Some of Gadamer’s most interesting work is on Plato and Aristotle. More so than many modern commentators, he sees their work as closely connected. He is especially fond of Plato. In the introduction to Gadamer’s The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986), translator P. Christopher Smith offers useful comments.

For Gadamer, “Plato and Aristotle both belong to the unified tradition of logos philosophy. In the Phaedo Plato’s Socrates turns away from naturalistic accounts of things to the logoi, our ways of speaking; similarly, Aristotle founds his investigations on ‘pos legetai’, how something is spoken of” (Smith, p. xiv).

At least in this work, the term “logos philosophy” is not explicitly defined. But in the passage above, it clearly indicates a linguistic character. It is nice to see a recognition that Plato’s — and even more so Aristotle’s — work has a substantial linguistic dimension.

Smith recalls that the Ionian pre-Socratics had “only two kinds of explanation at their disposal — from what, and by the agency of what — [and so they] could not properly grasp the cosmos, in which things occur for the sake of (heneka) what is good” (p. xv).

The moderns on the whole don’t really do much better than the pre-Socratics at recognizing what Aristotle calls “for the sake of” and the role it plays in the constitution of things. This involves not providential intervention, or even a reified indwelling ontological principle that could simply unfold. It is also not just a fact, but something that motivates without necessitating.

In Plato, “To begin with there are the refutational, or elenchtic, dialogues, in which Socrates confronts the great sophists of his time — Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus — and displays the emptiness of their claims to be able to teach virtue. In truth theirs is a technical mentality, and what they teach is only a techne of succeeding. The conclusion to be drawn from these dialogues — at times explicit, but more often implied negatively or indirectly — is that knowledge in virtue is somehow different from knowledge in techne. This shows up above all in the fact that virtue cannot be taught. And there is a further truth that emerges here, again largely unsaid, that the traditional ideas of arete upon which the sophists rely and which might be learned by imitating a paragon have become groundless and susceptible of sophistic dissimulation. Therefore, to withstand seduction by self-interest and by otherwise insatiable desires for sensuous gratification and power, to which sophism panders, one must now be able to give justification for what is good, that is, justification for one’s choices of what is right as opposed to what is wrong. But nobody seems to know how to do that, least of all those sophists who claim that they do” (pp. xv-xvi).

This concern with justification is something Gadamer shares with Habermas and Brandom. But Gadamer traces it all the way back to Plato, whereas Habermas and Brandom are modernists. It seems to me that Plato and Aristotle’s outrage at the Sophists has to do with the Sophists’ subversion of justification.

“The primary concern in these elenchtic dialogues, then, is a practical one, and that makes the Phaedo and the Republic, in which concern seems to shift to epistemological and ontological matters, appear to mark a definite transition in Plato’s thought. For in these next works the ‘ideas’ are introduced, and in the Republic even the ‘idea of ideas’, the idea of the good which would seem to serve as a first principle of both true knowledge and true reality. In the twentieth-century traditions of Plato interpretation — particularly the neo-Kantian, which found support for its theory of science in this ‘stage’ of Plato — would have it that the question Plato is addressing here is a new, theoretical one no longer related to the Socratic question concerning arete. But Gadamer sees a serious oversight here. A careful reading, he argues, shows that Plato is still dealing with the same issue” (p. xvi).

“Gadamer maintains … that if one asks what question is actually being addressed in the allegory of the cave, one sees that the concern is not just, or even primarily, a theoretical, scientific one, but in fact an existential-practical question of holding steadfastly to the truth in the face of tests or refutations (elenchoi) much as a soldier holds his ground in battle or a wrestler stands firm against attempts to throw him — this is the language Plato uses here. And what are these tests of mettle? The guardians will find themselves in a conflict between honest execution of the duties of their office for the public weal and the ‘pursuit of power after power’, as we in the English-speaking world might put it, using the words of Thomas Hobbes. The guardians, in other words, will be tested by the flattery of both their own desires for gratification and sophistic sycophants, flattery that might seduce them into sacrificing their integrity” (p. xvii).

