Harold Cherniss and the Study of Plato Today

Lloyd P. Gerson
There are, very broadly speaking, two interpretative approaches to the study of Plato. Let
us call the first the Protestant approach and the second the Catholic approach. According to
the first, the fundamental principle of interpretation is sola scriptura, adherence to the texts of
the dialogues as the only vehicle providing access to Platos philosophy. On this approach,
putative evidence for Platos thinking drawn from Academic testimony or the indirect tradition is
to be either excluded altogether or, if given any evidentiary value, is strictly subordinate to the
control of the dialogues. Thus, the contents of the dialogues always trump testimony.
According to the second approach, the dialogues are only one means, albeit perhaps the best
means available to us, for access to Platos philosophy. That is, the dialogues are not the
ultimate authority for Platos meaning. It is the Platonic tradition, beginning with the firstgeneration members of the Academy, that provides significant, although not unimpeachable,
control for understanding what is in the dialogues. 1 In cases where the tradition and the
dialogues stand in direct conflict, some further principle or principles must be adduced to resolve
that conflict. The most important witness that the Catholics have on their side is Aristotle. His
testimony regarding Platos philosophy is extensive; his criticisms, based on his understanding of
that philosophy, are penetrating and unrelenting. Aristotle is by no means the only witness. He
is, though, the key witness. For the tradition that constitutes the backbone of the Catholic
position relies heavily on Aristotles testimony. In particular, Aristotle testifies that Plato
reduced Forms to Numbers and that these Form-Numbers, as they are usually called, are
themselves not ultimate metaphysical principles. Rather, they are themselves derived or in some
sense generated from two ultimate principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad (or the Great and
Small), the former of which is itself identified with the Idea of the Good, the superordinate first
principle of all in Platos Republic (509B). And though this dialogue seems fairly clear that the
Idea of the Good has this pivotal role, it is far from clear in Republic or in any other dialogue that
this Idea was identified by Plato with something called the One or that, in addition to the One,
Plato posited another principle prior to any Forms and named the Indefinite Dyad, vel sim.
The Protestant approach rejects this testimony on the grounds that the dialogues
themselves do not confirm it. But this puts the matter a bit too starkly. For there is, of course,
much testimony in Aristotles works that is confirmed by the dialogues and nothing in the
dialogues that contradicts that testimony in regard to the first principles, although this fact is
seldom noticed. So, an obvious question in the face of this Protestant rejection is: why accept
some testimony and not all of it, particularly since Aristotle nowhere distinguishes either
between testimony based on the dialogues and testimony that is, shall we say, conjectural or
speculative. One strategy for answering this question is to suggest that the Form-Numbers and
1

If I may expand a bit on my analogy with a telling anecdote. The great Swiss classical scholar and one of the most
learned men of his time, Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), was a Huguenot, a French Protestant. All intellectual
Catholic Europe prayed for his conversion and all Protestants exulted in his resistance to intellectual and even
financial pressure. Casaubons wide interests included the Greek Church Fathers, the tradition in my analogy.
When word got out that Casaubon was devoting himself intensely to the philological and theological study of these
texts, Catholics rejoiced in their surmise that Casaubons conversion must be imminent, for anyone who would
willingly go beyond Scripture to explore the meaning of the Christian faith would sooner or later rejoin the one true
Church. In fact, that conversion never materialized. But his willingness even to consider the insufficiency of the
sola scriptura principle provided considerable consternation to his Protestant peers.

