The Philosophical Faculty Journal

Category: Lucas Gronouwe

  • Uses of Philosophy

    Critical and Postcritical Interventions in the Philosophical Canon

    Introduction

    This paper encourages academic philosophers in the Netherlands[1] to consider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? The answer to the first question is no longer self-evident. For the past few decades, the canons operative in the humanities have been under attack for being too male, too white, and too Western. Within the disciplines of literature (Morrissey 2005), history (Grever and Stuurman 2007), and the arts (Brzyski 2007), the self-evidence of what is read, studied and taught is a thing of the past. Philosophy forms no exception in this regard: its canon has come under increasing pressure both inside and outside academia (Dabashi 2015; Van Norden 2017; Tyson 2018). In the Netherlands, the canon debate has been given a recent impetus by the publication of a series of articles about reforming the ‘dead white males’ canon for the history of philosophy (Ierna 2020; 2021; 2022). Responses to such a reform show great division between those who defend the canon as it stands, emphasizing the value of tradition (Molenaar 2020; Drayer 2021; Dros 2022; Doorman 2022), and those who agree the philosophical canon should be more inclusive, stressing the richness of diversity (Verburgt 2021; Booy and Varekamp 2021). Meanwhile, some have drawn attention to the limits of diversification (Dhawan 2017) and have instead challenged the very idea of a canon for philosophy (Bright 2020; Ierna 2022).[2]

    To move this conversation forward, one needs to consider and respect the concerns of each of these parties. We cannot simply do away with Kant, for instance, but we cannot close our eyes to his sexism and racism either. Hence, we have to reconsider how we study and teach particular philosophers. And if we want to move beyond the canon, we also have to reevaluate why we study and teach certain texts in the first place. In the remainder of this paper, I address these two questions. First, how do we study and teach? This paper confronts three approaches that provide an answer to that question. The first is deconstruction: a way of reading initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that focusses on contradictory and marginal aspects of philosophical texts. The second is postcolonial-feminism: a critical movement within the humanities which demonstrates how the androcentric, ethnocentric, and Eurocentric biases of the philosophical tradition have led to the exclusion of various social identities. The Indian scholar Gayatri Spivak has critically adapted deconstruction for these purposes. Although both of these approaches focus on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in canonical philosophical texts, they recognize that one cannot do away with tradition: we still have to read Kant; we just have to read him in a non-traditional way. Hence in the first and second section of the paper, I provide a brief outline of what such a non-traditional way might entail.

    Deconstruction and postcolonial-feminism are confronted with a third approach, which is called ‘postcritique.’ This is both a theory and method of reading and interpretation, coined by literary  scholar Rita Felski, that opposes critical or suspicious forms of reading, and instead seeks to reveal how texts can be seen as actors which create various kinds of attachments in present-day readers.  What if we would translate this theory within the discipline of philosophy? If we would transpose Felski’s project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy? That would certainly force us to reconsider why we study and teach certain texts in the first place. In the third and final section of this paper, then, I consider alternatives for the justification criterium of canonicity, such as the capacity of philosophical texts to change how we think and feel, to enchant, shock, or intrigues us, or to assist us in addressing problems we currently care about. I conclude by discussing how these criteria might reconcile the different parties in the canon debate.

    Unity/Multiplicity: Derrida’s Deconstruction

    How do we read, study, and teach? This is the central question of this first section and the next. I have selected the work of Derrida and Spivak to provide an answer to it, as they agree with those who argue for the importance of the philosophical tradition, but problematize a traditional way of reading it. While Derrida and Spivak continue to read and interpret canonical texts, they do so in a non-traditional way, by focusing on multiplicity rather than unity (Derrida), or historical and political context rather than just philosophical arguments (Spivak). Both have worked under the flag of deconstruction.

    In the late 1960s and early 70s, Derrida (1967a) coined the term ‘deconstruction’ for his project of interrogating and problematizing Western metaphysics, insofar as it attempts to master reality by theoretical means. According to Derrida, this desire for control manifests itself in a variety of ways. One of them is to demarcate that which is allegedly ‘proper’ to philosophy, and to exclude everything beyond these self-defined limits (Derrida 1972a). Another is the search for principles and fundamentals which create order and stability (Derrida 1967b). On several occasions, Derrida (1967a; 1972a; 1984a; 2019) has remarked that the traditional way of reading and interpreting Western philosophy is directed at gathering together the unity/essence of a thinking, a single text, or an oeuvre. For him, this is yet another example of a metaphysical desire for theoretical mastery.

    Let us elucidate Derrida’s observation with an example. In each of the texts mentioned, Derrida’s standard case study is Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger has two seminal books on Nietzsche, that are definingly called ‘Nietzsche I’ (1996) and ‘Nietzsche II’ (1997), in which he presents Nietzsche as ‘the last metaphysician’, because, arguably, in the end Nietzsche develops a metaphysics of will to power. Derrida argues, in turn, that this interpretation of Nietzsche is guided by a ‘unifying’ tendency: what Heidegger tries to do, is to read Nietzsche in such way that in the end, everything he says can be reduced to one great thought, which is that of the will to power, or that of the eternal return—for Heidegger these are different expressions of the same thought. It is in this move, in this strategy of reading that tries to find the unity of a thought, that Derrida takes Heidegger to exemplify a desire for mastery and control, which he also refers to as logocentrism (1967a; 1984a; 2019).

