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Dissertation Title: Plato's Concept of Divination PLATO’S CONCEPTION OF DIVINATION AARON LANDRY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO May 2014 © Aaron Landry, 2014 ii Abstract One of the goals of Plato’s dialogues is to stake out a territory for philosophy. In order to do this, Plato evaluates and critiques other, more established, disciplines like rhetoric, the sophistic movement, poetry, and finally, divination. The last, in particular, has been neglected even though it arises in nearly all stages of Plato’s writing. Accordingly, in this dissertation, I interrogate Plato’s concept of divination. First, I analyze his account of mantic authenticity, together with his curtailment of mantic authority. I specify the ways in which Plato both embodies and transforms divination. One significant component of this account is the relationship between divination and craft. Plato often uses uncontentious crafts like medicine and divination in order to illuminate the features of other more contentious crafts, such as moral knowledge. In the second part of my dissertation, I examine the relationship between divination and madness. In the Phaedrus, the best things we have come from madness, but this claim beguiles the reader of the Phaedo and Republic. Has Plato changed his mind about the role and value of madness? Finally, I interrogate the Symposium, specifically Socrates’ conversation with Diotima. I argue that Diotima represents an intuitive seer, someone that Plato elsewhere claims to be impossible. To this end, clarifying Diotima’s function in the dialogue is crucially important and I sketch an explanation that underscores Plato’s fundamental religousity. In my final chapter, I examine the relationship between divination and philosophy as depicted in Socrates, Plato’s most celebrated character. iii Acknowledgements Many thanks must first be given to my supervisor, Gerard Naddaf, for his insightful comments and thought-provoking instruction. It was his graduate course on Plato’s Timaeus-Critias that first struck chord with me. In subsequent courses, and in one-on-one conversation, he has provided me with indispensible tools with which to navigate all the puzzles in Plato’s dialogues. I am deeply indebted to him for this. To my parents, Brian and Carole Landry, for their everlasting support and encouragement. To my brother and sister, Kyle and Kristen, for always smiling at an older brother who likes to begin sentences with ‘According to Plato’. To Steve Kwa, Nick Fenn, and Ross Sweeney – all hearty conversationalists I am fortunate to call my friends. Finally, to my partner, Caitlin Colson, the person with whom I stand in love. iv “O Baby, what Hell to be Greek in this country – without wings, but burning anyway” -Gwendolyn MacEwen, ‘Poem Improvised Around A First Line’ v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 – 16 CHAPTER 1 – What Does Euthyphro Know? 17 – 42 CHAPTER 2 – Mantikē Technē 43 – 66 CHAPTER 3 – Between Inspiration and Technē: 67 – 93 CHAPTER 4 – Irony and Inspiration in the Phaedrus 94 – 119 CHAPTER 5 – The Status of Divination in the Phaedrus 120 – 154 CHAPTER 6 – Plato’s Symposium and Divination 155 – 181 CHAPTER 7 – Socrates, Divination, and the Daimonion 181 – 196 CONCLUSION 197 – 202 1 Introduction At Phaedrus 244a8-d5, Socrates distinguishes between two sorts of divination. First, there are seers who undergo divine possession by a god or spirit, so-called possession divination. For the duration of the experience, the seer loses him or herself. The canonical example of this is what occurs to the Pythia at Delphi. Second, there are seers who access divine will through an intermediary, so-called technical divination. There are myriad kinds of this type of divination. One might, for instance, divine through material objects (e.g., bird movements, animal entrails) or natural phenomena (e.g., a bolt of lightning). Various textual sources, including the cited passage from the Phaedrus, demonstrate that Plato privileges possession divination over its material counterpart, but his justification is not entirely clear. The impetus for this dissertation is that Plato, on occasion, seems to ignore his own distinction. In particular, a seer like Diotima in the Symposium cannot be easily categorized according to the dichotomy developed in the Phaedrus. Despite sustained treatments in contexts like the evaluation of knowledge and the formation of the ideal state, there has been a disproportionate lack of attention paid to divination in comparison to, for instance, Plato’s concept of poetry and the poet.1 In fact, there has been no systematic treatment of Plato’s concept of divination. There are several ways in which this dissertation intends to contribute to current Plato scholarship. First, it challenges the thesis that Plato’s concept of divination is “too schematic and elides Greek 1 In terms of Greek divination generally, the most comprehensive is Bouché-Leclercq (1879-82), specifically volume 1. Other studies include: Pritchett (1979) 47-90; Roth 1982 (PhD Thesis); Bremmer (1993) 150-183 and (1996) 97-109; and Flower (2008). Flower, in particular, is responsible for the first “book-length study of Greek seers in any language” (3) and has accordingly, proved invaluable to the present analysis. One caveat to Flower is his unwillingness to use Plato in his investigation. This is so because Plato, in seeking to legitimize philosophy, cannot help but distort divination. Flower’s most trusted source is Xenophon. 