the One-Indefinite Dyad belonged to lateperhaps very latedevelopments in Platos thinking

and for this reason, we can construct a firewall around the dialogues (or most of them) such that
these new principles do not need to be adduced to explain anything in the written works.
It is easy enough to see the vulnerabilities of each approach. The Catholic approach must
defend the prima facie implausible claim that evidence other than the dialogues themselves can
sometimes trump Platos own words as evidence for his philosophical position. The Protestant
approach, by contrast, commits itself to the sufficiency of the dialogues for determining that
philosophy. Indeed, one version of extreme Protestantism contends that, given only the
dialogues as a data set, there is no way to determine Platos philosophy since in those dialogues
Plato nowhere speaks in propria persona. 2 More mainstream Protestants try to bootstrap an
account of Platos philosophy from the dialogues alone. But since the dialogues are not
obviously completely consistent either in their subject matter or in their apparent claims, this
interpretative stance almost inevitably leads to a reliance on some sort of developmentalist posit,
typically grouping various dialogues into early, middle, and late periods of Platos
thinking, along with an arbitrary assumption about doctrinal consistency within each of these
period. The patent inadequacy of this assumption is nowhere more evident than in the felt need
to posit completely fictitious transitional dialogues that do not consistently conform to the
supposed philosophy of one distinct period.
In 1944, Harold Cherniss published a monumental work titled Aristotles Criticism of
Plato and the Academy. In fact, this book was intended as the first of a two volume work, the
second one of which was to focus on the above Aristotelian testimony about the principles. That
second volume was never published. 3 The contents of that second volume or at least the main
lines of Chernisss method for dealing with the Aristotelian testimony are, however, not really in
doubt. They appear both in a slim volume published in the following year, The Riddle of the
Early Academy, itself based on a series of lectures given in 1942, and in numerous papers and
reviews touching on the matters relating to the doctrine of first principles and their putative
relevance to the dialogues. Cherniss argues that Aristotles testimony about Platos philosophy
cannot be trusted for a variety of reasons, including Aristotles tendentious reading of the
dialogues out of context, his intentional conflation of Platos philosophy with that of other
Academics, and the intrusion of Aristotles own principles and terminology into his
interpretation of Plato. 4

I call this position extreme Protestantism because it reduces the sola scriptura principle to absurdity. It does this
by claiming that the dialogues alone cannot tell us what their author thinks, which is one possible, albeit highly
implausible, conclusion to draw from rejecting the Aristotelian testimony. Another form of extreme Protestantism,
represented by Leo Strauss and his followers, reduces sola scriptura to absurdity in another way. Rejecting or
ignoring the Aristotelian testimony, it claims to possess, on the basis of no apparent evidence, a non-philosophical
secret key to the meaning of the texts.
3
I am informed by some who were close to Cherniss that the manuscript of the second volume was actually written
and still exists in Chernisss papers but that it was never published, in part, because Cherniss was deeply
discouraged by the widespread rejection of his fundamental claim, namely, that Aristotles testimony was virtually
worthless as an independent source for discovering Platos philosophy. I do not know if this is true. And one can
still read many extremely laudatory reviews of the book by some of the leading scholars of the time.
4
The Catholic, polar opposite of Chernisss approach was developed some 37 years earlier by Lon Robin who in
his book La thorie platonicienne des ides et des nombres daprs Aristote; tude historique et critique sought to
reconstruct Platos philosophy solely on the basis of Aristotles testimony. Needless to say, the resulting picture is
quite different from anything contemplated by Protestants, although it is in line, as Robin emphasizes, with the later
Platonic traditions understanding of Platonism.

