CUP (2023) h/b 308pp £30 (ISBN 9781108483087)
This book brings together fourteen articles on Plato composed for a variety of readerships and audiences. The book is not one of literary analysis or discussion of Plato’s use of the word καί—instead S. largely shows us ‘how’ Plato writes by analysing the thought processes at work in his texts and posing tough questions of his author and ourselves. As he well puts it (p.184) ‘we no longer find it helpful to characterise the “how?” as a literary question categorically quite distinct from the “what?” as a philosophical question.’
The book opens with a survey of general issues: Socrates in his intellectual milieu, Plato’s encounter with Italy and Sicily, the rivalry with Isocrates (whose teaching [or perhaps marketing] of rhetoric was the polar opposite to the Socratic and Platonic school of inquiry), Parmenides, Heracliteanism, the Theory of Forms, the world of Plato’s Academy and above all the place of the Laws.
The second chapter tackles the thorny issue of when and why Plato wrote narrated dialogues (such as Parmenides and Charmides)—as opposed to scripted ones such as Ion or Gorgias, or hybrid cases such as Symposium where we have a scripted frame dialogue but a narrated heart. He draws attention to the fictionality and unreliability of the text such as the preface to the Timaeus where Critias speaks of a war between Athens and Atlantis from the remote past whose historicity is seriously dubious. Plato wants it both ways—claiming veracity while undermining veracity—and keeping readers on their toes is thus found in the style as well as the argument.
The second part of the book looks at argument and ‘dialogue architecture’ in Gorgias, Parmenides and Cratylus. S. takes us through 505d-509c of the Gorgias, where the blustering Callicles is reduced (effectively) to muttering ‘no comment’ and leaving Socrates to conduct both sides of his own interrogation. He then takes another look at the ‘third man regress argument’ in Parmenides, shedding new light on this ancient conundrum without either dumbing it down or leaving us in a state of blind incomprehension. The chapter on the Cratylus is brilliant: S. shows how the eponymous interlocutor starts the text off but then goes missing for about forty pages before re-emerging as a very different character at the end. Cratylus was of course a Heraclitean and this may simply be a neat joke on Plato’s part—you cannot speak to the same Cratylus twice even in the pages of one dialogue—but S. sees it more subtly than I did and his pages on the Platonic analysis of naming and knowledge are among the most rewarding of the book.
The Republic is perhaps the most famous of Plato’s dialogues, and two major chapters look at the ‘noble lie’ and the ‘cave’ sections in terms of myth and allegory. The ‘noble lie’ adapts epic (and especially Hesiodic) myth to account for the differences between the social classes. This is not easy to pull off: how can rulers convince the citizens that what they had always thought was true was all in fact a dream? Anyone who thinks that this ancient Greek has nothing to say to us today should read S.’s illuminating pages (pp.144-50) on the ‘morality of lying’ in the light of the (mis)information age in which we live. In the ‘Cave’ section Socrates offers us two divergent accounts of the same allegory, showing that the two different versions of the Cave ‘generate rather different philosophical models of intellectual imprisonment and liberation’ (p.177). One version shows us the conversion of the philosopher from the shadow-world of the cave to the understanding of intelligible reality, but the second shows us ourselves, caught like rabbits in the headlights of the truth when we are freed from our routine reflexes.
The final section of the book concerns the Laws, and these pieces are enormously informative and inspiring for anyone who is as yet unfamiliar with this enigmatic but hugely rewarding text. The recommended politeia is a Platonic theocracy: ‘wherever cities have a mortal, not a god, for ruler, there is no respite for them from miseries and hardship’ (713e). This is not (S. argues) standard piety: the divine is recast in abstract terms as rationality in favour of a political system in which ‘law is framed in such a way as to promote the common advantage’ (p.195). Nor is the ruler some sort of deified philosopher-king, but rather ‘dispassionate rationality embodied in social and political institutions’ (p.195). Elsewhere (in the Statesman) Plato had argued that during the age of Cronos the god had ruled over us, but that now we have to rule ourselves and ‘law’ ends up being a very imperfect and sclerotic system to impose order on a messy mob. The disparity of views between Statesman and Laws on this issue—law as a necessary harness for fallible people versus law as a divine principle showing us what is in our best interest—is well discussed by S. Plato is always alive to human frailty. As Aristotle put it (Politics 1288b37-9): ‘it is important to consider not only the best but also the possible, and likewise the one that is easier and more common for all.’
Throughout the Laws Plato seeks to find answers for social and psychological problems which have never gone away. In book 3 he examines the ‘lessons from history’ and the ways in which states can decline into tyranny and disorder, when absolute power goes to the head of the absolute ruler. Plato maps out the ideal city but also keeps an eye on the real city in areas such as private property and the family. Citizens need educating into doing what is right of their own volition, but our recalcitrant human nature also needs laws to check our baser tendencies.
Nor was Plato writing in a vacuum, and in a lively chapter on ‘Plato, Xenophon and the laws of Lycurgus’ S. shows Plato’s debt to Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans. The Socratic paradox that ‘nobody is unjust willingly’ is found alive and well in the Laws and S. painstakingly distinguishes involuntary injury which requires compensation from unjust acts which (while ‘involuntary’ on Socratic principles) require punishment by law. S. artfully shows that for Plato injustice occurs when ‘passion or pleasure or desire take over the mind’ and so (for instance) a judge who wrongly convicts an innocent man, thinking he is guilty, is committing an injury but not an injustice.
This idea of voluntary and involuntary actions is beautifully encapsulated in Plato’s image of humans as marionettes (Laws 644de), and S. devotes a chapter to this topic. The gods are not the puppeteers, but we are both the marionette and the puppeteer, and although we have conflicting agencies pulling us in different directions, we are free to reject either of them by the use of ‘calculation’ (λογισμός). What matters, says S., is ‘the responsibility we as ‘single entities have for our choices and our lives’ (p.271).
The final chapter looks at the concept of ‘play’ as a serious assessment of how human lives are lived, both in Plato’s Laws and in Heraclitus. Callicles may have characterised Socrates’ philosophical life-style as mere ‘lisping and playing games’ (Gorgias 485): but play is a rewarding way of looking at our lives philosophically. The element of freedom in the concept of play, urges Plato, is what liberates human activity from the mortal plane to something approaching the divine.
S. has spent over fifty years working on Plato, and it shows in the style of the book itself: S.’s style of incisive and elegant philosophising mirrors the lucid clarity of the Greek he is discussing and engages and entertains us while at the same time showing us thought-processes we never knew we had. If Plato were alive and working in Cambridge today, my guess is that he would be writing philosophy like Malcolm Schofield.
John Godwin