The previous chapter argued for a view of the myth of the Politicus according to which, even on a literal reading, we are currently living in a period governed by god. In this respect, the letter of the text has been shown to be consistent with the cosmological accounts of other dialogues, which gives us good reason to suppose that Plato does after all mean to present our universe as one under divine guidance. And this, in turn, has enabled us to make better sense of the possibility of human and political progress as allowed in the rest of the Politicus. A further point to discuss now, however, is how literally the myth should be taken in other respects, and whether it does not still deserve other levels of analysis that could complementarily enrich and enlighten our understanding of its function in the dialogue. It is prima facie clear that the guise of the myth is cosmological, but how much cosmological significance does it have?

Positions on this point have often been extreme. Thus, the myth has sometimes been treated either as a digressive and separate piece of cosmological doctrine, or as a rather lengthy tale fashioned for the political purposes of the dialogue but deprived of great cosmological importance. In this chapter I wish to undertake a more integrated analysis, by stressing the cosmological content of the myth and, against that background, exploring further its ethical and political implications and its relevance to the general political purpose of the dialogue.

This book is the result of many years of thought and research, and has taken on several different shapes before reaching its final version. It started as a project based on (and soon took off beyond) my Ph.D. thesis, written between 1992 and 1995. My research on Plato's cosmology goes back somewhat further, and I am happy that, as this book is coming to fruition, my La noción de dios en el Timeo de Platón, originally published in Buenos Aires in 1991, is due to appear in its second edition for a Spanish-speaking readership. Proper acknowledgements were made in both those productions to scholars and institutions, in Argentina and in England, which contributed to my research then. But I would like here to thank David Sedley and Richard Sorabji for their keen criticism early on. I am also grateful to Christopher Shields and Raphael Woolf, who commented on different chapters of the book, and to the anonymous referees for Cambridge University Press for their helpful suggestions. It is my pleasure to thank, in addition, the National Endowment for the Humanities for generous financial support, and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, which has allowed me to finalise the manuscript in optimal research conditions and in an excellent collegial environment.

Previous versions of sections of this book have appeared as follows: Chapter 2, Section II.2 is based on Carone (2004c); Chapter 3, Section III is based on Carone (1997); parts of Chapter 5, Section I are based on Carone (2000); Chapter 6 is based on Carone (2004a); parts of Chapter 7 are based on Carone (1993); and parts of Chapter 8 are based on Carone (1994).

The Laws presents Plato's last and vast attempt at laying the platform for a political project, where all the citizens will have an understanding of the reasons why they should abide by certain norms. In this respect, the dialogue sustains the effort of other late dialogues to extend education to the many, and thus avail them of more solid foundations for the attainment of happiness. The Laws also lays down the groundwork for a system where political law is to be based on natural law; but establishing this point requires proving that there are norms of nature. To this effect, Plato finds it of importance to establish that there is nous – intelligence – pervading the cosmos, and that our own intelligence is akin to it. In particular, if it is the role of intelligence to grasp objective goodness, the hope is that by having all citizens acquire and use critical understanding, they will reach agreement about common values and this will in turn secure the rule of law in a way that is grounded in nature. Thus, book IV relates the etymology of nomos, law, to nous, intelligence (714a; cf. XII 957c), and presents the divine nous that ruled during the golden age of Cronus as paradigmatic for a political search. In this way, in opposition to the view that laws are merely the arbitrary rule of the stronger, the Laws presents a normative concept of law; one which should, in a desirable political system, promote the individual flourishing of virtue.

So far I have argued that there is a tendency, in the late dialogues, to emphasise the teleological arrangement of the cosmos as one in which intelligence prevails. In this context, it is possible to see how the universe can provide a framework for the realisation of human autonomy, if now it is no longer expected, or required, that the individual should be under the rule of a gifted sage in order to attain happiness. Instead, by studying and imitating the rational consistency that pervades astronomy and mathematical disciplines in general, he can find and internalise models for his own behaviour, and be encouraged to explore his identity within that larger picture. This move towards the education of the many, who are no longer expected blindly to follow an authority, seemed to contrast with the Republic, and promised to pervade Plato's thinking in his later years as a mark of positive philosophical development. However, the Politicus confronts us with a problem in this respect – or, rather, with many problems.

