PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN CONDITION transmitted in the same form as clicy existed in anti is rather that Plato deliberately removes his signature from hi wr ings in a series of distancing strategies. First there is the genre the dialogue: Plato transforms Heraclitus' dialectics from a ph sophical position to a method of philost plizing. Through very nature, the dialogue forn invites a plurality-of perspec rather than a single dogmatic position. Second, Plato compl removes himself as a protagonist from the scene of philosophy His name does appear in a couple of dialogucs but invoked to ultimately explain his absence. In the Phaedo, the dia logue which recounts the death of Socrates, for instance we a told that not present because ho"was ill'. It is fas ing that Plato chooses to highlight his absence from the scene which could lay claim to be the founding moment of western philosophy. It is this elusivencss which has earned Plato, as much as Socrates, the reputation for being a rnaster of irony. So although Plato's position in the philosophical canon is undis. puted, some would say unrivalled, he remains one of the most self-effacing figures in the history of thought. European philos- words of the twentieth-century ophy may be the 112 philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, nothing more than"a series of footnotes to Plato', but his own writings kccp us guess- ing who and what'Plato' might be Parmenides imagines philosophy as a journey into a celestial realm driven by a horse-drawn chariot accompanied by maidens Access to the Way of Truth" is granted by a benevolent goddess who stands at the gates of night and day. His philosophical suc- cessor, Plato, guides his readers n on an ascent but on a descent. Where the descent into the underworld(often called by its Greek name katabasis, meaning going down is a central part of the heroic narratives ofOdysseus, Orpheus and Heracles, the voyage into the Cave plays a cruci role in the education of the protagonists in Plato's Republic. Whereas Parmenides' ascent is the narrative of one man iourney