Politics and Dialogue in the Philebus 109

Politics and Dialogue in the Philebus 109 Politics and Dialogue in the Philebus J AMES L. WOOD BOSTON UNIVERSITY [email protected] I. Two related aspects of Plato’s philosophy have come increas- ingly to the attention of scholars in recent years, due largely to the influence of Leo Strauss and his followers: the political and the dramatic. By the former I mean the general theme of politics, the interaction of human beings together in the polis. By the latter I mean the aspects of the dialogue form—time and place, character and context—that they have in common with actual dramas. But while it is obvious that Plato writes in dialogue form and often takes up politics as a central theme in his dialogues, there may be a broader and less obvious sense in which Platonic philosophy itself, as informed by its dialogical character, is fundamentally political in nature. We might call this the “political thesis.” As Strauss puts it, “All Platonic dialogues refer more or less directly to the political question” (Strauss 1975, 160). But as he points out immediately following this statement, there are only three dialogues that deal directly with politics and indicate this in their titles: Republic, Statesman, and Laws; and it is in these dialogues that one can best discern Plato’s political teachings. This lim- itation suggests the corresponding difficulty of extracting the political significance of other dialogues. Here the dramatic dialogue form becomes particularly useful. Plato’s dialogues always take place as a living interaction between different sorts of people, often historically based and politically significant, in the concrete context of a given time and place, typically in or near the city of Athens (cf. Nails 2002, xxxvii). As dialogical, then, Platonic philosophy is also political. It may be said that in this sense the form of Platonic philosophy determines its content. In addition, by presenting his philosophy in the conversations of human beings with each other, Plato gives dramatic expression to the political ©2007 Interpretation, Inc. 110 I nterpretation possibilities and limits of philosophical activity, and in particular to the relationship of philosophers and non-philosophers in the city. The juxtaposi- tion of philosophical activity and the city in or near which it takes place in the dialogues also perpetually calls to attention the potentially fertile but also precarious relationship that exists between philosophy and the city. The dialogues as a whole, then, show Plato to be particularly attuned to the problems and the possibilities inherent in the relationships between man and city, philosophy and politics. One cannot, of course, simply assume the “political thesis” to be true; such a claim would require a good deal of justification. But since a complete justification of this thesis would require a thorough investigation of the dialogues as a whole, such a task is well beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I mean to provide a partial and negative justification for the political thesis by considering and then dismissing an apparently powerful counterexample to it: namely, the Philebus, which is notable for its lack of both dramatic context and political content. It is not so unusual that this dialogue does not explicitly address political themes, as there are many dialogues that do not; but the absence of the explicitly political from the Philebus is reinforced by the near-absence of the explicitly dramatic, with the result that the broad sense in which every dialogue is political becomes severely weakened and seriously questionable in the case of this dialogue. In the following section (II), I will review the apparently non-dramatic and apolitical features of the Philebus, then contrast it with other “late” dialogues, by way of showing the peculiar nature of this dialogue. Next (III), I will attend more closely to the one explicitly dramatic feature of the Philebus—its characters—and explore each of the characters, their positions, and their interaction in order to elicit their significance both individually and collectively for the dialogue. Finally (IV), I will argue on the basis of this investigation that, far from indicating a decline or even disappearance of Plato’s concern with political philosophy in a broad sense, the Philebus rather reaffirms this concern and indicates its most important expression and application. To state the matter in advance, the political significance of the Philebus can be seen in its use of dialogical interaction to overcome obstacles to philosophical discussion and secure and further the possibility of philosophy within the city. Looked at in this way, the Philebus shows Plato coming full circle to the Socratic political mission as articulated in the Apology: the transformation of the city through the individual transformation of its Politics and Dialogue in the Philebus 111 citizens, their awakening to the value of living virtuously and philosophically, so far as this is possible. That there are limits to this possibility is also shown in the Philebus, so that once again we are presented through the medium of dialogical interaction with both the ultimately insurmountable tensions between philosophy and politics, as well as the urgency of overcoming them as much as possible. II. The peculiarities of the Philebus’s dramatic form are immediately apparent, for the dialogue begins without dramatic preface or preliminaries. It opens in the middle of an ongoing discussion over the nature of the good, in which Philebus has been advocating the goodness of pleasure and delight and Socrates that of intellect and wisdom (nous and phrone-sis) and the like (11b4-c1). This beginning marks a transition from Philebus to Protarchus, who is supposed to take up and defend Philebus’s position. We have some indication that there are some other characters, probably young men, present as an audience (cf. 16a4-6, 66a5), but only these three speak and are explicitly identified. In short order we are thus introduced to the main theme and the characters of the dialogue, and as the dialogue proceeds we do receive some clues as to the nature of these characters. But these clues are very scant, and otherwise Plato tells us nothing about the context in which this discussion about the good is taking place. Let us begin with the characters. In the first place, while many of the characters in Plato’s dialogues have an historical basis, this is not the case in the Philebus. Philebus himself is entirely fictitious (cf. Nails 2002, 238); and while Protarchus may not be, we do not have any information about a possible historical antecedent for him aside from a single reference to him as the “son of Callias” (19b5), and just who this Callias is we are not told. At any rate, despite claims by Bolotin and others to the contrary, he cannot be the Callias from the Apology and Protagoras, the famous lover of sophists, on account of the age of his younger son at the time of Socrates’ death (cf. Nails 2002, 257; Taylor 1956, 12; Benardete 1993, 14). The real-world political significance of many of Plato’s characters is thus simply not an issue here. The Socrates character is, of course, historically based, but even in view of the considerable liberties Plato takes with the historical Socrates in his dialogues generally, this Socrates is a remarkable departure from type. Even more than the Socrates of the so-called middle dialogues, he is given to lengthy metaphysical and analytical discourses, has little apparent concern for eliciting and investigating the views of his interlocutors, and makes little use of his typical homespun metaphors and 112 I nterpretation playful irony. Compared with the “Socratic dialogues,” there is little in the way of Socratic dialogue in the Philebus, as Taylor in particular has remarked upon (1956, 9-11). Plato’s choice of Socrates to lead this dialogue may signify nothing more than Socrates’ historical appropriateness for conducting a discussion about the good, and perhaps, the dialogical precedent of the Republic, in which Socrates first mentions the competition between pleasure and wisdom for the title of good (Republic 505b). Taking these considerations together with the relative paucity of information given us about these characters, we might well conclude that they are nothing more than placeholders for the positions Plato wishes to discuss, with Plato’s own view put into the mouth of Socrates. This has been the conventional, if usually tacit, interpretation of the character roles in Plato generally, and the Philebus seems to provide solid support for this view. Beyond the basic presence of characters conversing together (and it is Socrates who does most of the talking), there is no dramatic structure or setting in this dialogue at all. Plato says nothing at all about when or where the dialogue takes place; and while it is likely that it takes place in Athens, given Socrates’ role in it, we do not even know this for sure. Aside from Protarchus’s remark that Socrates agreed to hold this discussion to find out what “the best of human possessions” is, and promised to investigate it to its end (19c6, e2-4), we are told nothing about how or why this particular discussion arose. One reason for the indeterminacy of the context is another manifestation of it: the lack of a clear-cut beginning and ending. The fact that we enter a dialogue which is already in progress leaves us guessing about the way in which it began; and similarly, the fact that it ends with an indication that the conversation continues leaves us guessing about its ultimate outcome. There is also no clear sense of the “middle” of the dialogue, since there is significant difficulty surrounding its thematic unity.

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