/lit/ - Literature

>For Whitehead, Plato, who despised democracy, is nevertheless an heir of Pericles, whose trust he turned into a philosophical generalization. This is why there is not the slightest contradiction in the fact that this philosopher whose affinities with the Stoics, Nietzsche, or Deleuze I have emphasized had, for his part, defined the European philosophical tradition as " footnotes " to Plato's text. What "saves" Plato, for Whitehead, making him the first philosopher, is the affirmation that the divine element in the world must be conceived in terms of action that is persuasive or erotic (lure), not coercive. This implies, correlatively, that human beings are defined by their susceptibility to the attraction of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

>The fact that the power of the true, the beautiful, and the good over human souls is that of Eros thus constitutes, in the cavalier perspective typical of Whitehead, a properly philosophical generalization of what was first attested by Pericles, persuading the Athenians to unite without threats or reference to transcendent values to force them to it. Consequently, whatever may be the restrictive conditions, normative judgments, and unnecessary oppositions produced by the Platonic statement, Plato is, for Whitehead, the first philosopher, because he defined the human being as "capable of the Idea."

>Philosophy as footnotes ... and indeed, the most misanthropic or the most subversive philosophers, because they are philosophers, may well denounce the pettiness of humans, the stupidity of opinion, the nastiness and cowardice of conformism: they will still inherit, albeit in a critical form, an ideal based on the intrinsic possibilities of the human.

>What is the last word, the one that closes the circle, and includes Whitehead in the adventure? God is obviously not the ultimate, but neither is creativity in this case, for it is only the ultimate of Whitehead's philosophical construction, referring to his responsibility as a thinker, not to what makes him think. The ultimate of adventure, the only thing that really matters, is the question that inhabits this adventure of ideas: the question of what those who define themselves as "capable of ideas " are capable of. This is the question that always returns. It unites Job, whose solitary cry rises up to God; Protagoras, who turns the gods into fabrications of which man is the measure; Pericles, who knows that all that matters is the greatness to which the undisciplined crowd may rise; Jesus, who announces the victory of love over death, but also those merchants who Jesus drove from the Temple, insofar as their practice wagered on mutual persuasion and not on force; and finally Nietzsche, whose hammer-thought undertook to destroy that Temple.