    It seems to me that this way of reading is still very much present within our current academic milieu. Take, for instance, a standard introductory course to Plato. Usually, this starts with a short biographical sketch of Plato’s life, and then turns to what is considered to be the guiding thread throughout Plato’s work, viz. his theory of ideas. Subsequently, some specific sections of Plato’s dialogues are selected to be studied by students, in which this theory of ideas is particularly well-illustrated (e.g., the allegory of the cave from the Republic, and the passages about the ‘ladder of love’ from the Symposium). Will we find something in these dialogues, then, that might contradict the previously established unity of Plato’s thought? It seems to me that we will likely find this ‘essence’ reflected in the dialogues—from which it was assembled or gathered in the first place. What if we would start from the heterogeneity of the Platonic dialogues instead (e.g., confronting parts of the Republic with parts of the Parmenides, where Plato, by voice of Socrates, undermines his ‘own’ theory of ideas), and then seek to determine Plato’s relationship to the theory of forms?

    In my view, deconstruction can best be understood as a strategy of reading and interpretation that challenges this hermeneutic practice of gathering together the heterogenous elements of a single text or entire oeuvre into a coherent totality. In his seminal reading of Plato, for example, Derrida (1972b) has attempted to demonstrate how Plato’s dialogues structurally undermine ‘Platonism’, understood as a hierarchical system of divisions between ideas and representations, philosophers and sophists, body and soul, etc. Moreover, throughout his career, Derrida (1967a; 1984a; 1984b; 1994; 2019) has continued to contrast his own readings of Nietzsche, that highlight the multiplicity of positions, names and voices inhabiting Nietzsche’s works, with those of Heidegger. In a similar deconstructive spirit, Derrida has shown Freud’s corpus to be replete with contradictions and has drawn attention to the multiplicity of heirs claiming the name and heritage of ‘Marx’ (see Derrida 1993; 1997; 2002). What connects these and other cases is deconstruction’s focus on the written philosophical inheritance, where it discovers tensions, unthoughts, and above all, a multiplicity of voices that resists homogenization. In fact, this heterogeneity at the level of written texts is what animates all debates on questions of interpretation amongst philosophers—which means that as long as a unifying tendency within research and education prevails, the philosophical community structurally undermines its own conditions of possibility.

    Exclusion/Inclusion: Spivak’s Postcolonial-Feminism

    Let us turn to the second approach; a second answer to how we might study and teach. It is only after deconstruction has reoriented our attention towards the internal logic of texts, that particular philosophers may be problematized for the sexist, racist and/or imperialist gestures accompanying their writings, and that othertexts may be read. Now this two-sided project, I would argue, has defined feminist and postcolonial approaches to the philosophical canon. Since both sides of this project can be found in the work of the Indian literary scholar Gayatri Spivak, I would like to dwell on it for a moment. In the wake of deconstruction in the 1980s and 90s, Spivak has exposed dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in the relationship between the European tradition on the one hand and what she calls the ‘subaltern’ on the other. The subaltern is a concept borrowed from the Italian neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci to designate what Gramsci (2014) called ‘social groups in the margins of history’ (Spivak 2021), which can qualified in a variety of ways. From a feminist and postcolonial perspective, Spivak (1988; 1999) has shown how the androcentric, Eurocentric, and ethnocentric biases of the philosophical tradition continue to silence the subaltern. This tradition has systematically denied the Other the position of speaking subject, Spivak argues, and her texts are dedicated to finding ways for the subaltern to speak—and to be heard, for example in contexts of education (Spivak 2009; 2012) and translation (Spivak 2022).

    Actually, Spivak first made a name for herself by a now widely celebrated translation of Derrida’s Grammatology (1967a) into English, to which she added a long and influential preface. In fact, I would say that the profound influence of deconstruction on Spivak’s postcolonial-feminist project can hardly be overestimated. Derrida, for instance, is the only contemporary French intellectual that comes of relatively unscathed in Spivak’s (1988) seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in contrast to Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. Moreover, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 1999), references to Derrida and deconstruction are paramount, both in the main text and its footnotes. The book also contains an appendix titled ‘The Setting to Work of Deconstruction’, in which Spivak attempts to reconstruct the development of deconstruction throughout Derrida’s works. Now since Spivak is explicitly engaged with canonical philosophical texts in the first part of this book (definingly called ‘Philosophy’), it will be my focus in the remainder of this section.

    Let us return to our guiding question: how do we study and teach? The dominant reading of the history of philosophy is, arguably, one that dismisses signs of sexism, racism, and/or imperialism as somehow unimportant, inessential, or marginal. Usually, we bracket the historical and textual context of certain philosophical ideas, in order to focus instead on certain arguments we deem important to write about or teach students about (Krogh 2022). Some have called this the ‘streamlined version of the history of philosophy’, where the proper name of a philosopher is taken to be a placeholder not for what they actually wrote, but for what are deemed to be their best ideas or arguments (Bernasconi 2003). Spivak (1999) does something very different. Setting deconstruction to work in Kant’s third critique, she demonstrates how Kant’s system claims to be universal, but is actually founded on the exclusion of specific indigenous peoples. What Spivak’s reading attempts to show, are precisely the historical and political conditions of possibility for Kant’s claims to universality, as well as the ‘philosophical’ positions that contain what she calls an ‘axiomatics of imperialism’. When Kant claims that the existence of certain inhabitants of South-America and Australia is less natural than others, as he does, then this might serve as a legitimation for colonial subjugation.

    Subsequently, Spivak (1999) offers us a parallel reading of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics on the one hand, and the Bhagavad Gita on the other, in which she seeks to supplement Hegel’s reading of the Hindu scripture with her own deconstructive one. This is already a remarkable intercultural dialogue in itself, but Spivak’s aim is to show that whilst Hegel invokes the Gita to exclude India from the teleological dialectics of history, the Gita itself contains dialectical elements which can be manipulated for nationalist and/or colonial purposes. Finally, then, Spivak turns to the afterlife of a notorious statement by Marx on ‘the Asiatic Mode of Production’, in order to render visible how Marx, along similar lines as Hegel, excludes Asia from his historical materialism. Since Asia does not have the capitalist system, so Marx’s reasoning goes, it cannot take part in the revolution and attain a state of freedom. According to Spivak (1999), this is also the kind of reasoning used to legitimate imperialist intervention in Third-World countries. In each of these readings, Spivak demonstrates how the philosophical theories of Kant, Hegel, and Marx are inextricably connected to the prejudices of their time, which, via these canonical texts, continue to influence the present.