The main theme of this paper is the influence of Harold Chernisss treatment of
Aristotles testimony on Platos philosophy generally and on the doctrine of first principles in
particular on subsequent Plato scholarship. But I must interrupt my account to add a brief
reference to two other books, appearing more than a decade later. For these books, along with
Chernisss, not only served to guide Plato scholarship for the last seventy or more years, but to
divide it along linguistic lines. In 1959, Hans Joachim Krmer published his doctoral
dissertation done at Tbingen under Wolfgang Schadewalt in 1957, titled Arete bei Platon und
Aristoteles. In 1963, Konrad Gaiser published his Habilitationsschrift of 1960, also under the
direction of Schadewalt at Tbingen, titled Platons ungeschriebene Lehre. The central thesis of
both works is that Plato had unwritten teachings principally about the principles the One and
the Indefinite Dyad and that these were esoteric in the sense that they were not published in the
dialogues and were reserved for the Academic adepts. For our purposes, the key feature of this
interpretation is the reliance on the accuracy of Aristotles testimony. Krmer devoted a 100plus page chapter to das Problem des esoterischen Platon which is, in large part, a detailed
criticism of Chernisss thesis. A related set of criticisms is found throughout the extensive notes
in Gaisers book. 5 The influence of the so-called Tbingen school of Plato interpretation
throughout Europe is well known and is now into its third generation. It is, I think, fair to say
that this school represents the dominant Catholic approach to Plato in the world today. But the
English-speaking world is solidly Protestant. And in this regard, one should not underestimate
the influence of a review of Krmers book by Gregory Vlastos in Gnomon in 1963. This review
by the man who was at that time perhaps the leading Plato scholar in the United States, severely
criticized the very idea of an unwritten teaching of Plato and the concomitant demotion of
the evidentiary value of the dialogues for Platos philosophy. 6
Vlastos, among whose Princeton doctoral students are today many of the leading Plato
scholars in North America, in effect gave permission with this book review to a generation of
Plato students simply to ignore the results of the work of Krmer and Gaiser. It would be too
strong to say that he gave permission to ignore in toto the Aristotelian evidence. Vlastos himself
regularly relied on Aristotles testimony for his Plato interpretations, particularly insofar as this
could be thought to serve to distinguish the historical Socrates from the Socrates of the dialogues
and thereby to distinguish the latter from Plato himself. But since Aristotle does not generally
distinguish between dialogue-based testimony and testimony that is based on orally transmitted
communications, it seems inevitable that Vlastoss authority in North America would have the
effect of marginalizing Aristotles testimony altogether. 7 One should also not discount the fact
that the two founding books of the Tbingen school comprise some 1200 pages of dense
academic German prose and have never been translated into English.
Returning to Cherniss, my aim in the remainder of this paper is to give an account of the
influence of Chernisss book on Plato scholarship in the English-speaking world over the last 70
years or so. As I will try to show, that influence has been enormous, even though I am quite sure
that it has resulted in trends in Plato scholarship that Cherniss, who died in 1987, would have
5

I am informed, too, by Cherniss intimates that in his papers is a very thick file of notes for a rebuttal of Krmers
criticism, alas, still unpublished.
6
I recall that as a graduate student, if during a discussion among graduate students of ancient philosophy, someone
happened to mention the Tbingen school, a typical response was just read Vlastoss review of Krmers book.
Vlastoss authority in North America, added to the considerable effort needed to make an independent assessment of
Krmers claims, resulted in his book seldom being mentioned much less seriously discussed in the literature.
7
A prominent senior Plato scholar told me casually that he intended someday soon to get around to studying
Aristotles testimony on Plato.

