Good and Bad Plato

Kant likes Plato the academic. He doesn’t like Plato the letter-writer, teacher, and sender of messages. The latter is, through no fault of his own, too much the Schwarmer for Kant’s tastes.

The dividing line between the good and bad Plato – or, more accurately, between Plato and Kant – has, Derrida says, to do with mathematics: “Plato, enchanted by geometric figures, as Pythagoras was by numbers, would have done nothing but have a presentiment of the problematic of the a priori synthesis and too quickly would have taken refuge in a mysticism of geometry, as Pythagoras in the mysticism of numbers. And this mathematizating mysticism always goes hand in hand with the phenomena of sect, cryptopolitics, indeed superstitious theophany that Kant opposes to rational theology” (Derrida in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, 135).