The Portable Plato Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PROTAGORAS

  SYMPOSIUM

  PHAEDO

  THE REPUBLIC

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

  Plato

  Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He came from a family that had long played a prominent part in Athenian politics, and it would have been natural for him to follow the same course. He declined to do so, however, disgusted by the violence and corruption of Athenian political life, and sickened especially by the execution in 399 of his friend and teacher, Socrates. Inspired by Socrates’ inquiries into the nature of ethical standards, Plato sought a cure for the ills of society not in politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers. At an uncertain date in the early fourth century B.C. he founded in Athens the Academy, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all western universities. He travelled extensively, notably to Sicily as political adviser to Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse.

  Plato wrote over twenty philosophical dialogues, and there are also extant under his name thirteen letters, whose genuineness is keenly disputed. His literary activity extended over perhaps half a century; few other writers have exploited so effectively the grace and precision, the flexibility and power, of Greek prose.

  Scott Milross Buchanan (1895-1968) taught philosophy and religion at the College of the City of New York, the University of Virginia, and Fisk University. During his nine years as dean of St. John’s College at Annapolis, Maryland, he helped inaugurate and implement its “great books” curriculum. His books include Possibility and Poetry and Mathematics.

  Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.

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  First published in the United States of America

  by The Viking Press, Inc., 1948

  Reprinted 1957,1958,1959,1960,1961 (twice),

  1962,1963,1964,1965,1966 (twice).

  1967,1968,1969,1970,1971,1973 (twice), 1974, 1976

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  Copyright 1948 by The Viking Press, Inc. Copyright @ renewed The Viking Press, Inc., 1976

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING PUBLICATION DATA

  Plato.

  The portable Plato.

  Bibliography: p. 41.

  1. Philosophy—Collected works. I. Jowett, Benjamin,

  1817-1893. 11. Title.

  B358.j-54346

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  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  IN THE year 1948 the reading of Plato’s dialogues by a large number of people could make the difference between a century of folly and a century of wisdom for the world. Reading The Republic has made that difference at various times of crisis in the past. A young American who reads Plato now may sympathize with the youthful Alexander who must have shuddered to see the chaotic world that he was fated to conquer. Tutored by one of Plato’s pupils, Aristotle, Alexander read Plato. He gave a unique quality to the world that fell under his dominion: he was the first statesman in our tradition to see the world as one city. If there is a chance now of one political world without the dread necessity of conquest, it may come about partly because human virtue and political justice can still be seen in the mirror of Plato’s writings. Alexander was a conqueror and something less than a philosopher-king, but he did have the elements of a liberal education.

  For many people in the past the reading of Plato has been the beginning of their deep liberal education. Such education takes devious ways and it has many by-products, some good, some bad, all of them disturbing. The first and most obvious symptom that it is taking effect is an incorrigible urge to question things that have always been taken for granted. The second stage of the disturbance is a feeling of shame that such questions have never been asked before. Partial recovery from this blow to pride is achieved by a rally to the attack, the supposed enemy being conventional morality and opinion. The questions then come in Chinese puzzles, one inside the other, or in ranks, one behind the other in endless array. Apparently the conventions are easily routed, for they seem to melt away. Actually they have disguised themselves and changed sides, turning up everywhere as the assumptions behind the questions. The result at this point is panic, confusion, and paralysis.

  Bright boys in college blame their teachers and protest in anger when this happens to them. Only later do they know that a splinter of Socratic irony has lodged in their souls for which they will always be grateful. In a similar mood Mens, a grown man, reports his pain thus:

  “O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits’ end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.”

  And the Socratic response to the protest is not altogether comforting:

  As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not oth
erwise; for I perplex others not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry.”

  So the reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote, for adventures of the mind. And although there is a deep consent, like a fire kindled deep in the mind, there is always a tension between the squire and the knight-errant, the little man with proverbs for wisdom riding on a donkey and the knight with the piercing eye riding on a horse, those two parts of each human soul. The intellectual destiny that each of us has depends upon who gets the upper hand, knight or squire.

