This sequel to “Plato’s Apophatic Legacy and the Tübingen School” (I) continues to argue for a generally apophatic interpretation of Plato᾿s thought and especially of its influence and appropriations throughout the centuries down to modern times, for example, in Romantic thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Crucial is the self-negation of thought that undoes or deconstructs its purported objects in order to open thinking to the infinite that is always the context and horizon in which its sense registers and can (...) be formulated. The second part of this combined reflection goes into more detail concerning the author᾿s debate with the Tübingen school of interpretation, by highlighting tensions within that school itself between its objective philological methods and certain speculative exigencies of Platonic thought. Thought aspires to something that cannot be objectified but that remains unsurpassable at its own source and origin. This particular way of construing the essence of Platonic thinking highlights continuities with its precedents in presocratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides, who begin to disclose the reflective resources of speculative thinking aiming at an unencompassable and undecomposable whole. On the other side of Plato, historically speaking, the negative theology of his Neoplatonic heirs is then traced in its ramifications into unlimited branches of culture and expressions in art, especially literary art, in all subsequent ages. (shrink)

Plato's works and legacy are explored in this essay as the root of a type of thinking and a multi-millenary culture that I construct under the banner of the "apophatic." The apophatic is literally the “unsayable” that nevertheless functions as the orienting lodestar for everything whatsoever that can be and is said. This is my own way of construing the far-reaching import of Plato's thinking. The essay develops this construction of the Platonic gnoseological project with a focus particularly on the (...) so-called unwritten doctrines, the ἄγραφα δόγματα, that are often supposed to represent Plato's most difficult and deepest thinking, principles which he shared only with a circle of initiates and would not commit to writing. The Tübingen school of Platonic interpretation has been especially industrious in reconstructing exactly what this teaching would have consisted in and entailed by collating all the mentions and fragments of it in subsequent texts and in the testimonies of Plato's students. My contention is that Plato's thinking hinges on principles that are necessarily unwritten and even unsayable: the nature of thinking, as Plato discovers and transmits it, is to be an aspiration toward a oneness that remains necessarily inarticulable. (shrink)

The text—drawing inspiration from the tale of the three waves in Plato᾿s Republic—focuses on the final journey of Odysseus, foretold by Homer’s Teiresias in the Odyssey. This journey—undertaken alone with an oar on his shoulder to a land where people know nothing of the sea—represents a stage in the path of moral maturation, essential for achieving a serene old age, concluded with a gentle death among happy people, and a fulfilled life. It symbolizes the path to a confrontation with something (...) beyond ordinary experience. Plato points to the need for a similar journey, as in the Allegory of the Cave, where the most important lessons are learned not from others but through individual effort, by turning away from what we know in everyday life. At the end of his final journey, Odysseus is to face the question of whether the oar he carries, symbolizing the hardships of his journey back from Troy to Ithaca, is in fact a winnowing fan—a farming tool used to separate the grain from the chaff. The final journey is essential to—using Plato’s language—achieving inner harmony, which is the basis of justice, a virtue Odysseus appears not to have fully attained before this journey. (shrink)

ABSTRAKT: Centralnym tematem artykułu jest pojęcie wolności, które – wespół z odpowiedzialnością – było dla Szasza pojęciem najważniejszym, „cywilizującym”. W części pierwszej przedstawiam i analizuję definicję i uwarunkowania wolności w ujęciu Szasza, w części zaś drugiej przypominam odpowiedź Szasza na fundamentalne, zawsze aktualne pytanie: „jak ocalić nie tylko religijną, lecz i medyczną wolność”? Na zakończenie staram się uwidocznić sens tytułu książki Szasza na tle jego własnych poglądów. -/- *** -/- ABSTRACT: The central topic of the article is the concept of (...) freedom, which – together with responsibility – was the most important, “civilizing” concept for Szasz. In the first part, I present and analyse the definition and conditions of freedom according to Szasz, and in the second part I recall Szasz’s answer to the fundamental, always relevant question: “how to save not only religious, but also medical freedom”? Finally, I try to highlight the meaning of the title of Szasz’s book against the background of his own views. (shrink)