By Dr. Reinhard Hütter
On August 31, 2023, IHE Faculty Scholar Prof. Reinhard Hütter and IHE invitee Prof. Thomas Pfau (Duke University; author most recently of Minding the Modern and Incomprehensible Certainty) brought to completion a three year long Graduate Plato Symposium, conducted via Zoom, in which the complete corpus of Plato’s works was read and discussed.
Participants from The Catholic University of America, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame included IHE graduate scholars Vincent Birch (doctoral candidate; historical and systematic theology), Dr. Jessica Jones (philosophy), and Patrick Jones (doctoral candidate; moral theology/Catholic Social Teaching) as well as Dr. Aaron Ebert (Duke University; historical theology) and Matthew Messer (Duke MTS; doctoral candidate, University of Notre Dame; medieval theology).
Among all his writings, Plato’s Gorgias, Symposium, Phaedrus, Phaedo, Apology, Republic, Timaeus, Statesman, Sophist, Parmenides, and Laws, were the pivotal stations of a voyage, suggested in Plato’s famous allegory of the Cave, from the shades and shadows of simulation into the open in which the sun is the only fitting image of the surpassing good, a journey from an all too familiar and comfortable disorientation of contemporary intellectual endarkenment to an uncomfortably disorienting and dizzying ascent of enlightenment.
Mindful of Alfred North Whitehead’s famous remark that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” such a voyage cannot be undertaken without synchronic and diachronic interpreters and interlocutors, from some to take instruction, others to criticize. On this three-year voyage these were in one or the other way, among others, Francis M. Cornford, Robert E. Cushman, Rafael Ferber, Paul Friedländer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Konrad Gaiser, Jens Halfwassen, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Joachim Krämer, Georg Krüger, Constance C. Meinwald, Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Paul Natorp, Josef Pieper, Stanley Rosen, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Julius Stenzel, Leo Strauss, Thomas Alexander Szlezak, Gregory Vlastos, Eric Voegelin, Egil A. Wyller, and Catherine H. Zuckert.
In retrospect it is hard imagine how one might conceive of, let alone encompass, the full scope and rich texture of “human ecology” without at one point in one’s intellectual and moral formation having embarked on that voyage of ascent to which Plato invites, a voyage indeed all too often antecedently dismissed from within the unquestioned presupposition of the “immanent frame” or indefinitely postponed in light of the purportedly unpostponable urgency of immediate political demands du jour within the existence of the cave, an existence constantly absorbed by multicolored phantoms flickering on the over-sized screens that fill the diurnal vision and the nocturnal dreams of its dwellers in twenty-first century America and elsewhere.
Dr. Reinhard Hütter is Ordinary Professor of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology at The Catholic University of America’s School of Theology and Religious Studies. He is also an Ordinary Academician of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas and an Appointed Member of the International Theological Commission.
