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Myth and philosophy can be seen as two forms of narrative, Keum (2021) suggests.
Keum (2021) argues that during the 18th century, Plato was adopted as the original champion of philosophy’s long and continuing battle against myth. Prior to that, Europeans would have been more familiar with a different portrait of Plato’s thought: the one offered by Neoplatonism. Adherents of this wide-ranging philosophical tradition, which first flourished in late antiquity and was revived in Renaissance Italy, saw in Plato’s scattered writings a radically coherent metaphysical system, arranged around a highest, unifying Form of goodness. Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato’s philosophy often had a mystical bent – acquired, in part, as it gradually negotiated for itself a place alongside Christian orthodoxy. In order to reassure Christians, who were wary of granting too much influence to a pagan, Neoplatonists insisted that Plato had been divinely inspired as a prophetic instrument of God’s design for human history. Pointing to Plato’s descriptions of divine poetic inspiration in the Ion and Phaedrus, they argued that Plato himself was aware of his own role as a vessel of a higher power. Such readings of Plato gained an esoteric flavour. ?ey elevated the role of inspiration over that of reason, and they tended to focus on themes such as enthusiasm, love or – especially in the context of Renaissance humanism – the divine gift of eloquence.”
Keum (2021): Academic scepticism: “When Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and his associates turned to Plato, however, they often did so in the spirit of a far older interpretive tradition, one that long predated the Neoplatonists. This was academic scepticism, which had been the dominant school of thought in Plato’s Academy from the 4th century BCE – about three generations after Plato’s death – and lasted into the 1st century BCE. Where the coherence of Plato’s metaphysical system was a central tenet of the Neoplatonic tradition, academic sceptics denied that Plato had any system of philosophy at all. Rather, their Plato was the antisystematist par excellence, resisting dogma at all costs in favour of the critical suspension of judgment. Plato’s sceptic interpreters emphasised the mercilessly rigorous nature of Socratic interrogation and the inconclusive endings of some of the early dialogues, which seemed to represent a disavowal of certain knowledge.”
“The sceptic portrait of Plato was especially appealing to Plato’s Enlightenment readers, who similarly adopted a principled programme of challenging authority and questioning received knowledge.”
“Enlightenment champions of Plato were unwilling, at the same time, to accept the fully sceptic conclusion that certain knowledge was impossible. Eventually, they negotiated a compromise between the Neoplatonist and sceptic accounts of Plato. They accepted that Plato had a coherent philosophical system, and that constructive and certain knowledge was indeed possible. But the path to knowledge was not through revelation or inspiration, but through the kind of critical reason that the academic sceptics so prized.”
“Plato’s Enlightenment readers also took him to be an embodiment of their own political values. His portrayal of the Socratic gadfly helped model an ideal of philosophical citizenship – of citizens as critical thinkers, refusing to take social norms for granted, but instead exposing unfounded pretences to knowledge and the vague and mystifying myths of society.”
“The dominance and popularity of the Enlightenment portrait of Plato meant that the interpretations that had preceded it largely fell out of sight … . This was the process by which the rationalist Plato, so despised by Nietzsche, was created.”
“For Plato was not just the champion of rational argument that the Enlightenment presented him to be. His dialogues, significantly, contained myths: carefully constructed narrative interludes, woven into the philosophical investigation, that reworked or mimicked existing material from the Greek mythological tradition.”
“This Enlightenment Plato is, by and large, the one we have inherited today, who coexists uneasily in our imaginations with the mythmaking Plato we encounter when we read his texts.”
“The lessons of Plato’s myths, however, point us to another way. If we remain allergic to the presence of myths in our cultural landscape, we miss the larger point, and risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Plato’s insight was that myth is a powerful, enduring force in politics and culture – a point of common ground in both Nietzsche’s and Popper’s critiques of Plato. Not taking this seriously risks falling into denialism about the very real ways in which such symbolically rich narratives influence our worldviews.”
” … Plato’s own philosophical reinvention of myth also suggests that myths can be reworked in creative ways. Myths are not monoliths impervious to change, but dynamic stories open to reinterpretation every time they are retold.”
“If myths turned out to be an inescapable part of modern life, Plato teaches us not to despair that our Enlightenment expectations of rational progress have gone unmet. Instead, he invites us to make theoretical space for the myths around us, and to remember our own capacity to rework them.”
References
Keum, T.-Y. (2021) ‘Why philosophy needs myth’, Aeon. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/was-plato-a-mythmaker-or-the-mythbuster-of-western-thought (Accessed: 10 November 2021).
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