2 experience” (Flower 87). Second, it explores the connection between technē and divination and the adjoining implications for Platonic epistemology. For Plato, the inspired arts are uncontroversial forms of knowledge and he often appeals to them in order to investigate knowledge claims of a more contentious sort (e.g., moral knowledge).2 Finally, in a more general sense, this dissertation further substantiates the increasingly accepted contention of Plato’s pervasive religiosity. Part I – Methodology Something must be said about the methodological approach to Plato adopted in this dissertation. One distinction often employed in the history of Platonic scholarship is between doctrinal and skeptical approaches to the dialogues.3 Whereas the former affirms the thesis that there are positive philosophical theses explicit or latent in the dialogues, the latter emphasizes their aporetic and inconclusive features. My argument does not rise or fall depending on the result of this debate. Divination does not receive an exhaustive treatment like rhapsody in the Ion or rhetoric in the Gorgias. Instead, it emerges at the joints of other arguments – the notion of divine inspiration, humankind’s relationship to the gods, and the craft analogy. In fact, there is a sense in which divination occupies both sides of the debate. When it comes to the doctrinal methodology, the status of divination is radically altered by, for example, the epistemological theses Plato develops in the Meno.4 2 For instance, in the Laches, the search is for an adequate definition of courage, and attempts are made to define it in terms of a technē, at least initially (182c). Roochnik (1996) offers an in-depth analysis of this approach, especially chapter 1. 3 Press (1996) 508. 4 At the conclusion of the Meno, Socrates develops a disjunction between knowledge and right opinion. Since statesmen cannot give an account of their expertise, they are only able to govern according to right opinion. In this way, “they are no different from soothsayers and prophets” (ουδεν διαπηεροντōσ εκηοντεσ προσ το πηρονειν ē ηοι κηρēσμōδοι τε και ηοι τηεομαντεισ) (Meno 99c2-3). 3 At the same time, divination, particularly when it gets deployed in the context of divine inspiration, checks the rationalist presumptions of the philosophy. For instance, in the Phaedrus, Socrates notoriously says that the best things we have come from madness. In order to specify the meaning of this statement, he goes on to give an account of three kinds of madness – prophetic, telistic, and poetic. Unlike in dialogues such as the Republic and the Symposium, philosophy now encompasses a degree of madness. In this way, divination destabilizes what has been a popular interpretation of philosophy in Plato’s dialogues. Following the majority of Anglophone Platonic scholarship, I affirm a cautiously doctrinal methodology. In other words, I subscribe to the thesis that within the dialogues, there are positive doctrines that one can reasonably subscribe to Plato.5 This does not preclude a strong role for aporetic elements. Another consideration is the distinction between developmental and unitarian approaches to the dialogues.6 The developmental methodology uses a medley of evidence, principally stylometry, to classify the dialogues chronologically. The most widespread classification separates the dialogues into early, middle, and late groupings. Although attempts have been made, further chronological classification, specifically within each group, is exceptionally difficult.7 Part of the motivation for the developmental methodology is the recognition that not all the dialogues were written at once. If this is so, which seems probable, it is 5 Wolfdorf (2008) states, “In the last decades of the twentieth century, Anglophone Platonic scholarship was principally conducted within a developmentalist and relatively doctrinal framework” (6). He goes on to point out that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, unitarianism has enjoyed a resurgence. 6 As Wolfdorf (2008) notes, doctrinal and skeptical methodologies can be applied to either developmental or unitarian methodologies. 7As Kahn (1996) points out, “The attempt to establish a complete linear ordering of the dialogues on stylometric grounds has produced no reliable results, no agreement after a century of work” (45). 4 reasonable to think that Plato developed and refined his philosophical ideas as time went on. To take a well-known example, whereas knowledge of the Forms grounds the philosopher-kings’ expertise in the Republic, they go without mention in his late political work – the Laws.
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