Plato is among us

And what if Plato was among us?

We tend to wrongly believe that philosophy is a footnote to the work of Plato. I really don’t know who said such a stupid thing, but I bet he/she lived before 1905. For it is in 1905 that the new philosophical revolution began.
I won’t say a word about this revolution, otherwise very well known by the readers. I will only show how this idea (that we’ve received from Windelband, tells me one of my students) is stupid.
Knowing that the past is a foreign country (and, when saying that, I stand on the shoulders of authorities such as Lévi-Strauss and his pals), and knowing that Plato lived in the past, it follows that Plato is a stranger for anyone of us. He lived in a world where there weren’t train stations, fountain pens, electricity, or even common things like the coffee and cigarettes or the tomatoes. Not to mention the turkies and the computers.
If Plato came one day in our world, he would certainly be horrified. If we ourselves went in his world, we wouldn’t be less terrified.

The past, in fact, isn’t just any country. like Mexico for instance, but the alterity itself. Living in the past, (almost) unlike living in Mexico, is a logical impossibility. (Like any other logical impossibility, this one too, when taken into account, fathers the comedy. Just remember Mark Twain’s yankee.)
From this logical impossibility, it follows that any conceptual translation from a past language to a present one is impossible. How could we translate the greek “glottopoiein”? How to explain “the invisible hand” concept to an (ancient) greek?
Obviously, we can’t possibly understand a word from Plato’s work. So, writing footnotes to what we don’t understand (although it might be a current practice in the scientific papers) is just stupid.
All in all, philosophy has nothing to do with Plato.