Politics, Philosophy, Writing : Plato's Art of Caring for Souls

Politics, Philosophy, Writing: Plato's Art of Caring for Souls Zdravko Planinc, Editor University of Missouri Press Politics, Philosophy, Writing This page intentionally left blank Politics, Philosophy, Writing i PLATO’S ART OF CARING FOR SOULS Edited with an Introduction by Zdravko Planinc University of Missouri Press Columbia and London Copyright © 2001 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 54321 0504030201 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics, philosophy, writing : Plato’s art of caring for souls / edited by Zdravko Planinc. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1343-X (alk. paper) 1. Plato. I. Planinc, Zdravko, 1953– B395 .P63 2001 184—dc21 00-066603 V∞™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printer and Binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typeface: Minion For Alexander Tessier This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 Zdravko Planinc Soulcare and Soulcraft in the Charmides Toward a Platonic Perspective 11 Horst Hutter Shame in the Apology 42 Oona Eisenstadt The Strange Misperception of Plato’s Meno 60 Leon Craig “A Lump Bred Up in Darknesse” Two Tellurian Themes of the Republic 80 Barry Cooper Homeric Imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus 122 Zdravko Planinc “One, Two, Three, but Where Is the Fourth?” Incomplete Mediation in the Timaeus 160 Kenneth Dorter Mystic Philosophy in Plato’s Seventh Letter 179 James M. Rhodes About the Contributors 249 Index 251 vii This page intentionally left blank Politics, Philosophy, Writing This page intentionally left blank Introduction i Zdravko Planinc THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is not a series of footnotes to Plato. Quite the contrary: Plato is seldom more than a footnote in the works of other philosophers. In his Essays (2.12), Michel de Montaigne observed that philosophers, theologians, and “all sorts of learned authors” use references to authori- tative texts—the Bible, Homer’s epics, Plato’s dialogues—as little more than rhetorical ballast for their own views:“See how Plato is tossed and turned about. All are honored to have his support, so they couch him on their own side. They trot him out and slip him into any new opinion which fashion will accept.When matters take a different turn, then they make him disagree with himself....The more powerful and vigorous the mind of his interpreters, the more vigorously and powerfully they do it.”1 More recently, philosophers have not considered it an honor to have Plato couched on their side. Immanuel Kant, for instance, dis- missed Plato as “the father of all Schwärmerei in philosophy.”2 Schwärmerei, one of Luther’s favorite terms of abuse, ranges in meaning from “enthusiasm” to “zealotry” and “fanaticism.” But a critique of Plato is not necessarily any the more accurate an understanding of his writing. Interpretations of Plato’s dialogues need not be arbitrary, but all too often they are. In Truth and Method, one of the most important contemporary studies of the nature of interpretation, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that “a hermeneutical situation is determined by the prejudices that we bring with us.” For Gadamer, “prejudices” are simply our given understandings, “the horizon 1. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 662. 2. Kant, “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie,”translated in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. P. Feuves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 62. 1 2 i Zdravko Planinc of a particular present.”They are not necessarily “a fixed set of opinions and val- uations.” Prejudices in the pejorative sense occur only when we are closed to what is beyond our particular horizon, and, more specifically, when we are closed to the “historical horizons” that constitute the past for our present circumstances. Without such openness, there can be no true understanding of anything in the past. Understanding, for Gadamer, “is always the fusion of . horizons supposedly existing by themselves.”Without a fusion of horizons, the past remains lifeless historical material, the stuff of “mere reconstruction” and empty speculation.3 Despite the honors we pay the man, Plato’s dialogues are treated, for the most part, as curious historical, cultural, and philological artifacts; they are not read as texts representing a horizon of understanding that can question our own. “Plato”is a name to be conjured with,the magical power of which increases with the irrelevance of his writings to the things that most deeply concern us. The global technological society in which we live and work, the society that shapes the horizon of our concerns, has almost no civilizational continuities with an- cient Greece. In the easy confidence that modernity has subsumed the best of the Greeks and surpassed the worst, we even allow ourselves the conceit of nam- ing the modern research university after Plato’s Academy. But there is little ben- efit today for an academic to attempt to understand Plato on his own terms. In Western civilization there are at least three collections of writings, each of which may be said to express the full range of human experience and the great- est possible openness to the several horizons that are definitive of the human condition: the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, and Plato’s dialogues. The Bible and Shakespeare’s plays are texts that are interpreted within popular institutions— the churches and the theater—that continue to have their place, however ten- uous, in modern society. The modern university, organized around technolog- ically driven research in the sciences, recognizes the significance of scholarly research on the Bible and Shakespeare insofar as such textual work might still be thought important in society at large. But Plato’s dialogues have no compara- ble institutional embodiment; consequently, despite their intrinsic worth, they receive little serious consideration. Getting Plato right is—to say the least—a matter of some indifference in the academy. For all that they have been celebrated and abused over the centuries, Plato’s 3. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J.Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 306–7, 374. Introduction i 3 dialogues remain an undiscovered country more often fantastically described than explored, though the borders prevent no one from crossing. Their riches are not hidden from view; they lie in plain sight, but remain unseen. Perhaps this is not surprising. Legions of biblical scholars and almost equal numbers of Shakespeare scholars are regularly occupied in the intricacies of textual interpretation, and do not often claim to have penetrated the heart of their text’s mystery. If a “fusion of horizons”with a profound text—one that calls every aspect of the reader’s own horizon into question—is inherently difficult to attain, and if the entire endeavor is beset with many distracting interpretive problems created by a tradition of accommodation and neglect, it is quite understandable that Plato’s dialogues would have relatively few serious readers. The collection of essays in this book arises from a conviction shared by the authors that a great deal remains to be learned about Plato’s writings.We do not share a methodology, an interpretive paradigm, or the affinities of understanding that come with belonging to a “school.” As we have come to learn of each other’s work over the years, it is not so much our shared appreciation or respect for previous groundbreaking studies of Plato’s political philosophy—well- known books by Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Stanley Rosen, for example— that has drawn us together, but rather the sense that each of us, studying Plato independently, is working toward the same end, motivated above all by a desire to read and understand Plato properly. Our particular interests differ, as might be expected. And in working on the specific dialogue or text that draws our attention, we also differ in the manner in which we deal with the constant problems associated with interpreting Pla- to. There are different balances struck in the weighting of textual exegesis and historical contextualization. There are different balances in emphasizing— without ever assuming that they are entirely distinct—the political and the philosophic aspects of a work. We have different exegetical approaches—bal- ancing the dialogic or conversational features of a text with its features as a lit- erary work—and different emphases on various aspects of the context for a given text, ranging from the religious and poetic traditions of Greek culture generally to the more specific political circumstances of Athens at the time of Socrates’trial and Syracuse at the time of Plato’s visits.What emerges from these collected studies of texts as diverse as the Charmides and the Seventh Letter, however, is an understanding of the unity and integrity of Plato’s work as a whole. The title of the collection, Politics, Philosophy, Writing: Plato’s Art of Caring 4 i Zdravko Planinc for Souls, both expresses what our several studies have in common and identi- fies the aspect of Plato’s work we consider to be least well understood today. The phrase “the art of caring for souls” is grating to modern ears; it jars us, offend- ing our sensibilities in any number of ways, and rankles if we consider it. It makes us immediately into liberal democrats, suspicious, in turn, of any need to consider ourselves as something other than free and rational beings, and of all well-intentioned notions that threaten to overstep the clear distinction be- tween private and public matters.

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