    To recall, I have selected these two authors—Derrida and Spivak—because they agree with those that argue for the inescapability and importance of tradition, but at the same time, they recognize the feminist and postcolonial concerns of those that have problematized the canon, and rightly so. What both Derrida and Spivak oppose is a traditional reading of the history of Western philosophy that starts from the putative unity and neutrality of the works of canonical authors. And what they oppose to it, is a deconstructive approach to what we read, study and teach. I am not arguing that we all have to become deconstructivists—in the next section I will explain why not. My point is rather that when we want to reconsider the question of how we study and teach, the work of Derrida and Spivak provides us with valuable, if not indispensable, resources.

    Critique/Postcritique: Felski’s Postcritique  

    The attentive reader may have noticed that I announced I will confront three approaches that provide an answer to the question ‘how do we study and teach?’. This third approach is called ‘postcritique’. Within the field of literary and cultural studies—if not the humanities in general—the past decade is marked by an attempt to develop approaches to cultural objects that move beyond the dominance of ‘critique’ in its various manifestations. Within this context, Felski (2015) has recently coined the term ‘postcritique’ as an alternative for the omnipresent method and style she calls—drawing on Paul Ricœur—a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Felski joins two highly influential essays here—‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (2003) by queer theorist Eve K. Sedgwick and ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ (2004) by philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour —in challenging the hegemony of interpretative approaches that start from suspicion and critique.

    In this endeavor, deconstruction is criticized for its emphasis on contradictions, instabilities, and foreclosures, as well as for its excessive vigilance and abundant use of scare quotes (Felski 2011; 2015; Anker and Felski 2017). Meanwhile, postcolonial-feminism is taken to task for its focus on ideological oppression and social inequalities, and for its persistent wariness of the reader’s own complicity (Felski 2008; 2015; Anker and Felski 2017). This position is all the more remarkable, considering the fact that Felski’s first books are all contributions to feminist theory. Nevertheless, Felski renounces feminist critique no less than deconstructive and postcolonial critique, because of their investment in denaturalization, their outright negativity, and their attitude of analytical detachment (Felski 2008; 2011; Anker and Felski 2017).

    Yet, one might question whether this characterization is appropriate. Indeed, Derrida and Spivak are focused on destabilizing and denaturalizing, but both have resisted the idea that their approach would be negative (Derrida 1992; 2005; Spivak 2014). In fact, present-day critics have suggested that Felski’s postcritique may be based on caricatures (Robbins 2017). Conversely, one could ask whether postcritique could be regarded as a hermeneutics of trust? These doubts might compel us to consider what method or style—critical or postcritical—would be best suited to approach texts within and beyond the philosophical canon. Needless to say, critical readinghas yielded valuable results, also—or perhaps especially so—in postcolonial-feminist contexts, and it will maintain its relevance for the decades to come. But when it comes to reading texts from a diversity of authors and traditions, a largely critical or suspicious interpretative attitude seems to be less appropriate.

    Besides a vigorous debunking of critique, Felski’s recent writings (from 2008 up until the present) are marked by a rather constructive spirit that tries to develop new forms of aesthetic engagement. From Latour (2007), Felski takes the insight that texts have agency: they are actors that can make an impact on the world by making connections, just like humans, animals, or things can (Felski 2011; 2015; 2020). It is because texts, like all artworks, are actors, that they can affect us and create various forms of attachment: they can move us to act in a certain way, make us feel a wide range of emotions, and change our ways of looking at the world (Felski 2008; 2011; 2015; 2020; Felski and Anker 2017). From the methods of Actor-Network Theory and phenomenology, Felski derives the inducement to describe these experiences, giving rise to novel ways of reading that take texts to be co-actors rather than reducing them to something they supposedly express. In fact, Felski replaces the explanation of texts or other works of art with an effort to describewhat she calls the ‘uses’ of literature (Felski 2008) and art more generally (Felski 2020). The guiding question of her postcritical project is thus not what works of literature/art mean, but what they do.

    What if we would translate Felski’s theory within the discipline of philosophy? What if we would transpose her project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy? That would certainly force us to reconsider why we study and teach certain texts in the first place—which is my third, and last question. Usually, answers to this question resort to arguments of canonicity, whether in the form of historical influence (we read Plato because, as Whitehead famously said, the European philosophical tradition is nothing but ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’), or philosophical quality (we read Ryle and Wittgenstein because they proposed such innovative arguments). But could we not also provide justification criteria for our selection of texts without recourse to what Felski (2008) calls ‘the canon-worship of the past’? Such criteria would depart from the relevance of particular philosophical texts for the present-day reader rather than their canonicity. As Felski (2011; 2015) remarks, this would involve a rethinking of the relationship between past and present: we would no longer read texts because they belong to a certain historical period or context (such as ‘modern philosophy’ or ‘German idealism’), but because they appeal to us in the present, as they somehow affectively or cognitively transform us or assist us in addressing questions we currently care about.

    Conclusion

    The goal of this paper has been to invite academic philosophers in the Netherlands to reconsider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? I used the first question as an entry into the current debate about the canons within the humanities, and the philosophical canon in particular. In the past decades, the body of literature, philosophy, and works of art known as the Western canon has come under increasing pressure for being dominated by white male viewpoints. In the Netherlands, the canon debate has been given a recent impetus by the publication of a series of articles about reforming this ‘dead white males’ canon for the history of philosophy. I observed that responses to such a reform show great division between those who defend the canon as it stands, stressing the value of tradition, those who agree the philosophical canon should be more inclusive, stressing the richness of diversity, and finally those who have challenged the very idea of a canon for philosophy.