“In short, it turns out that the theory of dialectic in which they are to be trained is a way of distinguishing and, above all, of distinguishing practically between right and wrong, good and bad. To do that, the guardians must know the idea of the good, for that idea is exactly what those in the cave do not know. The cave-dwellers’ technai (arts) give them the knowledge ‘how to’ do something, knowledge of the means to an end, but not knowledge of the end itself, the hou heneka, the ‘what for’…. Thus, knowledge of the good turns out to be not just a theoretical insight, not just a matter of logos (reasoning). It is a principle on ergon (deed), and makes possible constancy in the choice of the life that one leads (Aristotle: prohairesis tou biou)” (p. xviii).

The sense in which he says the guardians “must know” the idea of the good seems to me to be of necessity quite different from the way in which we may be said, e.g., to know the Pythagorean Theorem. I would rather say something like, the guardians “must have wisdom” about the good.

“And now the real meaning of the hypothesis of the eidos in the Phaedo becomes evident. As opposed to what the neo-Kantian school might have seen in it, the hypothesis of the eidos is not at all the ‘scientific’ postulation of a universal idea that is to be verified by the facts. As in the Republic, the issue in the Phaedo is how to head off whatever might mislead us, how to head off sophistic talk…. Hypothesizing the eidos thus has nothing to do with empirical verification but, instead, with making precisely these eidetic distinctions…. The paradigm for steadfastness … remains Socrates, who was not to be dissuaded from what he saw to be right, no matter what arguments concerning his own ‘advantage’ might be advanced. His arete was such that he would not even accept the escape from death offered to him by his friends” (pp.xviii-xix).

At first I was confused by the reference to verification by facts. To speak of empirical verification of an eidos would be a category mistake. But I think “the hypothesis of the eidos” refers not to any particular eidos, but to the general “hypothesis” that there are eidei.

The important point here is the Socratic “steadfastness”, where steadfastness means not being lured and fooled by the verbal tricks of the clever sophists, who aim at success and at victory in argument, rather than at truth and shared understanding. It seems very relevant today.

“[The Philebus] too begins with an ethical issue — whether the good life is one of pleasure or of intellect or of some third thing — and it also involves its interlocutors in the task of giving justification for their contentions concerning the good life, justification that will make their arguments invulnerable to the sophistic arts of confusing and confounding people with sleights of hand that interchange the one and the many” (p. xix).

“Here the techniques of Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology can be put to good use, for the task is to display the phenomenon that Plato is getting at. In the Philebus Plato speaks of the good as the structure of a ‘mixture’ someone might brew, the ‘potion’ as it were, which is our human life. The various ‘ingredients’, the kinds of pleasure and intellect, are not to be mixed indiscriminately, but well…. A ‘good’ mixture is thus one that has limits to it, and the good itself is limitedness (measuredness, or metriotes) in the midst of constantly threatening indeterminacy and limitlessness…. As measuredness, the good in the Philebus, we now see, is precisely Aristotle’s mean between the extremes” (pp. xx-xxi).

Paul Ricoeur also points out the importance of a notion of mixture in Plato. This undoes many old stereotypes about Platonism.

I am rather unclear on what Husserlian phenomenology is supposed to specifically contribute to the history of philosophy here. I imagine Husserl might question this claim himself. He wanted phenomenology to be a precise “science”, grounded in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Here instead we have a thoughtful examination of Plato’s metaphorical language.

“In anticipating Aristotle’s criticisms, it should be noted that, as measuredness, the good in Plato must be distinguished, or ‘separated’ intellectually, from the mixture itself. But if one abstracts from this metaphor, one finds that, as measuredness, the good is what Hegel calls ein Moment, namely, an aspect of something which does not exist separately from it. In short, it is in the thing of which it is the structure. Thus, when we say that it is choriston (separate), we are not denying that it is in the thing. We are saying only that it must be distinguished from the thing in our thinking” (p. xxi).

For Aristotle, a thing that is called “separate” is simply a thing that is conceptually distinct, whereas for Plato, separateness involves independence from matter. This means a thing that Aristotle calls “separate” may nonetheless never exist apart from the whole to which it belongs. This has been discussed in detail by Gwenaëlle Aubry.

