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Philosophy and Law: on the Gravest Question in Plato's Minos

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Philosophy and Law: on the Gravest Question in Plato's Minos CHAPTER 15 Philosophy and Law: On the Gravest Question in Plato’s Minos Robert Goldberg Strauss published articles, essays, or books (or substantial portions of them) treating at length only ten of Plato’s 35 dialogues. All the more striking, then, is the fact that he devoted an entire essay just to the Minos or On Law—one of Plato’s shortest, strangest, and most easily overlooked dialogues.1 A justifica- tion for his having done so appears in his interpretation’s introductory para- graph, where he emphasizes the gravity of the question that the Minos raises and answers—What is law? The question is not only grave; it is also, apparently, sensitive. For Strauss emphasizes in addition the merely preliminary charac- ter of the dialogue and the reluctance of both Plato and Xenophon to depict Socrates raising the question it treats. While Plato has Socrates do so only in a preliminary and therefore apparently minor dialogue, Xenophon avoids hav- ing Socrates do so at all. Instead, he has the young man Strauss calls “Socrates’ ambiguous companion Alcibiades” raise the question of law in a conversation with Pericles when Socrates is absent (#1).2 As for the dialogue’s preliminary character, it appears to be merely the introduction to Plato’s Laws (his longest and perhaps most substantive dialogue). “The Laws begins where the Minos ends,” Strauss notes, and is especially in need of an introduction since it is “the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates is not mentioned or which is set far away from Athens, in Crete.”3 The Minos ends with a praise of the laws given to Crete by Minos—the son and pupil of Zeus; the Laws begins with an exami- nation of those laws, which are said to be of divine origin. Does Strauss thus 1 So that readers can use either the Strauss (1968) or the Pangle (1987) edition of “On Plato’s Minos,” I have numbered the paragraphs and cited Strauss accordingly. Except where noted, italics and bracketed words, including those in quotations, are mine. All Plato citations refer to the Stephanus page and line numbers in the Oxford Classical Texts edition, Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet. Translations from the Greek are my own. 2 See Strauss (1972), 15, and Memorabilia 1.2.39–47. 3 It thus appears that Strauss might have regarded the Epinomis, which continues the Laws, as spurious; if so, then he attributed to Plato 34 dialogues at most. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�9983�_0�8 Philosophy And Law 345 mean to suggest that the question of the Minos is preliminary to the question of the Laws? The question of law is not merely one grave question among many but, as Strauss asserts without explanation, “perhaps the gravest of all questions” (#1). It is raised here as a universal question, a fact underscored by the bluntness with which Socrates asks it to open the conversation, as well as by his com- panion’s remaining “nameless and faceless.” Strauss contrasts this aspect of the Minos with the Crito, where the particular question of Socrates’ own law- abidingness “distracts our attention from the universal question in all its grav- ity” (#1). It is not until the second paragraph, however, that Strauss begins to shed light on what he takes to be the gravity of the question. As he there observes, the question Socrates opens the dialogue with “cannot be said to be unambiguous.” The opening question occurs not in the universal form used by Strauss so far but in a slightly qualified form: “What is law for us?” According to Strauss, the qualification “for us” could mean either “in our opinion” (and thus make the question “universal or theoretical”) or “to which we (we Athenians[?]) are subject” (and thus make the question “practical or particular”).4 While distinct, Strauss notes, the theoretical and the practical questions are inseparable. Indeed, the second paragraph leads up to the state- ment that, according to the end of the dialogue, “the law deserving of the high- est respect is the law, not of Athens, but of Crete.” In finding out what law is, then, one may come to the realization that the law of one’s own country is infe- rior to the law of another country, perhaps even a country that is the enemy of one’s own. If nothing else, the knowledge that this were so could weaken the attachment one felt to one’s own country or laws. Indeed, when Strauss later comments on a passage in which Socrates is defending Minos, Crete’s legislator, against the way in which the Athenian tragic poets depict him, he observes that Socrates sets out to “liberate” his interlocutor “from the spell of an Athenian myth as he has liberated him from the spell of the Athenian laws” (#16). As troubling as this may be, it is not enough to show why the question of law should be a candidate for the gravest of all questions. After all, if another country’s law is deserving of more respect than one’s own, one’s own might still be deserving of some respect. And a worse law might be changed for the better. Moreover, there appear to be much graver questions for us as human beings than any question about law—for instance, what happens to us when we die and whether there is a God who cares for us. So the problems with law must go deeper than Strauss has so far indicated for the question of law to be as grave 4 Brackets are Strauss’..
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