For both Plato and Aristotle, the doctrine of becoming like god is one of the outcomes of the inquiry into the question that matters most to us humans, namely the question of how one ought to live one's life. This is the most practical of questions for both Plato and Aristotle, involving how we manage our affairs, order our desires and choose our actions with the aim of living the best life possible, namely, a happy life. For both, becoming like the divine as much as possible is one way of describing the nature of human happiness. Striving to be like, or better modeling ourselves on, the divine mind is one way of expressing what we humans do in trying to realize our happiness, whether or not we are aware of our striving to achieve this. What thus begins as the most human of inquiries threatens to end with the recommendation that we should flee what is human in order to be something else, i.e., divine. I will refer to this as the “flight interpretation.” Indeed many readers of Plato have concluded that the search for happiness leads the philosopher to turn his/her back on the mundane world and eschew practical activity as much as possible. Not a few readers of Aristotle find that ultimately he recommends a similar outcome.

A PUZZLE ABOUT PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Although Aristotle says that Plato's educational recommendations in the Laws are pretty much the same as in the Republic (Politics II.6.1265a6–8), one striking difference in the Laws is its emphasis on a lifelong regime of gymnastics or prescribed physical movement: the Athenian says that pregnant mothers are to take exercise so that the fetus they are carrying is moved about (789a–93e); from the age of three to six, children must play at wrestling and dancing (814e–16e); thereafter, they are to dance (as well as sing) in the chorus of the Muses until the age of twenty, when they graduate to the chorus of Apollo (664c), in which they participate until they reach old age and retire to the chorus of Dionysus (653d, 665a, 666b, 670b, 812b–c). They also train in fighting (813d–e). But what is the value of all this physical activity? The answer to this question is surprisingly elusive, and trying to answer it takes us to the heart of the psychology of Plato's late dialogues.

Let us begin with two passages in the Laws that suggest a direction for our investigation. In the first, the Athenian is commending the practice of rocking distressed babies to calm them.

INTRODUCTION

Plato's views about psychology in the later dialogues, such as the Laws, just as in the middle-period ones, such as the Republic, are tightly connected with other important aspects of his philosophy. An individual's character, virtuous or otherwise, is essentially constituted by the content, structure, and ways of regulating his knowledge, beliefs, emotions, desires, pleasures, and so on. Plato's understanding of these items will thus shape many aspects of his views on education, ethics, and political community. But Plato's understanding of these items also will constrain and be constrained by his epistemology and metaphysics.

The main issue that I discuss here is how Plato conceives of non-rational motivations – such as appetitive desires, some kinds of desire for sensory pleasures, anger, fear, and so on – and how he understands the relations among them and the person's reason. In previous work, I have argued that Plato's psychology in the Laws and other late dialogues differs significantly from that of the Republic. Here I want to consider some worries that have been raised about this account. I begin by noting, without arguing for them here, my earlier claims that are most relevant to the topic of non-rational motivations. Famously, the Republic divides the soul into three parts: the Reasoning part, the Spirited part, and the Appetitive part. This account holds that in the Republic:

1. 1 the three parts of the soul are the ultimate subjects of psychic items, such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on;

2. 2 all the parts have contentful beliefs and desires and this content is, at least partly, conceptual;

3. […]

This book started life at a conference which its two editors organized to honour Tony Long, better known to the world of scholarship as A. A. Long. It was held at his own university, the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2007, to mark his 70th birthday. “Models of Mind” was known to us as the working title of a long-term project of Long's own, and seemed to us to capture a theme that has, more than any other, been the hallmark of his truly seminal contribution to the study of ancient philosophy over four decades and more.

Tony Long was born in England in 1937. Since 1991 he has been Irving Stone Professor of Literature in the Department of Classics at Berkeley, where he is also an affiliated professor in the departments of Philosophy and Rhetoric. But his education and the first part of his professional career were set elsewhere. He took his BA and PhD degrees at University College London. There, among many leading scholars who taught and influenced him, special mention must be made here of David Furley, whose exceptional incisiveness and intellectual clarity in the study of ancient philosophy clearly passed from teacher to pupil. However, Long was not yet specializing in ancient philosophy, and his doctoral thesis (completed in 1964 under T. B. L. Webster) was in fact on Sophocles, later becoming the basis of his highly regarded 1968 book Language and Thought in Sophocles: A Study of Abstract Nouns and Poetic Technique.

