Introduction

Plato has often been understood by modern critics, as we have seen throughout this book, to be the originator of a definitive move in the Western world away from ordinary experience to abstract knowing and to the priority of the intelligible universe of pure thought over the ambiguities of ordinary life. According to this common view, knowledge for Plato tidies up the inscrutable difficulties of ordinary experience in favor of the secure but bland haven of abstract, universal knowledge. Here I want to argue two things: (1) that such a view is not warranted by the evidence and (2) that it overlooks a crucial strand of Plato’s thought that, as far as I can see, has never been noticed in modern scholarship. I shall call this strand “scientific perception” or “sharp seeing.” Of course, this is not to claim that Plato held perception to be in some sense knowledge. He did not, as the Theaetetus makes clear.Footnote ¹ Neither perception nor justified belief, or right opinion with a good account of itself, qualifies as understanding. Understanding something is just what it is: understanding. Nonetheless, Plato was also aware that an approach to knowledge by means of types or stereotypes – and antitypes (though he does not use the word antitypos) – is a prosthetic device that requires further tuning by the accuracy of knowledge of individuals in concrete circumstances that includes and transforms simple perception into a participatory process of knowing, a process that nonetheless can never completely predict or control the consequences of individual circumstances.

Let me say a few words about terminology and context first. The word “stereotype” or, for that matter, the words “archetype” and “prototype” do not occur in Plato’s dialogues. Because the word stereos/n and its cognates signifies solidity, especially bodily solidity, and since a “solid type” of anything just on its own pretends a kind of security that I suggest Plato did not believe in or that he thought needed shattering and destroying,Footnote ² the modern stereotype as such was not a philological or philosophical part of Plato’s preferences.

Nonetheless, Plato’s dialogues abound in stereotypes that provoke deconstruction – to give two examples: first, in the Republic, the dramatis personae: Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Socrates, of course, and then in the genealogies of books 8 and 9, the aristocrat, timocrat, oligarch, democrat and tyrant – all of whom live in the same “house”; and, second, in the Symposium, the genres, layers of narration themselves as well as the participants: Phaedrus, the ardent beginner; Pausanias, the Sophistic anthropologist; Eryximachus, the doctor who sees everything through the lens of medicine; Aristophanes, the brilliant but dangerous comic poet; Agathon, the “good” golden youth but in danger of emptiness; Alcibiades, the alcoholic, brilliant student of Socrates and, unwittingly, a good case for the prosecution that Socrates has corrupted the young; and then Socrates himself: saint or destructive menace? Wilfred Cantwell Smith observed that we tend to “Platonize” our own experience and “Aristotelianize” that of everybody else. One might add that while Socrates might have Platonized Plato’s own experience, Socrates himself simply breaks the mold – there was nothing Platonic or anything else about him, except for the transformative spirit of inquiry itself!

And so one might argue that the Platonic tradition both helps to create the phenomenon we call “stereotype” and yet calls it radically into question at the same time. Rather than our “stereotype,” Plato prefers simply typoi, gene, eide, that is, “types,” “kinds,” forms, even ekmageia (“molds” or “impressions,” as at Laws 7, 800b),Footnote ³ or again, paradeigma, a word that can mean an ordinary paradigm or exemplar of anything or, alternatively, a Platonic Form (as in Parmenides 132d), by contrast with “likeness” (homoioma) or “image” (eikon), or a living, speaking logos (as in Phaedrus 276a), by contrast with its brother written logos that is an eidolon of the former, or in the Timaeus, “the intelligible Living Creature” or Paradigm that includes all living beings to be generated in the cosmos. There is a slippage often among different meanings of “form,” “idea,” “type,” “paradigm”: first, there are “concepts” as in defining the “what is” of things; second, there are exemplars, types, and classifications of anything such as the classification of types of discourse and kinds of soul or people in the Phaedrus that one must modulate correctly (Phaedrus 271b–c: διαταξάμενος τὰ λόγων τε καὶ ψυχῆς γένη καὶ τὰ τούτων παθήματα δίεισι πάσας αἰτίας)Footnote ⁴ or the types/exemplars of lives that the soul before rebirth must choose between in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic (paradeigmata biōn); and, third, the Forms themselves, which are not types or stereotypes in the sense that we tend to use the word, nor even primary instances of something to which all kinds of beauty are to be tracedFootnote ⁵, but often just what beauty or justice is in itself, forms that give rise to every instance of beauty but are not instances themselves in the sense that they could be aligned with or assimilated to particular kinds of beauty.