  Too often it is the squire that masters the knight and drags him off the unbeaten track. The record shows that readers of Plato become Platonists and ride donkeys. Seeing the battle with the conventions as the rivalry of opinions, they choose what seems to be the winner, call it the truth, and spend the rest of their lives in defense, challenging all comers. This was already happening before Socrates died. Some, noting the argument, recorded in the Protagoras, to show that pleasure is the good, set up the Cyrenaic School of philosophy which later combined with the atomism of Democritus to make the doctrine of Epicureanism. Others noted the opposing doctrine that the good is virtue, and virtue is knowledge, and became Cynics and later Stoics. It is true that these riders of Platonic donkeys have ruled islands, as the leaders of these schools did, and some of them ruled empires, as the Roman Stoics did, but the shock of reading Plato and touching Socrates has, as a piece of education, proved abortive in them. It may be that some of these caught the vision of the idea and, feeling its power, rode a horse, but they allowed the donkey to lead them down familiar roads where convention puts vision to sleep.

  There are, of course, those whose minds took fire from the inquiry concerning the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo, from the intellectual pursuit of love in the Symposium, or from the exploration of utopia in The Republic. These set out on adventures, tilted with illusions, and identified new realities. Such are Plotinus, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, the builders of the Church, and the founders of the Italian city republics. These were followers of Plato, to be sure, but they were not Platonists. They found insights, not doctrines, in Plato. They built large worlds which they understood but did not try to rule.

  But there is great danger in reading Plato through the mediums that these Platonists and these followers of Plato contributed to the tradition. For the modem mind doctrine and influence suggest heroes and cults. Any persistent opinion gets traced back to a personal origin, and we depend upon history to explode or inflate the myth that results. Most of Plato, both influence and origin, has thus been reduced to a cloud, sometimes luminous and sometimes dark. The origins of his ideas are lost in pre-history; his influence in our civilization is at once weak and all-pervasive, as we now see it in the modem fog.

  It hardly need be said that Plato is a very eloquent writer, but this very fact should be a warning to the reader. Almost any current doctrine or movement of the day will begin to resonate with a Platonism as the Dialogues are read. It is all too easy to identify a character in a dialogue, or, worse, Plato himself, with one of these fragments of contemporary history, and it is often an effective device in teaching Plato to use temporarily such an aid to the student, but the equation should be erased before it becomes a label or a cliché. Plato the Anglo-Catholic, the mathematical physicist, the totalitarian, the rationalistic atheist; these are the impostures of the last generation of Plato readers, all of them plausible, all of them deeply misleading, and, worst, all making the simple direct reading of the dialogues impossible. A recently arrived European scholar, teaching a freshman class in Plato, reported in a kind of ecstasy that the boys thought Plato was talking to them. This, he added, would be impossible in Europe, where Plato may still be the inspirer of an ideology or even the revered leader of a party.

  One of the banes of our time, as it was of Plato’s time, is party scholarship, which splinters subject-matters and grinds texts into dust. The profession of philosophy is particularly susceptible to the party spirit. The cure for it is the rebirth of wonder in a man’s mind. One of the means to such rebirth is the direct, simple, rapid reading of Plato. It seems likely that Aristotle was thinking of Plato when he said that philosophy begins in wonder.

  I would therefore advise the present reader to stop reading this introduction at this point and turn to the dialogues. I promise him that the rest will wait for him until he comes back with the confused curiosity that the wonder of the dialogues themselves engenders. I would add only one suggestion, similar to the museum guide’s direction where to stand as one views the pictures: Plato is the craftsman of a very superior dramatic art; the play is the thing.

  The secret of the power of these dialogues, the Protagoras, the Phaedo, the Symposium, and The Republic, is their dramatic wholeness. This is true of all the dialogues, but these have most often been chosen for their dramatic verve, and also because they contain most of Plato. The naming of the persons of the drama is a suggestion that the dialogues are dramas, and there is a further recognition of it in the theory that Plato was imitating the mimes, or short dramatic sketches, of Sophron. But this would lead one to suppose that Plato was sugar-coating high and difficult doctrine. This is not the case. His mind is always on the story, the narrative account of things done, the plot that is the soul of the conversation. It is not an accident that the highest philosophic teaching that Plato offers is not doctrine, but dialectic, a conversation in which ideas animate persons in search of wisdom. A dialogue, which is the practice of dialectic, is a historic event in which men with bodies, senses, passions, and thoughts live and move with purposes and willful intentions that involve even the reader in the highest and most serious human concerns. No thought is expressed except by a character, and no act is done without revealing an intention. This dramatic principle is realized throughout a dialogue and in the finest detail. There are no first acts where things are done and said merely to introduce a strange person; there are no interludes of humor merely to relieve the suspense; there are no episodes merely to summarize and to provide a spectacular end. There is nothing left unprocessed by dramatic workmanship. No poet except Shakespeare has more fully made people intelligible to themselves and to us.

