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Randall's general thesis reflects his conviction that the West had
selectively absorbed Plato as a religious culture. It was Plotinus,
however, who chiefly put the ideas in the “single all embracing
Mind of God…" 23 This is confirmed by his final assessment of Plato
in his Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason, 24 where he compares
Platonism and Neo-Platonism as philosophical traditions, and
notes: “Both Platonism and Neo-Platonism have been of immense
philosophical significance. The latter has undoubtedly been more influential
in the West. It appeals to and supports strong intellectual
impulses, while the former calls for more critical acumen and firsthand
appreciation of the dialogues themselves in all their complexity
and ironic subtlety."
(e) Irwin Edman, finally, taught graduate courses in Plato and
the tradition of Platonic idealism. Edman called himself “an empiricist
homesick for Platonism". It is said of him that he “didn't believe
a word that Plato said, but Plato was his favorite philosopher".
25 In his essay on Plato (1928), Edman treated the dialogues
as philosophical drama. To a naturalist like Edman, Anton says, the
Doctrine of Ideas is to be understood not as transcendent realm but
as perfect world projected in rational imagination. 26 In his comment
on the aesthetics of Edman, Anton states that “Edman wrote and
thought with the flair of a logical poet who had no difficulty
enjoying aesthetically, just as Santayana had done, these perfections
of the mind. Still he insisted, “The world of Platonic ideas, if it is
one thing more than another, it is a world of values". 27
There is no better concluding remarks on this undertaking than
Anton's final evaluating assessment of Edman's “naturalistic" approach
to Plato. “Edman", according to our second paradigm case
of the Western world and Platonic tradition, “was confident that he
found in the Republic the keystone of Plato's thinking. Plato is the
thinker “with a passion for the passionless and the poet with mystic's
sense of beauty, the statesman with a vision of a state conceived
and ordered by anadoring, disinterested comprehension of the
good". Plato, for Edman, was not the teacher of a system but the
dramatist of the soul." 28 In Edman's own words, “It was Coleridge
23 The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background
of the Present Age, rev. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1940, p. 47.
24 New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 262.
25 In Charles Frankel, ed. The uses of Philosophy: An Irvin Edman Reader,
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955, p. 4.
26 Op. cit., p. 299.
27 I. Edman, Uses of Philosophy, p. 54.
28 American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy, op. cit., p. 299.
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