abhorred. Cherniss himself was a unitarian Protestant. That is, he thought he could show, using
the dialogues alone, a fundamentally consistent metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and
psychological worldview maintained by Plato. The evidentiary basis excludes Aristotles
testimony except insofar as this can be confirmed by the dialogues themselves, in effect
stipulating that that testimony is either redundant or irrelevant. Unitarian Protestantism is
widespread and it certainly does not originate with Cherniss. But this view is committed to
arguing that anything in the text of the dialogues that tends to support Aristotles testimony about
Form-Numbers and about the ultimate principles has to be explained away. Thus, the positing of
a superordinate Idea of the Good in Republic is dismissed as hyperbole, and therefore having no
significance for metaphysics or even for ethics. The so-called greatest kinds in Sophist (254D255E), labeled Forms in the text and treated as immutable immaterial entities exactly like other
Forms, are reduced to the level of concepts. The distinct level of cognition and of being in the
Divided Line in Republic (510C-511A), appearing to be and acknowledged by Aristotle as the
realm of mathematical intermediaries, is trivialized as merely providing examples of discursive
reasoning, whose objects have no special ontological significance. The claim in Philebus (23C26D) that everything that exists now is a mixture of the unlimited and the limit and is
caused to be such by an eternal divine intellect is dismissed as having no relevance to Aristotles
account of the reduction of Forms to Numbers and their derivation from two principles of
unlimitedness and limit. The passage in Timaeus (53B-C) in which Plato has Timaeus describe
the Demiurge as putting intelligibility into the sensible world by using numbers and shapes
(i.e., arithmetic and geometry) is treated as having no special significance, even though the only
way Timaeus describes the intelligibility of things in our cosmos is in mathematical terms.
Again, the truly massive amount of material in the dialogues concerned with mathematics is
written off as a kind of independent hobby of Plato having nothing to do with his metaphysics or
epistemology, and certainly nothing to do with his ethics. 8
Finally, there are two texts which loom particularly large in the Catholic interpretative
milieu and which, therefore, the unitarian Protestant approach is especially eager to discount.
The first is a passage in Phaedrus (274B6-278E3) in which Socrates goes on at some length
about the inferiority of written work to oral teaching. The second is a passage in Platos 7th
Letter (340B1-345C3) in which Plato tells his correspondent that there does not exist a document
containing information about those matters with which Plato is most concerned. These texts lend
support both to the idea that Plato had, as Aristotle testifies, an oral teaching and that this is at
least as important as anything in the dialogues. Of course, if this is the case that does not mean
that the dialogues are worthless as evidence for Platos views, but it does, nevertheless, leave us
to ponder the relevance of that which is contained in them to Platos unwritten teachings.
Chernisss response to these two passages is unambiguous: the 7th Letter is a forgery and the
denigration of written philosophy in the Phaedrus passage refers to writings other than Platos
own. There is no space here either to respond to some of the detailed points Cherniss makes
regarding both passages or to deal with the full implication of both if the Letter is authentic and
if the Phaedrus passage is taken to refer to Platos own works. Suffice to say, the argument that
both passages are irrelevant to understanding Plato since if they were relevant, then Aristotles
testimony would also be relevant is a patently circular one.

The work of Kenneth Sayre and Mitchell Miller represent two outstanding exceptions to the general insouciance
regarding Aristotles testimony in North America. The work of Myles Burnyeat on the role of mathematics in Plato,
necessarily bssed on Aristotles testimony, is another example.

