PLATO (The Philosopher): USER's GUIDE

PLATO (the philosopher): USER’S GUIDE (version of December 6, 2016, emended April 6, 2020) “Unless either the philosophers become kings in the cities or those who are nowadays called kings and rulers get to philosophizing truly and adequately, and this falls together upon the same person, political power and philosophy, while the many natures of those who are driven toward the one apart from the other are forcibly set aside, there will be no cessation of evils, my dear Glaucon, for cities, nor, methinks, for the human race.” Plato, République, V, 473c11-d61 “I realised that it is not only the material world that is different from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be directly perceiving and that we compose by means of ideas which don’t show up but are active, in the same way the trees, the sun and the sky would not be such as we see them if they were appre- hended by beings having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for this task with organs other than eyes which would provide equiva- lents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual.” M. Proust, The Guermantes Way, translation C. K. Scott Moncrieff revised by me (Note: a table of contents based on bookmarks is available for display on the left part of the screen in Adobe Reader) Foreword: this paper is a translation by me into English of a paper I originally wrote in French, my native tongue, under the title “Platon: mode d’emploi” (version of December 6, 2016). Being both the author of the text to be translated and the translator, I felt free to adapt in some cases the original text and reformulate it in English rather than slavishly translating the French. Besides, some section of the original in French deal with specific problems of translation from Greek into French (e.g.: the fact that, in French, the Greek words to agathon may be translated as either “le bon” or “le bien”, which is not the case in English, where it is always translated as “the good”); in such cases, I obviously had to adapt the English text. And conversely, there may be problems of translation from Greek into English that don’t exist in French. Regarding quotations from Plato, I always translated directly from Greek into English rather than translating my French translation into English. And finally, I apologize for the fact that my English may be at times clumsy, if not even faulty. Though I lived for six year in the USA (from 1972 to 1975 and again from 1983 to 1986), my English, more American English than British English, is obviously far from perfect. I only hope that it remains understandable without too much effort, so that the efforts of the reader may be focused on understanding what I say about Plato and Plato himself. Note of April 6, 2020: I want to express my deepest gratitude to Phillip Lundberg who, without even knowing me, volunteered by e-mail to emend a printed version of my text of typos, spelling and grammatical errors and to send me the emended version over the Atlantic Ocean free of charge. This new edition is the result of his work. If imperfections or mistakes remain, it must be that I overlooked some of his emendations and the responsibility is mine. Overview (to get a taste of what’s coming) The thesis I intend to argue in this paper is that Plato didn’t write his dialogues as independ- ent works spread out over a span of fifty years of thinking, each presenting the state of his thoughts at the time he was writing it and the answers he himself was giving at that time of his life to the questions he was then working on, answers that might have evolved through the years 1 All the translations of Plato quotes in this paper are mine. References to dialogues are given using the univer- sally accepted system based on the 1578 three volume edition of Plato complete works by Henri Estienne (Stephanus in latin), whose page numbering is reproduced in about all modern editions and translations of the dialogues. For those unfamiliar with this mode of quotation, it is explained in the page of my Internet site at adress http://plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq007.htm. When references include the line number, it is based on the Oxford Classical Texts (OCT) edition of Plato complete works in 5 volumes by John Burnet. Plato : User’s Guide based on the development of his thinking, but actually a single work in 28 volumes artfully structured by a master of pedagogy in light of his own prior evolution and his experience as a teacher at the Academy, the school he had founded in Athens to form future leaders, a work meant to accompany the student (and, more broadly, the reader) intent upon embracing a political career in his progression toward that goal, not by providing him with prepackaged answers but rather in eliciting thoughts on his part on the right issues, in pointing at the limits and weak- nesses of speedy, simplistic answers and in showing how all the questions that must be addressed are intertwined and call for a set of answers consistent with one another and with the observed facts gathered from life experience. The question which is at the root of all this, asked in the opening dialogue and remaining in the background of all others, is the following: “What entitles a human being to rule over fellow human beings? What skills must one have to play that role?” At the end of this journey, which should have made things clearer for us on this issue and given us leads toward appropriate answers devised by us along the road, Plato doesn’t give his own answer, but only an example, necessarily dated, of the work awaiting a lawgiver, putting the stress more on the spirit in which this work has to be done than on the specifics of the laws he comes up with. To talk of skills expected from a ruler means to assume knowledge that might be required for that role, which leads to the problem of knowledge and to the question “What can a human being know?” And when one realizes that all knowledge, and more generally speaking, all human thinking, is dependent upon words and logos (“speech”) through which it is expressed, either internally or vocally, the question becomes that of the power and limits of logos2 and of 2 I don’t translate in this paper the Greek word logos, whose array of meaning is too broad to be rendered in English by a single word without losing part of its richness, which it is important to keep in mind to properly understand Plato’s problematics. The reader unfamiliar with ancient Greek should only know that its possible meanings include, among others: “verbal expression”, “speech”, “tale”, “definition”, “account”, “reason” (both as the faculty of the mind and as the “ground” for doing something), “proportion”, “explanation”, in short, almost anything that can be expressed through words. With the word logos and derived words such as the verbs legein (to speak) and dialegesthai (to dialogue, discuss), the stress is put on human speech as having meaning. When Plato want to stress the physical dimension of speech as the production of sounds, he uses the verb phtheggest- hai, which may also mean “to speak”, but which has the much broader meaning of “producing a noise, a sound”, not only for a human being, but also for an animal or a material object. The fact of being endowed with logos is for Plato, even before Aristotle, what distinguishes human beings from all other animals. From a more general standpoint, I ask the reader not familiar with ancient Greek to excuse me for using so many Greek words in this paper, sometimes without translating them, but it seems to me it is the price one has to to pay if one is to properly understand Plato. Some of the words used by Plato cannot be translated into English by a single word without losing part of what he is trying to make us understand (logos is the most striking example of this). Plato had no intention of imposing his law upon words by forcing a unique meaning on each one in order to create a “technical” vocabulary, but on the contrary he wanted to start with speech as used by anybody else and to play with its ambiguities in all consciousness to reach his goals. We’ll see another example of this with the word politeia, which he chose as the title for the central dialogue of his work (called in English the Republic), precisely because of the multiplicity of meanings of the word, which is lost in the English word “republic”. We’ll see that it is also the case with words central to what scholars call the “theory of forms” which they ascribe to Plato. The end result is that one should be careful with all translations of Plato, all of which convey, through choices made by the translator to render into English those loaded Greek words, the understanding and assump- tions, explicit or implicit, he or she made about what Plato was trying to say. For this reason, the less bad solution, for a reader who seeks more than a cursory overview of the dialogues, is to use several translations and compare them on problematic sections so that possible differences between them alert him to the fact that maybe the original Greek text was not so easy to understand and that a problem of understanding might exist there, before con- structing broad theories about what Plato wanted to say based on faulty or biased translations.

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