The analysis of the previous chapter suggested that myth in the middle dialogues expresses a synoptic view of reality. Myth extrapolates from the particulars of philosophical discussion and produces a narrative we might call ‘collective’ (or ‘recollective’). The philosopher's devotion to dialectic and to the examination of the grounds of his knowledge renders him capable of an intuitive leap to a vision of the soul separated from its body and related to the whole. The mythological vision is a self-qualifying image of the truth expressed in narrative. This intuitive understanding cannot stand by itself, however; it arose in the first place from dialectic and must return to dialectic to ground itself.

This final chapter on Plato will examine how the treatment of myth in the late dialogues takes this vision in a different direction. This is not to say that synoptic myths do not occur in the late period. The cosmologies of the Statesman and the Timaeus are universalising, albeit incomplete, accounts of the world from a transcendental perspective. Nevertheless, the relationship of these accounts to the context of the dialogue in which they are set differs from the middle period. Instead of being a philosophically intuitive leap, they are firmly integrated into a framework of analytic method and methodology. Thus the cosmology of the Timaeus is an exercise in structured scientific and philosophical inference, while the cosmology of the Statesman is intended to help clarify a potential error in the dialectic process.

Is myth a disease of language? If so, it is one for which language has a genetic weakness. Philosophical myth strives to be the inoculation against the disease, and, as is often the case, infects the patient with a weakened and preventative strain of the illness. By introducing a particular, engineered strain of myth into philosophical discourse, the authors whom I have been considering can both acknowledge and attempt to move beyond the inherent weakness of words. They can appropriate the productions of poetic predecessors and contemporaries and reissue them in their own image, while still guarding themselves against any charge that they repeat poetic mythological mistakes. Once recognised, the fallibility of language becomes a source of opportunity. Parmenides' goddess can, in the second part of his poem, boast of the deceitful ordering created by words, while still expecting her audience to be proof against it. Meanwhile, the errors of mortal thought are mercilessly exposed in the first part, but in such a way that we are forced to question whether the language of the poem can contain the conclusions expressed.

The sophists view myth as a form of literary and cultural convention. By manipulating this convention they can advertise their intellectual expertise and attract pupils. Since the content of their teaching is rhetorical, manipulation is not only a means but an end. Manoeuvring in and through language, they display its detachment from any universal or metaphysical truth.

Specifying the function of myth in early Greek philosophy is a perilous enterprise. What is myth? What is philosophy? How can we recognise philosophical myth? These categories are retrospective impositions on the competitive intellectual world of the sixth to fourth centuries bc. In order to define terms, we must realise that several interpretative problems overlap. First and most basic, there is a problem concerning what we mean and what the Greeks meant, when they used the word ‘myth’ (mythos). Second, there are problems concerning what conditions helped to bring about the rise of what we call philosophy, and the nature of the intellectual project involved. Third, we must investigate what moves are involved in the representation of the rise of philosophy, and how philosophy is related to the larger worlds of poetic discourse and mythology. This last set of questions is crucial because the formation of a specifically philosophical mythology is a result of the conceptual exclusion of poetic mythological discourse by early philosophers. This exclusion has influenced subsequent generations and has led to modern misconceptions of the relationship between philosophy and myth in ancient philosophical authors. Since early philosophers reject poetic claims to seriousness, we have often assumed that mythological elements within philosophy are ornamental bows in the direction of an obsolete thought world. We ignore the possibility that myth may serve a philosophical purpose.

The sophists, as we have seen, blur the boundaries between mythos and logos. They use the former to illustrate the latter, and pretend to distinguish the two only to obscure the distinction. Given Plato's hostility to the sophists, we might expect that he would differentiate rigidly between the two and that his myths would be susceptible to easy definition. This is not the case however. This chapter, the first of three devoted to Platonic myth, will demonstrate that Platonic myth is characterised by subjectivity. By this I mean that myth lies in the eyes of the beholder and that this is connected with our nature as humans. We all fall short of philosophical knowledge, and few have the intellectual means to be aware of the status of the arguments and declarations we make. Like the sophists, Plato is aware of human fallibility, but the conclusion he draws from this is radically different. Whereas the sophists reacted with relativism and the acceptance and manipulation of social and linguistic convention, Plato wants us to work through our weakness towards secure knowledge. His belief in the immortality of the soul means that we have many lifetimes in which to achieve this. Our understanding of the status of myth is tied to context, in the broadest sense. Personal knowledge and the ability to explain it, the range and type of interlocutors present at any given conversation, the incarnation of the soul – all affect the authority of any statement.