First, it is not clear what the function of its cosmological myth is in relation to the overall political argument of the dialogue; at any rate the prevalent tendency has been to read that myth (by contrast with the dialogues we have so far considered) as suggesting that the universe is not under the control of god.

INTRODUCTION

What kind of universe do we live in? How can we coherently explain a world where there is room for both beauty and ugliness, good and evil? In what way do these factors interact, and to what extent do they affect our own lives? The Timaeus will utilise a rich conceptual apparatus, anchored in the notions of intelligent design and recalcitrant necessity, to make sense of these issues, which will occupy us here and in the next chapter.

The leading image the Timaeus employs for this purpose, that of an intelligent craftsman or “demiurge” coping with difficult materials, may raise suspicions about its philosophical meaning, particularly in a work that offers such a difficult medium for the interpreter. Two questions in particular need to be addressed at the outset: First, how much of the Timaeus should be considered mythical, and how much as pertaining to the realm of argumentative discourse? Second, what is the relation, if any, between the various speeches that compose it? Let us start with the latter question.

Notably, Socrates is not the main speaker (that role is allotted to Timaeus, an expert astronomer from southern Italy). Yet the Timaeus starts with an allusion by Socrates to his speech “given yesterday” concerning the best kind of constitution (politeia, 17c), which seems to be reminiscent of the content of the Republic.

In the previous chapter, we examined Plato's conception of god in the Timaeus as the teleological agent par excellence, and showed how that agency relies on bodily conditions, so that god turns out to be immanent to the universe. Now, why should this matter from an ethical perspective? What, if anything, are we to learn from this god, both through its mythical description and through the more rigorous study of astronomy?

I shall argue that Plato thinks we have indeed much to learn. In the course of my treatment, it will also become clear in what ways the Timaeus can be seen as a response to the Republic (and in that regard it may be no accident that the dialogue should start with an account reminiscent of that work). However, rather than claiming, as has been done recently, that the Timaeus keeps “the basic ethical and political ideology of the Republic”, I set out to show how the Timaeus can, to a large extent, be seen as an attempt by Plato not just to resume but also to move beyond some important Republic conclusions.

In particular, I shall emphasise how Plato's ethics in the Timaeus takes us away from the elitism of the Republic, presenting instead an independent way to happiness that is available to everyone. How is that possible? It is possible, I argue, precisely because everyone can share the universe as a common paradigm, and internalise its order.

The dialogue ends with a concrete illustration of the theme of the first conversation between Socrates and Lysis in 207–10 – about the way Lysis' parents refuse to allow him to do what he wants, even handing him over to a slave for the slave to do whatever he wants with him. The slave-guardian in charge of him (see 208c) comes to get him (and Menexenus' to get him), so cutting the conversation short. But this, given the content of the conversation, begins to look like a genuine case of stopping him from doing what he wants, insofar as it brings to an end an opportunity to philosophize (to express his own philosophia, his ‘love of wisdom’: 213d), that activity which alone promises to get him the wisdom that he and everyone else desires. And these guardians are the very ones whose job it is to take the boys to the teacher's (208c again):

In this, the final part of the main argument, Socrates draws some threads together before reaching a conclusion (though in the immediate sequel, 222b3–e7, he will make the conclusion seem to be in doubt): that ‘[i]t's necessary … for the genuine lover, one who's not pretended, to be loved by his darling’ (222a6–7). Quite what this amounts to, and how it relates to the argument so far, may be as opaque, at first reading, as it evidently is to Menexenus, and to Lysis. But on our analysis, it is a natural outcome of the argument of the Lysis up to the present point.

The short passage in question may for convenience be divided up into two movements, though the division is more than usually artificial. The passage has some markedly strange features, which are accounted for by a partial change of register, from full seriousness to a certain mixture of the serious and the playful – largely caused by the fact that Socrates will simultaneously (a) reach his conclusion, (b) appear to give Hippothales what he wants, and (c) leave Lysis and Menexenus in differing degrees of uncertainty as to what, precisely, they have agreed to, even while they have plainly come some of the way with him.

