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2019 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

15. Plato’s Sons and the Library of Magnesia

verfasst von : Pavlos Leonidas Papadopoulos

Erschienen in: Socrates in the Cave

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Papadopoulos explains why Plato, unlike his Socrates, wrote philosophic texts and founded a school. His paper brings together the Phaedrus and Laws in an attempt to show how Socrates’s critique of writing is met by the Athenian Stranger’s prescriptions for the preservation and study of texts in Magnesia. Papadopoulos reflects on the possible ways in which Plato’s writing can be construed as a kind of philosophic care or philanthropy.

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Fußnoten
1
For an interpretation of the corpus focused on its five philosophic characters and structured by the dialogues’ dramatic datings, see Catherine Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
 
2
Even scholars who argue that Plato’s dialogues should be read “developmentally” (moving from Plato’s early fidelity to and straightforward presentations of Socratic philosophizing to a later, independent mode and content of philosophizing presented primarily through non-Socratic characters) cannot deny the preeminent importance of Socrates as a philosophic character in the Platonic corpus, precisely because the “late” Plato is understood as a development of the “early,” Socratic Plato. But such scholars are not Socratocentric, because they tend to view each dialogue as an expression of Plato’s thought, sometimes to the point of neglecting the distinction between the relevant philosophical protagonist (Socrates, Timaeus, the Eleatic Stranger, or the Athenian Stranger) and the author Plato (e.g., Trevor J. Saunders, “Introduction” to Plato, The Laws, translated by Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Penguin, 1970)).
 
3
Leo Strauss, “Plato,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 33.
 
4
See, for example, Socrates’s criticism of Polus for describing rather than defining rhetoric (Gorgias 448d–449a) and of Meno for asking what kind of thing virtue is rather than asking what it is (Meno 71b).
 
5
The promised dialogue Philosopher would complete the trilogy begun in the Sophist (217a) and continued in the Statesman (cf. 257a–258b, 311c). The Apology seems to be the next dialogue in dramatic order; see Debra Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 321–322. Zuckert argues that the Apology–Crito–Phaedo includes Socrates’s rebuttals to the Eleatic Stranger’s political and philosophical criticisms (Plato’s Philosophers, 736). It would be plausible to narrow the identification of the missing Philosopher from the dialogues as a whole to these final three dialogues, but they like all the others seem to demand a transtextual treatment: “Each Platonic dialogue seems to stand on its own and declare its dependence on others” (Seth Benardete, The Archaeology of the Soul (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2012), 343). Thus we are turned back to the Platonic corpus as a whole as we seek to find or define the philosopher.
 
6
Catherine Zuckert, “Plato’s Laws: Postlude or Prelude to Socratic Philosophy?” The Journal of Politics 66.2 (2004), 374–395: 374 (emphasis in the original).
 
7
Socrates criticizes writing at Phaedrus 274b–279b; he reports his own writing at Phaedo 61a–b.
 
8
This would be particularly unsurprising if the Laws were the last work composed by Plato, as some scholars have argued following the rumor reported by Diogenes Laertius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, III.37). (Aristotle notes that the Laws was written after the Republic but does not discuss its compositional date relative to the other dialogues, Politics II.6 1264b25). However, my argument does not depend upon any compositional dating of the Laws, much less any form of the developmental hypothesis.
 
9
This is a particular application of what might be called the hermeneutic of inter-textual complementarity, according to which Plato has divided his treatments of fundamental topics (such as erōs, rhetoric, or in this case, writing) into partial or one-sided treatments contained in two or more dialogues. For articulations and examples of this interpretive approach, see Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 111–112, and James H. Nichols, Jr., “Introduction: Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Politics,” in Plato’s Phaedrus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 18.
 