This list is by no means exhaustive. What the items on this list share is a commitment to
forego the plain sense of the text of the dialogues when this suggests that Aristotles testimony
may be accurate. Even more portentously, since all unitarian Protestants accept the claim that
Platonism is not just the sum of what is in the dialogues, but rather a comprehensive
philosophical view that is variously revealed throughout the dialogues, they must appeal to some
criterion for determining the unity of the comprehensive view. But they eschew the unity
provided by the Aristotelian testimony. Indeed, rejecting that testimony, they find it easier to
pay scant attention to the texts of the dialogue that actually support it.
Empirical observation of the works of the unitarian Protestants reveals that the criterion
employed is, for the most part, plausibility to a modern, academic audience. So, a sort of
deracinated, demythologized Platonism emergesPlato lite wherein Forms are real
universals existing neither eternally in a divine mind nor dependent for their essence and
existence and, as Plato adds, for their knowability on a unique and evidently impersonal first
principle of all, the Idea of the Good. And though the attempt to make Plato respectable cannot
forego grounding the objectivity of ethical claims in the Forms, the attempt to avoid Aristotle
results in the unwillingness even to consider why Plato gives a unique and even superessential
place to the Idea of the Good and what goodness could possibly have to do with unification or
unity, as Aristotle claims. The very idea that Plato was content to rest his mature metaphysics on
an infinite array of more or less unconnected Formsand this despite his explicit claim in
Republic (511B5-6) that the dialectician must seek out an unhypothetical first principle of all
seems to me to reduce to absurdity Chernisss position as exegesis, even if it is otherwise
defensible or at least respectable in the contemporary academic marketplace of ideas.
Cherniss, as I mentioned above, took the bold yet exceedingly implausible step of
dismissing the Idea of the Good as something of a hyperbolic joke. This has been, however, too
much for most succeeding unitarian Protestants. But the attempts to take seriously the Idea of
the Good without the key provided by the Aristotelian evidence are no less implausible, each in
its own way. One interpretation is that when Plato says that the Idea of the Good provides, that
is, is the cause of, the essence, existence, and knowability of the Forms, he should be taken to
mean that the Good is the condition for the possibility of there being immutable, eternal existents
that are available to our intellects. Plato, however, is quite clear about the difference between
conditions and causes as evident in Phaedo and Timaeus. He is equally explicit in claiming that
the Good is a cause. That it should be thought even for a moment to be a mere condition is, to
say the least, puzzling. One hardly knows how to respond to a view that would entail that in
Symposium when the love of the beautiful is said by Diotima to be equivalent to the desire to
possess the Good because in its possession is to be found happiness, we should understand this to
mean a desire to possess the condition for the possibility of happiness (Denyer, Teloh).
Another interpretation along these lines has it that the Idea of the Good is just the sum of
all the other Forms (Santas) or that which makes the sum into a whole (McCabe, Reeve). So, on
the first interpretation, the cause of the being of A, B, and C is then their sum. Why this sum
is said by Plato to be an unhypothetical first principle of all becomes quite unclear. On the
second, it is equally unclear how the whole that consists in all the eternal essences there are is
itself beyond essence. Indeed, it is also unclear how that which is beyond essence can make a
sum into a whole unless it has some nature itself. But the evidence that this nature is, as
Aristotle says, unity, is excluded. Another has it that the Good is the Form that all the other
Forms participate in, explaining, for example, why justice is a good thing to pursue (Fine). Of
course, if the Forms do participate in the Good, then this is true for all of them, including, say,
5

the Form of Triangularity whose goodness as an object of desire or even as an object of

knowledge is not exactly obvious.
These desperate expedients, along with a number of others I have not mentioned, might
be justifiable if there were no other way available to us. Sometimes in ancient philosophy,
owing to the sad paucity of evidence for the views of so many philosophers, we are driven to
pure speculation about the meaning of a passage or how our author would answer an obvious
objection. But in the present case, it is not a paucity of evidence that hampers us, although no
one supposes that Aristotles testimony is without serious problems. We are hampered,
obviously so, I think, by adherence to a conscious or unconscious assumption that Aristotles
testimony is to be ignored. Sometimes expedients, desperate or otherwise are simply
abandoned, and the references to the Idea of the Good are systematically ignored along with
Aristotles testimony regarding it. This measure has a weird sort of consistent internal logic: if
the only thing that makes X intelligible cannot be adduced, then we should pretend that X does
not exist or at least that it is not of central importance. In this regard, I casually refer to five
fairly recent books on Platos metaphysics in English on my bookshelf (Silverman, Harte, Gill,
Dancy, Mohr). One would surely suppose, a priori, as it were, that a book on Platos
metaphysics would cast a very bright light on what Plato calls an unhypothetical first principle
of all, evidently referring to the focus and endpoint of the philosophers quest for knowledge.
But a study of each of these books will not reveal even a mention of the putative crucial role of
the Idea of the Good. And, not coincidentally, none of these books take any notice of Aristotles
testimony as being relevant to determining Platos metaphysics, although in one case (Gill), the
author explicitly announces, without explanation, her intention not to take any notice.
The complete lack of interest in what Arisotle has to say about Platos principles when
treating Platos ethics introduces additional complications. The root of the complications is that
the Protestant unitarianism of Cherniss is merely an assumption which is easily open to question.
What reason have we to believe, absent Aristotles testimony, that Platos thought did not evolve
or develop, in which case, perhaps we can find within the dialogues markers or criteria for
segmenting the philosophical stages of Platos thought? So, developmentalist Protestantism
seems a live hermeneutic possibility, one which is especially important in ethics. For if it is
possible to discern in Platos writings a set of dialogues containing a distinctive ethical doctrine,
perhaps one can isolate the ethics from the metaphysics and epistemology and psychology of
another set of dialogues. In fact, Gregory Vlastos, the doyen of developmentalist Protestants,
famously argued that Platos so-called early dialogues contain a Socratic moral philosophy and
that this is different from the moral philosophy of the dialogues dubbed middle and late.
This Socratic philosophy is more or less identical with that of the historical Socrates. The
specific difference between the moral philosophy of the early dialogues and the moral
philosophy of later dialogues is, Vlastos put it, that the Socrates of the early dialogues is no
metaphysician.
So, at least at one time, Plato advanced a version of moral philosophy that was innocent
of separate Forms, Form-Numbers, first principles, the ne plus ultra of cognition, knowledge
(epistm) that has only Forms as objects, and so on. Quite independently of Aristotles
testimony, this is of course possible. What it means, though, is that the core of the supposed
Socratic ethics, usually encapsulated in the Socratic paradoxes that no one does wrong
willingly, it is better to suffer than to do evil, a worse man cannot harm a better man, one must
never do evil under any circumstances, knowledge is virtue, and so, cannot be understood to
require any metaphysical backing or any epistemological backing that depends on that
6

