When I saw that my thesis advisor from back in the day was publishing a new book on Plato just as I finished reading his complete works, I felt compelled to complete the circle -- Andrea Nightingale was the professor who brought Plato to life for me for the first time back in sophomore year. A lot of what I remember distinguishing her as an excellent professor seems to be exactly the same. The book explores Plato's extensive reference to ancient Greek religious practices as his way of marking the Forms as divine entities. In other words, she still explores Plato's ideas in context and treats his writing as literature. This technique quickly makes the received interpretation of Plato's philosophy as "Platonism" look like a pretty one dimensional reading. She also remains a very clear writer and thinker. There's nothing grandiose and vague in her ideas, and nothing trendy and jargony about her style. So while her book is clearly an academic work mainly meant for the other two people who specialize in this sort of stuff, even a fucuuking amateur was able to read and understand it without too much trouble. At the level of specific details, I got a lot out of reading this, and I'll go into the particulars of what I learned about each of the four dialogues she analyzes in a moment.
First though, the bad news. Nightingale's thesis that Plato considered his Forms divine cuts against the grain. If western philosophy has a deeply religious bent from right from its inception, it undermines the claim that western thinking is uniquely rational, scientific, and universal. While this claim has obviously changed its form many times since Plato, having today morphed into what we might call 'scientism', discovering an overtly religious aspect right at its root can't help but make us more aware that this same thread runs through the whole project. Today, this is an inconvenient fact for pretty much everybody. As you might expect from someone who proposes a controversial thesis -- indeed, she begins by observing this idea goes against all her own training -- Nightingale is at pains to nail her argument down against every possible objection. This makes for a very clear and thorough presentation, but also for a lot of repetition. Sadly, it also means that in 250 pages, we don't really get that far, philosophically speaking. Because the fact that Plato's Forms are "out of this world" and that his style tends towards myth and poetry the more closely his content approaches them, is actually kinda obvious if you read these texts with an open mind. To excise this aspect of Plato and treat him as a purely rational thinker clearly does violence to the man and his work. Since I had already come to this (apparently controversial) reading, all the time spent convincing me to take seriously the idea of Plato's mysticism was time wasted. I would have liked to see Nightingale take the next step and ask what impact this thesis has on our overall view of Plato's philosophy and what implications it might hold more generally for our view of the western cannon and mindset. Perhaps the last question is too broad and vague for an academic work, but it seems to me the first should be a natural companion to her thesis. After all, while all the detailed textual work is indispensable, when I listen to someone who has spent 30 years studying Plato, I hope to come away with something broader than the knowledge that the word ἐπόπτης at line 210a in the Symposium refers to an initiate to the Eleusinian Mysteries. That's fascinating and all, but shouldn't there be some attention given to why I should care? Aside from a brief mention of Heidegger's ideas about Plato's "ontotheology" or Ricouer's claim that there is a "polytheism of Forms" the larger questions are simply not addressed.
The good news is in the details. First, there's a lot of Greek language in the book, which alerted me to all kinds of etymological connections I hadn't known about. For example, I'd never noted that theoria has a reference to the divine (theos) hiding in plain sight -- originally it meant a kind of sacred pilgrimage to gaze on religious objects. Kinda changes the resonance of "theory", no? Or who knew that autopsy literally means "seeing for oneself"? Or that our "choreography" is a reference to the choreia or "choric dances" that the Greeks used for religious festivals? Or that "harmony" is the translation of kosmos? Or etc ... it's enough to make you want to learn Greek.
Second, Nightingale's real contribution with this book is how she puts together the details of Plato's language with what was already known about various aspects of ancient Greek religious life. Her basic thesis is that Plato considered the Forms a new type of divine entity. So when he tries to talk about what these new divinities are like, he couches the discussion in a language already familiar to his readers. Not only does he deploy a new mythology, but he makes specific reference to the Greek habit of seeing the gods directly in the form of a divine epiphany, as well as particular reference to both Orphic and Eleusinian mystery cults. Nightingale does a great job of pinning down exactly where and how Plato's language takes this religious turn when it comes to talking about the Forms. As I observed, while Plato's "high and mighty" tone is obvious and unmistakable, there are many details the casual reader will never catch.
For example, in the Symposium, Diotima's speech (given via Socrates) makes unmistakable reference to the two stages involved in entering the Eleusinian mystery cult. First, you become an "initiate", and later a "see-er" or epoptes. In the second and final stage, through what sounds like a combination of clever tricks with torchlight, you get to see some dazzlingly bright vision of the goddess Persephone. That is, you don't just understand something about the goddess or learn some secret information; the epoptes actually sees the goddess, has some direct experience of the divine. Likewise, the whole point of Diotima's speech is that the philosopher, through a series of stages, can actually have some experience of Beauty in itself. Understanding the Forms rationally is a stepping stone to experiencing them directly in the form of a divine epiphany. Plato is introducing a new theology here. I think taking this mysticism more seriously could put a substantially different spin on our interpretation of the Forms. Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious to me how to join this idea to the more rational and dialectical aspects of Platonism. Of course, I presume it isn't obvious to Nightingale either, as she doesn't suggest any means of integrating what she's uncovering. At the very least, it bears mentioning that Socrates' trial and execution for "profaning the gods" looks a lot different in this light. Perhaps the Athenians understood him much better than we do!
The other big and non-obvious example Nightingale gives us is her analysis of Plato's references to Orphism in the Phaedo. In reading Plato, I was often struck by just how Christian he sometimes sounds. I mean, he's all about ascending, purifying, leaving behind the dirty world and our corrupt physical body. In fact, Phaedo famously ends with Socrates owing a cock to Asclepius, presumably because this god of healing has cured him -- of the illness called life. Obviously, calling this aspect of his philosophy "Christian", and interpreting it through the lens of original sin, redemption, and guilt, is an anachronism. Except, it turns out that Plato did have a Fall myth available to him. The Orphics believed that humans were created from the soot of the Titans that Zeus killed with his thunderbolt upon discovering that the Titans had eaten his son Dionysus. As a result, we inherited something of the guilt for the Titans' action. Our punishment, according to the Orphics, is to be born into a body and doomed to perpetually reincarnate until ... well, until we become initiated into Orphism, purify ourselves, and obtain forgiveness and release from Dionysus. After that, our immortal soul will dwell in some non-incarnate paradise. Plato makes extensive reference to this myth in his dialog. In fact, it's built right into its structure. Socrates is literally imprisoned, but with his death, his soul is about to be freed from the prison of his body. As a true philosopher, since he has practised leaving his body behind for so long, undoubtedly his soul will ascend to the realm of the Forms after this purification. So again, Plato is creating a new theology here. He takes an existing religious story and substitutes in his own new, more abstract, gods.
Nightingale covers several other ways that Plato either explicitly marks the Forms as divine or refers to the experience of them in the same way that his contemporaries would have referred to seeing a divine epiphany. But I imagine you get the idea by now. Plato's project was to make what is literally "out of this world" actually appear within it. It's an inherently mystical and religious project, and the master used all the tools at his disposal to bring it alive for his readers.
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