10
This interpretation builds upon but goes beyond those offered by Glenn R. Morrow and Trevor J. Saunders. Morrow observes the parallels between the Nocturnal Council and what we know of Plato’s Academy, but he does not explore the possibility that I argue for in this essay: that, through Stranger’s proposal in Book VII and the institution of the theōroi, Plato provided for the Council to study his own texts. See Plato’s Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the Laws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 500–515; cf. 339–340. Saunders’s careful analysis of the political activities of Academicians includes a substantial discussion of the Laws, but he assumes that the Athenian Stranger is an Academician, implicitly according the dialogue a very late dramatic date (during Plato’s lifetime, when the Academy is well-established). As a result, he overlooks the complexity and misjudges the scope of Plato’s philosophic-legislative project in writing the Laws. By assuming the existence of the Academy during the drama of the dialogue, Saunders loses the incentive to investigate the institution of the theōroi, their charge to gather foreign nomoi and logoi, and the Nocturnal Council’s study of the Laws itself and related logoi. The same assumption leads Saunders to read Plato’s ambition in the Laws narrowly, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with the present and foreseeable future, in which the Academy exists and teaches certain “right (i.e., Academic) opinions on moral and political matters” that the Council may initially depend upon; thus Saunders neglects to discuss the Council’s charge to conduct open-ended studies for the ongoing and future stability and benefit of Magnesia. See “‘The RAND Corporation of Antiquity?’ Plato’s Academy and Greek Politics,” in Studies in Honor of T. B. L. Webster, ed. J. H. Betts, J. T. Hooker, and J. R. Green (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1988), 260.
 
11
Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 1.
 
12
Catherine Zuckert, “On the Implications of Human Mortality: Legislation, Education, and Philosophy in Book 9 of Plato’s Laws,” in Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth in Politics, edited by Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 169–188; 170.
 
13
Shawn Fraistat, “The Authority of Writing in Plato’s Laws,” Political Theory 43.5 (2015), 657–677: 665, 662.
 
14
The grammatocracy is meant to “comprehensively regulate the conduct of each citizen from cradle to grave” (ibid., 665). Fraistat argues persuasively that the Magnesian regime, with its elections and law code, is not a radical alternative to the Republic’s philosopher-kingship but a “second-best method for realizing” the rule of philosophers (668).
 
15
Cf. Deuteronomy 17:18–19. It is my understanding that this passage requires any king of Israel to write a copy of the entire Torah or Pentateuch (mishneh torah, “a copy of this Law”), not merely the discrete “law” or “teaching” about the conduct of kings given in the immediate context (mishpat hamelech, 17:14–19). Compare with Laws VII 811b–812a, discussed below.
 
16
The Stranger often speaks directly to the future citizens and office-holders in the regime they are founding; these speeches, and the various “preludes” to the laws, are an important component of the regime, and are meant to be actually repeated to the colonists. Thus, without this proposal in Book VII, at the very least the “preludes” must be either memorized or written down if the actual founding of Magnesia is to imitate the “city in speech” described in the conversation.
 
17
The importance of dialogue to the Socratic authors is evident from their writings; moreover, the literary record of classical Greece suggests that dialogue was a peculiarly Socratic concern. Far from being a common term to denote conversation, the first extant use of the noun dialogos is found in Plato; the cognate verb dialegesthai exploded in popularity only with the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Plato in particular gave dialogos a strong connotation of inquisitive or truth-seeking discussion. See Katarzyna Jażdżweska, “From Dialogos to Dialogue: The Use of the Term from Plato to the Second Century CE,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 54 (2014), 17–36.
 
18
According to Diogenes Laertius, “Aristotle remarks that the style of [Plato’s] dialogues is half-way between poetry and prose” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, III.37).
 
19
Kleinias’s aggression in the opening pages of the Laws is demonstrated by Eric Salem, “The Long and Winding Road: Impediments to Inquiry in Book 1 of the Laws,” in Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth in Politics, ed. Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 48–59; 50–51.
 
