Platone e l'invenzione della philo-sophia

Abstract

A discussion on the interactive relationship between philosophy and literature must refer to the works of Plato. The use by the philosopher of the so-called Socratic dialogues, his frequent recourse to pre-existing myths and invention of new ones, as well as the recurrence of metaphors attest to his representing an important step in our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and literature. However, the present work will focus on another aspect: one regarding structural invention and the expression of philosophy, a noun which allows Plato to link in an original way, that is, unprecedented in his time, two manifestations of human desire and endeavour: friendship and knowledge. This connection binds philosophy from its origins to literature much more tightly than the mere adoption of one or another literary form, because literature, the ‘poetic narrative’ already referred to by Aristotle as the ‘mimesis of an action’, is the favoured terrain for the expression of human desire and the relation- ship between desire and thought. In order to correctly grasp the force of this reference, however, it is necessary to bear in mind that ‘philo-sophy’ should not be considered, as in Plato, at the moment of its foundation, in the form of knowledge, but rather in that of the ‘love of knowledge’. The erotic compo- nent cannot be removed; for this reason, the link between eros and philosophy established in the Symposium does not emphasize the myth of the eternal search but describes an ‘epistemic structure’. In short, if ‘philosophy’ is ‘realised’ as ‘knowledge’ it becomes so in the form of desire-for-knowledge. As a conse- quence, the dialogue form plays a decisive role, not only as a peculiar form of written expression and as a means of developing an argument, but first and foremost as an original way to express the project of ‘philosophy’.