In the middle of Book 4 of the Laws, the visitor from Athens (henceforward just ‘the Athenian’) suggests that if the new city he, Megillus and Clinias are setting up ‘in words’ (logôi) is, like democracy, oligarchy and so forth, to be called by the name of the element in it that is master, then ‘it should have the name of the god that is truly master over reasonable people (noun echontôn)’. ‘And who is the god in this case?’ asks Clinias. Instead of offering a direct answer, the Athenian refers to the myth of the rule of Cronus, ‘which finds its imitation in the city that is best governed of those now existing’ (713b3–4: [archê te kai oikêsis] hês mimêma echousa estin hêtis tôn nun arista oikeitai). Now it looks clear enough that we are not straightforwardly to identify the god in question with Cronus: the rule of Cronus, after all, ended with the end of his age – and what the Athenian draws from the myth of Cronus is just that

And it is law – this law, representing the ‘disposition of reason’ – that must be master, and the rulers its slaves.

For Tony Long:

Plato's Phaedrus obtrusively foregrounds issues of the rhetoric and reality of madness, inspiration, and mimēsis. In this most “poetic” of dialogues these issues are embodied by an (ironically?) inspired Socrates, and commentators have long been at a loss to nail down the precise ratio of play to seriousness in his myth of the charioteer. This essay examines how the rhetoric of Socrates' famous palinode both raises and defuses problems that have perplexed commentators concerning the status of the poetic, prophetic, and initiatory lives in the scheme of the myth: why are such lives ranked low in one place, yet lauded at the beginning of the speech as the purveyors of the greatest blessings? The palinode, however, provides suggestive indications as to the possibility of a new model of inspiration. Not the least achievement of the speech is to use a conventional framework to present a radical rethinking of the impingement of the divine upon human consciousness. The rhetoric of the speech reflects a changing conception of reality, as a philosophical model of inspiration displaces Plato's (tendentious) presentation of the contemporary cultural realities of divine madness and influence.

At the opening of the Didaskalikos, Alcinous – if in fact he is the author – provides two definitions of wisdom: first, that “it is the knowledge of divine and human matters”; second, that it entails “a loosening of the soul and turning away from the body.” The first definition is also attested for the Stoics. The second definition, inspired by Plato's Phaedo, would seem a particularly good fit in a Middle Platonist context, such as Alcinous' handbook, because it emphasizes a stark and unmitigated dualism between the intelligible and sensible realms. Precisely for that reason one would not expect such a definition to show up in a Stoic context, since Stoicism is an implicit target of criticism in Alcinous' account. Yet Seneca seems to have been quite attracted to this second view of wisdom and philosophy, and his texts are interspersed with echoes of the theme. But for all his attraction to the Phaedo and to other Platonic accounts, Seneca remains quite rooted in Stoic thought, even if he finds himself dreaming, on occasion, of immortality (Ep. 102). To get this point across, one does not need to explain away certain passages of Seneca as mere metaphors, or rhetoric in the service of practical, moral philosophy. From a hermeneutical point of view such an approach is unsatisfactory because, for one thing, it does not address the question why Seneca chooses certain metaphors or rhetorical devices over others.

