III - The Seriousness of Play

Summary

It is not surprising that Erasmus, true attention-seeker that he was, should write about himself; but this was also something that Huizinga, by nature self-effacing, did. Both were aware that their work was very personal to them, like a fingerprint, an iris-scan. Both revealed themselves in their work. Yet at the same time, both attempted to hide behind their work, to conceal themselves. They wished to do justice not to themselves, but to reality in all its contrariness and incomprehensibility. At the same time, each was saying ‘know me’ and ‘deny me.’ Erasmus called it Christianity and Huizinga symbolism, and both referred to Plato's mysticism.

Nor should this surprise us, because Plato was a great master of the dialectic of self-expression and self-disguise that we call art. This dialectic lay deeply anchored in the distinction that he made between appearance and reality, between the tumultuous changeability of phenomena and the unchanging forms of reality. In that respect – as someone who was searching for the essence of things – Plato was a philosopher. But was he not simultaneously a writer, someone who hid behind the voices that he allowed to be heard?

Plato

Was Plato a philosopher or a writer? Were his dialogues about philosophical content or literary form? For many years, the answer was invariably the former. This was a grave over-simplification, but one for which Plato himself was responsible. After all, he discussed the polemic between poetry and philosophy in The Republic, and sided with philosophy. Although there are still two camps (the ‘analytic developmentalists’ versus the ‘literary contextualists’), Plato as a writer is increasingly coming to the fore, and connections are increasingly being made between the form and the content of his philosophy.

It is thus now the case that for every argument and every discourse in Plato's work, we ask who is speaking, why he is saying this, to whom he is saying it, and what is the intended effect on the reader or the spectators. As such, the drama of Plato's discussions has become a meeting-point of philosophy and literature, and his ‘ideas’ are seen rather as desires. Those essences are closer to being projections on the wall of his mind, whereas the spectacle of his dialogues, the multiplicity of voices and clash of opinions, form the true reality.