Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy

by Lloyd P. Gerson

If you find Platonism unacceptable, then you ought to abandon philosophy or, to put it slightly less starkly, you ought to abandon philosophy as it has been practiced for some 2,500 years.

Rorty maintained that the fundamental divide between Platonists (whether self-declared or not) and anti-Platonists is that the former believe that it is possible to represent truth in language and thought whereas the latter do not.

Suppose that someone offers an explanation for a natural phenomenon, say, a volcanic eruption. Apart from the acceptance of this explanation, one may reject it in favor of another explanation or, like Rorty, reject it on the grounds that any explanation requires an illicit representationalism. Rorty is obviously in no position to reject any explanation on the basis of a better one; he must reject all explanations, whether the explanans falls within the realm of natural science or the realm of philosophy. His rejection, springing from his critique of representationalism, leads him at various times into quietism, relativism, skepticism, or pragmatism.

The Platonic response to the affirmation of pragmatism on the basis of a rejection of representationalism is that the criteria for evaluating practical solutions require a mode of cognition unavailable to the antirepresentationalist. It is a mode of cognition that is not representational, because it is presumed by all representation. Plato’s response to Rorty’s pragmatism will deny his assertion that there is no difference between “it works because it is true” and “it is true because it works.”

I do not find anything ironic much less self-contradictory in a philosophical position that maintains the impossibility of philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein provided one rationale for the use of philosophy for its ultimate self-eradication. Similarly, it is not prima facie absurd to offer a political argument for the illegitimacy of the state, and hence for the illegitimacy of political doctrines as they are usually understood, that is, assuming the state’s legitimacy.

I have elsewhere argued for the position that Plato’s Platonism rests upon the foundation of his rejection of many, though not all, of the doctrines of his major predecessors.11 These include materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism.

Much of the history of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been a series of attempts to take elements of Platonism and elements of the opposing Naturalism in piecemeal fashion, seeking some sort of rapprochement among them.