Plato and the Invention of Life

Michael Naas

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823279692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Métaphysique philosophique

The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived.This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato's most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato's thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition.Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas's account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.

CHAPTER 1

The Lifelines of the Statesman

Où passe la ligne de partage entre l’événement d’un énoncé inaugural, une citation, une paraphrase, un commentaire, une traduction, une lecture, une interprétation?

—JACQUES DERRIDA¹

Opening Lines

I begin my reading of the Statesman by briefly recalling the characters as well as the dramatic time and setting of the dialogue (257a–258b). Present for the dialogue is, first of all, Socrates, the Socrates we all know, the son of Sophroniscus, from the deme of Alopece, the Socrates of Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and so many other early and middle dialogues, the Socrates who, let me assert without justifying, is never simply the mouthpiece for Plato but, in most of these dialogues, surely represents the philosophical ethos and many of the views of their author. Also present in the dialogue is, curiously, another Socrates, a younger one, he, too, from Athens, a character who therefore shares a name with Socrates and so, at least in name, might be taken for or confused with him. In a dialogue in which the question of the relationship or the fit between the name and the thing is so central, a dialogue whose central myth depicts humans growing younger and younger, it is surely not insignificant that it is Young Socrates who will bear most of the responsibility for responding to the questions of the one who really leads the dialogue and has the most to say in it.² That is, of course, not Socrates, Socrates the Elder, as we might call him, who, as in Sophist and Timaeus, participates only at the outset of the dialogue, but someone called simply the Stranger (the xenos).

The dialogue is thus conducted in large part by a Stranger visiting Athens from Elea, in southern Italy, where he would have been part of the Eleatic school founded by Parmenides. While the Stranger’s identification with Parmenides is much more in evidence in the Sophist, where he famously argues against his “father” Parmenides that non-being in a certain sense is, we will still want to ask throughout what this association with Parmenides signifies for the Statesman and why Plato gives such pride of place not to Socrates but to the Stranger in this important dialogue.³ Again without justifying this for the moment, let me simply assert that if the Eleatic Stranger is no more the simple mouthpiece for Plato than Socrates ever is, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of his views would have been compatible with those of the author of the dialogue.⁴ For if there is irony in the dialogue, and there surely is, and if there is skepticism with regard to certain methodologies, such as diairesis, and there surely is, it is hard not to think that the author of the Statesman would have endorsed at least some of what the Stranger argues. If, in addition, the Stranger ends up arguing things that would have sounded somewhat strange or incongruous coming out of Socrates’s mouth, then we perhaps have a first reason for Plato’s choice of the Stranger rather than Socrates to lead the dialogue.

Rounding out the dialogue, in addition to Socrates, the Young Socrates, and the Eleatic Stranger, is Theodorus, a mathematician from Cyrene (a colony in North Africa), also present in the Sophist and Theaetetus, and, finally, Theaetetus, a young man who, as we know from the Theaetetus (144d–e), bears a striking physical resemblance to Socrates.⁵ We thus have one character whose name echoes Socrates’s and another, Theaetetus, whose appearance resembles his, and whose hometown, Sunion, is enough to call Socrates to mind. For it was, as we know from the beginning of the Crito, from Cape Sunion, at the southern tip of Attica, that the ship returning to Athens from Delos was seen, portending the end to the holy period in Athens and thus the execution of Socrates. The mere presence of Theaetetus of Sunion in the dialogue is thus enough to evoke the entire drama surrounding “the last days of Socrates.”

It is, however, not just the setting and characters of the dialogue that evoke Socrates’s trial and execution but its dramatic time. Plato has Socrates say at the end of the Theaetetus that he must go off “to the Porch of the King, to answer the suit which Meletus has brought against [him]” (Theaetetus 210d). Socrates would have thus gone off to answer the indictment at the stoa of the King Archon and he would have encountered on his way, as we know, Euthyphro, whom he will engage in yet another, much less lengthy dialogue on the nature of piety. But before taking his leave at the end of the Theaetetus, Socrates suggests to Theodorus, who has been part of the dialogue, that they meet back up the following morning in the gymnasium for more conversation. Theodorus will keep his promise of meeting the next day, after Socrates will have conversed—according to the dramatic chronology—with Euthyphro and answered the indictment of Meletus against him. But when Socrates, Theodorus, and Theaetetus, the principal participants of the Theaetetus, meet the next day, Theodorus brings along with him the Eleatic Stranger, who will eventually lead a dialogue to define the sophist and then, later in the day, the statesman and, perhaps—though this never happens, or at least there is no such dialogue, though it seems to have been on the program—the philosopher.⁶

Like the Theaetetus and Sophist, then, the dramatic setting for the Statesman is a gymnasium and its dramatic date is 399 BCE. It immediately follows the Sophist, which follows by a day the Euthyphro, which takes place after but on the same day as the Theaetetus, and it would be followed, some days or weeks later, by Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. If everything from the style, theme, number of characters (just two), and the centrality of Socrates suggest that the Euthyphro was written long before Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, Plato decided to wrap these latter three dialogues around the former, thus giving us four dialogues in a two-day dramatic stretch not long before the trial and death of Socrates. If, as I will argue in what follows, the Statesman needs to be rethought through the question of life, it will not be insignificant that it develops in an atmosphere or in the context of Socrates’s impending death—that is, his impending absence and withdrawal.

