Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 89

THE POVERTY OF ANTIHISTORICISM

does this, Gadamer contends, in order to emphasize a contrast
with his own argument about the good, which sees it as a living
and developing thing that exists concretely within the physical
world (145, 134n6).
Gadamer's careful exegesis of the Platonic dialogues, however,
shows that despite the use of ideational metaphors and somewhat misleading locutions-such as the chorismos or "separation" of the good from sensible phenomena-there is for Plato
no separate world of ideas providing the standards against which
the concrete reality of human affairs is to be judged. Gadamer
flatly states that "the complete separation of a world of the ideas
from the world of appearances would be a crass absurdity" to
which Plato never subscribed (16). Significantly, he notes, Plato
coins the term methexis, meaning "participation," to describe the
relationship of the many to the one, or the particular to the universal, and to express the one as a thing "in common" among the
particulars of certain human experiences (10-11).
Thus, Gadamer explains that "one must look for the dynamis
[power] of the good in the manifold of what the dynamis of the
good brings about-as, for instance, the dynamis of seeing consists
in the manifold sights and nothing else. In conceptual language,
that means that we are dealing here with the inseparability of the one
from the many. True reality, or 'being,' is one but nevertheless in all
the many things" (118, emphasis in the original). For Gadamer, this
"participation" of the good in concrete reality thus implies that to
claim the good's oneness or universality requires no assertion of
a reality independent of our lived experience. On the contrary, he
shows that Plato himself had an awareness of this "inseparability"
or dependence of the one on the many, the universal on its being
concretely instantiated in the particular (117-18).
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover1
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover2
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Contents
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 2
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