metaphysics. Not surprisingly, this self-imposed limitation leads Vlastos and those who have
followed in his path to a thoroughly pragmatic, thisworldly moral philosophy where the
paradoxes are cashed out as moral maxims like honesty is the best policy and crime doesnt
pay. 9 Again, there is no a priori reason why this could not have been Platos view at one time.
And we might be content to make of the Socrates of the early dialogues a minimalist moral
philosopher with some sharp observations about the logic of action and desire were it not for the
Aristotelian evidence.
In the present case, however, the evidence is not that which concerns the first principles,
but the evidence concerning the development of Platos philosophical career. In his Metaphysics
( 6, 987a32b1), Aristotle writes of Plato,
For, having from his youth become familiar first with Cratylus and the
Heraclitean doctrines that all sensibles are always in flux and that there is no
knowledge of them, he continued to believe these things even in his later years.

Aristotle goes on a few lines later to mention Socrates influence on Plato and the latters
conclusion that because sensibles are always in flux and that there is therefore no knowledge of
them, if there is knowledge at all it must be of non-sensible entities, which he called Ideas.
This brief description gives us the elements of Platos well-known two-world metaphysics and
epistemology. And, once again, it is certainly possible that Plato developed this metaphysics
sometime after he wrote the early dialogues.
But this does not seem possible if we take Aristotles testimony seriously. For the above
passage begins with the words from his youth (ek neou), a term which, as we know from other
authors like Xenophon, would have been an insult to use for anyone over thirty. But Plato was in
his late twenties when Socrates died, and almost no one thinks that any dialogues were written
while Socrates was alive, and absolutely no one thinks that all the dialogues designated as
early were written before this time, for the simple reason that some of them, like Euthyphro
and Crito describe the trial of Socrates and the aftermath. So, we can safely assume that unless
Aristotle is lying, he reveals to us a Plato who from a young age was a metaphysician. Of
course, one could continue to insist that even if this is true, Plato could have suppressed his own
philosophy when he was writing dialogues intended only to represent the philosophy of another,
namely, Socrates. But this seems a considerable stretch, not just because Aristotle nowhere
supports the idea that in some of the dialogues Socrates is a mouthpiece for the historical figure
and not for Plato, but also because it is intrinsically implausible that at the time of writing these
dialogues, while Plato believed that, among other things, knowledge was only of Forms, he had
Socrates argue that the knowledge that is virtue is of something else, in effect true belief in
prudential judgments. 10 Vlastoss developmentalist picture is different from Chernisss
unitarianism, but the former is very much influenced by the principles that underlie the latter.
9

Vlastos actually wants to make Socrates a moral absolutist, one for whom the pursuit of virtue is unqualifiedly
paramount. But eschewing metaphysics, he has, so far as I have been able to discover, no basis for any arguments as
to why this should be so. Those who have followed Vlastos in constructing the non-metaphysical Socrates, have
mostly taken the predictable course of abandoning absolutism for Socrates and making of this an unnecessary or
even embarrassing Platonic embellishment on Socratic ethics.
10
Indeed, Vlastos (1991: 94, n.51) cites part of this passages but omits mention of the words ek neou, perhaps
realizing that including them would undermine acceptance of his claim that in the early dialogues there is no
metaphysics.

