Spring 2016 Volume 42 Issue 3

341 David Foster Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 367 Nelson Lund A Woman’s Laws and a Man’s: Eros and Thumos in Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) and The Deer Hunter (1978) 437 Thomas L. Pangle Socrates’s Argument for the Superiority of the Life Dedicated to Politics Review Essays: 463 Liu Xiaofeng How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato’s “Protagoras,” “Charmides,” and “Republic” by Laurence Lampert 477 Matthew Post The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Rights, ed. Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty; Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World: The Politics of Natural Rights by Mark D. Friedman; The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism by Steven Wall

An Exchange: 495 Tucker Landy Reply to Antoine Pageau St.-Hilaire’s Review of After Leo Strauss: New Directions in Platonic Political Philosophy 497 Antoine P. St-Hilaire Strauss’s Platonism and the Fate of Metaphysics: A Rejoinder to Tucker Landy’s Reply

Book Reviews: 501 Rodrigo Chacón Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics and the Order of Freedom by Christian Volk 507 Ross J. Corbett Scripture and Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls by Alex P. Jassen 513 Bernard J. Dobski On Sovereignty and other Political Delusions by Joan Cocks; Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism by Sharon Krause

521 Lewis Fallis On Plato’s “Euthyphro” by Ronna Burger 525 Hannes Kerber Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters by Ronald Beiner 531 Pavlos Leonidas Western Civilization and the Academy by Bradley C. S. Watson Papadopoulos

543 Antonio Sosa Democracy in Decline? by Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner 551 Dana Jalbert Stauffer Making Religion Safe for Democracy: Transformation from Hobbes to Tocqueville by J. Judd Owen

557 John B. Tieder Jr. The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience by Alan E. Johnson

563 Shawn Welnak The Political Is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy by Lorna Finlayson

©2016 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Book Review: On Plato’s “Euthyphro” 521

Ronna Burger, On Plato’s “Euthyphro.” Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2015, 124 pp.

The Divine, the Holy, and the Just

Lewis Fallis Harvard University [email protected]

On Plato’s “Euthyphro” presents a more thoughtful and careful analysis of the dialogue than any previous full-length commentary. Ronna Burger argues con- vincingly that the Euthyphro should be read as a Platonic defense of Socrates against the accusations made by Aristophanes in the Clouds (15). In that comedy, Socrates is presented as a threat to the authority of the fathers and to traditional piety. In Plato’s dialectical comedy, Socrates is presented as “the defender of the fathers and the practices of piety in the city” (113). To be such a defender, Socrates must moderate the fanaticism of Euthyphro, a young diviner who is attempting to prosecute his own father for murder. By the final exchange in the dialogue, “Euthyphro has been moved from his boastful identification with a punishing god to acceptance of the public practices that foster in the family and the city recognition of limits, sanctioned by higher powers” (103–5). Socrates’s primary motive in speaking with Euthyphro, then, seems to be philanthropy. The inclusion of a number of references to other works is both a strength and a weakness of the commentary. Burger refers to works by Aristophanes, Augustine, Cicero, Halevi, Herodotus, Hesiod, Isocrates, Kierkegaard, Maimonides, Nietzsche, Strauss, and Thucydides, as well as to a number of Platonic dialogues. Often these references are very helpful in casting new light on the Euthyphro, as when Burger compares Euthyphro to Abraham in order to illustrate two modes or aspects of piety (67–69). (In the first mode,

