Eschatological and Related Myths

Abstract

The determination which of the many possible passages in Plato are mythical will depend, as already noted, on which definition of myth is adopted. Those who see no myths at all have the easiest task, whether they are defending Plato, like Findlay, or attacking him, like Popper. They may well be willing to refer to ‘myths’, but this is simply because a misnomer has so passed into common usage that it would be pedantic to insist on some other term. Where, however, the presence of myths in the Platonic dialogues is freely acknowledged, there is still much confusion in the definitions of myth and therewith in the selection of those passages to be interpreted accordingly. Purely mechanical criteria, like the superficial determination whether the form of a passage is narration or dialogue, or detecting the presence in or about it of some characteristic term meaning ‘myth’ or a near equivalent, are equally useless, as Frutiger has shown. But his own criteria, while much more intelligent and sensitive to the text, founder in part because he insists on treating certain unquestionably mythical passages as dialectical because they embody ‘self-evident propositions’. Yet, leaving their alleged selfevidenceevidence to one side, that is precisely why I believe they are mythical, as I have argued in the section on Frutiger in chapter 3.