221d6–e5: IS THE OBJECT OF PHILIA WHAT BELONGS (TO OIKEION)?

SOCRATES TALKS TO HIPPOTHALES, THEN LYSIS AND MENEXENUS, THEN LYSIS BY HIMSELF (203a–210d)

The Lysis begins when Socrates is brought together with a group of young men, one of whom, Hippothales, is in love with one of a number of beautiful boys who are also present, namely Lysis. This introduces a first subject-matter of the Lysis: erōs (being in love, erotic love, sexual passion). Socrates quickly turns one of the questions he addresses to the lover Hippothales, namely ‘Who is the favoured beauty?’ (204b1–2) into the question ‘How should a lover speak to his darling?’ Socrates' answer to this question, as it soon emerges (206a1–c7, 210e1–5), is in effect ‘Don't sing his praises, and so puff him up. Instead, take him down a peg.’ Socrates is subtle enough not to carry the banter on the lover's strategy so far as to make it explicit that Kni. the only way in which one should take the darling down a peg is by showing the darling that he needs knowledge.

Nevertheless, we take this to be the clear purport of the opening section of the dialogue (203a1–206d6), when this is taken together with the questioning of Lysis at 207d5–210d8 that serves as an illustration of the strategy Socrates recommends for a lover.

Lysis and Menexenus, another beautiful boy, now appear on the scene.

[Preliminary note:

We found the part of the Lysis covered in this chapter, together with that covered in chapter 3, the hardest in the whole dialogue. In the case of the material of the present chapter, our difficulties were increased by the cavalier treatment Socrates appears to hand out to the poets and the cosmologists whose views he is supposedly canvassing. The reader may well feel that Socrates is not in fact taking their views seriously at all, but rather using them as an excuse to drag in a bunch of claims he wants to discuss in any case: that the y in ‘x loves y’ can only be the good; that the x in ‘x loves y’ cannot be either the good or the bad, but is rather the neither-good-nor-bad; and that the object of love is a certain self-sufficient, teleological and hierarchical good that is the ultimate object of love for all desirers – all of whom stand in need of something, namely, that self-sufficient ultimate good. (It will turn out that the self-sufficiency involved is of a special, particular kind: a maximal, or practicable self-sufficiency. But that is to anticipate a specific issue that will bulk large in the present chapter.)

An obvious parallel the reader might adduce, for the whole style of the passage, is Socrates' treatment of Simonides at Protagoras 338e6–347a5: the passage which – extraordinarily, one might say, even mischievously?

On first reading, and even twentieth reading, the next section (we shall call it ‘the Menexenus discussion’) is one of the most baffling passages in the Lysis. It is baffling because it is difficult to see what it accomplishes philosophically, and so also because it is difficult to see how it accomplishes anything that is of the slightest use to the forward motion of the dialogue. At any rate, this represents an accurate description of our (Penner's and Rowe's) history with the passage; it probably also covers the experience of most previous interpreters, the majority of whom appear to have given up on the Menexenus discussion completely, concluding that it plays either wittingly or unwittingly on ambiguities (readings which, again, will affect the global interpretation of the Lysis: if there is dishonesty or confusion here, why not elsewhere?). We ourselves, indeed, came close to the same sort of judgement, being strongly tempted by the view that the best we could say of it was that it showed Socrates giving Menexenus the eristic a dose of his own medicine (see chapter 2 above, text to n. 6).

We have, however, finally come to a clear view of the philosophical importance of the passage, within the economy of the whole. The key difficulty turned out to be our resistance to having Socrates anticipate assumptions that he will justify only later: even though, as we suppose, the argument will work sufficiently well without those assumptions to carry the immediate interlocutors, Lysis and Menexenus, along with it, and to secure their agreement with Socrates, the full defence of at least one crucial claim will require the deployment of resources which have yet to be introduced, that is, in this particular context, and in this particular conversation.