© 2016 Interpretation, Inc. 522 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 when he attempts to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham accepts God’s will as disposi- tive and obeys without questioning. In the second mode, when he negotiates with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham subjects even the will of God to a standard, a standard that seems to him knowable by the unassisted human mind; he attempts to bring God, as he experiences Him, into conformity with the standard he somehow knows even God must obey or respect.) But at times, the references to other works seem extraneous and distract attention from the dialogue, as when Euthyphro’s father’s treatment of Euthyphro’s laborer—taking the laborer to be a “stand-in” for Euthyphro himself—is linked to Oedipus’s father’s treatment of Oedipus (31). One wishes that certain connections were either elaborated more fully, or ignored in order to enable a tighter focus on the puzzles of the dialogue. One of the great virtues of the commentary is the sustained emphasis it puts on a pair of crucial questions: how is the divine related to the holy (35, 67), and how is the holy related to the just (75, 87)? This emphasis, along with the thoughtfulness with which Burger has clearly considered these questions, sets the commentary apart. Yet it seems to me that her answers to these ques- tions, answers which are to some degree stated and to some degree implied, are not entirely satisfying; I will try to explain why. Euthyphro is ambivalent with regard to the relationship between the divine and the holy. Specifically, he is ambivalent as to whether divine love causes the quality of holiness or the quality of holiness causes divine love. In discussing his ambivalence, scholars typically assume that Euthyphro must choose between two options which they treat as mutually exclusive: either divine love can cause the quality of holiness, or the holy can be tethered to a fixed standard. Burger transcends this assumption. According to her “dynamic account” of the holy, the just causes divine love, and divine love causes the quality of holiness. As she puts it, “the holy is a product of the gods’ approval, but that approval is itself elicited by the gods’ recognition of an intrinsic property, more specifically, the just” (87, cf. 59 and 73–77). This innovative account clarifies the relationship between the divine and the holy, and between the holy and the just, while retaining both of the things which Euthyphro seems to want: the holy can be both tethered to a fixed standard and determined by divine love. A potential problem with the dynamic account is that Euthyphro, the believer, does not seem to accept it. Instead, when pushed to decide whether divine love is determinative of or determined by the quality of holiness, he chooses the latter: the gods love the holy because it is holy (10d5). While Book Review: On Plato’s “Euthyphro” 523 noting that Euthyphro does not accept the dynamic account, Burger claims that Socrates and Plato would accept it. She justifies this claim mainly on the basis of a purported ambiguity in a response by Euthyphro. When asked whether the gods love the holy “on account of this [touto], that it is holy, or on account of something else/for some other reason?” Euthyphro answers, “No, but because of this [touto]” (10d4–5). According to Burger, this response is ambiguous, since “his words more naturally refer to the last thing said— ‘some other reason’ why the gods love what is holy” (71). But it seems odd to attribute a complex theory to Socrates and Plato on the basis of an ambiguous response by Euthyphro. Although Socrates has led Euthyphro to agree that the gods love what they find noble and good and just (59), there does not seem to be textual warrant for claiming that the dynamic account as a whole is a theological reform that was “suggested” or “implied” by Socrates (87). While the account has the advantage of resolving the ambivalence or tension within Euthyphro’s understanding, it might be more fruitful to analyze that tension on its own terms, rather than to relieve Euthyphro too quickly in his distress. But should we care what Euthyphro thinks about the divine and the holy? Did Socrates care? We are led back to the question of Socrates’s motive in speak- ing with Euthyphro. To moderate Euthyphro, Socrates tries to persuade him to subordinate the gods to the ideas (53, 89)—that is, to grant that the actions and affections of the gods are responses guided by their awareness of certain fixed and knowable classes. But as Burger notes, fanaticism is perfectly compatible with that subordination, if one’s understanding of what is required by the ideas is sufficiently fanatical (89). Indeed, the subordination of the gods to the idea of justice “would allow the fanatic to claim divine sanction for his pursuit of justice” (89). Therefore, Socrates abandons this dangerous tactic and employs a new one: in the final section of the dialogue, according to Burger, the search for an idea of the holy is replaced “by something quite different—an examination of piety in the city and its relation to justice” (37, cf. 89). But if the first tactic was so unpromising for the goal of moderating Euthyphro, why did Socrates ever employ it? The disharmony between the tactic and the apparent goal suggests that Socrates, in employing that tactic, had another goal in mind: not moderat- ing Euthyphro but learning from him (see 37, 113). But what did he hope to learn? Burger suggests that the conversation with Euthyphro allowed Socrates to “articulate the problem of the holy, in all its complexity” (109) and to achieve “a more articulate knowledge of ignorance” (103, cf. 37). But in order to do so, why was it necessary for him to speak with Euthyphro? The difficulty in saying that Socrates hoped to learn anything substantial from his conversation with Euthyphro is that, in Burger’s account, Socrates 524 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 already knew what he thought about the highest beings (27, 111). He had already settled the question of what types of gods he would “accept” (47) or “acknowledge” (67). Indeed, he was so confident in his disbelief in “the fic- tional gods of the poets” that he could blithely transform them (91) or replace them with the ideas (25) and the philosophers themselves (111). But what were the grounds for his disbelief? Burger’s position, as far as I can reconstruct it from her indications (37, 47, 57, 63, 73, 103), is that a philosopher would combine a meditation on the question ‘What is god?’ with a critique of justice, especially a critique of the legitimacy of the punishment of wrongdoers—who, as desirers of the good, must have chosen the bad on account of an ignorance that was not voluntary (63). This meditation and this critique, taken together, would justify a disbelief in the gods. In response to this position, I would raise two objections. First, even if one were to grant that justly punitive gods could not in theory exist, what about beings similar to those gods? Such beings might still be called divine, on account of their apparent immortality and power. The experiences which seem to point to the existence of gods—experiences which most, if not all, human beings have—might still be strong evidence for the existence of such beings. I have in mind especially experiences during which one feels the presence of something greater than oneself, something which may command one to carry out or forgo certain actions. And neither a meditation on the question ‘What is god?’ nor a critique of justice, undertaken by a philosopher on his own, could do anything to cast doubt upon the apparent evidence of divinity provided by the experi- ences of other human beings. Second, Burger’s position leaves unanswered the question of why Socrates engaged in dialectical refutations, as part of his quest to refute the Delphic oracle. That he risked his life to engage in those refutations is perhaps some evidence that the “meditative route,” or the essentially solitary meditation on justice and theology, was not in his view sufficient. Setting aside these qualms, Burger’s commentary is very much worth reading. The textual analysis is extremely careful (see esp. 57–59 and 95n16). And the commentary is peppered with many helpful insights. Burger cor- rects the misimpressions of Marlo Lewis and Laszlo Versenyi that divine love (philein) implies some kind of erotic neediness on the part of the gods (65n34). And she corrects the misimpression of Euthyphro that the daimonion is to blame for the city’s distrust of Socrates; Socrates is distrusted on account of his activity of making others like himself, but the daimonion “is the mark of Socrates’ individuality and could never be reproduced in another” (23). These and other insights, along with the ambitious sweep of Burger’s commentary as a whole, make it very valuable to any student of the Euthyphro.