Plato's Laws

Force and Truth in Politics

Gregory Recco, Eric Sanday

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780253001825
• eBook ISBN: 9780253001887
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

Readers of Plato have often neglected the Laws because of its length and density. In this set of interpretive essays, notable scholars of the Laws from the fields of classics, history, philosophy, and political science offer a collective close reading of the dialogue "book by book" and reflect on the work as a whole. In their introduction, editors Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday explore the connections among the essays and the dramatic and productive exchanges between the contributors. This volume fills a major gap in studies on Plato's dialogues by addressing the cultural and historical context of the Laws and highlighting their importance to contemporary scholarship.

3 The Long and Winding Road: Impediments to Inquiry in Book 1 of the Laws

Eric Salem

It is dawn or perhaps just before dawn—a good time, we later learn, for discussing regime change, nation building, and legal reform (722c; 951d; 961b). The day promises to be hot and sunny, and since it is, as we also later learn, just around the summer solstice, the day will certainly be very long—long enough, say, for a very long conversation (625b; 683b). Three old men, a Cretan, a Spartan and an Athenian, stand outside the walls of Knossos and ponder the day ahead of them. They will hike together to the cave of Zeus—the well-spring of Cretan laws—and as they hike (and rest, as needed) they will pass the time talking and listening to talk about “regime and laws” (625a–b). Three grand old men, representatives of three great Greek powers, have already taken their stand together outside the walls of the city. And they will now make their way, in speech as well as deed, into the dawning light. They will ascend together from Knossos to the source of Knossos, from effect to cause, from convention to nature.

Or that, at least, is what we might expect them to do. This long hot summer day turns out differently than the day just sketched out. There is no indication that the trio of elders ever makes it to the cave of Zeus. In fact there is no indication that they ever make it past the first rest stop: there is more talk at the beginning of the dialogue about resting than staying in motion, about taking it easy (

) than toughing it out, about staying out of the summer’s heat than moving forward into its light (625b–c; 722c).¹ And what holds true of the action, the ergon, of the Laws holds true of its argument, its logos, as well. There is something shady, something murky, something irresolute and disorienting about the whole enterprise. Put in another way: it becomes clear over the course of Book 1 that the Athenian Stranger is full of interesting questions about “regime and laws.” But it is also true that those questions emerge only in fits and starts and it is not clear what purchase they will have within the ensuing conversation: Are those questions going to anchor and direct the conversation or just bubble to the surface now and then? “Where are we and how did we get here?” “What exactly is the question on the table?” “Was that an argument for something?” These are questions that every reader of other Platonic dialogues must ask now and then. They are one’s constant companions when reading the Laws.²

Why is that? What accounts for the murkiness of the conversation in the Laws? What stands in the way of an intense focused inquiry into the root sources of “regime and laws”? Three possibilities come to mind.

(1) The setting of the Laws may have something to do with its peculiar character; this is the only Platonic dialogue to take place in a foreign land; it may be one thing to have a conversation outside the walls of Athens, another altogether to talk outside the walls of Knossos.³ Perhaps, to borrow Cleinias’s phrase, “the nature of the

, the landscape” has some effect on the nature of the conversations possible within that landscape (625c).

(2) The subject matter of the dialogue may also shape it in fundamental ways. Some things are harder to talk about than others; mud, hair, and dirt may be harder to talk about than virtue.⁴ Now, regime seems to be something one can talk about in a relatively straightforward way; consider the Republic. But the subject matter of the conversation in the Laws is not regime but regime and laws. Perhaps

are the sticking point here—perhaps laws or the pair “regime and laws” are in themselves more difficult to get hold of and to discuss than regime by itself.

(3) Of course the conversation in the Republic can only take off once Cephalus is out of the way: imagine having a ten-hour conversation with Cephalus about regime or laws or anything at all. Interlocutors matter, and that brings us to a third possibility and the one that will be the focus in what follows. The Laws is not a monologue or near-monologue. As their responses indicate, Cleinias and Megillus are full participants in the conversation even when they stand there—for whole books at a time—silent, listening. This conversation matters to them and they matter to the conversation. What effect do their characters and their ways of looking at the world have on the conversation in the Laws—or at least on the conversation in Book 1? How do they impede, alter or otherwise shape it?

