PLATO: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED GUIDES FOR THE PERPLEXED AVAILABLE FROM CONTINUUM: Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, Alex Thomson Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, Claire Colebrook Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen Earnshaw Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed, Claire Colebrook Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, Chris Lawn Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed, David James Hobbes: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen J. Finn Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed, Angela Coventry Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matheson Russell Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed, TK Seung Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed, Clare Carlisle Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed, Franklin Perkins Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, B. C. Hutchens Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed, Martin McIvor Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed, Eric Matthews Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed, R. Kevin Hill Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Kemp Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed, David Pellauer Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matthew Simpson Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Cox Spinoza: A Guide for the Perplexed, Charles Jarrett Wittgenstein: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mark Addis PLATO: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED GERALD A. PRESS Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © Gerald A. Press 2007 First published 2007 Reprinted 2009, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 9780826491770 PB: 9780826491763 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and Pbroinutnedd bayn dM bPoGun Bdo ionk Gs Lretadt, BBroitdaminin, Cornwall CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Perplexity, doubt and the quest for wisdom and happiness 1 Part I. Background 1. Plato’s life and works 13 2. The contexts for interpreting Plato’s dialogues 23 Part II. Sources of perplexity: Change 3. A brief history of Platonism and Plato interpretation 39 4. Dialogue form 55 5. Arguments and ideas, vision and doctrines 75 6. Fables, myths and stories 92 7. Irony and other forms of humour 106 8. Play and seriousness 118 9. Paradox 130 Part III. Plato’s philosophy: Permanence 10. Platonic anonymity and the nature of Plato’s philosophy 146 11. Persistent themes and Plato’s vision 159 12. The Platonic path to wisdom 172 Part IV. Help in reading and understanding Plato’s dialogues and philosophy 13. How to read a Platonic dialogue 185 14. Summaries of the dialogues 209 v CONTENTS Glossary of Greek terms 221 Bibliography 231 Index of dialogues, persons and subjects 235 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book offers, in summary form, a way of reading and under- standing Plato’s dialogues that has been slowly growing in the shadow of older and rather different orientations for nearly a cen- tury. Its foundations are a few simple principles that I have thought were true since before I knew their names: contextualism (interpret- ing texts within their original linguistic, historical and intellectual contexts), holism (interpreting texts in their entireties rather than piecemeal), and organicism (treating passages and details of texts as parts of wholes organized by their authors in just this way). The chapters that follow synthesize not only my own work, but also, more importantly, work done by many scholars over many years. I wish to acknowledge them briefly here because the book is primarily intended for non-specialist readers for whom extensive footnotes and bibliographies are confusing rather than clarifying. From my own teachers – Jason Saunders, Richard Popkin, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Henry, S.J. – and the teachers of my teachers – Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall, Jr and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge – I learned close attention to the texts in their original languages as well as sensitivity to textual types and nuances. I also learned from them the necessity of scholarship and the ground- ing of interpretation in historical context, the significance of drama in Plato, and the importance of challenging inherited modes of interpretation. I have also learned a great deal from scholars of places and times further removed from my own experience: Paul Shorey, Paul Friedländer, Luigi Stefanini, E. N. Tigerstedt, René Schaerer, Antonio Capizzi, Richard McKeon, Harold Cherniss and Jacob Klein. I have learned, too, from scholars of my generation whom I have not known – Rudolf Weingartner, Kenneth Sayre, Herman Sinaiko and Michael Stokes – and from those I have been vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS fortunate to meet or to know – Robert S. Brumbaugh, Rosamond Kent Sprague, H. S. Thayer, Victorino Tejera, James Arieti, Francisco Gonzalez, Hayden Ausland, Thomas Schmid, Samuel Scolnicov, Mitchell Miller, Lloyd Gerson, Debra Nails, Ruby Blondell, Chris- topher Rowe, Harold Tarrant and Thomas Alexander Szlezák. Above all, over 40 years, from reading his publications and from personal interactions at conferences, by letter, and by email, and despite the points on which I remain in disagreement with him, I have learned from Holger Thesleff, to whom I dedicate this – as he would say – protreptic. His universality of scholarship, depth of textual knowledge, openness to new approaches, and flexibility in bringing a variety of approaches and points of view to bear on particular issues are ideals of humane learning and the opposite of the sycophancy, ideology and demagoguery that plague our times. March 2007 viii INTRODUCTION: PERPLEXITY, DOUBT AND THE QUEST FOR WISDOM AND HAPPINESS THE BEGINNING READER’S EXPERIENCE Plato is one of the greatest and most influential of all Western philo- sophers, but reading Plato is a puzzling experience for many begin- ning readers. His dialogues seem much more approachable, more reader-friendly than the treatises, essays, disquisitions and medita- tions written by some of the other classic philosophers. For one thing, they read like stories; and the stories and characters are often interesting and entertaining even though the dialogues include a good deal of argumentation that can be fairly complex. For another, Plato’s language is rich, often beautiful, and uses a wealth of literary devices that elicit, maintain, restore and reward the reader’s interest in ways paralleled by only a few of the great Western philosophers. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the best-known and most recent examples of highly ‘literary’ philosophers and, as with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – each of whom had a special relation to Plato – it is very difficult for the beginner to figure out what the ‘philosophy’ is exactly. It may be even difficult to recognize what teachers or books say the philosophy is, or the reader may find that the phil- osophy they say is there, while recognizable, seems wrong, offensive or unnecessarily complex. An overall cause of reader perplexity about Plato is the contrast between what appears on the surface and what seems to exist, but obscurely, beneath the surface. The dialogues are characterized by many interesting details that change both within each dialogue and from one dialogue to another: dramatis personae, framing, setting, tone and subject. Behind or beneath these superficial differences, however, but difficult to articulate clearly, there seems to be a stable set of views about what is true and what is important, about what is 1