Atlantis. New reflections on a Platonic utopia

Lecture by Tobias Hirsch followed by a discussion

The city of Atlantis described in the Platonic dialogues Timaeus and Critias serves modern artists as a source of inspiration and a place of longing. In contrast to this, more recent Plato research interprets Atlantis as a decadent counter-model to the original Athens, which was oriented towards the concept of the state in the Politeia. This article aims to show that the Atlantis narrative in the Critias surpasses that of Ur-Athens in scope and impressiveness and is designed by the narrator Critias as a positive counter-utopia to that of Socrates. At the same time, Critias proves to be an unreliable narrator who attributes his story, which is presented as a factual account, to arcane knowledge and modifies it several times. The identification of the dialogue figure Critias with the eponymous leader of the "Thirty", who ruled Athens by force in 404/3 BC, which was obvious to Plato's contemporaries, makes Atlantis, which bears traits of a collective tyranny, especially due to the ten Atlantean kings' free power of disposal over the lives of their subjects, appear as a conceptual anticipation of that historical tyranny. Overall, the article understands Plato's Atlantis narrative as an examination of the instrumentalization of utopias.

The presentation will be held in English.