TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PHAEDRUS

The Phaedrus is, in a sense, the last Socratic dialogue. Not that Socrates disappears from Plato's work; the continuity of literary form is preserved by Socrates' presence in every dialogue except the Laws. He plays an important and unprecedented role in the Parmenides; he is the principal speaker in the Theaetetus and also, for one last time, in the Philebus. The Theaetetus even imitates the formal pattern of an aporetic dialogue. But in comparison with earlier dialogues the portrayal of Socrates in the Theaetetus is rather wooden and didactic, and even more so in the Philebus. The Phaedrus is the latest work in which Plato's talent as a writer is displayed in its full intensity. It is also the work in which Plato reflects most explicitly on the role of writing in philosophy. So it is fitting that we conclude this study of Plato as author of Socratic dialogues with a consideration of the Phaedrus.

This dialogue occupies a unique place among Plato's literary masterpieces. It does not have the dramatic power of the Protagoras, Symposium, and Phaedo, or the magnificent argumentative structure of the Republic. But in the Phaedrus Plato shows himself the master of a new kind of art. First a pastoral dialogue with the charming picture of Socrates wading through a cool stream on a hot day, stretching himself on the grass in a shady spot near a shrine to the nymphs, with the music of cicadas all around in the noonday heat. This romantic description of nature is unparalleled in Plato, and rare in Greek literature.

WHAT IS PLATO'S THEORY OF FORMS?

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the concept of Forms in Plato's work. As the distinctive object of philosophical knowledge, the Forms in the Republic provide the criterion for distinguishing philosophers from non-philosophers. The Forms play this central role in Plato's epistemology precisely because they constitute the basic entities in his ontology. Furthermore, as source of value and ultimate object of desire, the Forms are equally fundamental in Plato's moral psychology, as we have seen in Chapter 9. In ethics and political theory they provide a paradeigma, a pattern to be imitated in the moral life as well as in the construction and government of the best city. In theology also the Forms are paradigmatic, since it is by their relationship to the Forms that the gods themselves are divine (Phaedrus 249c). In the Cratylus and the Sophist the Forms provide the basis for a theory of language; in the Timaeus they constitute the framework for Plato's cosmology and philosophy of nature. In the Symposium and Phaedrus the Form of Beauty functions as a principle for esthetics and above all for an account of love, including an account of that privileged form of erōs that constitutes the life in philosophy. No doctrine in the history of philosophy has been more ambitious, and few have been so influential.

Nevertheless, the status of this doctrine in Plato's work is problematic in more than one respect.

THE PLAGE OF THE PROTAGORAS AMONG THE DIALOGUES

Among the seven works grouped together here as threshold dialogues, the Protagoras is clearly the literary masterpiece. It is the longest of the seven, roughly the same length as the Symposium and Phaedo. As an exemplar of Plato's dramatic art the Protagoras is rivaled only by the Symposium in the number and eminence of the speakers, the vividness of the dialogue, and the diversity of the action. Plato has taken pains to create here a brilliant picture of Athenian culture in the last years of the Periclean age, a half dozen years before his own birth, as backdrop for a full-scale treatment of the question raised by Socrates in the Laches: what is the proper goal of moral education, and how can this goal be achieved?

But if the Protagoras is one of the most brilliant of Plato's dialogues, it is also one of the most perplexing. There is, first of all, the question why Socrates' offers such an elaborate misinterpretation of Simonides' poem. This episode has often been an embarrassment to admirers of Socrates, since he seems here to be playing the part of the sophist rather than that of the philosopher. There is the much-discussed problem of Socrates' identification of pleasure and the good in the final argument, which is unlike what we find in any other dialogue. And there is also the strange denial of akrasia in the same argument: the denial of what we call weakness of will or yielding to temptation, acting against one's better judgment.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCRATES

In Plato's work the presence of Socrates is overwhelming. Out of twenty-five or more dialogues, Socrates is absent from only one: the Laws. (And this is so exceptional that Aristotle, in a slip, can refer to the Laws as one of the “discourses of Socrates,” Politics 11.6, 1265a11.) Even in Plato's latest period, where Socrates, though present, is normally replaced as chief speaker by a visitor from Elea or Locri, he can still surprise us. In the Philebus he resumes once more the role of protagonist when the topic under discussion returns to familiar Socratic territory, the relation between pleasure and the good.

