Platonic Footnotes: Figures of Asymmetry in Ancient Greek Thought

Abstract

In 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed, “It is useless to deny that philosophy limps…. [In the philosopher’s] assent something massive and carnal is lacking. He is not altogether a real being.” My dissertation is a critical rereading of the Platonic dialogues and their reception through the lens of one key trope: “limping.” I trace limping through philosophical and literary texts and rhetorical treatises – through authors ranging from Plato, Sophocles, and Hippocrates to Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida. I show that this metaphor, a figure for one-sidedness or deficiency, offers new material for the longest and most-footnoted debate, the debate over Platonic idealism. My project is grounded in a sustained re-examination of Plato’s Phaedo – the most body-denying or “somatophobic” of the Platonic dialogues. I demonstrate how the figure of limping works in conjunction with other metaphors of the body – and the figure of Socrates itself, in all its corporeality – to subvert one-sided or somatophobic readings of the Phaedo and of Platonism.

Part One of my dissertation looks at the rhetoric of the body; Part Two examines the body of rhetoric. Part One asks how Socrates’ body, in its satyr-like ugliness and strangeness, itself constitutes a deformity in ancient Athens. Examining the philosopher’s “body techniques,” I show that the Phaedo – which is framed by Socrates’ legs and feet – is mediated by the body it denies. Part Two closely examines Socrates’ terminology in the Phaedo’s first argument for the immortality of the soul. Focusing on the Greek abhorrence of nature as a “limping” body, I study associated tropes of completion and incompletion, balance and imbalance, and metaphors that rely on somatic, circular, and compensatory structures (among them, the periodos, or sentence, and the diaulos, the double racecourse).

My project, which draws its title from Alfred North Whitehead’s famous characterization of European philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato,” concerns itself with the metaphorical feet, legs, and gait of philosophy itself. In examining the “lame inheritance” the ancients have provided the moderns, my project uses the rhetoric of disability and prosthesis to reframe Classical reception studies.