INFLUENCES ON PLATO

We lack the materials for a proper biography of Plato. He hardly refers to himself at all in the dialogues. The ancient “Lives” are infected by gossip, legend, and fiction and the ostensibly autobiographical Seventh Letter is probably spurious. Fortunately, however, Aristotle provides us with important evidence on Plato's intellectual development. He says that Plato was first influenced by Cratylus the Heraclitean, and later by Socrates (Met. 987a32-bio). It is unlikely that Aristotle derived his claim about Craytlus from reading Plato's dialogues;he probably had some independent source. And since he was probably well informed about Socrates and Plato, his statement deserves to be taken seriously.

Aristotle implies that Plato is influenced both by the older, “pre-Socratic” tradition of the “naturalists“ (phusiologoi; cf. Aristotle, De Caelo 289b25-9) and by the more recent application of philosophy to moral and political questions. What, then, did Plato find when he looked at these two movements in Greek philosophy?

Religion permeated life in classical Athens and in classical Greece generally. It is hardly surprising, then, that religious vocabulary - mention of gods, festivals, beliefs, and rites - also pervades Plato's dialogues. These dialogues reveal a man struggling to understand human life and how it ought to be lived, a man engaged in deep reflection about rational inquiry, the human roles in society and in the cosmos, and man's relationship to the divine. Religion, as rite, conception, motif, and vocabulary, is integral to his thinking. By showing how this is so we can illuminate Plato's thinking from the religious side, as it were, and thereby exhibit Plato's relationship to Greek religion and piety.

It is hard to exaggerate the prominence of religion in Greek life. Greek religion was pluralistic and heterogeneous,- there was a host of divinities with overlapping roles and features. A dozen gods formed the conventional core of this pantheon (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Demeter, Dionysos, Hephaistos, Ares); broadly conceived as Zeus's family, these, and lesser divinities such as the goat-god Pan, are the Olympians, so called after Mount Olympus, site of Zeus's palace. They and other gods, such as Hades and Persephone, were themselves varied and multiple, each present at dozens of places in various guises, serving a variety of purposes and roles. Zeus, for example, manifest as a thunderbolt, was the strongest of the gods and the father of gods and men.

Plato does not have a comprehensive theory of love. Rather, he diverts certain received opinions about love to his own peculiarly philosophic ends. He is not interested in telling us what it would be like to live with someone as a platonic lover. Or so I shall argue, from a reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus. I shall ignore the social regulations for sexuality proposed in the Republic (III 402d-403c, V 459-461) and the Laws (VIII 835c-842a) as not directly relevant to what has most fascinated Plato's readers about his approach to love, and is the topic of this essay: namely, the bridge he constructs between love and philosophy. I shall also ignore the potentially relevant discussion of friendship (against the background of a love affair) in that subtle and complex dialogue, the Lysis, in order to leave room to stretch myself to something worthwhile on the Symposium and Phaedrus. Of these two works, I shall focus on the former, for it alone among the dialogues is concerned exclusively with love.

Although the main topic of the Philebus, the rivalry between pleasure and knowledge as candidates for the dignity of the highest good in human life, is a familiar one from the early Socratic dialogues on, for the wider congregation of Plato's admirers the Philebus to this very day remains largely terra incognita. It is regarded as one of the late and difficult dialogues, an area for the specialist who has mastered the intricacies of the late Platonic doctrine that we find more alluded to than explained in the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, and the Sophist. What frightens the student of Plato's ethics off the territory is most of all the long “dialectico-metaphysical preface” of the Philebus (14c-31b). For the first quarter of the dialogue is filled with a rather complex discussion of dialectical procedure, dealing with “the one and many,” and with a new kind of ontological classification that is, at least at first sight, more bewildering than enlightening and may exhaust the reader's patience before he has even penetrated to the lengthy discussion of different sorts of pleasures that starts at 31b and fills most of the rest of the dialogue.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato expels the poetry of Homer and his followers- “the poetry of pleasure” as he calls it- from his ideal state by observing that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. At the same time, he expresses a willingness to put aside the quarrel. His spokesman, Socrates, throws out a challenge: If the poetry of pleasure or its defenders can show that it is “not only pleasant, but also useful for cities and human life,” they would gladly receive it back (607a-e). Plato returns to this challenge in his last work, the Laws. The tragic poets approach the lawmakers and ask, May we bring our poetry to your city? The lawmakers reply that they, the lawmakers, are “poets” too, rivals and competitors in making the “most beautiful drama.” Their drama is the state, an “imitation of the most beautfiul and best life.” If the tragedians can show them dramas that agree with theirs, they will be allowed to perform; otherwise not (817a-d).

In the Laws, Plato takes the more conciliatory stance of one who admits rather than expels, but the quarrel persists. Only the type of poetry that is politically correct is permitted; the rest is banished. The reason is that poets and lawmakers are rivals in fashioning human life. Both are at once “makers” (the etymological meaning of poiētai, “poets”) and “imitators” of moral values; and in a wellordered society they must speak with one voice. This subordination of poetry to politics has offended many readers of Plato from antiquity to the present. Plato sees the poet primarily as a maker of ethics, and this concern appears strangely one-sided.

Does Plato have a “later” political theory, as distinct from an earlier? It is certainly easy to suppose so. Read the Republic and you confront the most radical political system ever devised. Plato's key argument is that ruling a state is or should be a skill, based on precise knowledge of certain suprasensible, eternal, and unchanging realities called Forms [ideai], notably those of the social and political virtues, but also those of the rest of reality. On the strength of such insight, the rulers of Callipolis (“Splendid City”),a highly trained cadre of Guardians, or Philosopher-Kings, exercise direct and total political control; and lawmaking is accordingly treated by Plato in a decidedly offhand manner, as a humdrum business on which the Guardians will spend little time.

If you are by now gasping with astonishment or even indignation at the audacity of these proposals, you have every justification; for at first sight Plato's thought seems almost unintelligible. For what are Forms, and why ought they to have such a drastic effect on practical politics? The explanation, though full of philosophical problems that cannot be explored here, can be stated quite briefly. A Form, say of virtue, is the essence of virtue, what it really is, as distinct from the individual things or actions or people that instantiate it in this world; for they only share in the Form of Virtue in varying degrees; they are not Virtue Itself. Now the Greek word usually translated “virtue” is in fact better rendered by “excellence” - excellence for something.

Plato's commitment to what has been called “self-predication” that is, to sentences of the form

Bravery is brave

The Large is large

is one of the most evident and characteristic features of his work. This commitment figures in dialogues of all three periods, and is so far from optional as to be at the foundation of Platonism. Yet these sentences immediately produce negative reactions in us. The first one displayed above, for example, seems clearly false. It seems to be attributing a feature to Bravery that it could not have - we can hardly imagine it performing deeds of valor or bearing up under adversity. The characteristic claim that the Large is large without qualification seems ludicrously to take its subject as another thing like an elephant, only bigger. The presence of claims of this type in Plato's text can make us feel that his way of thinking is not merely foreign to us, but seriously confused as well. Aristotle's rude and dismissive outburst “So good-bye to the Forms. For they are nonsense” seems about right.

Our background suspicion that the Platonic Forms may not really be respectable makes the Parmenides especially intriguing to us. For that dialogue owes its fame to the presence, in its first part, of an exchange between a young Socrates and a venerable Parmenides. The utterances of Socrates are reminiscent of statements that are widely regarded as constituting Plato's theory of Forms, as presented in the Republic and the Phaedo. Yet here, when questioned by Parmenides, Socrates fails repeatedly to uphold his views, and falls into perplexity. This passage has seemed to generations of readers to show a sensitivity to the kinds of problems they themselves associated with Platonism (including but not confined to confusion over self-predication).

Can the philosophical views of the historical Socrates be distinguished from those of his pupil Plato? And if so, how do the master's views differ from the pupil's? And do these Socratic views add up to a coherent philosophical position?

In Section I of this chapter, I explain the basis on which, following most modern interpreters, I feel able to divide Plato's dialogues into a group of (earlier) “Socratic” dialogues, where the character Socrates speaks more or less for the historical Socrates; and a group of (middle and later) dialogues in which the main character (now not always Socrates) speaks rather for Plato. I argue that the Plato of the middle and later dialogues, though some of his views remain the same, and though he attacks some of the same enemies and for some of the same reasons, has nevertheless in some ways gone well beyond the master. On some points, I suggest, he even contradicts him. In Section II, I contrast these Socratic dialogues with the other dialogues - first, in their form, method, tone, and subject matter; second, in their attitude to the sciences (arts, crafts, expertises), education, rhetoric, and mathematics; and third, in their theories of virtue, desire, and “weakness of will.” In Section III, I address myself to the question with what right I attribute any views at all to a philosopher who claimed that he knew only that he knew nothing - especially when the Socratic dialogues virtually all end negatively.

Hannah Arendt once remarked of Augustine that he turned to religion out of philosophical perplexity. Augustine's account in the Confessiones of his discovery of philosophy lends support to her judgment. In book III he recalls his reaction at age nineteen to Cicero's Hortensius, an exhortation to philosophy. “Truly that book,” he reports, “changed my disposition.” Judging from the earlier sections of the Confessiones, Augustine's former disposition had inclined him towards experimenting with sin, a disposition so puzzling in its motivations that he can hardly recollect it with a semblance of intelligibility. When Cicero converts him to philosophy, Augustine turns the mystery of his own perversity into an object of study. Thereupon begins his intensely personal and profoundly philosophical preoccupation with evil. What was its nature, its origin, its end? – questions not unrelated in his mind to God's conceivability.

For a considerable stretch of the narrative in the Confessiones, Augustine describes himself as having been bound in imagination to a material God, and, by consequence, to evil as the material antithesis of God's substance. This Manichaean outlook on good and evil as eternally opposed natures seemed to Augustine, for a long while, to make sense of his own struggle against apparently intractable vice. Ultimately he would find the dualistic view of good and evil obfuscating, its power to explain illusory.

I think it fair to say that my reading of Augustine on human freedom is controversial both as an interpretation of his texts and as a theory of free will. I have already offered a detailed analysis of his texts, and I stand by it as an interpretation of Augustine. In conclusion, I would like to consider more directly the question of theory, or whether Augustine offers us an adequate and illuminating perspective on free will. Here I raise the question of theory explicitly, but I have touched upon it many times over the course of my attempt to articulate the different lines of argument that come together in his conception of will. The task of interpreting him properly on free will could not have been accomplished with much success without having had to engage him over the proper view of free will. I assume as an interpreter of Augustine that he intended to speak the truth, and so when I attribute meanings to his utterances, I draw upon my own sense of what is true and what is not and seek, on a reasonable principle of charity, to attribute to him the least amount of false utterances. This is not to imply that Augustine ought to be forced into the mold of contemporary wisdom. We cannot learn from him if we refuse to respect the integrity of his thought.

The cornerstone of Augustine's natural philosophy is his distinction between sensibility and intelligence. Human beings share with other animals the ability to perceive the material world via the senses. Through the senses we take into our minds mental representations of sensibilia, or physical objects. On the basis of these representations, which either take place in the presence of their objects or are called up in memory, we can situate ourselves in time and space and become aware of our physical surroundings. But if our modes of knowing were confined solely to sensibilia, we would have very limited capacities for judgment. We could, for instance, judge whether material conditions were favorable or likely to be favorable to the satisfaction of our needs or desires, but we could not judge whether the desires we happened to have in response to some set of circumstances were appropriate or worthy of satisfaction. For evaluative judgments we need to have representations, not simply of sensibilia, but of sensibilia under some aspect of the good. Mental representations of goods, intelligibilia, inform a mode of knowing unavailable to nonrational animals. Via their intelligence, human beings can perceive the physical world in its vileness or beauty, its evil or its goodness.

Augustine credits the Platonists for having brought the intelligibilia into proper philosophical focus. Following their lead, he associates sensibilia with what we can sense by the sight and touch of a body (uisu tactuque corporis), intelligibilia with what we comprehend through the mind's eye (conspectu mentis).

I tend to approach philosophy theologically, and so it is not surprising that I am drawn to Augustine. His was the greatest attempt in late antiquity and perhaps of any time thereafter to find in the greatest philosopher of antiquity, Plato, a theologian manqué. But I was not able to appreciate the ingenuity and profundity of Augustine's Platonism until I was able to appreciate Platonism. For that I have to thank Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, whose portraits of Plato in The Sovereignty of Good and The Fragility of Goodness respectively converted me to Platonic philosophy. Murdoch is a fellow Platonist but not a fellow theist; Nussbaum is neither Platonist nor theist. I doubt whether either philosopher would find the Platonism I ascribe to Augustine very congenial. Anyone familiar with their works will nevertheless recognize their pervasive influence on what I have written.

Augustine's Platonism led me to consider in particular his conception of will. The theme of willing and limits to willing runs throughout his writings, not as a constant fixed by a set of definitions, but as an increasingly intricate web of connections between knowledge, virtue, grace, and the philosophical quest for happiness. In my attempt to reconstruct this web and display its marvelous coherence, I found it impossible to maintain a sharp distinction between interpretation and reconstruction.

In De Trinitate Augustine observes that “all who are happy have what they want.” Even so, he continues, “not all who have what they want are for that reason happy.” We can be wretched in one of two ways. We can either lack what we want or we can have what we ought not to have wanted. His two conditions for happiness, then, are that we have what we want and that we want nothing inappropriate or evil. Modern habits of thought might incline us to take the former condition as establishing the context for the latter, in which case having to limit our desires would diminish our prospects for having all that we want. But Augustine would have us reverse our perspective. Consider the desires that those tutored in wisdom would have, and then impose the condition that for happiness, they must be able to attain all they desire. Underlying his characterization of happiness is his assumption that we could never be happy and vicious. Happiness coincides with virtue. For purposes of clarity, I will refer to virtue-based happiness as beatitude.

It may strike us as arbitrary to restrict happiness to beatitude. Individuals do, after all, seem to find happiness in a multitude of satisfactions, not all of which are virtuous or honorable. To prejudice happiness in favor of virtuous pursuits is simply to confuse happiness with virtue.

After Augustine's vain efforts in De libero arbitrio to establish a foothold for the voluntary in the natural order, the fate of the voluntary/natural distinction in his thought hangs on whether he can bring human willing down to earth. To be more precise, he must do what the classicist Albrecht Dihle credits him for having done: that is, develop some conception of the will (voluntas) that no longer presupposes classical psychology's distinction between the rational decisions of the mind and the irrational impulses of the emotions or appetites. Were he to integrate cognitive and affective sources of motivation into his conception of willing, Augustine would potentially have the resources for explaining how a vicious volition could be other than an inexplicable aberration of rational agency and how a virtuous volition could be other than an insubstantial shade of some mind's perception of order.

Augustine's first decisive steps towards articulating this new conception were taken, curiously enough, during the hiatus between the composition of the first book and a half of De libero arbitrio in Rome in late 388 and the completion of the rest of the work in Hippo Regius sometime before the end of 395, not long before his ascent to the episcopate. His intervening writings continue to pursue anti-Manichaean themes, especially the theme of sin as a voluntary act of will, though the polemical intent of the discussions is generally more explicit than it had been in De libero arbitrio.