    To answer my second question (how do we study and teach?), I turned to Derrida’s deconstruction and Spivak’s postcolonial-feminism, because they share both a sense of the value of tradition, and a sense for the concerns of those who have criticized this tradition for its limitations and biases. I have argued that Derrida and Spivak both oppose a traditional reading of the history of Western philosophy that starts from the alleged unity and neutrality of canonical philosophical texts. What they oppose to it, is a deconstructive approach to what we read, study and teach, which highlights a multiplicity of voices rather than a unity of thought, and historical and political context rather than merely arguments. Felski’s postcritique then enabled us to reflect on the hegemony of interpretative approaches that start from suspicion or critique, like the deconstructive ones practiced by both Derrida and Spivak.  I briefly discussed Felski’s own approach to literature and art, which starts from the idea that texts have agency and can create various kinds of attachments in present-day readers, to subsequently describe these readerly experiences or ‘uses’ of literature.

    Now, if we want to move beyond the canon, we must not only reconsider what and how we read, but also why we read, study and teach certain philosophical texts in the first place—my third and last question. I argued that by transposing Felski’s project from the uses of literature to the uses of philosophy, we may be able to develop new justification criteria for the selection of texts within research and education. These criteria would depart from the relevance of particular philosophical texts for the present-day reader rather than their canonicity. In some sense, this changes nothing: we can still read texts by authors that are part of the current canon, as long as we can justify their contemporary relevance, thus accommodating those that seek to defend the canon as it stands. In another sense, it changes everything: we are now unshackled from tradition, which allows for the inclusion of forgotten thinkers by making a case for the value of their work—thus accommodating those that emphasize the richness of diversity. To see how this might work, let me conclude this paper with two examples.

    Returning to my initial question (what do we study and teach?): we might study and teach on the relationship between the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Franz Fanon; not because de Beauvoir is a woman, and Fanon is a person of color, but because each of them makes us think and feel in a different way. And if we want to teach a course on power, exclusion, and civilization, we probably do well to discuss Foucault, but we might just as well discuss Aimé and Suzanne Césaire; not for political reasons, but for hermeneutical ones, if you will; because their work can enchant, shock, or hook us—to use some Felskian terms. What I am looking for here, is a justification criterium that is neither founded on canonicity, nor on mere representation, but one that is founded on agency and attachment, or ‘use’. The value of philosophy, I would argue, lies at least in part in its uses—which are vital, but understudied. My hope is that transposing Felski’s project within philosophy enables us to fill this lacuna, since it may very well be a path on the way to reconcile the opposing parties in the canon debate.

    [1] Since this paper was first presented at the 2023 annual conference of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy, its primary target audience is academic philosophers in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the issues it addresses extend beyond these institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

    [2] Although these sources are in Dutch, they are not necessary to make this point: one can find more or less the same positions in the books quoted earlier (or in staff meetings about curriculum reform, for that matter): there are always those who urge for a diversity of perspectives and those who argue for the relevance or the quality of the current canon.

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    Spivak, Gayatri C. 2021. “How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today.” Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 1 (1): 19-29. https://doi.org/10.2021/ju.v1i1.2309.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 2022. Living Translation, ed. Emily Apter, Avishek Ganguly, and Mauro Pala. London/Calcutta: Seagull Books.

    Tyson, Sarah. 2018. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Verburgt, Lukas M. 2021. “Opinie: Elma Drayer wringt zich in rare bochten bij de herziening van de filosofiecanon.” De Volkskrant, August 18. https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-elma-drayer-wringt-zich-in-rare-bochten-bij-de-herziening-van-de-filosofiecanon~b3b48e33/.

  • Uses of Dialogue; or, Why We Love Plato

    The author would like to thank Kyrke Otto and the Splijtstof editorial team for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

    Why do we love Plato? To the historian of philosophy, this must come across as a strange, if not out-of-place question. Not because he or she would necessarily deny its premise, but because our affective ties to the works of Plato are considered to be a private rather than a professional affair. Let us therefore slightly displace the question: why, after almost twenty-five centuries, do we still read Plato? Why is he still so prominent in philosophical research and study programs? Responses to such questions generally resort to one of two arguments, or a combination of those:

    (1) We still read Plato because of the decisive theoretical and methodological mark he left on the further course of the history of philosophy. As The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has it: ‘‘Plato […] is, by any reckoning […] one of the most […] influential authors in the history of philosophy’’ (Kraut 2022). In every historical period, philosophers have deemed Plato to be a valuable or even indispensable interlocutor. And as the Encyclopaedia Britannica endorses: Plato is ‘‘best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence’’ (Meinwald 2023). I will call this the historical resonance account. It is exemplified by Whitehead’s renowned witticism that ‘‘the European philosophical tradition […] consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’’ (Whitehead 1978, 39).

    (2) We still read Plato because his arguments remain an indispensable point of reference in contemporary discourse. This rationale is illustrated by the effort of ancient philosophy scholars to reinsert and reevaluate Plato’s arguments in new contexts (such as his arguments against democracy in the context of political epistemology [Nawar 2023]). I will call this the argumentative touchstone account. The aim of this paper, then, is twofold: first, to demonstrate that both of these accounts are reductionistic; and second, to develop a more comprehensive justification for why we still read Plato’s dialogues today.