It is fascinating to observe that the developmental Protestantism of Vlastos, when taken

to its logical conclusion, becomes a new kind of unitarian Protestantism, quite different from that
of Cherniss. Christopher Rowe, in a recent book Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing
(2007) starts with the non-metaphysical Socrates of the early dialogues and then asks the
question why we should suppose that if there is no metaphysics in these dialogues, there is any
metaphysics in any of the others. That is, why should we suppose that Plato believed any of the
things that are said in these dialogues. The foundation for this very odd position is contained in
his unequivocal rejection of the Aristotelian testimony. 11
Both unitarian and developmentalist Protestants want to embrace objectivity in ethics.
Indeed, for some this is all Plato wanted to do as well, or all we need to ascribe to him. But this
objectivity does not, obviously, have its metaphysical basis in a superordinate Idea of the Good,
and it certainly does not require that, as Aristotle tells us, the Good is the One. So, knowing the
Good amounts to knowing what is good (and bad) for us here and now in any particular situation.
On this view, achieving the Good could only consist in actually doing what is good for us and
avoiding what is bad. And the criterion of what is good for us is, accordingly, conformity to the
deliverances of the practical reasoning of human beings.
There are two problems or issues for this approach. The first is whether or not objectivity
in ethics can be grounded in anything other than a separate Form of the Good and the second is
whether if it cannot, this separate Form must in fact have a superordinate role in the ontological
hierarchy. The minimalist, anti-metaphysical Protestant would like to have objectivity without
Forms, or at least without separate Forms, including a Form of the Good. Since this is most
implausible as an interpretation of the middle and late dialogues, not only must objectivity
without separate Forms be taken as a feature only of the early dialogues, but it must be
maintained that Plato separated a Form of the Good needlessly, in effect seeing the right answer
in the early dialogues, but somehow losing it late on. Conversely, if Plato saw that he needed a
separate Form of the Good, it is very hard to accept that he did not see this when writing the
early dialogues, as Aristotles testimony suggests.
If, then, it is granted that a separate Form of the Good is a part of Platos ethics, even if
one can extract from some dialogues a positioncall it Socraticthat eschews such a Form,
the question remains in regard to the status of this Form in relation to all the others. If a Form of
the Good is on a par with all the others, then it has or is an ousia. In other words, goodness
names a specific nature, different from all others and when, for example, it is claimed that
justice is good what is meant is that the nature that is justice has a further property of being
good owing to its participation in the Form of the Good. What exactly is this property? Most
defenders of this approach claim that it is something like conducive to our happiness. One
might maintain that what is conducive to human happiness is objective in a broad sense, that is,
for the most part doing certain things and refraining from doing others is what most people most
of the time will come to see as having put them into the state that they desire. But this sort of
objectivity does not rise to the standard of the absoluteness in Socrates pronouncements about
wrongdoing and virtuous action. For some people, crime does actually pay, according to their
own lights. And to deny this one must appeal to objectivity in the sense of universality, such that
11

See Rowe (2007: 48): But there is no reason why we should follow Aristotelian doxography here. . . . Aristotles
authority amounts to nothing. Whereas Rowe at least concedes that Plato toyed with some metaphysical ideas in
the middle and late dialogues, Sandra Peterson, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato (2011) takes
Rowes position even further, claiming that there is no doctrine whatsoever in these dialogues beyond Platos
commitment to the non-metaphysical philosophy of Socrates of the early dialogues.

