Western Philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato quote
A series of footnotes to Plato A.N. Whitehead quote, meaning
A.N. Whitehead (Alfred North Whitehead) was a widely influential twentieth
century philosopher and mathematician. He is responsible for
coining the following celebrated quote about Plato's enduring influence.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979];
To put this quote in its wider context to better grasp its meaning:-
...So far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned.
There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers
into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted
can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of
some supreme master of thought - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant.
But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the
systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I
allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period
of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.
...
In his most clebrated work, "The Republic", Plato asks:-
"...can we possibly refuse to admit that there exist in each of us the same generic parts and characteristics as are found in the state? For I presume
the state has not received them from any other source. It would be ridiculous to imagine that the presence of the spirited element in cities is not
to be traced to individuals, wherever this character is imputed to the people, as it is to the natives of Thrace, and Scythia, and generally speaking,
of the northern countries; or the love of knowledge, which would be chiefly attributed to our own country; or the love of riches, which people
would especially connect with the Phoenicians and the Egyptians...
...Are all our actions alike performed by the one predominant faculty, or are there three faculties
operating
severally in our different actions? Do we learn with one internal faculty, and become angry with another,
and with a third
feel desire for all the pleasures connected with eating and drinking, and the propagation of the species;
or upon every impulse to
action, do we perform these several actions with the whole soul?"
(Plato - The Republic : Book 4)
These brief quotations from Plato's The Republic can perhaps be seen as being, "precursive?", to the
rather important German or Transcendental Idealism of later centuries:-
"Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are
human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned
with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able
to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint
of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment."
Immanuel Kant
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Is Human Being more truly Metaphysical than Physical?
