods and of human immorality masquerading as morality (as in the Republic 2-3) yet remains connected to the myths of the past and rethinks the position of the state’s gods (as in the Phaedrus). It likens its ascending steps to the lesser and greater Eleusinian mysteries (as in the Symposium), makes its dialectic resonate with a very different kind of sacrifice which “assembles” and “cuts” the joints of “reality” (as in “collection and division”, e.g. Phaedrus, Sophist, etc.), and “rubs” all its conceptions, images, words together, as it were, to create a sacred light (as in the Seventh Letter, 344b). It builds into itself, as an integral part of its being, the possibilities of subversive refutation (“with well-meaning refutations”, Seventh Letter 344b) and of the presence, however uncomfortable, of the non-persuaded other (e.g.
Thrasymachus in the Republic); and it allows for a new indeterminacy of what is more ultimate than conventional representations of the gods (e.g. the “good” in the Republic, the “beautiful” in the Symposium or “the what is” as opposed to the traditional Greek pantheon in the Phaedrus), while opening up a space, to supplant any privileged position even for Socrates, for the “stranger” - female or male - who becomes a major interlocutor in the Symposium and later dialogues. One could hardly have a more radical model for the destruction of conventional religious representations or social authority in order to let new light shine on a hitherto unimagined scale than this: an open, relatively undetermined sacred space where the stranger assumes the hierophantic role of linking the whole community to the divine; a kind of new orchestra, a “Plain of Truth” en logois (cf. Republic 9.592a), or with Plotinus later, “a thing of all faces, shining with living faces” (Ennead 6.7.15), as if the orchestra or even the Coliseum were suddenly to become charged with sacred thought, that is, to become a potentially intelligible space. It has been argued in the latter half of the twentieth century CE that this is, in fact, a totalitarian, tyrannical model, but despite strong conservative tendencies in the late Laws, religious tyranny or totalitarianism is precisely what Plato repudiates most in the dialogues and letters.If this is so, then philosophy from this perspective is not a means of penetrating the heavens on the basis of our own wishful contemplations, as Justin Martyr will later suppose to be characteristic of Platonism, but a simultaneously practical, contemplative form of ascesis, as Hadot has argued is true of later Hellenistic philosophies, an ascesis which is to be undertaken as a lifelong pursuit of divine wisdom by two or more partners, but one which is always and - significantly - not entirely in the power of its practitioners. How is this so and what are the consequences?
The Good in Republic 6-7 or again the Beautiful in the Symposium is not a “rational” principle as such, for it is non-propositional and beyond being and thought (Rep.
6.509b). Yet Socrates presents it as the most practical and useful good of all: without it, nothing is truly beneficial (Rep. 6.505a ff.). Furthermore, it is the regulative ground of all our judgements, dimly glimpsed or “divined” in all our experience from perplexity (Rep. 6.505d-e) to sex (the latter, at least, according to Aristophanes [Symposium 192c—d]); and it is also what provides both the power and means of seeing, feeling or thinking anything. In short, the Good is that by which the best state or capacity of anything is felt, seen, imagined or thought, and its causative power is an integral part of our capacity to do anything. Here the later distinction between contemplation, praxis and poiesis does not yet apply (especially if this is understood too rigidly). This “good” is not an empty “placeholder”, as it might seem for us, but for Plato (and Aristotle) the non-rational, practical ground of all desire, thought and perception, or for Plotinus later, the ground not so much of thought and life (though it is also their ground too) as of all existence, including the bare being of ourselves, other animals, plants and stones (cf. Ennead 6.7.23). What it is therefore for anything to be a “good” or to be in the best state of its potentiality or capacity, no matter how rudimentary, is a function of this non-rational but reflexive activity of the Good, at once cause and condition of practical usefulness, creative art and reflexive thought, as well as of the barest existence and experience as daily practice.