there can be no exceptions to the rule that wrongdoing never pays and that our happiness always
and necessarily results only in doing good. In Republic, I take it that the example of the Ring of
Gyges is intended precisely to be a challenge to the view that sometimes crime does pay. And
this challenge is met in the dialogue by showing that under no circumstances is this the case. But
in order to do this, objectivity in the sense of universality is required.
A separate Form of Good on a par with the rest might be thought to fulfill this
requirement. But the argument of Republic is intended to show that justice is beneficial to us in
itself and also for its effects. I take it that the first point means that justice is supposed to be
intrinsically desirable just because it is justice. So, justice is not beneficial only because it
partakes in another nature, the nature of goodness. This appears to be why, for one thing, the
Idea of the Good is above ousia. The Good provides ousia and existence (einai) to all the
Forms, that is, to everything with an ousia because it is a principle that is beyond the
limitations of specific natures. 12 The Form of Justice is indeed good by participating in the Idea
of the Good, but not by the Good being a Form with a specific nature. The truth and knowability
that the Good gives to Forms makes them Good like (agathoeid), but it does not give each of
them a specific property, one shared by every other Form.
The insufficiency of taking goodness as what is objectively beneficial to every human
being necessarily leads to a trivializing of Platos claim that the philosophical life is the happiest
and that it is this life that constitutes assimilation to divinity (Theaetetus 176B). 13 For, after
all, what is beneficial to those not inclined to philosophy is different from what is beneficial to
those who are. If conducive to human happiness is meant to focus on the lowest common
denominator, that is, the merely practical, much of what Plato says about the nature of
philosophy goes by the boards. 14 By contrast, the role of knowledge of Forms as constitutive of
human happiness is a central theme in Plato. So, if we grant as relevant to this issue Platos
explicit words, and take the Idea of the Good as superordinate, how then does achieving
knowledge of the Forms amount to achieving the Good? In antiquity, when Aristotles
testimony was universally assumed to be fundamentally accurate even when mistaken in the
adverse consequences drawn from that testimony, the Good was assumed to be the One,
absolutely simple, unique, and the cause of the being and knowability of all that is knowable. So,
knowledge of all the Forms constituted achieving the Good when that knowledge was assumed
to be a comprehensive grasp of the unity of all intelligible reality.
While acknowledging the highest level of scholarship in Chernisss book Aristotles
Criticism of Plato and the Academy, I think the influence of this book has been largely baleful.
Vlastoss review in Gnomon inadvertently made matters worse, because people came to identify
the interpretative position of the Tbingen school with the claim that the Aristotelian evidence
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The lack of interest in the superordinate status of the Idea of the Good in Republic usually results in a discounting
of Philebus 65A where the Good cannot be captured in one Idea (i.e., it cannot be understood as one nature), but
can be captured in three: beauty, proportion, and truth.
13
An excellent example of the consequence of Protestant rejection of the Aristotelian evidence is found in the works
of Terry Irwin, two of whose book focused entirely on Platos ethics and totalling more than 900 pages of text, do
not even mention the idea of assimilation to divinity, an exhortation which in antiquity was taken to be the best
emblem or slogan for expressing the heart of Platos moral philosophy, indeed, his whole philosophy, period.
14
Roslyn Weiss, Philosophers in the Republic, announces at the beginning of her book that she will pay scant
attention to Platos metaphysics, supposing that it adds nothing to a discussion of Platos views on philosophy. I
suspect that Weisss lack of interest in Aristotles testimony provides the rationale for her diffidence in regard to the
passages on metaphysics in the dialogues that are both explicitly connected by Plato to his account of philosophy
and that also support and explain Aristotles testimony.

was crucial. But one can continue to hold the latter without endorsing or fully endorsing the
former. The divergence in the work of much European and North American Plato scholarship
since 1950 can be traced, I believe, to the respect paid or not paid to Aristotles testimony about
Platos philosophy.

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