In this chapter, postponing what will essentially be an extended treatment of the Republic in chapters 5–9, I discuss three problems in another pre-Republic dialogue, Gorgias. Each of these problems turns out – I claim – to be resolvable in terms of Plato's writing strategies; the outcome will be a further case study on that topic, but one which at the same time reinforces my so far relatively sketchy account of the positions from which Plato's Socrates starts – and starts, I claim, as much in the Republic as in the dialogues that precede it.

PROBLEMS

The Gorgias, from most points of view, looks anomalous. For on the one hand the dialogue contains one of the most spectacular applications of the Socratic theory of action, in the shape of Socrates' claim that orators and tyrants have no power – a claim from which he not only never retreats, in the rest of the dialogue, but on which he seems to build even more surprising, paradoxical, even (apparently) comical claims. Those supposedly enviable people, who – so Gorgias has claimed – can do whatever they want, in fact – Socrates says – do nothing they want, only what seems best to them. ‘How ridiculous!’ responds Polus. But of course Socrates is perfectly serious: they don't do what they want.

I offer in this book what is in some respects a new approach to Plato: one that attempts to take account of his strategies as a writer who writes, for the most part, in order to persuade his readers; an approach that attempts, in particular, to understand the way in which those strategies help to shape what he writes. In other words, my first concern is with understanding the nature of Platonic rhetoric. What he actually says, or has his main character – usually Socrates – say, is usually only a version of what he wants to say, designed to suit a particular audience on a particular occasion, as defined by the dramatis personae and the setting of the individual work; and he may well offer us different versions of the same thing, either in the same dialogue or, more usually, in others. It is one of the main claims of this book that trying to read off Plato's thinking from the surface of the dialogues is unlikely to be a reliable method for understanding him; especially when such a method is combined, as it often is, with a tendency to interpret different treatments of the same topic in chronological terms, that is, as evidence of ‘developments’ in his thinking. What will emerge, by the end of the book, is a Plato who will be, to most readers, and often for different reasons, unlike the Plato they have come to think they know.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about Plato as a writer of philosophy: probably the most accomplished and sophisticated such writer the western world has known, but also one of the most puzzling. One of the chief puzzles about Plato's writing, and the one from which I shall begin, is its enormous variety. Why should he write in so many different ways? Philosophers, surely, only need to write in one way – as clearly and intelligibly as possible. Granted, virtually every item within the Platonic corpus is written in the same general format, that of imaginary conversations (reported or direct) between two or more interlocutors. However, this format is deployed in markedly varying fashions, and not only that, but often with what appear to be markedly varying outcomes. It sometimes appears almost as if different parts of the Platonic oeuvre might have been written by different people. Most strikingly, while a significant number of dialogues, mainly short ones, take the form of an apparently open-ended exploration of particular subjects (often particular virtues – what I shall prefer to call ‘excellences’: aretai), led by a Socrates who continually advocates the importance of such – apparently open-ended – exploration and inquiry, other dialogues seem to show us a quite different Socrates, and a different Plato.

One of the central themes of the present book, and one that will continue to recur, is the importance, for the way in which he writes, of Plato's awareness of the difference between his view of things – what, through Socrates, he calls the philosophical, or the true view – and the way things appear to ordinary non-philosophical folk, whether these are Socrates' interlocutors, or Athenians/Greeks in general; or, by implication, the generality of the readers of the dialogues. Plato's sense of his, and his Socrates', ‘out-of-placeness’ (their atopia), in relation to run-of-the-mill perspectives, and of the barrier to comprehension that this threatens to raise, is one of the chief determining factors shaping the dialogues. And – as I shall go on to argue in the following chapters – nowhere is this clearer than in the Republic. In this Introduction, I propose to try to demonstrate the point in relation to a particular context in the dialogue: the simile of the cave. The outcomes of the discussion of this one context will turn out to be unexpectedly wide reaching.

In the simile of the cave, the form of the good is still at the centre of the image that is presented to us, as it has been in the two similes that precede it (the sun and the divided line).

The Phaedrus is – like so many other dialogues of Plato's – one of a kind. It appears to reach its climax with one of the most memorable pieces of Platonic writing (the great myth of the chariot of the soul), only to go on to treat it as a starting-point for a dry discussion of what Socrates calls the ‘art of words (logoi)’. What emerges at the end of this discussion, between Socrates and Phaedrus, an amateur enthusiast for rhetoric, is a critique of writing as a medium of communication, and a strong statement of preference for the spoken word, in the particular form of dialectic between master dialectician and student. It is the critique of writing, together with the description of a new, philosophical rhetoric that frames it, that will be the main subject of the present short (and last) chapter.