    Such a comprehensive account is warranted because the present-day significance of Plato extends far beyond his historical importance and the relevance of his arguments. Departing from such theoretical accounts, I will turn to the work of literary scholar Rita Felski to sketch the contours of an aesthetic rather than theoretical account of why we still read Plato today: an account that revives the literary character of the Platonic dialogues so often neglected in philosophy. Felski’s work is well suited for such a task, since her intellectual project may be described as an attempt to supplement the detachment of academic practices of interpretation with the attachment characterizing our ordinary engagement with texts and other artworks (see e.g. Felski 2008; 2020). In remainder of this paper, I will employ parts of this project to argue that both the historical resonance account (§1) and the argumentative touchstone account (§2) fail to do justice to the rich aesthetic experience reading Plato is. Subsequently, I take inspiration from Felski’s theory of attachment to highlight some of the affective responses involved in the encounter with Plato’s dialogues (§3).

    This paper is one of the first to transpose Felski’s efforts within the domain of philosophy. My hypothesis is that Plato is perhaps one of the best authors for doing so, since, as Vittorio Hösle remarks, his dialogues constitute a bridge between literary studies and philosophy in that the philosophical dialogue is, after all, a literary genre (Hösle 2012, xv-xvi). I will engage more extensively with Hösle’s study of the Platonic dialogues later. For now, I would like to warn the reader that this paper is not about interpreting the dialogues of Plato. Rather, it is about describing what these dialogues do (i.e. what responses they incite in the reader) and why they matter. Since Felski initially captured her project under the heading Uses of Literature, I have called the project initiated in this paper Uses of Dialogue.

    §1. From Historical Resonance to Present-Day Relevance

    That Plato is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy is undeniable. In nearly every period, from ancient to contemporary philosophy, his works gained traction as objects of inspiration, critique, commentary, exegesis, parody, deconstruction, and so on. Nevertheless, as an explanation for why we still read Plato today, such a historical resonance account is insufficient, because it relies on a narrow concept of history. In this section, I will argue for this claim by drawing on Felski’s article “Context Stinks!”, that tries to break the spell of the text/context distinction she believes is holding literary studies captive. My focus, however, will be on another central distinction in this text: the one between past and present.

    Within philosophy programs, students’ first systematic encounter with Plato often takes place in a course on the history of ancient philosophy. The founding father of philosophy is situated in ancient Greece, alongside Socrates, Aristotle, the Athenian agora and democracy, the Peloponnesian War and the Greek pantheon at Mount Olympus. This is to say that Plato is located in his historical context, which is in many respects utterly different from our times. Literary scholar Wai Chee Dimock calls this phenomenon “synchronic historicism,” since a text and its meaning are deemed to be coextensive with their original context of production. “The object of inquiry is dated,” Dimock (1997, 1061) writes. “Its reference points are events that began and ended in its original context.’’ According to Felski, such a model of history takes context to be “a kind of box or container in which individual texts are encased and held fast” (Felski 2011, 577).

    However, the historical resonance account goes beyond synchronic historicism, because it draws our attention to the fact that Plato’s ideas crossed the borders of ancient philosophy to resonate in other historical periods. This is reflected institutionally in that the name Plato often resurfaces in both historical and systematic philosophy courses in the wake of ancient philosophy. In this sense, the historical resonance account comes close to what Dimock calls “diachronic historicism,” which depicts texts as time travelers that speak differently to new historical audiences (cf. Dimock 1997, 1061ff). On this account, however, history is still perceived as a “vertical pile of neatly stacked boxes” (Felski 2011, 577) we tend to refer to as the past in contradistinction with the present.

    Having arrived at this point, we begin to see in what sense the historical resonance account is reductionistic. Although it can very well explain the relevance of Plato for understanding the history of philosophy, it is hard-pressed to give an account of how Plato is able to create attachments in the present. With its gaze turned towards to the past, the historical resonance account fails to provide an answer to questions related to the present-day relevance of texts:

    Why has this work been chosen for interpretation? How does it speak to me now? What is its value in the present? To focus only on a work’s origins is to side-step the question of its appeal to the present-day reader. It is, in a Nietzschean sense, to use history as an alibi, a way of circumventing the question of one’s own attachments, investments, and vulnerabilities as a reader (Felski 2008, 10).

    Note that Felski does not consider history unimportant. The historical resonance account is not wrong, but incomplete, in so far as it evades “the question of why past texts still matter and how they speak to us now” (Felski 2011, 577). Hence, it cannot fully account for why we read Plato today.

    In addition to its focus on present relevance rather than past resonance, Felski’s theory is also better equipped to explain Plato’s present-day appeal because of its concept of agency. The historical resonance account downgrades the agency of a text in favor of the explanatory power of context:[1] the reception of Plato in the middle ages, for example, is often explained by reference to the theological concerns that were central to the time, rather than the ability of Plato’s dialogues to elicit emotions and affections. In Felski’s account, the center of gravity is shifted to the agency or power of texts. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory – originally developed as a methodology for social science studies –, Felski proposes to see texts as non-human actors rather than as objects to be explained (cf. Felski 2011, 582ff). This revaluation of agency then allows Felski to explain why some texts survive, and others disappear. That is, quite simply, because the former are much better at establishing connections: “Artworks can only survive and thrive,” Felski remarks, “by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts” (Felski 2011, 584). But how do Platonic dialogues do this?

    §2. From Theoretical Interpretation to Aesthetic Attachment

    How do Plato’s dialogues create attachments? What is it in these ancient works that attracts present-day readers? We have arrived at the preliminary conclusion that for answering such questions, resorting to historical resonance is insufficient, since it fails to account for Plato’s contemporary appeal. Hence, we might better focus our attention on the dialogues themselves. In this respect, the argumentative touchstone account seems to be a better candidate than the historical resonance account to explain why we still read Plato’s dialogues today. This account emphasizes that since the arguments of Plato’s Socrates are still relevant for contemporary concerns and discourses, one should definitely take note of them within philosophical research and education. In this section, I will argue that such reasoning is aesthetically reductionistic, by drawing on Felski as well as others.