It is not simply Socrates as dramatis persona who persists throughout Plato's work. It is Socrates as the martyred embodiment of a moral ideal and also Socrates as the paradigm philosopher, tirelessly pursuing intellectual inquiry by the method of question and answer. If for Plato the highest form of philosophical activity is named “dialectic,” the art of conversational discussion, that is an obvious reminder that the method of Socratic conversation remains Plato's model for philosophic teaching and research.

THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETING THE DIALOGUES

An anecdote reports that, when Plato was about to submit a set of tragedies for competition at the Dionysian festival, he encountered Socrates on his way to the theater. After this conversation with Socrates, so the story goes, Plato returned home and burnt all his poetic compositions. If this story is not true, it is certainly ben trovato. Plato had the dramatic gifts of a Sophocles or Euripides, but he decided to exploit them in a different literary form. In the preceding chapter we surveyed the new genre that the development of Greek letters had provided for his use: the logos Sōkratikos, or “conversation with Socrates.” Since it was Socrates who had made Plato a philosopher, it was by writing about Socrates – more exactly, by representing Socrates in his writing – that Plato could legitimately deploy his dramatic powers in the service of philosophy.

Plato's compositions in the dramatic dialogue form achieved an immense literary success. But Plato's use of this form, in which he himself never appears, creates formidable difficulties for the interpretation of his thought. The anonymity of the dialogue form presents the interpreter with a problem that is unparalleled for any other philosopher. According to a Platonic doctrine suggested in many places and crystallized in the Republic, the philosophical vision tends to see things together, to seek for unity in the midst of diversity and plurality. But where is the unity to be found in Plato's own vision? Since we never hear Plato's own voice, how can we know where, and to what extent, what Socrates says represents what Plato thinks?

In Chapter 3 § 3 we examine a text concerning dialectic in Memorabilia IV.5–6 where the influence of Plato is, I believe, unmistakable. But this is not an isolated case. I consider here a number of parallel texts to demonstrate how pervasive is Xenophon's dependence on Platonic material.

The importance of this Platonic influence on Xenophon must not be exaggerated. His use of Platonic texts is essentially superficial, almost cosmetic in nature. Xenophon seems to have had no real sympathy with Plato's portrayal of Socrates. Thus his Symposium, though no doubt inspired by Plato's dialogue and largely devoted to the same theme, is as different from that work in tone and substance as anything one can well imagine. As von Fritz pointed out, it would be a mistake to think of Xenophon as trying to compete with Plato; he simply rejects and hence ignores the spiritualized view of Socrates that Plato presents. In Antisthenes and Aeschines, on the other hand, Xenophon found more congenial representations of Socrates that he could to some extent absorb into his own portrayal.

A full study of the parallels between Xenophon and Plato would call for a separate monograph. What follows makes no claim to completeness. I simply note some eight or ten passages from the Memorabilia where the direct literary dependence of Xenophon upon Plato seems to me at least probable, and two from the Symposium where it seems certain.

(Mem. 1.6.14)

As for myself, just as someone else takes pleasure in a good horse or dog or bird, in the same way and even more so do I take pleasure in good friends.

I offer here an interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues which aims to do justice to the genius of Plato not only as a thinker but also as a writer. For Plato is the only major philosopher who is also a supreme literary artist. There is no writer more complex, and there is no other philosopher whose work calls for so many levels of interpretation. Plato was the first author to offer a systematic definition of the goals and methods of philosophy. But he was also a social reformer and an educator, whose conception of philosophy entailed a radical transformation of the moral and intellectual culture of his own time and place. Much of his writing is designed to serve this larger cause. Hence a perceptive interpretation of Plato's dialogues calls for attention to his revolutionary cultural enterprise as well as to the literary and philosophical dimensions of his work.

My understanding of Plato reflects three quite different traditions. As a student at the University of Chicago, I learned from David Grene to read Plato as a great dramatist who belongs in the company of Shakespeare and the Attic tragedians. As a doctoral student in Classics at Columbia University, I was initiated into the mysteries of historical philology by Ernst Kapp and Kurt von Fritz. There I came to see Plato's dialogues as central texts for Greek culture of the fourth century BG, in the perspective of the great Plato commentaries of John Burnet and E. R. Dodds.

