Bloomsbury (2025) h/b 200pp £16.99 (ISBN 9781399403375)
Plato may be long dead, but he can still help us to find out ‘how one should live’ (Gorgias 500c) both as individuals and as societies. H. tells us that ‘Plato makes sure that readers have a lot of interpretive work to do and problems to solve for themselves’ (p.122): she too shows where we can (and must) do our own thinking. That is, in essence, the point of this excellent book.
The introduction looks briefly at Plato’s life and Socrates’ life and death. H. then examines Plato’s radical choice of the dialogue form with its capacity to show philosophy being done in real time by recognisable people. Dialogues engage ‘not just our rational minds, but our emotions too’ (p.9), and crucially they are not ‘pugilistic’ attempts to demolish the interlocutor’s case but rather an open-ended quest for the truth. If these dialogues end inconclusively, then that at least shows the inadequacy of earlier answers. They also show good teaching practice: the regular checking for understanding, the drawing of agreed conclusions, the positive and friendly spirit of shared learning—all this should be shown in every place of education. H. (like Plato) is not starry-eyed about Athenian democracy, which was only free if one was a free-born male citizen and where political change (in 404 BC for instance) could end up being lynch-justice; and while it might be true that Athens was a magnet for philosophers who could thrive in its ‘culture of vigorous debate’, this did not stop Socrates being executed.
H. in chapter two presents the notion of flourishing and harmony, showing that Plato sees people as more than the sum of their actions, and the flourishing city as a reflection and a result of flourishing individuals. The ‘harmony’ of the state depends on each of the three classes performing its proper function, while the individual is also ‘harmonious’ when the tripartite soul is a balanced synthesis of reason, spirit and appetite. The issues raised by Plato and H. are huge ones and she is quick to point out the need to talk them through. Seeing injustice as a lack of mental health implies a mechanistic psychology which is open to abuse: and the rigid class-based society is itself open to accusations of totalitarianism. H. admits that ‘few people now would want to adopt Plato’s ethics (and politics) of flourishing with any exactitude’ (pp.46-7) but shows that Plato matters now not because he gave us all the answers but because he made us question everything—including himself. H. stresses the importance of social and cultural conditions: in education we should be seeking to allow children (and life-long learners) to become the best version of themselves rather than simply cogs in the industrial machine—and Socratic thinking could be a vital part of this. In healthcare we need to accept that flourishing only occurs when people enjoy stable social and economic conditions as delivered by urban planners, educators and artists as well as doctors and nurses.
Chapter three looks at the Gorgias as a highly charged exploration of the relations between politics and philosophy. Gorgias, with his flowery style and breezy rock-star self-confidence, is an easy target when he is taken off his comfort-zone soapbox and subjected to Socratic surgery about moral matters, but his verbal wizardry makes the interesting case that rhetoric is a kind of magic which can dazzle the audience (and rule the world). Then comes the classic paradox that injustice harms the agent more than its victim, and H.’s analysis of this exchange (pp.53-5) is brilliantly clear and incisive, showing the ‘pretty slippery means’ by which Socrates refutes Polus; but this then leads on to the more formidable Callicles who espouses an ethic of nature over convention and ‘natural law’ over pusillanimous conformity (pp.56-7).
Callicles shows how easily democracies are subverted from within, at the hands of ruthless crowd-pleasers abusing popular support for personal power and replacing democracy with tyranny. He—like Thrasymachus in Republic 1 with his concept of justice as cynical moralising by powerful people to enforce their own narrow interests—claims to be describing rather than prescribing human behaviour: we would all be tyrants if we could (p.66). We need to discuss this now as much as we ever did, and Plato will help us to do so.
Chapter four continues the political analysis, taking up the challenges of Republic 1 and showing how justice needs to be seen in the ideal city to assess its value to the individual citizen. H. queries the ethics of the ‘Noble Lie’—where arrant falsehood is used to secure social cohesion—but then offers some positive views of the role of stories for ethical purposes: a theme she refers to at the end of the book.