Selection (ἐκλογή, selectio) is a key concept in Stoic ethics. It has a prominent role in attempts by Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in the second century bce to explain and defend the Stoic conception of the good life or human telos. It is a major target of ancient criticism from their contemporary Carneades down to Plutarch and Alexander. And it is central to recent attempts to reconstruct Stoic moral psychology, which take selection to be a distinctive kind of motivation, a species of rational “impulse” (ὁρμή) that differs both from the uniquely virtuous “dispassions” (εὐπάθειαι) of a sage, and from the inherently defective “passions” (πάθη) found in everyone else. So construed, a selection is simply an impulse to act in pursuit of an objective viewed as “indifferent”: not as either good or bad (as in dispassions correctly and passions incorrectly), but as “preferred” or “dispreferred,” on the basis of its “selective” value or disvalue. This intermediate form of motivation, which is common to everyone, sages and others alike, is supposed to help explain how we can make “progress” from vice toward virtue: simply by transforming our passions into selections, that is, by viewing as “indifferent” but “preferred” much of what we ordinarily consider “good.” It also underpins recent accounts of practical reasoning in Stoicism: the correct way to decide what to do is simply to select the available option that promises the greatest selective value.

Consider the famous Delphic pronouncement, “know thyself.” In archaic and classical Greece, self-knowledge or sōphrosunē involved an understanding of oneself in relation to others, both human and divine. The man who “knows himself” understands human limits and does not attempt to overstep these boundaries. The sōphrōn knows his place in relation to the gods and understands his station in society. Challenging traditional views, Plato offers new, philosophical “selves” who achieve different modes of self-knowledge. In the early dialogues, Plato portrays a philosopher who comes to know himself even as he seeks for truths that he cannot fully grasp. And, in the middle dialogues, Plato introduces an incorporeal soul that contemplates the Forms and understands itself in relation to these beings. This transmigrating soul, however, is incarnated in a specific person in a given place and time: the incarnated soul shuttles back and forth from a personal life on earth to an impersonal “vision” of higher realities. This “double life” of the soul generates a new kind of self. In these texts, Plato transforms the Greek command to “know thyself.” Long has taught us, the Greek philosophers offered radical reconceptualizations of the “self.” I want to explore the new “selves” that Plato dramatized and conceptualized in his explorations of self-knowledge.

“Know thyself,” one of the two famous inscriptions at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, seems to ask what the place of human beings is in the cosmos. One interpretation of the oracle would relate it to that other saying, “Nothing too much,” and would go, “Know that you, being human, are mortal. Know your limits. Do not strive after divine wisdom or immortality. Do not tempt the gods.” Another possible interpretation is: “Know that you, being human, have a divine element – reason – within you. Strive to perfect that element and become as divine as is possible for a human being.” The former interpretation may be the more traditionally religious response and is perhaps one of the lessons of Oedipus Rex. The philosophers, whether Plato, Aristotle, or the Stoics, favor the latter interpretation. Plotinus is without doubt in this group, but what is quite striking about him is that he takes “know thyself” to refer not only to knowing ourselves as human beings in general but even as human individuals, and that he believes that ultimately we are divine. So when I seek to know myself I am to ask not only what it is to be human but also what it is for me to be the particular human being that I am. Moreover, I am to seek not merely to be the perfect human being, but to be the perfect me, and in fact, the divine me.

In both the Republic and the Laws, Plato delineates societies whose aim is the happiness of the citizens; and in both works they are to achieve happiness by living a life of virtue. It is the chief aim of Magnesia, the city of the Laws – one it shares with the Doric societies of Sparta and Crete, though with an enlarged and improved view of it – to make the citizens happy by rendering them virtuous.

In the Laws we do not find an account of virtue as the harmony of the soul's parts, as we do in the Republic, but this does not indicate that Plato has narrowed or impoverished his view of virtue as the good condition of the person's character. Virtue is not merely a matter of reliably doing the right thing, but requires that the person do it in the right way, with the right understanding and with the right feelings. So much is clear from the important programme of education, which is to train the citizens of Magnesia not just to do the right things but to enjoy this, to find a life of virtue pleasant and a life of vice repulsive.

There is one obvious change: in Magnesia the citizens are to become virtuous by growing up and living in a society explicitly regulated by laws.