The Statesman begins with Socrates thanking Theodorus for having introduced him the previous day, at the outset of the Theaetetus, to Theaetetus, and, earlier on the same day, to the Stranger, who went on in the Sophist to define the nature of the sophist (257a). When Theodorus says that Socrates will be three times more grateful once they have defined the statesman and the philosopher, Socrates rebukes Theodorus for using such a mathematical proportion, insinuating that there is no common measure between these three, the philosopher being on a different scale of value, it would seem, than the sophist or the statesman as they are commonly understood (257a–b).⁷ One of the central questions of the dialogue will turn out to be whether or in what way the philosopher is indeed on a different scale of value and, in parallel fashion, whether the best form of government—the seventh form—appears on a different or the same scale of value as the other six that imitate it, but then whether, even more provocatively, a certain notion of being and of life, of life itself, of pure life, appears on a different or the same scale as various modes of becoming or various forms of what we call life.⁸

Having resolved to define the statesman after the sophist, the Stranger from Elea suggests using the Young Socrates rather than Theaetetus as his interlocutor so as to give the latter a rest (257c). It is here that Socrates remarks, in what will be his final words of the dialogue, that both Theaetetus and the Young Socrates are in some sense “related” to him, akin to him, insofar as one looks like him while the other shares his name.⁹ Because one should, he says, “get acquainted with our relatives by debating with them,” Socrates says he would be delighted to hear the Younger Socrates examined, having himself examined Theaetetus on the previous day. From this point on, it will be the Stranger who guides and orients the dialogue, questioning and leading the Young Socrates in a way that is not wholly unlike the way Socrates leads the young Theaetetus in the Theaetetus.¹⁰

Diairesis as the Art of Drawing the Line

The Stranger begins by taking up yet again, just as he had done in the Sophist, the method of diairesis or division, in short, the method of drawing lines (258b–267b). The word diairesis, from the verb diaireō, means precisely to distinguish, to divide, to draw lines. Though the Stranger himself will ultimately recognize the shortcomings or limitations of this method, it does not appear that the Stranger—or Plato, for that matter—is using it simply to criticize, mock, or reject it.¹¹ It is unlikely that this method would be used not only here but in the Sophist and the Phaedrus (265e) if Plato considered it without value. Moreover, if diairesis involves, at its most general level, trying to draw lines between concepts or ideas in order to highlight the relations and differences between them, then it could be said that all philosophy, including and especially dialectics, relies upon this practice, whether explicitly or implicitly. The use of diairesis at the beginning of the Statesman will therefore reveal as much about the object of the dialogue, namely, the statesman and statesmanship, as about philosophical method more generally.¹² It is no coincidence that the question of method will emerge so often in these early pages (see 258c, 262b, 263b, 265a), as if method—in this case the art or practice of drawing lines—were one of the central themes of the dialogue, as it is, of course, in so many of Plato’s dialogues.

Once it has been decided that they will seek to define the statesman by means of diairesis, the next most important “decision” concerns the starting point for the division. This happens with little notice or fanfare when the Eleatic Stranger gets the Younger Socrates to affirm that the statesman, the politikos, belongs to the class of those who have a science, an epistēmē (258b). The object of the Stranger and Young Socrates’s search will thus be the politikos, the statesman, the title of the dialogue itself, and his art or science, his epistēmē, would be politikē, statesmanship, an art or science whose end result or end product, at least as it is practiced by an originary statesman, would be the laying out of a politeia—that is, a constitution or a regime or, indeed, as this word is commonly translated in the title of one of Plato’s most celebrated dialogues, a republic. Hence the entire diairesis is premised, it seems, upon a prior, unexpressed or unstated division between the arts or sciences, everything that might be called an epistēmē, and something else to which these arts and sciences would seem to be opposed. As we will see, everything will ultimately hinge on the fact that the statesman is credited here at the outset with having not a tribē (a knack) or phronēsis (practical wisdom) or even sophia (wisdom), but an epistēmē (a science), or, in some of the same passages, a technē (an art), these two words being used more or less interchangeably throughout the dialogue. Though we do not yet know the nature of the statesman’s art or science, we do know that he has an art or a science and that it goes by the name of statesmanship.

Once this assumption or this assertion—this concession—has been made, the Stranger offers his first comment about the method of diairesis, arguing that they must divide the sciences in a way, or according to a path, that is very different from the one they followed when searching for the sophist (258b). The Stranger asks, “where shall we find the statesman’s path? For we must find it, separate it from the rest, and imprint upon it the seal of a single class [idean],” that is, a single idea or single form. Notice the order here: They must first find this class, this idea, of the statesman, as if it already existed, even if virtually, in nature; they must then separate it off so that it can be more easily defined; and then they must label or mark it, put a sign, seal, or si...