    Why is the argumentative touchstone account reductionistic? First of all, because it tends to reduce Plato’s dialogues to their argumentative content. As the philosopher Lawrence M. Hinman has suggested in the 1980s, this tendency may very well be the product of the wide-spread assumption among especially analytic philosophers that “a philosopher’s style is, at best, something which obscures the structure of his arguments”. As a result, Hinman notes, some historians of philosophy tend to purify a philosopher’s oeuvre of its stylistic elements:

    While no one claims that Plato was writing pieces for Analysis, many read and write about him as though he were doing precisely that. In a curious version of the patchwork thesis, the dialogues come to be treated as an aggregate of three and one half page articles which were presumably gathered together for Oxford University Press (Hinman 1980, 512).[2]

    In this passage, Hinman mobilizes an equally widespread assumption among philosophers: that in isolating the argumentative content of Plato’s dialogues something essential gets lost; something which is often referred to as form, style, or more generally: poetics or aesthetics.

    Hösle provides additional support for this assumption in his juxtaposition of theoretical and aesthetic analysis. Acknowledging that the Platonic dialogues have an aesthetic quality, he counts them among a small group of “philosophical texts that must be enjoyed as works of art, that is, to which injustice is rendered if only their argumentative content is analyzed” (Hösle 2012, 2; my emphasis).[3] This group includes texts that obviously are about something, such as rhetoric or poetry, but also have a rhetoric or poetic quality themselves. Plato’s Phaedrus is a strong example of this.

    However, this is not to say that a theoretical analysis of, for example, Plato’s Phaedrus would be irrelevant. The Platonic dialogues do contain truth claims that any scholarly engagement with them should respect and account for. Hence the argumentative touchstone account is, just like the historical resonance account, not wrong, but incomplete, in that it rules out the aesthetic features of Plato’s work. Yet, these aesthetic features might not only be pivotal for explaining the present-day appeal of Plato, but also, as Hösle points out, for understanding his arguments in the first place, for example when literary devices are used to bestow certain claims with greater authority than others. Hence, the argumentative touchstone account is founded on a denial of its own conditions of possibility.

    Felski’s analyses, in turn, render the argumentative touchstone account reductionistic in yet another, and perhaps even more radical sense. By operating at the level of the encounter between reader and text rather than that of the form and/or content of the latter, they debunk academic analysis, of both a theoretical and aesthetic nature, as just one aspect of our aesthetic engagements. This insight is first articulated in Uses of Literature, where “knowledge” is only one type of textual engagement amongst many others, such as recognition, enchantment, and shock. From this perspective, the argumentative touchstone account diminishes the Platonic dialogues to a source of knowledge – something which they obviously are, but not exclusively. Now this also means that the cognitive aspects of aesthetic response are absolutized at the expense of many affective ones (cf. Felski 2020, 16, et passim). As such, Plato’s lively corpus becomes a corpse; a dead body to be dissected (Felski 2020, 152).

    However, Uses of Literature packs less of a punch than it could possibly deliver in the face of the argumentative touchstone account. This it because it fails to explain how the forms of textual engagement that it describes are connected. Hooked, Felski’s latest book, rectifies this shortcoming by revealing how interpretation and attachment, for example, are intertwined. Against the widespread view “that attachment is an obstacle to interpretation,” Felski argues that it is actually its condition of possibility: “What we choose to decipher, how we decipher it, and to what end—these decisions are driven by what we feel affinity for, what resonates. Interpreting is far from being a purely cognitive exercise” (Felski 2020, 126, 128). Affection precedes interpretation, given, of course, that one is free to choose what to read, interpret, and write about.

    In this sense, the argumentative touchstone account simply defers the question of why we still read Plato today. It emphasizes that Platonic arguments are an indispensable reference point for contemporary scholarship, but it does not explain how we are driven to these arguments and the literary worlds in which they appear in the first place. To develop a comprehensive account of why Plato is so successful in “making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts” – to reprise an earlier quote –, it seems we must turn our attention to the affective rather than cognitive aspects of our engagement with Plato.

    §3. From Authorial Intent to Readerly Response 

    In the preceding sections, I argued that both (1) the historical resonance account and (2) the argumentative touchstone account are reductionistic. Indeed, Plato is markedly influential in the history of philosophy, but what about his present-day appeal? Sure, Plato’s dialogues give us much to interpret, “but what about love?”, we might ask. “Or: “Where is your theory of attachment?” (Felski 2015, 17).[4] The upshot of our inquiry up to now has been that understanding Plato’s appeal requires an analysis of the affective responses involved in reading his dialogues. In this section, I will take a first step in this direction, by drawing on Hösle’s aesthetic analysis of the Platonic dialogues to elicit and explain such readerly responses. My hypothesis is that it is because of its literary qualities – use of characters, setting, style, etc. – that Plato’s oeuvre is so successful in creating attachments in present-day readers, and academics in particular. 

    First of all, what is attachment? Felski provides a bridge between the previous section and this one when she connects the supposed detachment of the academic world with a definition of attachment. “In its most obvious sense,” Felski writes, “attachment denotes an emotional tie: whether passions and obsessions or low-key moods and lukewarm likes.” A little later, she adds: “Against the usual portrayal of academia as an affect-free zone, I would venture that affective ties are often stronger in academia than elsewhere” (Felski 2020, 28). Against this background, let us now consider the case of Hösle’s study of the Platonic dialogues in a little more detail, since he holds an ambivalent position with regard to the affective power of Plato’s writings.