In this appendix, I shall deal not with Plato’s Forms but rather with classes, concepts, and types, that is, the kinds that can be classified. Speusippus in the Early Academy posited a principle of scientific perception (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. VII 145–146: τὴν ἐπιστημονικὴν αἴσθησιν), and scholars have no idea where he got the idea. I think he was developing a strand of thought that has not hitherto been noticed in Plato but that this book has shown to be a genuine part of Plato’s thought.

So I will, first, indicate what I think is the most likely source of Speusippus’ notion of scientific perception and then go on establish that this is a major theme throughout the middle to late dialogues in order to show that Plato is not, at least in these dialogues, the exponent of abstract knowledge stripped of empirical content but rather a thinker who used “types” as a means to see through them more “sharply” into individual experience and deeper understanding. Finally, I shall indicate this scientific strand in Plato’s thought that need to be taken seriously.

Speusippus

Speusippus’ notion of scientific perception or cognitive logos is described by Sextus Empiricus as something that “participates in the truth in accordance with reason” – just as a flute-player’s fingers do not themselves primarily self-produce knowing but “possess an artistic activity that is fully developed as a result of training under the cooperative guidance of reasoning” (Adv. Math. VII 145–146 = Fr. 75 Tarán; cf. Dillon, Reference Dillon2003, 77–88:Footnote ⁶ ὥσπερ γὰρ οἱ τοῦ αὐλητοῦ ἢ τοῦ ψάλτου δάκτυλοι τεχνικὴν μὲν εἶχον ἐνέργειαν, οὐκ ἐν αὐτοῖς δὲ προηγουμένως τελειουμένην, ἀλλ’ ἐκ τῆς πρὸς τὸν λογισμὸν συνασκήσεως ἀπαρτιζομένην), so too “cognitive sense-perception naturally derives from reason the cognitive practice it shares, and which leads to the unerring diagnosis of its proper objects” (οὕτω καὶ ἡ ἐπιστημονικὴ αἴσθησις φυσικῶς παρὰ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ἐπιστημονικῆς μεταλαμβάνει τριβῆς πρὸς ἀπλανῆ τῶν ὑποκειμένων διάγνωσιν).

This is an interesting if puzzling passage, but its main notes are apparent; cognitive or scientific perception (1) depends upon logos (2) with which it shares an epistemic practice and (3) one that is directed to the correct diagnosis “of its proper objects,” namely, the subjects or individual substances in question. The phrase ta hypokeimena, the underlying subjects, is certainly ambiguous, for it refers either to the individual subjects themselves or to their underlying natures or to both (according to Aristotelian usage). In the context, I prefer to retain both meanings: individual things or subjects and underlying natures, for “diagnosis” evidently refers, if successful –“unerring” – to both. So, in the Timaeus, for instance, the works of “Reason and Necessity” are mixed: mind brings the “wandering cause” into a successful focus. Three elements, therefore, stand out as characteristic of scientific perception from Sextus Empiricus’ account: (1) logos-dependence, (2) shared epistemic practice,Footnote ⁷ and (3) the diagnosis of individual things and underlying natures.

Phaedrus

This theory of scientific perception can most plausibly be traced to the latter part of Plato’s Phaedrus (as we have, in part, already seen in Chapter 9) in the section devoted to the superiority of the living logos written in the soul over the logos committed to writing. The inner logos is not a purely psychic entity but “ensouled and living” and like the true art (techne) of rhetoric, outlined in the immediately preceding section, it is able to take account of “the types of discourses and souls” that need to be addressed because it is able to “see” the “object in respect of which we desire to have scientific knowledge” (270c–d); in other words, in order to see types and the individuals included under them, the orator needs more than experience; he must have techne (εἰ μέλλεις, μὴ τριβῇ μόνον καὶ ἐμπειρίᾳ ἀλλὰ τέχνῃ); only then will he be able to apply this knowledge to individual souls and circumstances: “All this the orator must fully understand, and next he must watch it actually occurring, exemplified in men’s conduct, and must cultivate a sharpness of perception in following it (271c–e: δεῖ δὴ ταῦτα ἱκανῶς νοήσαντα, μετὰ ταῦτα θεώμενον αὐτὰ ἐν ταῖς πράξεσιν ὄντα τε καὶ πραττόμενα, ὀξέως τῇ αἰσθήσει δύνασθαι ἐπακολουθεῖν). Understanding, together with sharpness of perception (ὀξέως τῇ αἰσθήσει), yields real practical knowledge, even if this is not yet episteme in the full sense.

