Plato
March 6, 2007
In class today, when we were talking about Plato’s significance in the story, I kept wishing I could speak more knowledgeably about the original Plato. After a few minutes on Wikipedia, I have a tentative theory about the character’s relationship to his namesake. One of Plato’s most famous contributions to philosophy was the idea of Forms. The basic idea is that everything in the sensory world is just a shadow of some abstract ideal. The sun’s brightness is a shadow of the Form of Brightness; a sweet taste is a shadow of the Form of Sweetness. There is some essential reality outside of what we can directly perceive that nonetheless informs the concrete world.
Chestnutt uses Plato to allude to that idea with respect to race. We might imagine there is a Form of Whiteness or a Form of Blackness. But Rena cannot fit into that idea of essential difference. At the beginning of Chapter 28, “for the theory of blackness as propounded by Plato could not quite counterbalance in the young African mind the evidence of their own senses.” It is ambiguous whether Plato refers to the character or the historical figure. I think Chestnutt means to destabilize the assumption of an essential difference between White and Black by placing this philosophy of fundamental essentialism against the fact of Rena. It seems an obvious idea to us in an age where so much discourse arises around words like social construction, but I think the subtlety with which Chestnutt can even allude to that idea points to how groundbreaking and dangerous an idea it once was.
March 7, 2007 at 12:52 pm
It’s a very interesting idea that Plato is so named to allude to the philosophy of the historical Plato. I’d like to add to that point by saying that Chesnutt might have had something else in mind as well. Perhaps he meant to say that Plato was the embodiment of the form of the slave. After all, Plato is, as far as I can recall, the only characters who calls a white man “Mars” rather than “Sir” or the like. And he is the only black character to glorify whiteness in the way that the white characters do – i.e. that whiteness confers almost godlike power over blacks.
As you already said, the clarity with which Plato fits the mold of the slave contrasts with and underscores the difficulty involved in “pigeonholing” Rena into any particular race. Ironically, the presence of a personified Form of the slave (with which blacks were often – though of course not always! – associated) subverts the very idea that such a Form exists.