    In his capacity as reader, Hösle is clearly affected, inspired, or energized by the dialogues of Plato. He uses words like “overwhelming,” “fascinating,” and “astonishing,” to describe the experience of reading Plato, which seem to designate not just a cognitive tie, but also an emotional or affective one. And Hösle makes no secret of his appreciation of Plato when he writes about the Charmides and Euthydemus that “they are so perfect that one is sometimes astonished that a human being was able to compose them” (Hösle 2012, 432). However, in his capacity as a scholar, Hösle does not account for this aesthetic experience. Most of the book is devoted to a formal analysis of the dialogues and their relation to the intentions of the composer (Plato). Thus, it treats the relation between the dialogues and their effect on the reader only indirectly, while from a Felskian perspective, affective readerly responses trigger such formal analyses of authorial intent in the first place: they are its unacknowledged condition of possibility.

    It is about time, then, that we shift the center of gravity from authorial intent to readerly response; from aesthetic qualities to aesthetic experience. In doing so, we must not dwell on the cognitive dimensions of this experience. Admittedly, Plato’s dialogues incite us to think; they provide us with an indispensable philosophical vocabulary, but they also make us feel; they speak to our senses. Therefore, a comprehensive account of why we still read Plato today should “begin to engage the affective and absorptive, the sensuous and somatic qualities of aesthetic experience” (Felski 2011, 76). In the remainder of this section, I will therefore single out three types of textual engagement with Plato, combining the work of Hösle and Felski: (1) identification, (2) enchantment, and (3) shock. We might also call these aesthetic responses uses of dialogue.[5]

    (1) Plato’s dialogues enable readers to identify with its characters. Though many of Plato’s characters were real historical persons, their realism is not a precondition for identification. “The draw of character,” Felski (2020, 80) notes, “has far less to do with realism than with qualities of vividness and distinctiveness,” and Plato is very good at staging both vivid and distinctive characters. Consider, for example, the speakers in Plato’s Symposium: Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades. Each of them gives not just a distinctive speech about eros, but also has some character quirks of its own: standing still at random times (Socrates), being a weak (Eryximachus) or a strong drinker (Aristophanes), hitting on Socrates (Alcibiades), etc. It is precisely because of such literary descriptions that Plato’s writings are able to forge affective ties, from scholars identifying with Socrates’ lofty philosophical character to feeling compassion for Phaedo, Crito, or Apollodorus, when they are unable to restrain their tears at the moment this same character is forced to drink his cup of poison. Yet another example would be the famous part of the Meno where Socrates guides an enslaved boy in solving a geometry problem to show that learning is merely recollection. Socrates’ step-by-step instruction invites the reader to identify with this enslaved boy, thus making it easier to be convinced by Plato’s arguments for the immortality of the soul. Plato’s use of the literary genre of the philosophical dialogue is indispensable for rendering such forms of identification possible. While in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (and many other works of philosophy for that matter), there is little to identify with, Plato’s dialogues offer a wide range of possibilities for identification.

    (2) Plato’s dialogues also have a distinctive capacity to enchant their readers. “Immersed in the virtual reality of a fictional text, a reader feels herself to be transported, caught up, or swept away” (Felski 2011, 34-5). In just a few paragraphs, Plato takes us to the Greek wrestling school (Lysis), Socrates’ death cell (Phaedo), the Athenian countryside (Phaedrus), or a formal drinking party (Symposium), offering us – for the time of reading – an escape to another world. Noteworthy, too, is the setting of the Laws, where the dialogue takes place during a pilgrimage from the city of Knossos to the temple of Zeus on Mount Ida, and that of the Protagoras. Before going to the home of Callias, where the great sophist Protagoras is staying, Socrates first needs to calm down his younger friend Hippocrates, who knocked on his door in the middle of the night to go and see Protagoras. During this initial discussion, it is difficult not to be affected by Hippocrates’ excessive excitement about Protagoras being in town. Interestingly enough, Hösle often invokes this “use” of the Platonic dialogues, such as when he remarks, though in passing, that Plato’s Symposium “still enchants us almost 2,400 years later” (Hösle 2012, 461). Another example can be found in his discussion of the Phaedrus in the chapter devoted to “The Space of Conversation.” In this dialogue, Hösle (2012) claims – again in passing –, “Plato offers one of the most enchanting descriptions of a landscape in all of Greek literature, which appeals in a few lines to the senses of sight, smell, taste, and hearing” (224). Here, it is Plato’s use of setting, which is a stylistic or literary device, that evokes the (sensuous) readerly response of enchantment.

    (3) Plato’s dialogues, however, can also trigger aesthetic responses that are less pleasant: they can disturb or even shock us. Such responses can result from the extremity of positions defended by some of Plato’s characters, such as Thrasymachus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias, who forcefully argue for the reason of the strongest. Or, they may be triggered by certain performative contradictions, such as when Socrates condemns writing at the end of the Phaedrus, while the reader has approximately 35 dialogues at their disposal that were written by Plato. Furthermore, disturbance or shock can also be the result of a clash between our current ethical milieu and the one in which the dialogue we are reading is embedded. Examples that come to mind are the references to enslaved people in Plato’s dialogues, and his treatment of the task and place of woman in the Republic, where Plato’s Socrates argues that they must be the joint property of the guardians (not to mention Socrates’ ideas about state-regulated human reproduction). Yet, as Hösle remarks, Plato’s position as an author may very well be ambiguous in such cases, as an initial disturbance or shock can be followed by a moment of critical reflection. “Plato doubtless considered the institution of slavery justified,” he writes, “but by showing that the slave in the Meno is capable of anamnesis, he unintentionally forces the reflective reader to ask why some people may be held as slaves, even if their intellectual gifts are not essentially different from those of free persons” (Hösle 2012, 461). This is an excellent example of how affective and cognitive responses; feeling and thought can become intertwined in the aesthetic experience of reading Plato’s dialogues.