So far in our text there is much use of verbs of seeing and knowing with emphasis throughout on techne, that is, art or craft, despite the frequent modern mistranslations of techne as episteme, but there is no occurrence of episteme as such, science or knowledge (except in the verb νοήσαντα – “all this the orator must understand”). For Plato, then, true rhetoric appears to be indistinguishable from philosophy in practice, but it remains a techne, no matter how advanced it may be. Only with dialectic, that is, the ability to see the one and the many together, does episteme as such emerge in the following section of the Phaedrus: in the living logos that is written in the soul of the farmer, doctor, or musician, which actually knows and sees whom to address and with what kinds of words and why, by contrast with the papyrus-word, or written-down word, which doesn’t actually see anything at all and cannot come to its own aid if questioned – only so, as employing dialectical techne, does the true rhetorician, musician, or farmer “select a soul of the right type and in it plants and sows his words with episteme (276e-277a: ὅταν τις τῇ διαλεκτικῇ τέχνῃ χρώμενος, λαβὼν ψυχὴν προσήκουσαν, φυτεύῃ τε καὶ σπείρῃ μετ’ ἐπιστήμης λόγους …). This is the first instance in the Phaedrus of this precise use of episteme and logos linked with dialectic and techne, and it is, strikingly so, a proximate source of Speusippus’ “scientific perception,” for it involves episteme, logos, aesthetic diagnosis of individuals and their natures through detailed practice and experienceFootnote ⁸ of individual cases in which one learns to see the individual object. There is need of sharpness of perception, then, to follow with greater precision and accuracy knowledgeable techne through, and in, individual cases.

Sharp Perception: Republic

This entirely overlooked motif of “sharp perception” in modern times is in fact an important theme that emerges in the early middle dialogues and culminates in the late Laws.Footnote ⁹ Here I shall trace it as briefly as I can in the Republic and then pick out its culminating instance in Book 12 of the Laws.

Generations of critics have thought that Plato’s Republic is concerned ultimately with abstract ideas or totalitarian, tyrannical aims, as we noted in Chapter 3. Such views go hand in hand with a general condemnation of Plato as an abstract thinker as opposed to the much more empirical, scientific bent of Aristotle and Theophrastus. Yet one of the central methodological principles of the Republic is simply the opposite of this, for it is critically involved in the question of what it means to see ordinary, not abstract, things and in the question of how we can see types and individuals more accurately through the lenses of our immediate and ordinary experience. The Republic is, in fact, an experiment in learning to see and in recognizing shadows for what they are. Where does this important, though almost entirely overlooked notion of scientific seeing start? It starts, for our purposes, in Republic Book 2 – at the beginning of the all-important question, why we should be good – not for riches, honors, or religious blessings but just for the good itself. Since we cannot see acutely or sharply – at least, in the immediate present, Socrates argues, we need to develop a microscope in order to see the significance of ordinary, small things by looking at what big things have to tell us and thereby come to inhabit the proper field of sharp-sightedness. Socrates speaks as follows:

Furthermore, at the beginning of Republic Book 6, it is agreed that those who have sharp sight are those who know the truth. The “blind” are those who are deprived of knowledge. The “sharp-sighted” are “the ones who have knowledge” (τοὺς ἐγνωκότας).

So, while knowledge and perception are of course clearly distinguished throughout Books 6–7, that which gives the power to know is the Good – dimly in sense perception, more clearly in thought or understanding. The “one who has knowledge” (to gignoskonti) or the “sharp-sighted one” is illuminated by the light of the sun and by that of the Good, since the Good reaches across the divide between sensible and intelligible. In fact, such knowing (gnosis – 508e5) is episteme and aletheia (508e). Sharp-sightedness of this kind, therefore, is the power for epistemic seeing. And it is located along a continuum of seeing from the clearer to the dimmer, a continuum that parallels, first, Socrates’ example of the epistemological “Divided Line” ranging from guesswork through faith/opinion to reasoning and, finally, understanding and, second, his parable of the light of the sun/the Good, the cave and the dialectical ascent in Book 7 in the attempt to see things together (synoptikos).