“These striking convergences of Plato’s thought with Aristotle’s leave us puzzled about Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Why would he criticize Plato if in fact he and Plato are saying the same thing? “(ibid).

We should be careful about saying things are “the same”. I have sympathy for Leibniz’s argument that no two things are the same. Then there is the question, at what level of blurriness can we no longer distinguish two things? But again the important point is rather the relative one that it is on the whole a lot less false to say Plato and Aristotle thought the same, than it is to present them as if they were opposites, as has also been done at times.

“At the core of the argument in all three [of Aristotle’s surviving ethical works] is the contention that Plato improperly fuses the ontological and the practical in his applications of the idea of the good” (p. xxii).

“Aristotle, of course, is a consummate phenomenologist who wishes above all to avoid running distinct things together. But is it just his ‘descriptive caution’ that leads him to try to keep ontological and practical theory separate? Gadamer suggests that there is something else fundamental in Aristotle’s way of inquiring that leads him to put things as he does, namely, his orientation toward life science. Mathematically oriented thinking such as Plato’s would indeed lead to inquiry about the idea of the good as an abstract structure of good things…. But that is not the orientation of Aristotle’s questioning, which gives primacy to the concrete living thing” (p. xxiv).

“The relationship of moral theory to practice is not at all the modern relation of theory to practice in which an objective, neutral theory can be applied generally to particular problems. In distinction to producing something (techne, poiesis), doing the right thing is not simply an application of general rules” (p. xxvi).

Even Kant has qualification and subtlety in his rule-orientedness.

“In the first place, as Aristotle recognizes, we need an ‘appropriate principle’ (oikeia arche) for moral reasoning, which is not to be confused with mathematical deductive reasoning. For in moral reasoning I always find myself in a particular situation, and the task is not to subsume this particular case under a universal rule which I could know apart from the situation I am in, but to define from within my situation what the general rule is of which this situation is an instance. The particular virtues and virtue in general, as finding the ‘mean between extremes’ are not universal principles that I apply to a situation, but universalizations of what I am doing when I do what is right. Hence it should be noted carefully that, although Aristotle does indeed speak of the ‘practical syllogism’, he in fact uses this syllogistic reasoning only to exemplify the technical choice of the right means to an end” (p. xxviii).

This is an interesting hybrid view on the universality issue. It is certainly true that Aristotle does not treat ethical conclusions as a matter of deduction (instead, they are matters of interpretation).

“[Cleverness] deals with means to an end, and for just that reason, he says, it is to be distinguished from [moral reasonableness]” (ibid).

“Moral reasonableness” is how Smith translates Aristotelian ethical phronesis. This is a kind of reason, which I have called ethical reason.

“As both the Philebus and Aristotle’s ethical treatises make clear, human beings are not gods, and thus the life that is best for them has to be a life that combines theoria and praxis…. The point that both wish to make — which is the fundamental point of agreement between them concerning the good — is that, in distinction to gods, human beings are always under way toward the divine, or, as Gadamer puts it, their best life is philosophia, not sophia, that is, striving for wisdom, not wisdom itself. Human beings are finite, not absolute — never absolved from the ‘remnant of earth’ (Goethe) in them that inevitably involves them in the task of living well here in the practical world” (pp. xxviii-xix).

Finitism and infinitism are both said in many ways. The very sharp distinction being made here between humans and gods seems rather one-sided in relation to Aristotle.

Gadamer is apparently a pretty strong finitist, and strongly opposed to the infinitism he sees in Hegel. What infinity means in the more “deflationary” views of Hegel I have sympathy for is quite different from this. Meanwhile Aristotle literally says that the world is finite, but allows for an expansive notion of human being.

“Thus, in both Plato and Aristotle, the good emerges as that toward which we are striving, that for the sake of which (hou heneka), that at which we aim (to telos). But not only we. The whole universe is to be understood as striving for perfection…. [T]he universe, and not only human experience, is to be thought of in relation to the good ” (p. xix).