K. explores Plutarch's polemical critique of a non-extant tract by Colotes that rejected the views of several esteemed philosophers, measured against Colotes' endorsement of Epicurus. In this way a twenty-first century scholar explores a first-century text rebutting a third-century (b.c.e.) Epicurean disciple who sought to demonstrate Epicurean superiority when set against famous Greek philosophers drawn mostly from the previous two centuries. K. sees her project as part of an effort to rehabilitate Plutarch's philosophical bona fides and establish his scholarly reputation as a historian of philosophy. In the course of her speculative reconstruction, K. extracts the original structure of Colotes' book and provides a vivid sense of following along as Plutarch closely reads Colotes. We observe Plutarch constructing a vigorous series of counter-arguments to vindicate various founding fathers of philosophy and turn the tables on Epicurean complaints against them. Scholarship does not get much better than this.
Adapted from her dissertation, K.'s book provides only a small sample of exegeses rather than complete coverage of Plutarch's Adversus Colotem. The first half is engaged in exhuming Colotes' historical and philosophical background, painstakingly reconstructing the original structure of the work, presumably ‘directed towards amateurs or beginners in philosophy’ (p. 132). K. then has only space remaining to provide three samples taken from Plutarch's polemic, illustrating how Plutarch went about refuting what Colotes had written about Democritus, Plato and the Cyrenaics, leaving out Plutarch's arguments countering Colotes' polemics against Empedocles, Parmenides, Socrates, Stilpo and Arcesilaus. K. has composed an unfinished symphony.
Since Colotes' diatribes were thematically assembled around a common complaint that older, established philosophers could not live according to their philosophies, K.'s thematic sampler unfortunately ignores the denouement of Colotes' grand finale and Plutarch's final cadenza in response. ‘I set aside Plutarch's attack on Epicurean ethics, as found in the epilogue of the Adversus Colotem, mainly because this is rather unsystematic’ (p. 171). Yet, living the right sort of philosophic life was the whole purpose of Colotes' book and Plutarch's rejoinder. By focussing on passages disputing Colotes' defence of Epicurean physics and canonic, K. blunts Plutarch's polemic.
The ghost of Harold Cherniss (1904–1987) haunts this exhumation of Adv. Col. Brilliant Plutarch scholars have gone down this path before, seduced by ambition to fathom what was hitherto obscure. Lurking in the background is a certain hubris: armed with meticulous scholarship, extensive bibliographical research, crystalline prose and pellucid footnotes, we moderns would prove ourselves more insightful than the ancients whom we study, better informed about their texts, better at philosophy. We can even take up a much-derided ancient author and make him more interesting to us, thereby resurrecting old Plutarch in our estimation. But no one will be reading this sympathetic rehabilitation of a particular diatribe by Plutarch a century from now. Plutarch will still be enjoyed. Enduring wisdom cannot be captured by the way we moderns ever so skilfully go about our research. We lose the forest for the leaves.
When Amyot first translated Plutarch into French, it inspired the genius of Montaigne to write his belletristic essays. What professional scholars and academic philosophers might today dismiss as banal truths and empty aphorisms about the human condition became an invaluable source of moral sustenance to a famished reading public looking for secular spiritual salvation, to be obtained by perusing Plutarch's moralistic stories of Greco-Roman lives or his wry essays on human conduct. Even this atypical work deconstructing Colotes' diatribe that no other philosopher can live a worthy life save the Epicurean served Plutarch's common purpose running throughout his essays, to provide moral illumination for his readers, in the service here of Platonism. That moral purpose is at the heart of what Plutarch wrote and explains why he is still read by amateurs if not by academics.
There are, albeit, deep questions here about the history of philosophy. Why do philosophers with different views read past each other, unable to attend the views of others? Why do scholars do this, too? The more narrowly conceived approach of ad hoc, ad loc. that focusses ever so literally on words, arguments and texts, facilitates misprision. Plutarch and Colotes became so polemical each failed to see what they shared in common with philosophies they contemned. And far more genteel scholars like K. fail to recognise the beam of modernity in their own scholarly vision, notwithstanding strenuous efforts to be descriptive, never normative, to keep ‘the methodological error of anachronism’ to a minimum (p. 170).
Alas, there can be no neutral modern interpretation that does not import into ancient texts historically dated and descriptively unstable terminology. So, sometimes it is better to stand back and take in the larger vista, rather than focus on particular words the way Stilpo himself notoriously had done.
Consider the motley question of ‘existence’. Throughout her sampler, K. sympathetically detects a kind of dualism at work in the arguments Platonist Plutarch wages against Epicurean materialism, distinguishing what ‘really exists’ from what does not. (See, e.g., pp. 143, 151, 153 n. 46, 183, 188–90, 191, 198–200, 205–8, 211–12, 248–9, 259, 282, 289.) If all there is are atoms in motion in the void, then do Epicureans claim that ordinary objects and their properties do not ‘objectively exist’? K. suggests, if an Epicurean sees a tree, it must then exist alongside the atoms that compose it. Consequently, there are then two separate sorts of existents and properties, sharing a common existence. In this way, K. falls into an ill-conceived philosophese, whether to reject any alleged Epicurean ‘eliminative materialism’ in favour, perhaps, of some form of ‘reductionism’ or ‘dualism’, not to mention, ‘neutral monism’, ‘interactionism’, ‘emergentism’ and all the other ‘isms’ of the debates about materialism in vogue 40 years ago, now outdated. Furthermore, K. frames her own interpretative assessment of Epicurean ontology within a Platonist/Aristotelian perspective with the very idea of ‘objective existence’, just as she overlooks the epistemic origins of ‘eliminativism’ (cf. p. 183 n. 8).
When the pragmatist R. Rorty came to the defence of eliminative materialism (1970), he saw it as an epistemic move, not an ontological one, to the effect that at one point humanity found use for certain terms, like ‘witches’, ‘pain’ or ‘soul’, which they later found to be replaceable with other, more useful words regarding social or neurological phenomena, when discussed in more technical settings. So, the tree outside my window is composed of millions of living cells that are in turn composed of separate kinds of molecules that are in turn composed of atoms, which are themselves collections of subatomic particles. Depending on the context of my discourse, I can talk about the tree, the cells in its leaves or even molecules or quarks. Depending on that context, I can dispense with one sort of discourse about molecules to talk about leaves instead. So, an Epicurean can talk about all sorts of things, even though all that is are atoms in motion in the void. This is not an issue of competing or complementary ontologies but a façon de parler. There are not differing ontologies at work, but ways of looking at reality from different perspectives. Lucretius, like Gassendi and Rorty, understood this well enough, but ancient controversialists had every reason not to, thereby duping scholars in their wake.
A modern perspective is always culture bound. So, K.'s valuable ruminations on Plutarch's Adversus Colotem displace Westman's 1955 monograph, just as her own tome will be dismissed one day. There will never be an end to this, as long as we have the humility to recognise, following Foucault, that our most earnestly descriptive efforts will inevitably be imbued with a situated viewpoint of our own. The late M. Frede, K.'s Doktorvater, may have tempted his brilliant student to think that anachronism could be minimised. Would that it were so. K. has composed the very model of modern major scholarship. Yet, as good as it can get, the scholarship of Greco-Roman philosophy will always pale by comparison with the authors it embraces. Plutarch is in no need of rehabilitation by us moderns.