The basic lines of a coherent interpretation of the Phaedrus were laid down by W. H.Thompson in the introduction to his edition of the dialogue, published in 1868. The dialogue starts, after some preliminaries, with Phaedrus reading an exhibition speech by – the person we know as – the great Attic orator Lysias on the theme ‘a boy should grant (sc. sexual) favours to the man who is not in love him rather than one who is’.

In chapter 9 I shall be discussing the topic of the good in the Republic. One useful starting-point for that discussion will be the passage at Republicvi, 504a–505a, which associates the future philosopher-rulers' study of the good, the ‘greatest object of study/learning’ (to megiston mathēma: 504d2–3, etc.) with their study of the soul and of the excellences – the latter, themselves, also being among ‘the greatest things’ (504d6–e3), though the good is ranked higher. Socrates refers back to iv, 435b–d, where he put the crucial question whether the soul too contains the three eidē, kinds, that the city had been found – at any rate by the rough and ready sort of method chosen – to contain. Socrates agreed, back there in Book iv, that he and his partners in the conversation should answer the new question by using the same rough methods as before, while insisting that an accurate answer would depend on their following ‘another, longer and more considerable (makrotera kai pleiōn) road’ (435d3). Now in Book vi he suggests that such a make-do approach would be unsuitable for any ‘guard of city and laws’: he or she will need to understand things ‘in the finest possible way’. And Socrates reminds Adimantus, his interlocutor at this point, that the accounts of the four excellences agreed to in Book iv were built on that evidently less than accurate answer to the question about the soul (vi, 504a4–6).

One of the main claims that I have attempted to justify in the preceding chapters is that there will usually be a range of aspects, in any given dialogue, that derive simply from the process of embedding content within a persuasive form, without themselves constituting part of that content; what might be called – by analogy with Timaeus’ discourse – the by-products of a literary necessity. Only when we have identified these factors, so I have argued, will we be in a position to separate out what it is that Plato wants to say.

‘What Plato wants to say’: this is the ‘Platonism’ of the title of this short Epilogue – not the Platonism of the various kinds of ‘Platonists’ who followed and interpreted him, each in their own special way. I am not here concerned with them; my interest is solely in the dialogues themselves, starting from them, and not from others' interpretations. (The case of Aristotle's treatment of Plato is in any case a salutary warning of the dangers of that. Despite some recent claims to the contrary, merely being close in time to Plato gives an interpreter few advantages.) If the dialogues sometimes point beyond themselves, as they do, for example, on the subject of the good, in the present context – and probably in others – I am content to note the fact and move on, back to the solider, because more accessible, ground of the written texts.

INTRODUCTION

In the twenty-three centuries of Western thinking since Aristotle, the subject called ‘ethics’ has grown to embrace many more topics than Aristotle took account of under this or any title. Many of our own central preoccupations in ethics are with questions on which, for one or another reason, Aristotle has little or nothing to say. This is worth emphasising. Because of Aristotle's pre-eminent greatness and the reach and power of his ancient authority, unwarned readers of his Ethics may simply take it for granted that in this or that important modern debate there is a theory of which Aristotle holds a version, or a side which he is recognisably on. Such assumptions are all the easier to slip into because so much of what he does have to say in his Ethics continues to shape our own thinking on those particular matters, and so much of it comes in direct answer to questions whose universal relevance is as obvious in our day as it would have been in his. What is more, because so much of what he has to say in his Ethics tends to seem to us extraordinarily sensible as well as illuminating, we can easily fail to absorb how unusual some of his presuppositions are by today's philosophical standards. In this essay I shall be bringing out some of the differences between Aristotle's concerns in ethics and contemporary concerns. However, there are parts of our Aristotelian legacy that we can wholeheartedly continue to endorse, and also parts from which we may be able to learn more than we have learned so far.

PART A: INTRODUCTION

(1) It used quite commonly to be argued against Aristotelian teleology that this type of explanation founders for lack of a suitable psychological basis in most of the phenomena for which it was invoked. The objection was that it does not make sense to attempt to explain X as happening or existing in order that Y should happen or exist unless one assumes that the production of X and Y is guided by thoughts, desires or conscious purposes relating Y as end to X as means. Yet Aristotle himself makes it clear that the domain in which, as he believes, teleological explanation is not merely illuminating but mandatory if we are to have any adequate scientific explanations at all, extends well beyond the domain of entities to which beliefs, desires and conscious purposes can be reasonably ascribed. Nor, on the other hand, does Aristotle protect himself against the objection by introducing a supernatural being who produces or shapes phenomena in accordance with divine intent. Thus if the application of teleology does depend on the presence of psychological factors such as those mentioned, it is a dependence which Aristotle fails outright to notice. Alternatively, there is no such failure because the claimed dependence does not hold.