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter we saw how viewing the mythological tradition as a text allowed the sophists to create ironising mythological epideixeis. These epideixeis demonstrated the manipulation of linguistic and social convention through the creation and undermining of rhetorical and ethical paradigms. I suggested that mythological role-playing enabled the sophists to enter into a close relationship with these paradigms. Hippias can play Nestor, Antisthenes can impersonate both Ajax and Odysseus. Epideixeis that concentrate on paradigms for correct ethical behaviour assimilate themselves to, and manipulate, the traditional and societally non-threatening genre of ‘advice to young men’. There was, however, an omission: Protagoras' myth of the origins of civilisation as transmitted in Plato's Protagoras. Because of the complexity of the issues involved, the Protagoras has been reserved for separate treatment. Interpretative problems abound. Are we to believe that the speech Plato puts into Protagoras' mouth represents a Protagorean or a Platonic, myth? If Protagorean, how is it affected embedded in a Platonic context?

In the following pages I shall argue that the myth of the Protagoras is substantially Protagorean and accurately represents a sophistic use of myth with close ties to other sophistic epideictic practice. This demonstration will have two (unequal) parts, both indicative of the role of social and mythological convention. The first concerns the use of myth to disguise the unexamined nature of conventional belief in the prerequisites for a just society.

INTRODUCTION

The Presocratics fashioned themselves by challenging the authority through which the poets constructed their discourse. The generation of multiple poetic versions of myths according to no verifiable criterion was, for them, symptomatic of careless intellect. Poetic myths had enshrined unexamined cultural conventions and governed education. The Presocratics treated here responded by creating myths and mythological characters that were responsible to ‘scientific’ criteria of truth and falsity and reflected potential problems in the application of these criteria. Concerns with the status of myth and poetry were closely connected with questions about the nature and efficacy of language, and myth was used to encapsulate these questions. The language of myth, was not, then expunged from philosophical vocabulary, but its reference was changed. We might call this attitude to myth ‘transformative’. I shall call the approach of the sophists and their contemporaries towards myth ‘appropriative’, since the traditional stories retain their old forms and are manipulated rather than questioned. As we turn to the second half of the fifth century, we find that the same concerns inform intellectual speculation: the nature and power of language, and the status of the poets and their myths. The context of the speculation is different, however. Athens has become the intellectual centre ofthe Greek world. The rise of the Athenian empire and of developed democracy entailed greater opportunities for political and financial gain for citizens who aspired to positions of influence.

This chapter examines the myths of the soul in the Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus. The mythological material from the later dialogues, which focus more on methodological matters, will be treated in Chapter 8. This division reflects a shift of emphasis in the deployment of Platonic philosophical myth between the middle and late periods. The final word on the chronology of the Platonic dialogues has not been spoken, but, fortunately, absolute precision is unnecessary for the present task. It is sufficient that the myths of the soul form a recognisable grouping reflecting primarily ethical concerns. Middle period myths give a synoptic view of reality. They are connected with philosophical intuition and with the unmediated perception of reality that is the goal of the philosophical quest. They do not reveal reality, but act as a model for this ultimate experience. The relationship between logical/analytic discourse and mythical/intuitive discourse is complex. ‘Myth’ describes both an insight which serves as a starting point for dialectic and one which comes at the end of the process of analysis. It is the discourse out of which dialectic emerges and in which dialectic ends when the object of its analysis cannot (as yet) be verified. Thus it can be regarded as a symbolic short-cut for the analytic process, although it can replace it. Myth is the multivalent discourse against which philosophy revolts, the discourse which is a kind of philosophical shorthand, and the discourse which represents philosophy's culmination.

This is not a book about ‘mythical thinking’, although it is about both myth and thought. Treatments of mythical thinking try to specify some system of thought as ‘other’, as primitive, mystical, childish, or irrational. The difficulties of identifying and explaining purported different mentalities are by now well known, and the explanatory utility of such a procedure is limited. Nor do I wish to attempt a rehabilitation of ‘myth’ in the face of ‘philosophy’. It has been suggested, for instance, that myth is a ‘pre-philosophical “mirror” of existential thought’, a liberation from excessive abstraction and objectivism, a primal, original, and essential form of truth. The validity of these assertions I am unable to gauge, for the myth with which this book is concerned is post-philosophical. It is myth seen through a philosophical lens and incorporated into philosophical discourse. As a form of truth it is neither primal nor original. From the standpoint of the philosophers we shall meet in the following pages, non-philosophical myth is a story about truth that is often pernicious and misleading. The myth they incorporate serves their own ends. These ends are: the reformulation of people's ideas about literary and cultural authority, the problematisation of the different modes of linguistic representation, and the creation of a self-reffective philosophical sensibility.

The story of philosophy's relationship with and transformation of myth is the story of its relationship with convention, both literary and societal.