20
Near the beginning of the dialogue, the Athenian helps Kleinias articulate his conviction that strife or struggle is the defining and inescapable character of cosmic, psychological, and political phenomena—a conviction that the Athenian will combat directly and indirectly throughout the dialogue. Kleinias, who praises the Athenian for helping him articulate his view “that all are enemies of all in public, and in private each is an enemy of himself” (I 626d), affirms that Minos, who received the Cretan laws from Zeus, arranged all things in their regime with a view to victory in war. We later learn that Kleinias’s emphasis on the strife within and between individuals extends to a kind of Manichean view of the cosmos. Kleinias holds this agonistic worldview ‘naturally,’ as it were—without any training in (or even exposure to) the materialist natural science or sophistic political theory that supports or even requires it—simply as a result of his soul having been shaped by the laws of his Dorian regime. The Stranger, unlike Kleinias, recognizes that this agonistic worldview aids and abets the very atheism and antinomianism that Kleinias knows is a threat to civic order and therefore desires to punish, that is, the very tendencies that would be encouraged by the “harmful writings” alluded to in Book VII.
 
21
As Catherine Zuckert has noted, the Athenian Stranger “always cites or quotes both Homer and Hesiod positively, whereas in the Republic Socrates is critical of the poets”; the Stranger “appears to be taking advantage of Clinias’ lack of learning and Megillus’ simplicity in an attempt to change their opinions,” a “rewriting” that Socrates could not have done with his better-read interlocutors (Plato’s Philosophers, 75, 75n49). Zuckert attributes the Dorians’ guilelessness to their lack of philosophical training (Laws VII 818e–819a), but the difference begins with their ignorance of Ionian and Attic poetry (X 886c).
 
22
Socrates credits Hipparchus, “the eldest and wisest of Peisistratus’s sons,” for bringing the Homeric poems to Athens and compelling the rhapsodes at the Panathenaia to recite them (Plato, Hipparchus 228b). The locus classicus of what has come to be called the “Peisistratean recension” is Cicero, De oratore, III.137. See J. A. Davison, “Peisistratus and Homer,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 86 (1955): 1–21.
 
23
The Stranger indulges Kleinias’s request for a paradeigma, and no doubt he intended Kleinias to ask for one. But it is worth noting that both characters share a great confidence in the possibility that a single text can serve as the paradigm for judging all others. As I discuss below, the Stranger proposes and Kleinias seems receptive to a textually-defined standard for Magnesia and Magnesian learning.
 
24
Eric Salem estimates that the conversation of the Laws proceeds at four books per six hours; if it began at dawn and it is high noon at the end of Book IV (822c), then it ends around midnight (“The Night Watchmen: or, By the Dawn’s Early Light,” Ramify 5.1 (2015); 1–19; 18n13). Compare with Morrow’s discussion of the length of the route from Knossos to the cave of Zeus; Morrow concludes that the cave in question was on Mount Ida, a 12- or 13-hour walk from Knossos (Plato’s Cretan City, 27–28).
 
25
Further argued by David Roochnik, “The ‘Serious Play’ of Book 7 of Plato’s Laws,” in Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth in Politics, edited by Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 48–59.
 
26
This possibility has been noticed occasionally in the secondary literature, but to my knowledge the point has not been developed. Benardete writes that the Athenian Stranger “proposes, in short, the writing down of Socratic speeches” (Plato’s Laws: The Discovery of Being, 215).
 
27
Plato’s Phaedrus, translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
 
28
This would seem to be suggested by Plato’s Seventh Letter, 344a–345c.
 
29
For a helpful discussion of how fourth century Greek philosophers appropriated the existing civic institution of theōros to define and to defend their novel, theoretical enterprise, see Andrea Wilson Nightingale, “On Wondering and Wandering: Theōria in Greek Philosophy and Culture,” Arion 9.2 (2001), 23–58, especially 31–38. Nightingale’s treatment of Plato focuses on the Republic, in which Socrates appears as a quasi-religious theōros to “the metaphysical realm” (36), but neglects to discuss the Laws, in which theōroi are charged to investigate foreign nomoi and logoi and thus enable the political-philosophical activity of the Nocturnal Council. Consider also Solon’s appearance as a theōros and an Athenian Stranger in Herodotus, The History, I.29–30.
 