One might ask at this point the following question: is not “sight” in the above passage just a metaphor? Those who have knowledge see a paradigm in their minds; they are not using aesthesis at all. There is something to this, indeed – except for the fact that these knowers are ‘like painters.’ In other words, their knowledge has to result in a perceptible work of the imagination. Their object is to bring knowledge, imagination, and perception together. On the other hand, does this mean that sensibles are, in some way, epistemic? Gail Fine has argued that at the level of understanding when one no longer needs to understand Forms on the level of images, one can apply one’s accounts to a knowledge of sensibles (Reference Fine and Everson1990, 111). In his critique of Fine, Gonzalez (Reference Gonzalez1996, 273–274) rejects Fine’s more positive “knowledge of sensibles” on the grounds that “it is inaccurate to say that the objects of this knowledge are the sensibles per se; it is precisely because this knowledge is not of sensibles but of the forms, that it can reveal sensibles for what they are: nothing but deficient imitations of these forms” (273). However, this cannot be correct, since, in the first case, not only deficiency but relative degrees of perfection are also at stake – and, even more important in the second instance, for Republic 5–7 as a whole, the knowledge that is dialectic is the ability to see together both the Form and the participants. This synoptic vision is not simply metaphorical but what perception in this collaborative focus really is and strives to be.

Here, then, I want to emphasize that “sharp seeing” is situated on such a continuum: first, it has an intelligible function; second, it is applied ironically to the prisoners in the cave and, at the extreme – with powerful psychological plausibility – to the tyrant who is compelled by his nightmarish circumstances to see things sharply. Perception (like desire) depends upon the pivot of focus. It “seems” (eoiken) “not to have nous” and yet nous is somehow there with it, since even the lowest rung on the ladder of cognition, no matter how dimmed, blunted, dark, is still connected along the continuum of seeing (see 508c–d).

First, there is its epistemic function:

Second, thinking and perception are symbiotic even in negative circumstances. The fundamental question is the “turning around” of the soul and awakening the real power of perception that is present remarkably even in defective seeing. Education is not putting sight into dead eyes but orienting the power of sharp-sightedness that is already always there (cf. 518d–519a):

Third, this applies even to the cave: “sharp-sightedness” at any level of being can be parodied as a deficiency of real or intelligible keen-sightedness:

Unlike the positive “divination” of the Good in Book 6, here in the guesswork (eikasia) and talking-points (doxa) of the cave, sharp seeing (τῷ ὀξύτατα καθορῶντι) and divination (ἀπομαντευομένῳ) can become distorted images of reality since they take the images cast upon the cave wall to be the only reality and suppose their value to be ultimate, closing off everything else to perception.

And finally, this is no longer the parable but the tragic mirror-reality of the tyrant depicted in Books 8–9 that he is forced to see sharply the excellences of those around him and yet, even against his own will, detest and kill them:

Keen-sightedness or scientific seeing based on memory and experience is fundamental, then, to the Republic. The image also occurs in Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium – of the sharp sight of the mind when sense perception wanes, in the Phaedo (89a) – of Socrates’ “sharp perception” of the effect of Simmias’ and Cebes’ objections upon the assembled group,Footnote ¹⁰ and in the Phaedrus – of sight as the sharpest of the senses. But the idea of a form of vision that is focused, concrete, and yet anagogic or revelatory is important elsewhere in the dialogues. In fact, it is characteristic, as we argued in earlier chapters, of the dialogue form itself that presents a whole range of different characters – or divided continuum of inferior, better and best personages/stereotypes/genres – for us to see for ourselves what may be better, best (and worse).

Epistemic Perception: Laws

Let me come finally to the culmination of the theme of epistemic perception in the late Laws (in 12 books). I have time here for only two points, one a general question about Plato’s methodology and the other more specific about the nature of sharp seeing and the role of knowing and seeing in the closing pages of this massive work.