Plato’s ideal society is not ideal to many today: guardians (of either sex) are not allowed personal property or families, babies are conceived at state mating festivals and taken at birth to state nurseries, and so on. H. shows how this extreme form of political programme makes us question issues such as social inequality, of crime and punishment, of the degree to which we want to be ruled by experts and how we secure rulers who are morally as well as intellectually gifted. Plato takes apart the ‘degenerate cities’ whose rulers are greedy: his analysis of the dangers of wealth as a marker of success is unsurpassed and a tract for our own plutocratic times. Democracy can degenerate into a ship run by mutinous idiots (Republic 488a-489a) or a savage beast (493a-b): it leads to anarchy which opens the way to demagogues (p.97) who subvert democracy itself, labelling opponents as ‘enemies of the people’ (566c), taking people into wars and purging their enemies: does this sound familiar? The answer Plato (and H.) put up here is (again) education as the essential weapon to arm citizens against tyranny.
Chapter five looks at how society regards and rewards its heroes. Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus, who are capable of great feats of brutality, raise questions of ‘whom we should honour and how, and the danger of cheapening heroism and conflating it with celebrity’ (p.107). Is Socrates a new type of hero? He is (for Plato) a better role-model than Achilles who is dominated by his feelings at the expense of his troops, and whose attitude may foster ‘an inappropriate fear of death or excessive emotionalism in general’ (p.113). Courting honour means courting popularity, and hero-worship requires that the heroes deserve it. Money is a very dangerous measure of importance: H. discusses the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009 and the looting riots of 2011, both reflecting and furthering a culture of greed. Plato would tell us to recalibrate our priorities and keep asking the questions of what is fine and noble: it is not likely to be a pair of trainers nicked from a shop or a tax-funded duck house.
Chapter six gives us a splendid analysis of personal relationships. Friendship can be a force for harm in rare cases but what matters is our quest for unity in a fractured world. Things are muddier when we meet Eros. H. elegantly takes us through the complexities of sex in ancient Greece (pp.129-30) and its double standards (made all the worse by the roles of women and slaves). The Symposium offers a kaleidoscopic range of views, and H. homes in on two of them. She shows that Aristophanes’ account of eros as a quest for wholeness (pp.131-5) masks some big problems: if we were to re-unite with our ‘other half’, would that be the end of erotic love? Does it regard our life-partners as mere means to fill the gaps in our lives, even if the exploitation is reciprocal? Socrates later tells us of the teachings of Diotima whose image of the ladder of love has at its apex the love of the form of beauty itself, but this is even more problematic. If we get all we could want from philosophy, then ‘there is to be no risky dependence on one individual viewed as irreplaceable’ (pp.141-2) and former individual beloveds are to be dismissed as ‘mortal trash’ (φλυαρίας θνητῆς (211e)). The Form of Beauty will not love us back: will it stop us forming human relationships? Plato wisely does not end the text there but has Diotima’s other-worldly love challenged by a very worldly Alcibiades who shows what her ‘ladder of love’ makes us forfeit. Phaedrus brings in a more positive view of human love as mutual (as opposed to the adoration of an indifferent beloved, be it a Form or a person), and as blissful madness.
The final chapter looks briskly at the education of children, state control, the nature of truth and the need to be philosophical historians. Plato politely escorts Homer out of the Republic (398a) because poetry tells us falsehoods, it can foster dangerous emotions and is a copy of a copy of the Forms. Should we censor writings for fear of life imitating art? Is Plato right to say that art inflames passion?
The final section looks at the myth of Atlantis which is ‘true’ more in ethical, political and theological terms than as history. Atlantis can be seen as a warning of the dangers of expansionism: but it also reminds us (p.164) that these are ‘cyclical cataclysms’. H. is right to end the book on this note of judicious scepticism about what we are told. Myths can be good thought experiments, but we need to distinguish ‘nourishing myths from harmful ones’ (p.167) and she ends with the noxious abuse of Plato’s Atlantis as the source of Aryan race-identity (pp.167-8).
There are very few errors—the worst of them being the statement (p.51) that ‘Gorgias was written in about 487/6’, which was some sixty years before Plato was born. There are two pages of maps, two pages of chronology and four monochrome pictures—although these images are not referenced or even labelled. There are an index and suggestions for further reading. The best further reading one can do after reading this fine book is (of course) to read Plato himself. Plato ‘writes in a way which requires his readers to engage in active interpretation’ (p.169) and it is no small testimony to the compelling power of this short book that H. does exactly the same.
John Godwin