Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Tae-Yeoun Keum

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780674984646
• eBook ISBN: 9780674250161
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities
Winner of the Istvan Hont Book Prize

An ambitious reinterpretation and defense of Plato's basic enterprise and influence, arguing that the power of his myths was central to the founding of philosophical rationalism.

Plato's use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this tension by treating Plato's myths as mere regrettable embellishments, irrelevant to his main enterprise. Others, such as Karl Popper, have railed against the deceptive power of myth, concluding that a tradition built on Platonic foundations can be neither rational nor desirable.

Tae-Yeoun Keum challenges the premise underlying both of these positions. She argues that myth is neither irrelevant nor inimical to the ideal of rational progress. She tracks the influence of Plato's dialogues through the early modern period and on to the twentieth century, showing how pivotal figures in the history of political thought—More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Idealists, Cassirer, and others—have been inspired by Plato's mythmaking. She finds that Plato's followers perennially raised the possibility that there is a vital role for myth in rational political thinking.

PART ONE

POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BOUNDARIES

1

NATURE AND MYTH IN PLATO’S REPUBLIC

MYTH AS A DYNAMIC MEDIUM FOR REWORKING FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS

READERS OF PLATO’S REPUBLIC often respond to the myths in it with a kind of unease that falls somewhere between Karl Popper’s condemnation of the Myth of Metals as an “exact counterpart” to Nazi racial policy, and Julia Annas’s infamous appraisal of the Myth of Er as a “lame and messy ending” to “an otherwise impressively unified book.”¹ At the heart of our discomfort around the myths of the Republic is the objection that Plato’s resort to the language of myth is in and of itself problematic. At one level, myth seems to be a vague and imprecise medium for conveying philosophical ideas. Much of the confusion and disappointment surrounding the Myth of Er, for instance, has to do with the conspicuous difference between the stylistic conventions of myth from those of logical argumentation. As the complaint goes, the long and careful philosophical argument spanning the breadth of the Republic ought to have sufficed on its own to carry out its central task—a defense of justice and the just life—so that capping it off with a myth seems to undermine what had come before. To not only accept the myth as necessary, but to give it the last word, suggests a kind of failure on the part of philosophy to communicate on its own terms with its audience.²

Then there are the fantastical literary excesses that lend myth its characteristic inscrutability. Myths, unlike arguments, abound with detailed descriptions that seem to serve no obvious purpose other than to enrich the story somehow. To the extent that they are not as clear or as direct in presenting their message, it is difficult to tell if the myths that Plato wrote into the Republic make a distinct philosophical contribution that would not have been better made in a more analytic form.³ In the case of the Myth of Er, the details of the story are so convoluted that readers, in fact, cannot agree as to whether it is meant to support or to subvert the Republic’s main arguments. Either way, the myth remains an awkward puzzle: had Plato written it as supporting material for the dialogue’s central ideas, it becomes a redundant iteration, in a different medium, of the preceding lessons, and an unnecessarily confusing one at that.⁴ But the alternative interpretation—that we ought to read the myth as a kind of subversive commentary on the rest of the Republic—raises more questions than it settles, as it takes on the burden of having to explain why Plato would intimate, in this roundabout manner, the opposite of what he means to say.⁵

There is a further level at which the myths of the Republic invite skepticism, and it is that the deliberate deployment of myth, especially for political use, can be seen to be manipulative, deceptive, or dangerous. This is a philosophical betrayal of a different kind, consisting not only in the choice of an inefficient medium of expression, but also in the calculated abuse of myth’s obscuring qualities to help close off certain claims from further scrutiny. The Myth of Metals in Book III, for instance, has time and again shocked readers for its seeming cynicism, and for what this might suggest, in turn, about Plato’s political thought. One of the more disturbing effects of myths like the Myth of Metals is that they can mislead their audiences into conflating certain social or political arrangements with the natural order of things, so that they seem beyond revision or challenge through critical examination and other philosophical channels. For this reason, myth, employed or tolerated in a political context, is often synonymous with a kind of falsehood told in the service of an end that only alleges to be noble.

Hence, Plato’s willingness to use myths in the service of his political vision is routinely taken up by his critics as evidence of his authoritarianism, while his defenders are put in the position of having to excuse his myths by first justifying his greater philosophical agenda.⁶ They tend to do so, more often than not, by casting the myths as unfortunate but necessary devices to persuade the unphilosophical: convincing the citizens listening to the Myth of Metals to be content with their assigned stations in the kallipolis; coaxing the audience of the Myth of Er into believing in the advantages of justice, even if they might not have followed all of the philosophical arguments Socrates had made for it before launching into this strange story. On this line of interpretation, Plato’s use of myth becomes at best a concession to a reality in which not everyone is capable of philosophy in its purest form, and those who are not must instead be reached through an inferior rhetoric.⁷

If these are grounds for being suspicious of the myths interspersed between the arguments of the Republic, they are exacerbated by Plato’s own seeming dismissal of myth, and his reputation for having inaugurated a distinction between the language of myth and the language of logical argumentation.⁸ As we have seen, the canonical position that Plato occupies in the Western intellectual tradition is tied to his groundbreaking efforts to define philosophy as an enterprise that deals in the latter rather than in the former, and demands, in turn, that knowledge is grounded in reasons rather than in unexamined conventions. When Plato critiques the Greek mythological tradition as being morally incoherent and intellectually arbitrary, or, in passing formulations, unfavorably contrasts mythos to logos, he appears to dismiss the discursive qualities specific to the genre of myth as inadequate, if not counterproductive, to the aims and tasks of this project.⁹