    In fact, Felski is well-aware that neatly separating different aesthetic responses or textual engagements fails to do justice to their relatedness and complexity. “I venture that aesthetic value is inseparable from use,” she notes at the beginning of Uses of Literature, “but also that
    our engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often unpredictable in kind” (Felski 2011, 8). The three responses I discussed should therefore be elaborated and expanded upon, in order to provide a more comprehensive account of how Plato captures, enchants, shocks, interests, entertains, arouses, surprises, moves, and obsesses us – or at least many of us.

    Conclusion

    In this paper, I have mobilized the work of literary scholar Rita Felski to argue that both the historical resonance account and the argumentative touchstone account are deficient in their answer to the question why we still read Plato today. Furthermore, I have developed a more comprehensive justification for why Plato features so prominently in philosophical research and study programs. According to the historical resonance account, we still read Plato today because of the decisive mark he left on the further course of the history of philosophy. This answer is reductionistic, in that it fails to account for why Plato appeals to us in the present.

    According to the argumentative touchstone account, we continue to study Plato because his

    arguments remain for us an indispensable point of reference. This response is reductionistic as well, in at least two respects. First, in that it reduces the dialogues to their argumentative content, thus leaving their aesthetic features and appeal unaccounted for. Second, in that it reduces our textual engagement with Plato’s dialogues to one of theoretical interpretation. Hence, it fails to account for our affective rather than cognitive ties to the writings of Plato.

    Vittorio Hösle’s study of the literary genre of the philosophical dialogue turned out to be a necessary, but insufficient condition for explaining Plato’s present-day appeal. Necessary, because he goes beyond the historical resonance account and the argumentative touchstone account in focusing on the form rather than the content of the Platonic dialogues. Insufficient, because he connects the aesthetic features of the dialogues solely to authorial intent. That is, according to Hösle, we still read Plato today because he is such a magnificent writer. In the end, this answer is reductionistic as well, because it fails to account for the relation between the literary character of Plato’s work and the affective responses it triggers in the reader. My hypothesis was that it is because of its literary qualities – use of characters, setting, style, etc. – that Plato’s oeuvre is so successful in creating various attachments in present-day readers.

    To put this hypothesis to the test, I isolated three uses of dialogue; three aesthetic responses involved in reading Plato’s dialogues: identification, enchantment, and shock. Establishing a connection between the aesthetic value of the dialogues and their use, I argued, is the first step towards a more comprehensive account of why we still read Plato today. The Felskian perspective I adopted in this paper allows us to see that Plato’s present-day appeal does not lie in his historical importance or the contemporary relevance of his arguments. Rather, it lies in the fact that we can identify with Plato’s characters; that we can become enchanted by the settings of Plato’s dialogues; and that we can be shocked by the customs and values we encounter there. We still read Plato today because of the affective and absorptive experience he provides us.

    In fact, a Felskian account is preferable, because it can incorporate the historical resonance account and the argumentative touchstone account, whilst having an additional advantage. First, it can incorporate and explain Plato’s transgression of temporal boundaries, by means of its methodological embracement of Actor-Network Theory, and its attribution of agency to texts in particular. That Plato has been markedly influential in the history of philosophy,  is – from Felski’s point of view – because his dialogues have a distinctive capacity to attach themselves to other actors, such as readers and writers, copyists and publishers, translators and parodists. Second, a Felskian reply is able to incorporate and explain the argumentative touchstone account, by acknowledging that theoretical interpretation is one of our textual engagements with Plato, alongside many others. However, it also draws our attention to the affective ties underlying such analyses: that we continue to refer to Plato’s arguments, we might say, has much to do with the literary worlds in which they appear.

    Besides its explanatory potential, a Felskian account also has an additional advantage, in that it enables us to answer the question with which we started this paper. Why do we love Plato? The historical resonance- and argumentative touchstone account are hard-pressed to provide an answer to such a question, consequently rendering the question itself misplaced. From a Felskian perspective, however, this question is only logical, while its answer is easy: we do not love Plato because of his influence or his arguments, but because of his vivid and distinctive characters with which we can identify. We love Plato, because his dialogues offer us an escape from our everyday reality and an acquaintance with a long-gone past. We love Plato, because after almost 2,400 years, his works have lost none of their capacity to enchant, amuse, disturb, or shock us. We love Plato, because his use of stylistic devices still hooks us.

    In short, Plato’s dialogues deserve to be studied and taught, not because of their canonical status, but because they make us think and feel differently; because they cause perceptual changes and elicit our emotions; because they create affective ties and incite attachments. Their value lies not just their content or form, I contend, but also in their use – which is vital but understudied. My hope is that transposing Felski’s project within philosophy enables us to fill this lacuna.

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    [1] Felski (2011) levels this critique against ‘‘Birmingham-style cultural studies and its model of articulation theory’’ (581), but I believe it can be applied to the historical resonance account as well.

    [2] The ‘patchwork thesis’ is the idea in Kant-scholarship that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can be seen as a ‘patchwork’ of his earlier, pre-critical writings.

    [3] See for this point, which is elaborated in the next paragraph, also Chapter 3: ‘‘On the Relationship between Form and Content in the Philosophical Dialogue,’’ especially 51ff.

    [4] Felski raises these questions in the context of her polemic against engagements with literature that focus on ‘‘agon (conflict and domination) at the expense of eros (love and connection),’’ such as, for example, postcolonial-feminist critics. Here, I oppose them to the supposed detachment of interpretation.

    [5] ‘‘Use’’ should be understood here in a broad sense, as having to do with the value of, in this case, philosophical dialogues for individual readers (which is my focus here) or society as a whole. Cf. Felski (2011), 7-8.