First, an important point of methodology that mirrors the attention to knowledge through individual practice in the case of the positive rhetoric we have seen in the Phaedrus. In the later dialogues, laws, however sacred, are only a second-best option to individual choice and personal attention. A good doctor, for instance, in the Politicus (295c–d), should not be bound by his prescriptions when the situation changes, and the patient inevitably prefers the individual doctor to his prescriptions. In Book 4 of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger frames the case of legislation as a dilemma between two medical models, a slave-to-slave model based upon strict adherence to “experience” – by which is meant only what has been done previously – and a much more nuanced model of collaborative medicine as ongoing experience, process, knowledge, personal attention, and free choice. The passage runs as follows:

The stereotype-contrast could not be stronger. The slave doctor imposes an abstract formula on the basis of past experience but no proper and prolonged study. The “free doctor,” by contrast, (1) examines the course of the whole disease; (2) immerses himself in the particular circumstances and environment of the sick person; (3) learns from the sick person and teaches something, if possible, that is, tries to make the sick person not a patient but an active collaborator; (4) obtains the patient’s consent, not as a one-time event but as an on-going process; and (5) tries to restore health on the basis of knowledge and observation of the sickness in the individual case and its environment with full mutual consent and shared up-to-date information. For the free doctor, the prescription emerges last on the basis of individual knowledge and personal association. And this is, according to the Athenian Stranger, the case for legislation that should be based, first, on persuasion. There is no such thing as abstract knowledge – just the opposite. One has to look through the stereotype to the collaborative, environmental, communal, and individual context.

Let us come then to the end of the Laws and to Plato’s final representation of epistemic perception in its most communitarian, potentially sustainable form: knowing and seeing or seeing with knowing – no longer simply an individual function but – on the community-medical model of Laws book 4 that we have just examined – an individual-community-political model. Here body posture and organization provide a model for scientific perception:

We should note here the implicit reference to Republic 7, 537bff. where the dialectical method is described as a kind of inductive gathering (συναγωγή) whereby the mind ascends from “the many” particulars to “the one” “idea”: a seeing together (σύνοψις) of the whole is what marks the dialectician (ὁ συνοπτικὸς διαλεκτικός).

Here we have precisely, but in a new community key, the sharp perception we have met from the Phaedo onwards and the combination of knowing and seeing in a single paradigm, namely, scientific perception, that we uncovered in the Phaedrus and then the Republic above. What is striking here, however, is that epistemic perception is now explicitly dialectical in the manner of the Republic (Book 7): it both sees the many and simultaneously presses on to the one in order to order everything synoptically (cf. Republic 7, 537bff.). Praxis or syntaxis is inscribed in the whole field of scientific attention.

As noted in the General Conclusion (Chapter 10), knowledge is not perception, as the Theaetetus makes clear. So, I do not agree with the position of Gill, even if I am in sympathy with her instinct (see Footnote note 1 above). Nonetheless, perception is implicitly cognitive, as we have seen throughout this work –Chapters 1–3 and 6, and as Fine has well argued, even if we cannot determine exactly the particular grade of cognition involved (these grades she takes from Descartes: physiological instinct, effects of mind and embodiment, mind proper).Footnote ¹² Active perception linked dialectically and symbiotically in the whole soul is, I suggest, epistemic, as we find reported in Sextus Empiricus.Footnote ¹³ Such a view, I conclude, is that of Plato.

Conclusions

Knowledge for Plato is not the abstract affair in either the middle or the late dialogues, which so much modern scholarship has taken it to be. There really does exist a hitherto unknown paradigm of sharp-seeing or epistemic perception in these dialogues, a paradigm sensitive to typologies and individuals, to process and dialogue, and one that Speusippus evidently took over from Plato. In the late Laws this is ultimately a community-based form of knowing and seeing that seeks to generate longer-term ecological sustainability in the full understanding that free choice of the best or of what seems the best to us, amidst the incommensurabilities of individual circumstances and the catastrophic rise and fall of civilizations, can never guarantee the permanence of anything. This paradigm is not a shift to be found in the later Laws only; it also characterizes the earlier Republic and Phaedrus, traces of which can be found already in the usage of the Phaedo and in the possibility of a “true rhetoric” in the Gorgias that looks forward to the treatment of rhetoric in the Phaedrus.Footnote ¹⁴

All of this evidently calls for a reappraisal of the question of knowledge in the early to middle dialogues and for a change in our view of the relation between Plato and Aristotle since, for both, things in the sublunary world are only so “for the most part” and practical, aesthetic knowing is a methodological necessity even if such seeing-knowing always depends ultimately upon contemplative or theoretical insight for its surest footing,and even if this insight is fleeting and open to questioning (as in the 7th Letter), fragile and liable to deconstruction (as in the Symposium) and never sufficiently stable to ensure that the best people we can produce will not be corrupted (as in the Republic).