(2) This poses the question: Is a non-psychological teleology as intelligible as Aristotle evidently takes it to be? We may be tempted to turn a deaf ear to this question if it seems to us that in other respects Aristotelian teleological explanations are effective or at any rate more effective than alternatives given the state of knowledge.

It is true that over a span of thirty-five years I have spent more time studying the philosophy of Aristotle than the philosophy of anyone, or anything, else. But Aristotle was not the original pull. It was my good fortune, at school and university, to have the chance to learn ancient Greek well enough to read Aristotle eventually; but my first encounter with him, I am not proud to say, was unexciting. It was an encounter, standardly the only one on offer when I read Greats at Oxford, with the Nicomachean Ethics. At the time this work seemed pedantic and prosaic by comparison with the Plato I knew from the Phaedo, the Republic, the Theaetetus, and the Sophist. However, literary and stylistic comparisons were not at that time the most pressing concern, because I was then discovering philosophy per se, and in particular acquiring an abiding fascination with the notion of causality. Hume's Treatise (although Hume is mentioned only twice in this volume) was a mighty stimulus. The first paper here, ‘Affecting and being affected’, responded to a causal question inspired by a passage in Plato's Sophist (248a–e): what stands behind the intuition that to know something is not ipso facto to affect it? Causal questions have shaped the majority of these papers, if one is allowed to include as expressing such influence the ones that discuss the idea of the summum bonum as good-maker (chapters 9, 10, and 11).

The aim of this paper is to bring two ideas together for mutual illumination. One is Aristotle's conception of the now as ‘always different and different’ (Physicsiv.10, 218a10; 11, 219b12–23); the other is the modern dichotomy of time into the two aspects of order and passage. This dichotomy was first formulated in 1908 by the Cambridge philosopher, J. M. E. McTaggart, who made it the basis of a brilliant and controversial proof of the unreality of time. From then on McTaggart's distinction has dominated discussion of time among analytic philosophers; hence it provides a contemporary perspective from which to think about Aristotle's contribution.

On one side of the distinction, events are considered as past, present, and future, and their occurrence is expressed by sentences with tensed verbs. The most striking thing about this approach is that the attributes of being future, present, and past, and the corresponding tenses, take it in turns to belong to each successive set of events. Consequently, what lies (as we say) in the future, in the present, and in the past, is changing from moment to moment. The occasion for which this paper was first written was once future, later on was present, and in a few more days was completely in the past, even if long to be remembered. We can think of each event as passing from the future through the present to the past. Alternatively, we can think of the future, the present, and the past as temporal locations whose contents are always changing in a regular way.

In the minds of most philosophers and historians of philosophy, the idea of the summum bonum (highest good) comes embedded in a question: what is the summum bonum? The idea seems entertainable to the extent that the question seems real. For the question to seem real at least two conditions must hold. First, it must seem as if some answers are objectively better than others. Secondly, it must not seem straight off obvious what the right or best answer to the question should be. But there is also, presumably, a third desideratum, namely agreement, implicit or explicit, on the second order question of what is meant by regarding X as the highest good, whatever X may be. This second order question is my subject here.

Let me approach by observing that the notion of ‘the highest good’ is marginal for modern ethical theories, although arguably it is the determinative concept of every ancient such system. We have all learnt to classify the antique examples in terms of the highest good according to each. Still, no surprise if after two millennia very different themes are now to the fore. But emergence of new claimants for attention does not really explain why the once supremely important notion of the highest good has pretty well dropped out of sight.

I shall begin by identifying an influence which I believe helps explain why the notion has been in eclipse, anyway during the last century and a half of ethical philosophising. This influence, I shall maintain, incorporates a modern misunderstanding of what, historically, it means to say of something that it is the highest good.

INTRODUCTION

What is it for one thing to affect or to act on another? Examples come to mind: bending a bar of iron, moving a ball, melting wax. But there are other relationships one can have with an iron bar: one can also look at it, think about it, want it, approach it. Are not these too kinds of doing to it? We might say: even thinking about something is treating it in a certain way. Yet we should hardly admit that thought, sight, desire, and approaching affect or act on their objects. If we want to say that these are ways of treating things, then we have to say that not all cases of treating things are cases of affecting them. To put it in the formal mode: not every transitive verb ‘φ’, i.e. not every verb ‘φ’ with active and passive voices, is such that ‘x φs y’ entails ‘x acts on or affects y’. Let us call the values of ‘φ’ for which this entailment does hold, affective verbs, and those for which it does not, non-affective. Now the question of this paper is: what are the logical characteristics of affective, as opposed to non-affective, verbs? Or to put it in the material mode, using the term ‘operation’ neutrally: what are the logical characteristics of affective as opposed to non-affective operations?