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Of Plato's Republic? David Lachterman 173 The St. John's Review Volume XXXIX, numbers one and two (1989-90) Editor Elliott Zuckerman Editorial Board Eva Brann Beale Ruhm von Oppen Cary Stickney John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Subscriptions Assistant Deirdre Routt The St. John,s Review is published three times a year by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis; William Dyal, President; Thomas Slakey, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $12.00 per year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available, at $4.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore. © 1990 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Composition Fishergate, Inc. Printing The St. John's College Print Shop v ...... Preface David Lachterman I . The Music of the Republic Eva T. H Brann 105 . Eidos and Agathon in Plato's Republic Robert B. Williamson 139 . What is "The Good" of Plato's Republic? David Lachterman 173 . Imitation John White 201 . A Note About the Authors Preface Although the four essays iu this volume were conceived and generated on separate occasions, they form, I think, a true collection, and not only by virtue of their common theme, Plato's Republic. First, all four authors are "historically" indebted to the speeches (spoken or wntten) and to the silences of Jacob Klein. The first two writers were his colleagues, while the third and the fourth were students at St.John's College during four of the more than forty years Jacob Klein taught there. The ec·;ays gathered together in this book, however, are not static testimonies to his ·'influence," but are intended as lively episodes in the continuing, even L nremitting, course of serious reading and education he practiced, often •n the most playful manner. (The colloquial expression "former teachcc·" is here, if anywhere, an oxymoron.) T\.,: Platonic dialogues were his exemplars of that uncanny kinship bet­ ween nlay and seriousness to which Plato, or a soul-mate, refers in the Sixth Letter (kai tei tes spoudes adelphei paidiai-323d). Imitating, or comment­ ing OL. these exemplars, he brought to the awareness of the authors of these .essays the status of the dialogues as "ethological mimes." Interroga­ tion o ,· the souls and opinions of the interlocutors, with, on a very few occas: ms, a display of the abrupt "turnabout" (periagoge) in which, ac­ cording to Socrates (Rep. VII, 518d), the beginnings of education consist, takes orecedence over any of the putative theses, theories, or systems to which Platonic thinking was reduced or calcified, as early as Aristotle's On the Ideas (Peri !dean) and as recently as Hegel and Heidegger. Noteworthy is the way the comic poets of Plato's age (e.g., Theopom­ pus, Amphis, Aristophon) and their Athenian audiences seem to have been quite amused by such reductions or by their ascription, in all seriousness, to Plato; compare, too, the newly discovered papyrus-fragment in which v vi PREFACE the dramatic, or miming genre of the dialogues is discussed ( =P. Oxy, 3219). An exotic modern variant, or obversion, of the same thoughts may be found in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols (par. 5): "Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: What really happened there?" Klein's own account of these "ethological mimes"· is familiar from the Introductory Remarks to his book A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); his renditions ofthe various modes of Socratic interrogation and its dramatization by Plato are available in his lectures on the Phaedo, the Ion, and the Philebus (Essays and Lec­ tures, ed. E. Zuckerman and R. Williamson [Annapolis: The St. John's College Press, 1985]), as well as in his last book Plato's 'Ii'ilogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Accordingly a very few comments should be sufficient here. (For further reflections on some differences bet­ ween Klein's approach to Plato and now traditional or institutional fashions, see the review of Plato's Trilogy in Nous 13 [1979], pp. 106-12.) Emphasis on the dialogues as "ethological mimes," on their dramatic, sly, convoluted ironies, is not at odds with the presence in those same dialogues of Platonic "teachings," those teachings with which Klein was equally preoccupied, especially in his first. book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (trans. E. Brann [Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968]; German original, 1934-1936). The link between that emphasis and this preoccupation may be stated in the following, unavoidably truncated, way: that to take the due measure of Socratic in­ terrogations one must reflect deeply on the sources of their governing begin, nings or archai. Reflection of this sort leads, in turn, to consideration of the most plausible source of those sources (esp. Aristotle, Metaph. A6, 988a7-14). Mathematics, especially arithmetic, carries a heavy weight in the bulk of ancient testimonia concerning the outcome of Plato's reflections on the governing beginnings and their own sources. Three speculations-not necessarily shared in full by Klein or by all four authors in this volume­ suggest themselves: (!) If mathematics does play this conspicuous role in Platonic reflec­ tion, this is due not to its being a precise technique of problem-solving or a formal deductive system, but to the way its elements and their con­ nections come home to us as truly ta mathemata, the items we can suc­ ceed in understanding by questioning and learning. · (2) When it is a question of the very first among these first beginnings or archai, understanding and discursive articulation (dianoia) part com­ pany. Reports of Plato's "mathematical" speculations on The One, The Unlimited Dyad, etc., refer to his "unwritten opinions" (agrapha dogmata); LACHTERMAN vii rivers of ink have subsequently flowed over these reports. Secretiveness or esotericism, however, seems less the point than the acknowledgment that what makes learning always possible is not open to discursive articulation (either in speech or in writing). Paradoxically, perhaps, the underpinnings of intelligibility are not themselves intelligible, at least not in any accus­ tomed fashion. When Plato, in the Seventh Letter, speaks of "the weakness of the logos" (to asthenes tou logou), this is not an index of human finitude or of the critical limits of reason, but an indication that logos, a collected tally of the beings that belong together in discourse and learning, cannot offer a similar reckoning of its own ultimate archai. These make their ap­ pearance, if at all, in the interstices of discourse, and with the suddenness characteristic of recognition as well as of eros (cf. Symp. 2!0e). (3) Because speculation on the "mathematical" constitution of the governing beginnings remains tied to concern for the human enterprise of learning (and of failing to learn), Plato's putative "unwritten opinions" cannot be divorced from his crafting of psychic characters in words, his ethopoiia, as the Ancients called it. Ethopoiia, mathematics, and what was later named "ontology" meet at the point of optimum responsiveness to the testing demands of Socratic questioning. Souls are all together better off by virtue of this responsiveness. Hence one version of the probably legendary inscription over the entrance to the Academy explains "'Let no one who is not a geometer enter here.' That is, let no one who is unjust come in here, for geometry is equality and the just" (Cf. Johannes Tzetzes, Chiliades, VIII, 974-77 [ed. Kiessling]). The three points just made can also be put somewhat differently. Ac­ cording to an anonymous follower of the neoplatonic school (ca. 6th C. E.), each Platonic dialogue "is a cosmos," composed of elements at first hearing motley (poikilos), but finally arrayed decorously with one another (Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy 16.1-40 [ed. Westerink]). In the light provided by Klein's own readings we might be tempted to discern three dimensions of a dialogue such as The Republic, three measures of responsiveness through which that written artifact is given amplitude and audibility: (a) The seeming impromptus of Socrates, the two strangers, and the other interlocutors, given voice by Plato's ethopoietic art (the dialogue as eiki5n); (b) Plato's formal orchestration of these voices, always modulated to suit the disparate perspectives of his listeners and readers (the dialogue as phantasma); (c) The dialogue of the soul with, and within, itself (Soph. 263e), provoked by Plato's two-fold art (the dialogue as psychagi5gia or maieusis). viii PREFACE The Platonic dialogue as a "cosmos" takes its proportions from the interplay of these three dimensions. In sometimes very different ways the authors of the following essays try to do justice to that interplay and thus to both versions of Jacob J(lein's teaching. Eva Brann's "The Music of Plato's Republic" first appeared as a special supplement to The Collegian (March 1966) before being published in the inaugural issue of AGON. Journal of Classical Studies (April, 1967). In it the animated structure of so-called "ring-composition" in early Greek poetry, or in the design of "geometric" vases, is displayed as the shaping force of The Republic as well. By exposing the plot of the dialogue she renews the truth of Aristotle's claim in the Poetics: "The governing princi­ ple and, so to say, the soul of the tragic play is the tale it tells (muthos)" (1450a39). So, among many other things, she shows how the dyad of des­ cent and ascent, far from being merely part of the spectacle (apsis) of the dialogue, is consubstantial with its primary philosophical themes.
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