Given so many reasons to find them unsettling, what would constitute a more satisfying reading of the myths of the Republic? A defense against these considerations would have to recognize that the myths are an important, integrated part of the Republic, rather than pieces of rhetorical ornamentation tacked on as an afterthought: the myths cannot be read separately from the whole, and the whole would be incomplete without the myths.¹⁰ But such a reading would also have to respect the distinctiveness of the myths as myths, rather than treat them as passages that are stylistically undifferentiated from the rest of the work: their literary status as myths has something to add to the coherence of the Republic as a philosophical work.¹¹ In particular, it would have to answer to the suggestion that the use of myth is at some level antithetical to our commitment to the philosophical ideal that no one view of the world, however deeply entrenched in a society, is immune to criticism and revision.

The aim of this chapter is to present what I believe to be the most promising approach toward meeting these requirements and, in so doing, to shed light on a use Plato makes of the literary genre of myth that is very different from those generally recognized by his readers. A convincing reading of the myths of the Republic, I argue, would have to give an account of the larger philosophical project uniting them. My own reading is built around a literary observation: three major myths of the Republic—the Myth of Metals, the Allegory of the Cave, and the Myth of Er—share a common plot, which recalls the experience of being delivered from a state of dreaming, underground, to wake up into a new reality aboveground. In each of these myths, the story about dreaming and waking comes to mark a transitional juncture in the educational curriculum of the kallipolis, in which citizens who have undergone a certain education are then tested for the qualities of a philosophic nature. Together, they explore a question of existential importance for Plato’s purposes in the Republic: Can and to what extent does a philosophical education shape the natures of its subjects? Sustained across the myths of the Republic, then, is a project that is at once more coherent and more overtly philosophical than commonly acknowledged.

In what follows, I try to make the case that these three myths of the Republic are at their most compelling and intelligible when they are read together this way.¹² In so doing, I attempt to give novel reinterpretations of individual myths, especially of the Myth of Er. But I also aim to draw attention to a distinctive philosophical function that the literary genre of myth can fulfill in Plato’s political writings. Plato certainly wrote myths in various forms and for different purposes across his dialogues—a practice that scholars have documented extensively—but our understanding of the range of possibilities that he saw in the medium will be significantly expanded by this account of the myths in the Republic.¹³ This is not only because it is in the context of Plato’s most widely read work of political theory that his recourse to myth has attracted the most controversy, but also because these myths instantiate a particularly intriguing use of the genre.

The philosophical inquiry at the core of the Republic’s myths is one that relies on the distinctive power of the medium of myth, absent in rational argumentation, to navigate a special kind of tension. A myth, on the one hand, has the unique capacity to ossify concepts in ways that resist critical engagement. In each of the three major myths of the Republic, Plato harnesses this function in order to posit an authoritative understanding of the nature of individuals, and with it, of the political reality in which they reside. In so doing, he draws attention to the surprising ways in which the self-understanding of philosophers—and the activities and practices stemming from that understanding—are anchored in conceptual frameworks that are deeply ingrained into our worldviews.

On the other hand, a myth can simultaneously alert us to the provisionality of such understandings and open up the possibility of revising them. This chapter tracks how each myth in the sequence builds on the previous myth’s efforts to assert a definitive account of the content of an individual’s nature. In so doing, it stresses another aspect of Plato’s preoccupation with the genre and its potential: while myths can help mold certain deeply entrenched frameworks in our worldviews, these same frameworks can be further reworked by other, subsequent myths. Read this way, the myths of the Republic offer an insight into the capacity of myth to convey both the authority and the provisional status of the unconditioned norms underlying political life.

THE MYTH OF METALS

Myths cushion the Republic at its most critical junctures. The question of justice, the dialogue’s primary topic of investigation, only enters the discussion with Cephalus’s mention of “the tales told about what is in Hades” and their effect on how one might perceive life, both retrospectively and in anticipation of what follows.¹⁴ The decisive challenge that Glaucon poses to Socrates—to defend justice on its own terms, stripped of its rewards—takes the form of a myth about a ring that turns its master invisible.¹⁵ When Socrates answers that challenge, he defines justice in terms of three parts that make up a soul, first introduced to the investigation when the Myth of Metals identifies the corresponding parts that make up his ideal city, kallipolis. And the so-called philosophical digression spanning Books V to VII of the Republic culminates in what is perhaps the most iconic image of philosophy yet written, the Allegory of the Cave. It is in this way that the famously enigmatic Myth of Er comes to conclude, not only the Republic, but also a sequence of philosophically significant myths running through it.

When the myths of the Republic are read in conjunction with each other, several new observations come to light. We see, for instance, that at some basic level the Myth of Metals in Book III, the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII, and the Myth of Er at the end of Book X all tell a similar story: the protagonists are underground, asleep, until they ascend to an upper realm and wake up there. The Myth of Metals asks the citizens of the kallipolis to think of their early upbringing as something they dreamed up while being fashioned in the earth, and now, fully formed and awake, they have been brought up into the world. The freed prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave makes a famous ascent, also likened to the proce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Plato’s Legacy and the Problem of Myth in Political Thought
• Part One: Political and Philosophical Boundaries
• Part Two: Myth and Modernity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index