I propose to examine this question by focusing in on two moments of high drama—or what passes for high drama—in the Laws.⁵ The first comes early on in Book 1; it involves Cleinias and is a moment of high praise for the Athenian. The second comes at the precise center of Book 1; it involves Megillus, and is a moment of intense but indirect blame. I focus on these moments because in Platonic dialogues, as in life, basic characters and ways of looking at the world tend to come to the fore in moments of passionate engagement. Human beings show what they are made of when they are put to the test.

Let us begin with Cleinias. The scene in question unfolds thus. The Stranger asks why “the law has ordained the common meals for you all (

) and also the gymnastic training and the weapons you employ” (625c).⁶ Cleinias is ready with an answer. He explains at some length that Cretan military (and presumably gymnastic) practices have their origin in the Cretan landscape and that those practices, as well as the practice of common meals, stem from the insight of the lawgiver that peace is just a name—that in fact by nature there exists an “undeclared war among all cities” (625c–626b). The Stranger fixes on this last point and pushes Cleinias to agree that the undeclared war of all against all that characterizes political life not only exists between village and village, household and household, man and man; it is also at work in the very souls of human beings (626b–626c). Cleinias bursts into extravagant praise:

O Athenian Stranger—I would rather not address you as merely Attic, for you seem to me worthy of being rather called by the name of the goddess—you have correctly followed the argument up to its source and have thus made it clearer, so that you will more easily discover (aneur

seis) that we were correct just now in saying that all are enemies of all and in public and in private each is an enemy of himself. (626d)⁷

What can we learn from this scene? Notice first that although the Athenian Stranger directs his opening question at Cleinias (

), he is in fact asking about practices common to Sparta and Crete (

) (625c). The Stranger had no doubt wanted, quite reasonably, to begin their common inquiry into “regime and laws” by starting with what his two Dorian companions have in common. It is Cleinias who leaps in and focuses exclusively on Crete. He commits an act of what might be called urbane aggression. Like a Cretan warrior he moves very fast over a lot of ground, leaving the heavy-armored, slow-moving Spartan in the dust (625d). Like a man who believes in the war of every man against every man, he moves quickly to take what he considers to be a very strong, perhaps impregnable position in the argument. In short, his manner of speaking reflects the content of his speech: he enacts his beliefs, turns his Cretan self-understanding into deed. The Athenian sees the situation clearly: right after Cleinias’s speech the Stranger notes that he is well-practiced and well-gymnasticized (kal

s gegymnasthai), in his understanding of Cretan customs (626b).

Notice also the breezy confidence with which Cleinias introduces his account of Cretan practices. “Our things,” he says to the Stranger “are in every way easy (

) to understand”—this is his opening line, and he repeats the word “easy” again near the end of his exchange with the Athenian (625c; 626d). Like so many men who think they have seen the darkness at the very heart of things, Cleinias thinks that truth can be found right there on the surface, readily available to the truly intelligent man. Nature—he uses the word twice in the space of twenty lines—may love to hide, but not from Minos and not from Cleinias either. Cleinias is absolutely sure that Minos got to the bottom of things and that he has grasped Minos’s meaning in full. (A side note: In the Minos Socrates also speaks of discovery. He repeatedly says that law wishes to be the discovery of what is.⁸ Cleinias, on the other hand, clearly thinks that the laws of Minos are the discovery of what is; they embody or encode the whole truth about human beings.) In short, Cleinias is a man in the grip of a theory, and one of the reasons he is so delighted by the Stranger’s conclusion that “in private each is an enemy to himself” is that by “following the argument up to the source” the Stranger has provided him with a capstone for his all-encompassing vision of the world (626d).

But this is not the only reason for Cleinias’s excitement. Cleinias is in the grip of something more than a theory. The Stranger no doubt meant, in the lines leading up to Cleinias’s outburst, to bring Cleinias to recognize the absurd or at least shocking consequences of his dark vision of the world. But Cleinias embraces those consequences with a passion, and his excitement suggests that he sees himself in them. The Stranger has helped the old man to make sense of his life, and he is grateful. Through the Stranger’s words he has seen, perhaps for the first time, the deep connection between his own inner turmoil and the outer life of his city. Cleinias is conflicted, torn, divided against himself; he is a man at war with himself, a man who thinks that “being defeated by oneself is the most shameful and at the same time the worst of all defeats” (626e). He is a man, in other words, for whom self-control req...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Synopses
• Readings
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index