Plato's Daoism and the Tbingen School

The purpose of this paper is to show some striking analogies between the new interpretation of Plato known as the "paradigm of the Tbingen School" and some fundamental aspects of Daoism. In the last fifty years, thanks to scholars like Hans Krmer and Konrad Gaiser, a new approach to Plato's doctrines has spread through Europe, especially in Germany but none the less in Italy, that is based on the so-called "criticism of writing" in both the 0RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2Seventh Letter1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT20RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2 - and 1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT20RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2Phaedrus1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT20RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2 - as well as accounts of Plato's thought from the "indirect tradition", i.e., ancient authors such as Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias or Hegel's main source Sextus Empiricus among others. Contrarily to the traditional way of approaching Plato's philosophy, summed up in the early 19th century by Friedrich Schleiermacher's classical introduction, the new paradigm holds Plato's dialogues not to be self-sufficient, since they ought to be read in the light of the doxographical tradition. While the classical thesis stresses the unity of literary form and philosophical topics, the new paradigm insists that Plato's best students wrote down what his "Unwritten Doctrines" were about. Consequently, according to this new perspective, a fundamental analogy emerges between Plato's philosophy and the tradition of the Dao in so far as they present a peculiar bipolarity between the One and the Dyad, on the one hand, and yang and yin on the other, making all that exists in the world a "mix" derived from those supreme principles. Indeed, Plato's One could be compared to yang since it represents the "active principle" that determines and orders the antithetical principle yin or Dyad, i.e., the "passive" element of the metaphysical relation in classical Greek philosophy. From this viewpoint, yang and yin, as well as the One and the Dyad, are thus equally original because one is not derived from the other. Although, an axiological superiority of one principle (yang, the One) exists in relation to the other (yin, the Dyad). However, "evil" does not represent a substance or principle detached from (or opposed to) "goodness". On the contrary, we may talk properly about the nature of evil only in relation to "bodies", i.e., according to the generation of the mutable world we perceive as a result of a "bad" combination of the constitutive principles of reality. Further, there is also a striking parallelism between what could be presented as a sort of "logic of the Fourth" in Plato's cosmologies (Timaeus, Philebus, etc.) and the "four Grandees" of #25 - in Dao-de-jing. Even the numbers are the same! Hence, analyzing the "kind of the cause present as Fourth in all things" the new paradigm suggests to read Plato's doctrine in a way closer to the Dao perspective rather than, say, traditional viewpoints like Hegel's or Aristotle's final cause. While Plato reveals his own sudden illumination in the 1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT20RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2Letter VII1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT20RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2, unfolding the techniques with words that remind us, once again, of far-eastern traphilosophy is open and its first principle "stretches always further" because it is in se unreachable, ungraspable, although present at all times, being the condition for all other principles.1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2