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter I examined issues that bear on the demarcation of a realm of myth. I outlined how usage of the word mythos, at first associated with authoritative speech, was transformed: gradually, it became connected with the traditional tales (myths) that were the vehicles of authoritative social conventions. The first philosophers attempted to appropriate this authority for their own intellectual project, whose product, they hoped, would displace traditional sources of wisdom. The textualisation of these sources in the wake of increasing literacy enabled philosophers to develop a methodological self-consciousness in the rejection of poetic multiplicity. They explored a new source for discursive authority, one which contrasted with Muse-based inspiration in its appeal to argument. An important aspect of textualising, demarcating, and excluding the poets was the concern that poetic predecessors had misused language. I suggested that this concern may have led to worries about the contingency of language. We may now proceed to a more detailed investigation of the nature of the gesture by which certain Presocratics reject the world of poetic mythologising. This chapter will focus on the challenge offered by Xenophanes, Herakleitos, Empedokles, and Parmenides to poetic thought and language, and, more briefly, on the response to this challenge. Parmenides' poem on Being will receive the lengthiest treatment, since it both critiques ordinary thought and language, and sets this critique in a framework. It is therefore well suited to dramatise the tensions and possibilities of mythology and philosophy.

MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM

God first (I shall come back to philosophy and farming in my final chapter). It is often supposed that all Plato's cosmic teleology is theistic, just as it is often supposed that he will make his theistic claims under the protective custody of a myth. If there are other stories to tell about myth, however, perhaps there are others about god, too. Indeed, if I am right that the Politicus myth invites a contrast between two mythologies, then the absence of god in the mythology of our era tells immediately against unthinking theism on Plato's part (and perhaps against thoughtful theism, too). Even if Plato would earlier have responded to the failings of Anaxagoras by adding to the mechanistic account of the universe an overseeing god (this is, if you like, giving Anaxagoras' Mind a job to do; cf. Phaedo 98b ff.), how far is this cosmological theology what we have in the Politicus and the Philebus?

At Philebus 28–30 Socrates offers an argument which seems at first to encourage a theistic view, that the cosmos is as it is by the agency of god. Socrates has been discussing the nature of limit and the unlimited in order to relegate the life of Philebus – a life which is barely a life, but rather the episodic existence of a mollusc – to what has no measure, to what is characterised by the more and the less.

This book had its origins in the W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1996; I am extremely grateful to John Dillon and Kathy Coleman both for the honour of their invitation and for the warmth of their hospitality, then and thereafter. My audiences in Dublin were very generous and their various comments and questions most illuminating. In particular, Vasilis Politis and John Cleary made me clarify a good deal that had been unclear; whatever opacity there remains – and I fear there may be far too much – is despite their best efforts.

In a form close to the present one Chapter 2 was delivered at the Southern Association for Ancient Philosophy in September 1996, and again at Queen's University, Belfast; and it is published in Dialogos 1998. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint that material here. A French version of some of Chapters 5 and 6 was delivered at the Sorbonne in 1996, and is published as ‘Téléologie et Autonomie dans le Philèbe de Platon’ in La fêlure du plaisir et la pensée. Études sur le Philèbe de Platon vol. I, ed. M. Dixsaut. Some of the same material was delivered at University College Cork and at King's College London. On all these various occasions I was fortunate in my audiences, whom I should like warmly to thank. In addition John Dillon, Verity Harte, Alan Lacey and Vasilis Politis have all read and commented upon a draft of the whole book; I am extremely grateful to them, both for their patience and for their insights. As reader for the Press, John Cooper made extensive comments on the whole manuscript with his customary care and incisiveness.

HERACLITUS' EARLY APPEARANCES

Heraclitus' influence on Plato from early on is evident, although it is not evident that it was the flux of the sensible world which was Plato's dominant problem. Instead, it seems that in the middle dialogues Plato was more interested in Heraclitus' logic, or his methodology. Consider Socrates' exhortation to his companions:

REASON AND SELF-DETERMINATION

Let us return, first of all, to the Politicus. The judgement of lives suggested that philosophy, the inquiring sort, is, at least in the conditions of the golden age, sufficient for happiness; and possibly necessary as well. Astonishingly, Young Socrates makes a similar point (indeed, this is his only point). The Stranger argues that the best state is one where the statesman is present to exercise the judgement which is his alone. Failing that, a state will have fixed laws, protected by fierce legislation. But in this state (from which the experts have departed) there would be no experts and no investigation into new knowledge, for fear of the overthrow of the fixed laws. Young Socrates is horrified:

If the cosmological myth makes inquiry sufficient for happiness in the golden age, Young Socrates supposes it to be necessary in this one. And yet this is in sharp contrast to the dramatisation of the dialogue itself, which makes it hard to see how the process of philosophy could be vital for a life that is worth living (would you want to be Young Socrates?). Why might men in the golden age fail to do philosophy? And why should they be worse off if they do? And why should the life of the ordinary citizen be utterly diminished by an embargo on inquiry?