ARISTOTLE'S PUZZLE

Plato's Laws has probably been the most unpopular of all his dialogues. ‘Not only’, says the Loeb editor in his introduction, ‘does it lack the charm and vigour of the earlier dialogues, but it is marked also by much uncouthness of style, and by a tendency to pedantry, tautology and discursive garrulity which seems to point to the failing powers of the author.’ It represents itself as the record of a rambling conversation, ‘framed apparently on no artistic plan’, between three elderly men, who get immersed in masses of detail often of little general philosophical interest. Damning remarks of this and other kinds can be found without difficulty in modern literature about Plato.

On a first inspection Aristotle might appear to stand at the head of the queue of those thinkers who on reading the Laws have found little there to reward them. The last chapter of his Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to an explanation of why law is an essential instrument for shaping the characters and behaviour of citizens, and of what sort of knowledge and experience someone needs to become a good legislator. His concluding paragraph begins with the notorious comment (EN 10.9, 1181b12–14): ‘Our predecessors have left the topic of legislation unresearched, so it would probably be better to study it instead ourselves.’ Aristotle's remark here makes it sound as though he has temporarily forgotten even the existence of the Laws.

The Theaetetus is by common consent one of the classic texts in the history of epistemology. But would Plato himself understand and endorse this description? If “epistemology” were defined simply as “the study of epistēmē,” it would be easy to answer affirmatively, epistēmē being after all the official topic of the dialogue. But does Plato recognize any area of philosophy that would correspond to what we call epistemology?

For the later Platonist tradition, “logic” had come to constitute one of the three parts of philosophy, alongside ethics and physics; and cognition of truth (often under the rubric “the criterion of truth”) was in its turn recognized as a primary focus of “logic”. Hence Platonist schematizations had no trouble in classing the Theaetetus as a “logical” dialogue if they so wished. The epitome of Plato preserved by Stobaeus (Ecl. 2.49.8–25) is able to say that the goal of “becoming like god” is set out by Plato in the Timaeus from the point of view of physics (φυσικῶς), in the Republic from the point of view of ethics (ἠθικῶς), and in the Theaetetus from the point of view of logic (λογικῶς).

PUZZLES AND THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE

In the interest of furthering our understanding of Aristotle's place in the history of skepticism, A. A. Long has urged that Aristotle left to posterity a methodology that takes certain skeptical strategies that could be used to present challenges to claims to knowledge and employs them instead in aid of maintaining a search for knowledge. In the course of illustrating and defending this conclusion in his article “Aristotle and the History of Greek Skepticism”, he lucidly highlights a number of respects in which Aristotle's methodological discussions reveal an awareness of the usefulness for his own purposes of argumentative ploys that in some form or other play a role in the skeptic's arsenal. Aristotle in fact does exhibit an awareness of the need to answer on behalf of his epistemology a variety of objections that would, if successful, undermine the possibility of knowledge as he conceived of it. In this essay I discuss some of these strategies as well as the general shape of his attitude towards the use of puzzles in philosophy. My focus will not be so much on the interpretation of particular texts as on the general epistemological stance that Aristotle takes on this issue, and accordingly I have tried to avoid matters of scholarly controversy to the extent that they do not impact very general methodological points.

THE LAW WITHIN

Kant is well known for his admiration both of the starry heavens above and of the moral law within. He is not the first to believe that morality should be understood as internal law. Butler expresses the same view in his claim that human beings are ‘a law to themselves’. Butler quotes this phrase from St Paul, and in doing so he connects his view with the conception of natural law that Patristic and medieval writers derive from St Paul. This conception is not purely Christian. Lactantius endorses the conception of natural law that he quotes from Cicero's De Re Publica, and so he allies himself with Stoic views.

How is Plato connected with this belief in morality as internal law? The author of the Epinomis (986c) agrees with Kant's view that the starry heavens above are an appropriate object of admiration. He finds there the embodiment of cosmic order and reason. The Laws has quite a lot to say about law and morality, but does it treat morality as internal natural law? If it does, we may take Plato to be part of a natural law tradition. If it does not, we may regard Plato as an ancestor of this tradition, but not as a part of it.

This statement of our main question is not definite enough to allow a clear answer. We need to clarify claims about an internal natural law. (1) What does it mean to speak of morality as law?