  There is nothing that more powerfully threatens to destroy the dramatic imagination than an idea; it is often said that Shakespeare’s sure and integral dramatic touch is due to his ignorance of ideas and his exclusive attention to people. Of course this is utterly false unless it means that he was the master of that learned ignorance that is identical with wisdom. The thought in Shakespeare is as high and as low as men go, and the same thing Can be said of Plato. Nevertheless, the threat of ideas in drama is real, and it is only the master who successfully copes with them as his essential materials.

  Aside from what may be attributed to native genius, Plato had great aids to confirm his dramatic bent. No people had a more dramatic common life than the Greeks, which is as much as to say that the Greeks as a people had a dramatic sense of life. This sense is most impressively expressed in the two great historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, who report the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, respectively. Herodotus, who brings almost all of the religious ideas of his world to bear on his narrative of events, often skeptically and humorously, builds a towering and broad-based structure out of all the materials in the known world, and the secret of the structure is the Greek tragic view of life. Not only is the great arching pattern the tragedy of the Persian Empire, but every constituent episode is a small tragedy with its parts welded together with choral lyrics and comments. The amazing thing is that there is little evidence that this was his literary intention. He moves freely in the medium of popular thought, and at times seems to be merely the loquacious compiler of everyday stories. He merely records the sights that people had of themselves.
Thucydides, in a much less richly imagined recollection, rises to greater tragic heights in a more tightly and powerfully reasoned plot in his account of the Peloponnesian War, of which Athens herself is the hero. In this dramatic pattern Thucydides seems to know, as we now know both from him and others, that the Peloponnesian War is the prototype and presiding spirit of all crises in Western culture. It has never been repeated, but every great incident has been an imitation of it. Thucydides did not write colloquially and facilely, as Herodotus did, but he speaks in full confidence that he will be understood by people acquainted with the style and principles of the great plays.

  Plato as a youth must have heard both Herodotus and Thucydides recited in public, but he also lived in a community that continued to move and think in the mediums that the historians used. There is evidence to make us suppose that Plato conceived his philosophic assignment as the attempt to understand the mysteries that the tragic history of Greece presented. The assignment to himself of this problem was a far greater aid than the ton or so of pre-Socratic philosophic treatises of which we have only the fragments.

  The other great aids to dramatic imagination are perhaps more incisive and germane, the poems of Homer and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The wholeness of Homer’s world and the integrity of his characters are miracles of poetic conception even for us. They were for the Greeks, of course, a bible, a manual carried in memory or in a tunic pocket everywhere and always. In Plato’s own lifetime a Homeric quotation was proverbial and aphoristic wisdom, like Spanish proverbs from the time of Cervantes until now. There is internal evidence that it was this use and wont in the Greek familiarity with Homer that set one of the basic loci of Plato’s thought. In the Meno, one of the so-called Socratic dialogues, Socrates is made to say in one of his most emphatic speeches that, although he is uncertain about most things, there is one thing that he will fight for as long as he lives, and that is that there is a valid distinction with a difference between opinion and knowledge. This distinction is both a problem and the first step in method for Plato throughout the dialogues, and one of his favorite devices is to have Socrates lay down a Homeric quotation as a touchstone beside any expression of opinion by a character in the dialogue. Opinion is somewhere between ignorance and knowledge; it is belief held when one does not know, but a belief within which there may be hidden some clarifiable and certain knowledge. Homer as quoted is the measure of such a matter of knowledge. There is no doubt here of the original wisdom of Homer or of the common man, but the mere second-hand expression, the myth, the unexamined meaning of it in the mouth of an Athenian, is the typical run of current Greek popular thought. So it gets extended to the so-called empirical wisdom of the artisan, the craftsman, the property owner, the soldier, the priest, the lawyer, and the political leader. As one must analyze the Homeric quotation, so must one analyze and criticize the common sense of every man, to get rid of the ambiguity, to eliminate the ignorance, and to save the spark of knowing that is in it. The common man and the poet utter oracles, and it is the pious man’s duty to inquire what of reality is being expressed. Socrates is a midwife who helps the pregnant common man to deliver his ideas. As Homer speaks for all men, so all men speak like Homer, and it is the business of Socrates to thrash and winnow the grains of truth from the perennial harvests of opinion in the market place.