Plato [Paperback]

Eric Voegelin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2000

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which has been hailed throughout the Western world as a monumental accomplishment of modern scholarship.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Voegelin's construction of Plato . . . is an original work that has taken its place in the first rank of great interpretation of Greek philosophy."—Gerhart Niemeyer

"Voegelin is superior to Toynbee in having a much wider and deeper philosophical background, in taking a greater interest in the history of ideas, and in showing a profounder sympathy with the Judeo-Christian tradition which lives at the heart of Western civilization."—William Foxwell Albright

"It is evident that the lavish praise Voegelin has won from many critics is not extravagant. His is one of the monuments of scholarship of our time. . . . Amid his solid learning and scholarly hypotheses are passages of incandescent eloquence, occasional sallies of humor. His work is an invitation to intellectual and spiritual adventure."—Christian Century

"Voegelin is probably the most influential historian of our century. . . . He is no vulgarizer or ideologue, but a scholar of such breadth and depth as the educational tendency of our age has made very rare among us."
—Yale Review

About the Author

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, immigrated to the United State. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, returning to the University of Munich in 1958. He spent the last five years of his career at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University before retiring there to continue his writing. During his lifetime he published dozens of books and more than one hundred articles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri; 1 edition (August 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826212980
• ISBN-13: 978-0826212986
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,253,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plato as a Referent for Life, August 8, 2001

By 

Terence Harwick - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Plato (Paperback)

Oxford Don, Raghavan Iyer noted that the world is a fortunate place when there are two people alive -- at the same time -- who understand Plato. Eric Voegelin was clearly one of those people in the twentieth century. This material was originally published in Volume 3 of Order and History, the core of the magnus opus that Voegelin chose to publish during his life time.

I met Eric Voegelin once as a graduate student, and asked him, "why'd you publish all this stuff?" I've been digesting his answer ever since. It was "to resist totality and totalitarianism."

Particularly, seen from this standpoint, a clear core of this book is his articulation of the Platonic concept of "metaxy," or the in-between character of life. In philosophical terms, this refers most directly and fully to "in-between" the Agathon (e.g., see myth of the cave and the Divided Line in the Republic) and the apeiron (explored most directly and deeply in the Timaeus). For the philosophically uninitiated, it is possible to speak of this in more mundane terms.

An unstated corollary of Plato's notion of the "metaxy" is that life is always larger than our categories. From a Socratic/Platonic perspective, this may include but will entail more than the epistemological recognition that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing. The notion of the "metaxy" is most fundamentally a linguistic indice pointing to ontological plenty as the ground of life, albeit lived within bounds of existential scarcity. This is a notion commonly shared by the great civilizations of East and West. The notion of the "metaxy" underscores that life is lived within a tension between the "transcendent" and "immanent" dimensions of being.

When we lose track of this tension, as we have to a great extent in the modern world, and subscribe to reductive ideological notions/understandings of life -- and most particularly, when we imagine that we can encapsulate life within the pride of our own "enlightened" categories -- on a political plane, there may be little to constrain the prideful actions of ideologies, irrespective of whether their clothing is Red or Black, or whether it is "left" or "right." Irrespective of the political stripe, repression and murder become "justified" in the pursuit of an ideological aim -- which in Voegelin's philosophical terms is to dissolve the "metaxy" in the usual modernist mode, through immanetizing the transcendent "eschaton."

Voegelin's philosophical terms may sound remarkably abstract to the modern ear (recall Robert Dahl's silly review of Voegelin's The New Science of Politics for the American Political Science journal). Facile critiques such as Dahl's typically focus on the unfamiliar language while overlooking the elementary fact that what Voegelin is asking us to do in every aspect of his work is to take a journey that precisely allows us to see the world in terms other than that of our inherited climate of opinion. For those willing to be thorough scholars rather than merely play at it within the context of given suppositions, Voegelin's scholarship offers new vistas and incredibly rich fields of study. His scholarship offers the capacity to reflect upon and act in the world in a substantively grounded mode with implications for every discipline (see e.g., A.G. Ramos' New Science of Organizations).

I submit that a key to understanding this text and the greater body of his work at large is to grasp the central significance of the "metaxy" -- not as a concept within the history of ideas -- but as a life referent of perennial relevance to the recurring challenge of resisting sophistic pretensions and the inherited or emergent ideologies of any time and place.

This text demands a good deal. You'll develop insights into Plato available no where else. But for Voegelin, such studies were never a matter of antiquarian interest. They were a matter of developing meaningful referents for life. The value in this text is precisely in its yield, capable of resonating throughout your life and offering far more than the initial effort it will require of you.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Voegelin's "Plato", April 7, 2008

By 

Daniel R. O'Brien - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Plato (Paperback)

Unquestionably the best commentary on Plato I have read as yet. No ideology, no radical interpretations of Plato, just extraordinarily insightful and incisive. The essential secondary reference in studies of Platonic political philosophy.