Plato is our friend, but we are not Plato's friends ／プラトンは我々の友だが、我々はプラトンの友ではない

The following article is an English translation by DeepL Pro of a past article on our blog, 「我々は過去へと関わるが、過去は我々に関わらない: 本に溺れたい(20161119)」. We felt that the title of the previous article was confusing, so we have changed the title of this English article to this one. Just in case.

The meaning may be unclear from the title. What I am trying to say is this. We know Plato, but Plato does not know us.

In other words, Plato is our friend, but we are not Plato's friend. We cannot call a person we do not know a friend. Thus, we are related to the past, but Plato himself has nothing to do with the present.

Let us suppose, as Seki Hirono argues, that Plato's ideological legacy, his ideas of the state system and his theory of ideas, influenced the early modern Western state system and the spirit of monetary thought and capitalism through the state system of the Roman Empire and the organization of the Roman Church. But since these were merely choices made by the people of the Middle Ages and by us in later generations from a wide variety of past resources, or an accumulation of such choices, Plato can only be said to be unresponsive, whether the influence was positive or negative. In the first place, it can hardly be said that Plato himself, even in his imagination, was aiming at a modern international finance capitalism. So, even if the ghost of Platonism is dragging us around in our modern life, it is only half of the story.

So, the next detail to be clarified is this. "How" and "why" did humans choose Plato's (or non-Plato's) legacy from among the many past resources available to them at the time?

I am now pondering this question. I would like to clear this up methodologically, but I am running out of intellectual resources tonight.