TRANSITION TO DIALECTIC AND THE FORMS

At this point our study undergoes a change of pace as well as a change in theme. Instead of moral psychology and the theory of virtue we turn now to the more technical heartland of Platonic philosophy: the concept of dialectic and the theory of Forms. This means moving also from the threshold dialogues to the Phaedo and Republic. It is Plato's own argument that has led us in this direction. In the last three chapters we have been following a line of thought that connects the beneficial knowledge of good and evil (as introduced in the Laches and Charmides) with the twin Socratic paradoxes familiar from the Gorgias, Protagoras, and Meno: that no one does evil voluntarily and that the moral virtues are somehow unified in wisdom or knowledge. But the problem remains: how can knowledge of the good guarantee right action? I have argued that Plato's conception of erōs, as a passionate desire for the good-and-beautiful, is the essential key to a Platonic understanding of these paradoxes. No one does evil willingly because our most fundamental passion is a desire for the good, a desire understood transparently or de re as a desire for what is truly good, and not merely a pursuit of what we happen to think is good. (This distinction is explicitly drawn by Plato in Rep. vi, 505D 5–9.) If we in fact pursue a goal or activity which is not really good, that can only be out of ignorance.

The task of philosophy, then, is to lead us to knowledge of the good.

A SURVEY OF THE CHARMIDES

The Charmides presents itself as a kind of companion piece to the Laches: an unsuccessful attempt to define temperance (sōphrosunē) matching the unsuccessful attempt to define courage in the Laches. In fact the two dialogues are very different from one another, and the Charmides poses many problems of its own.

A central thread connecting the Charmides with the other threshold dialogues is reflection on the parallel themes of knowledge in the strict sense, as technē, and virtue or moral excellence (aretē). The Charmides pays little attention to the topic of the teaching of virtue, which occupies center stage in the Laches, Protagoras, and Meno, as later in the Republic. The primary concern of the Charmides is to interpret temperance as a beneficial form of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can make us “do well” (eu prattein) and lead a happy life. The chief peculiarity of the Charmides (aside from the choice of interlocutors) is its preoccupation with the ambiguous claim that temperance must be knowledge-of-knowledge or self-knowledge, not knowledge of anything else.

To the delight of scholars, Aristotle's surviving writings are both extensive and obscure. One of the sources of this obscurity is familiar to us from scholastic philosophy: the arguments often seem to meander through a nearly featureless theoretical countryside. In this barren realm we find few familiar landmarks, so that even with the road map provided by the arguments, we are often unable to tell where we are headed or why we have taken a turn.

The first part of this chapter briefly sketches out some important features of the theoretical road map as it is presented in Aristotle's earlier, logical works, the Organon. This is not intended as a primary study of those features. Those seeking that can find other, far more detailed, discussions. My purpose is to introduce some key notions and to point out their limitations.

In the second I turn to the Physics and to questions about the geography and population of the landscape there. Some of these features are quite basic to Aristotle's philosophical concerns yet are never explicitly discussed by him; others he touches upon only tangentially or in unexpected contexts; still others he discusses over and over again. None of them is in any way esoteric: they are all homely features of the world that have been noted by ten year olds throughout history – things like spiderwebs, earth, houses, sheep, and ponds. To understand Aristotle's system, we need to see how these things fit into it.

Aristotle's elements, we saw in Chapter 2, have a bipolar constitution: on the one hand, each element has an Internal Principle of Change (IPC) in virtue of which it is disposed to be what it is; on the other hand, each element can be driven by external forces from what it is, lose its nature, and perish. The first of these possibilities it owes to its form; the second its owes somehow to its matter.

In the last chapter we were primarily concerned with elemental motion and alteration. In this we turn to the role of these two factors (form and matter) in two basic processes: elemental transformation, which Aristotle holds is the coming-to-be and perishing of elements; and the creation of homogeneous compounds out of elements, which he holds does not involve the coming-to-be and perishing of elements. I conclude by showing how dispositional essentialism can help with some puzzles regarding the difference between these two processes.

Change and Continuity

Prime Matter

For a quarter-century Aristotle's interpreters have disagreed over his doctrine of prime matter. One school contends that Aristotle is not committed to prime matter; the other, that he is committed to it. The issue has been put with admirable clarity by H. M. Robinson: