Jeff Mason

University of Arizona, Tuscon, 15-17 February 2002

How can the philosophical thought of the ancient Greek world, and especially Plato's, be meaningful to people who live in a present that has forgotten, or rejected, most of his philosophical views? I asked this question of Julia Annas, the host of the Seventh Annual Arizona Conference on Ancient Philosophy and noted philosopher of the ancient world. Her answer was that philosophy is dialogue, and that a good way into philosophy is through dialogue with its past. It does a philosopher little good to go off into a corner to reflect alone, from the beginning, on the nature of reality, freedom, knowledge, morality or politics. We stand on the shoulders of the philosophers of the past, and their views are a good place to begin, both to avoid old mistakes and to take advantage of their considerable powers of thought. Also, she added, it would be a bit narrow minded to talk only to contemporaries. I would add that the ancient Greek world is so different from ours that in a mirror of their devising we can see ourselves through fresh eyes. Yet there are enough similarities between us to make dialogue possible.

The Arizona conference was an excellent exemplar of this kind of dialogue. It was serious and funny in turns, and sometimes together. The delivery and questioning were investigative, rather than antagonistic. The participants were all genuine philosophers, who had come to discuss Plato, and who had no ego problems about constructive criticism. The resultant papers and discussions were first rate.

There is no way in a short review to go over all the papers, nor will I give credit to any individual speakers in the following reflections. Yet it is due to them that I can now summarise my thoughts about the conference as a set of interconnected themes centring around the questions of metaphor, myth and religion in Plato's dialogues. How are we to approach and understand them in light of Plato's wider philosophical projects?

At one point in the conference, some central questions emerged. Are contemporary analytic philosophers of ancient Greece so wedded to the image of Plato as a rationalist thinker that they can no longer see the poet and romantic? How should we think of metaphorical, mythical and religious themes in Plato's philosophy? Must they always be second best to a straight philosophical exposition? Is it out of weakness that Plato uses them? Or is it, on the contrary, one of his greatest and most enduring contributions to philosophy? Should discursive language always be paramount? I left with the feeling neither myth nor reason (mythos, logos) enjoys absolute dominance. Each has its proper place in Plato's philosophy. Sometimes Plato's Socrates is unable to rise out of the realms of belief, and then he uses metaphors, myths and religious motifs to orient the reader in a direction that he thinks is most likely to lead to advances in our thinking. We must remind ourselves that Socrates never claimed to know anything. At best, we can attain well-founded beliefs in matters about which direct knowledge is inaccessible.

It is here that Plato, in the Republic, has Socrates introduce his images of the Sun, line, and cave. These are the analogies, or extended metaphors, by which Socrates indicates the direction in which, for him, the truth lies. Socrates can at best gesture at the ultimate Forms, since he found no convincing definitions. In Plato's Republic we find representations of the truth, likelihoods rather than the real things. The long way is to say what things are in themselves, but we do not have time for the long way. We can only say what truth is like, not what it is in itself. The Form of the Good, for example, is like the sun. That is as close as we can get to it, a simile. This Form is like a lodestone that guides the soul toward the truth. We cannot get any closer to the Forms than a metaphor, and it is a vehicle of something truth-like, when the straight truth is not available.

The participants of the conference had differing opinions about whether to feel bad or good about Plato's use of figurative speech. There were similar differences about how to construe myths like that of the chariot in the dialogue called the Phaedrus. Here we have the soul likened to a two-horse chariot driven by a charioteer. These are the three parts of the soul. The work of the charioteer, reason (nous), is to keep the two horses, spiritedness and irrational appetite, under control. The spirited horse is biddable and the other is unruly.

Once we wheeled in procession behind our god or goddess on the edge of heaven, where, looking out, we beheld true reality, the Forms themselves, unencumbered by the gross body. Without this myth in the background, the doctrine that we recollect the Forms from a previous disembodied state would make no sense. The unruly horse tries to take us to earth. The biddable horse will listen to the dictates of reason, if reason will but speak authoritatively. Together, the smallest part of the soul, reason, in league with the biddable horse, control the irrational appetites and lead the soul aright. Otherwise there will be no justice in the soul and things will go awry. Happiness and goodness pull in the same direction.

Obviously, the myths and metaphors in Plato's writings are over determined in meaning. The virtue of straightforward argument is that meaning is pinned down and made to stay fast. Nevertheless, it is the suggestiveness and allusiveness of the myths that give them their memorable vividness. Despite decrying art and poetry in the Republic, Socrates embraces them, when it so suits his purposes. The Republic itself is a 'representation' three removes from reality, if we are to believe the analysis of Socrates. It is not that the truth is ineffable so much as elusive at those points that most concern the true welfare of the soul.

One message that came across to me is that Plato cannot tell us the way to truth directly. Each of us must find it on our own. The philosopher can only point in the direction she is taking. It is up to us to take the hint, or, like a dog can do, mistake the direction of the pointing finger.

Most disturbing, though, is what to do with the religious motifs and themes that abound in Plato's works. Is he a religious thinker, and if so, does it take anything away from his rationalism? Here again there were various views. There was an interesting discussion of a short paragraph in the Republic in which Socrates, finishing his plan for the ideal city, leaves it up to the priests of Apollo to set up the proper religious rites and institutions, binding the people together in worship of the gods. What seems clear is that he envisions a civic religion, in which the nature of the gods has been purified. We will no longer hear stories of the gods acting unjustly, changing shapes, raping women, or fighting among themselves.

More discussion followed this. Socrates speaks of the Forms as divine, yet are they just more gods? No, because the gods are portrayed as looking out on the same Forms as we do. Something transcends the gods as well as us. Those who see Plato primarily as a rationalist think that the Forms are an intellectualisation of the gods. They become the principles of intelligibility itself, that which makes it possible for us to understand or know anything. Those who see the romantic side of Plato, recognise in the distant Forms a longing for the infinite that cannot be accommodated in this world.

In a paper about the Myth of Er we saw that none of the lives chosen are philosophical in nature. The reason is that since the myths come at the end of the Republic, we have to see that not only is justice to be valued for its own sake in this life, but in any future life as well. The philosopher would perhaps wish to remain outside the cave, uninvolved with the shadow world of ordinary political and economic reality. However, the Republic shows that it is the duty of good people to work to make things better where they live. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but the philosopher, in order to live a good life must choose justice over philosophy.

There is no doubt that Plato's works are full of references to religion, and yet Socrates was put to death for being an atheist, or introducing new gods into the city. It was suggested that he put philosophy in place of the gods, and that this was the new power he unleashed in the city. Unlike the goddess Bendis, to whose festival Socrates goes at the beginning of the Republic, and who is welcomed with solemn rites and a torch-light procession, philosophy receives a more mixed reception. I emerged with the feeling that Plato is a religious thinker after all, but philosophy is his religion. From here it is possible to go in many directions, including atheism and pure rationalism. However, that would be to leave Plato behind, and while we are with him, we have to see his use of metaphor, myth and religious motifs as integral to his philosophy. The conference in Arizona went a long way towards clarifying these difficult issues. The organiser, Mark McPherran, is to be congratulated for putting together such a rewarding experience.
Jeff Mason

 

The Living Dead

Jeff Mason talks to Mark L. McPherran, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Humanities at the University of Maine at Farmington

What's the relevance of ancient philosophy for philosophy today? Didn't the ancients just get too much wrong for their work to be of interest?

It's true that the ancients were just wrong about all sorts of important things: that's why, for example, we don't assign Aristotle's On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, or Meteorology to undergraduate science majors. Nevertheless, for pedagogical reasons we college professors do assign what we now count as the philosophically-relevant texts (for example, in ethics), even if we think that those too contain a lot of 'false leads'. For instance, so that students might become familiar with the roots of some philosophical problem and work through some of the more basic 'bad' positions or provocative confusions relevant to that. To use one example, the Theaetetus can be read as foreseeing modern, Gettier-type concerns about knowledge parsed out as justified true belief.

However, in some cases we assign a text because we think it contains a true - or at least, plausible - position or insight, albeit in nascent form, that even has yet to be fully captured by modern thinkers. For example, I know serious thinkers who hold that Socrates was in some sense 'right' in his moral psychology. So, arguably, these thinkers articulate views that are relevant not only because of their impact on our intellectual history, but because they encapsulate points of view from which modern thinkers may still profit.

Perhaps the most valuable thing the ancients can teach us is something many modern philosophers and intellectuals seem to have forgotten; namely, that philosophy can have a lot to do with - is, on the ancient conception, supposed to have a lot to do with - how one lives and experiences one's everyday lived life. Here, anyway, is what I tell my ancient philosophy students:

"To recover our past is to recover a part of ourselves, to become more aware of what and who we are. I think that those who neglect this task are never fully themselves and that their good intentions therefore often go astray, for they live unconscious to the source and determination of their own thoughts and actions. Worse yet, they have no context rooted in reality by which to locate contemporary events and their own place in them: They are unknowingly bound to an unknown past. Real freedom involves intellectual liberation from such chains; knowing what has been tried, and what failed or succeeded, and what conceptual structures we have in our heads as a result. Only by understanding those things can we sort out in full awareness the meaning and value of the knowledge we may acquire, our times, and our own lives as they unfold.

"Imagine, if you will, that each of our texts has the following preface (from poet P Valery):

It depends on those who pass
Whether I am grave or treasure
Whether I speak or am mute
On you only this depends
Friend, enter not without desire

"There are many kinds of desire that Valery could be referring to here. But if you at least have the desire to learn something about the nature of our culture's inner, intellectual/spiritual history - and thus, something about yourself - and you are willing to trust the idea that these texts are not only records of past thoughts but are repositories of what lives inside of us now (and perhaps even contain a bit of 'The Truth'), then this class is for you."

 

What are the differences between seeing the ancients as thinkers of their time and as our contemporaries?

 Trying to understand the ancients in their own terms is tough, because getting an adequate handle on those terms is hard work: this is the job of the scholar (and any reader who wishes to fully appreciate the accomplishment of prior thinkers). Treating the ancients as contemporaries in a careful fashion - that is, an historically-sensitive fashion - requires that interpretive work, and then puts these ancients 'dressed up in modern garb' (for example, interpreted using modern logic) into conversation with more recent points of view and discoveries.

 

Is there a difference between studying the ancients as a form of scholarship and studying them as a source of useful philosophy?

Sure: in many cases, a world of difference (depending on the aims of the reader and the meaning of 'useful'). For while some academic might study The Handbook of Epictetus with solely his or her eye on publishing one more article on stoicism (so that they might get tenure), another reader might be looking for some guidance as they confront the emotional turmoil of losing a loved one. Ideally, of course (that is, as I see things), genuine scholars are 'holistic'; that is, they are motivated by a concern to understand an ancient author in his or her own terms, but with an eye to putting that understanding 'into conversation with' the whole of their desire to apprehend, communicate, and incorporate, the truth of their discoveries.