30
As Salem notes, “This is a regime given to forbidding a great many things” (“The Night Watchmen,” 6).
 
31
The sense of “divine” has shifted over the course of the Laws, and by this point a “divine human being” denotes what might be called a philosopher (a term absent from the Laws). The characters began on a pilgrimage to the cave of Zeus, where Minos was said to have had intercourse (sunousia) with Zeus and thus received the Cretan laws (Laws I 624b, Minos 320b). (Sunousia may connote either or both erotic and education activities; see V. Bradley Lewis, “The Nocturnal Council and Platonic Political Philosophy,” History of Political Thought, 19.1 (1998): 1–20: 5n13.) But the Stranger has corrected the Dorian theology by replacing Zeus with nous (intellect or mind); the divine is accessed not through the periodic encounter with a god in a cave, but through the cultivation and exercise of the mind in conversation—the sunousia of philosophic human beings, not the sunousia of a human being with a divinity.
 
32
If by “divine” human beings the Stranger means philosophers, then his observation seems to contradict a crucial premise of the Republic’s city in speech, which is ruled by philosopher-kings “grown” by its elaborate education. But the organic metaphor itself suggests that education is a process of cultivation, not construction; perhaps human beings with the potential to become a “divine human being” are born at the same rate in a well-ordered city as in a poorly ordered one. In any case, the Stranger here contrasts “cities with good laws” with those lacking them; Plato may agree with both his Socrates and his Stranger if he thought a city could have “good laws” without providing a philosophic education for its rulers, assuming that this kind of education is the cultivation that would help potentially divine human beings “grow” into true philosophers.
 
33
As Saunders has remarked, the “philosophic activity” of the observers in “consult[ing] foreign experts and inquir[ing] into the laws and jurisprudence of other countries” is crucial for Plato’s attempt “to ensure that Magnesia is founded on philosophic insight: the observers report to a full meeting of the Nocturnal Council, which no doubt attempts to feed into the legal system any new ideas and practices of which they approve” (“Plato’s Later Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 464–492: 477).
 
34
If the Council determines that the theōros has been corrupted by his travels, he is sentenced to a kind of internal exile in Magnesia, associating with neither youths nor old men and never claiming to be wise. If he obeys, he will be permitted to live a private life; if not, he must be put on trial and may be sentenced to death “for being a busybody in some way concerning the education and the laws” (XII 952d). It is unclear what the Council should look to when determining whether or not the theōros has been corrupted, but it seems to be evidenced by a moral flaw—perhaps merely the belief that one is wise when one is not, or perhaps the acts and choices that follow from this belief (952c). Saunders point out that the observers and through them the Nocturnal Councilors are “encouraged to have wider mental horizons,” but “the general run of Magnesians are to be totally immersed in Platonic values,” that is, the public teaching of the Laws (Saunders, “Plato’s Later Political Thought,” 472).
 
35
Moreover, this interpretation is not incompatible with the alternative (that a “brother” text would be one similar in content but not necessarily identical in authorship). Many of the Platonic dialogues depict discussions that more or less directly bear upon the topics at hand in Book VII—the proper education of the young, and the potential tensions between various poetic and philosophic teachings on one hand and the requirements of any given political order on the other—as well as the related legal, psychological, and otherwise philosophical themes that are described as the proper topics of inquiry for the Nocturnal Council.
 
36
See the discussion of “divine” in note 31 above.
 
37
See George Klosko, “The Nocturnal Council in Plato’s Laws,” Political Studies 36 (1988), 74–88, and Klosko, The Development of Plato’s Political Theory (New York: Methuen, 1986), 252.
 
38
Salem, “The Night Watchmen,” 2, 7, 10. Zuckert argues that the recognized need to reflect on these characteristically Socratic topics indicates that the Laws is a “prelude” to Socratic philosophy and should be dramatically dated as the earliest of the Platonic dialogues. See “Plato’s Laws: Postlude or Prelude to Socratic Philosophy?”
 
39
Salem, ibid., 12–13.
 
40
Salem, ibid., 11; cf. Laws XII 962b.
 
41
Lewis, “The Nocturnal Council and Platonic Political Philosophy,” 3. Lewis identifies the city in the Republic as “a philosophic regime,” while that in the Laws is “a regime with philosophy” (18–19n58, emphasis his). This distinction is not so precise as Fraistat’s (see note 14, above), but if my interpretation is correct, Magnesia “has” philosophy in the sense that philosophy is practiced by the Council, sustained by a literary tradition including Plato’s own corpus.
 
42
Ibid., 3, 7. This ultimate dependence of the political good on philosophic inquiry is never so directly addressed in the Laws—a dialogue between a philosophic Athenian and two unsophisticated Dorians, in which philosophy is neither discussed nor even named—as it is in the Republic, where the philosopher Socrates is challenged by Plato’s sophisticated brothers to provide a defense and exposition of philosophy, including its utility for the just city. On the contrary, the Dorians are only slowly brought around to agree that the city requires philosophy. They display this in their final action by enlisting the Stranger to help the actually found Magnesia; thus only at the end could they begin to ask the questions at the center of the Republic.
 
43
At least some of the confusion about the character of the Council has come from scholars’ failure to consider it in relation to the theōroi and the dynamic relation between these two institutions. Klosko suggests that the late appearance of the Council is a sign that Plato changed his mind while writing the dialogue: “At some point in working on the Laws Plato became dissatisfied with the rigidity of the state and took measures to remedy it. In Book XII the nocturnal council is assigned a legislative function, though Plato’s account of this is fragmentary, and one cannot be sure exactly what he had in mind or how well his presentation here fits in with the other eleven books” (The Development of Plato’s Political Theory, 252). Klosko mistakes the Council’s complex, transpolitical functions for an incomplete legislative authority. Moreover, as Lewis points out, a deliberative body with no direct power of its own still possesses influence on its members, who are themselves office-holders, pointing out that “two of the most important bodies in the executive branch of the United States government, the National Security Council and the Council of Economic Advisors operate in just this way” (“The Nocturnal Council and Platonic Political Philosophy,” 20n62). There seems no better way to achieve a philosophic “grammatocracy” than to institute a college of political elites and promising youth in which the fundamental text, and those like or pertinent to it, may be studied in common.
 
44
This interpretation solves several perceived defects in the Stranger’s plan for the Council. For example, Lewis points to the “vague terms” in which the Stranger discusses the kind of education the Councilors will need (ibid., 7). A library established by the theōroi with the Laws at its center would enable Magnesia’s educational officials to construct a curriculum appropriate to the city. As the Stranger notes elsewhere, the Magnesian legislation is a multigenerational endeavor; carrying on this project is the primary purpose of the Guardians of the Laws and thus of the Council (see Laws VI 769b–770a).
 
45
Plato, Phaedo, 97b.
 
46
For a helpful discussion of this rise, see Mark Munn, The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For a treatment of its material and technical dimensions, see E. G. Turner, Athenian Books in the Fifth and Fourth Century B.C. (London: H. K. Lewis and Sons, 1952), especially his evidence for the meaning of biblion (9–10); cf. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 55n16.
 
47
For a careful study that notes the absence of historical evidence about the Academy in Plato’s time, see John Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 BC) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). There is “disappointingly little evidence” for the “precise nature of the relations between master and student, or between associates, in Plato’s school, and of the educational and research procedures followed” (10).
 
48
Lewis, “The Nocturnal Council and Platonic Political Philosophy,” 18.
 
Metadaten
Titel
Plato’s Sons and the Library of Magnesia
verfasst von
Pavlos Leonidas Papadopoulos
Copyright-Jahr
2019
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76831-1_15