Human discourse, eros, and madness in Plato's Republic.

McNeill, David N.

I

IN BOOK 9 OF THE REPUBLIC, Socrates tells Adeimantus that the "tyrant-makers" manage to defeat the relatives of the nascent tyrant in the battle over the young man's soul by contriving "to make in him some eros, a sort of great winged drone, to be the leader of the idle desires." This "leader of the soul," Socrates claims, takes madness as its bodyguard and is stung wild, and if it detects in the man any opinions or desires deemed good and which still feel some shame, it kills them and pushes them out of him until it purges the soul of moderation and fills it with foreign madness.

Adeimantus responds to this account of eros and madness with the claim that Socrates' description of the genesis of the tyrant is most perfect ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Whereupon Socrates asks, "Is it because of this that love has been from old called a tyrant?" (1)

Socrates' description of the role of eros in the genesis of the tyrant contains the fiercest criticism of eros in Plato's dialogues. The strange coupling of an implanted ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) eros and an imported ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) madness cannot help but call to mind the very different association of eros and madness we find in the Phaedrus. Moreover, the assessment of eros as a tyrant is in direct contradiction to Socrates' claim in the Phaedrus that eros is "a god, or something divine." (2) Indeed, the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus contain not only, in general, strikingly different representations of eros, they also contain directly contradictory assessments of eros's supposed divinity, with each of these assessments seemingly endorsed by Socrates in the context of the various dialogues. (3) Previous interpretations of these divergent assessments of eros have, for the most part, either gestured toward the more or less ascetic moods created by the different subject matters of the various dialogues or have suggested that each dialogue presents us with a different stage in Plato's developing assessment of the role of eros in human life. (4) In contrast to these interpretations I would like to suggest that Plato's intention in presenting these different accounts of eros is both more systematic and more programmatic.

Whatever else we can say about Plato's conception of philosophic eros, it seems clear that it deals with the way in which we are led from our everyday experience of the world toward those things which "most truly are," and hence with the relation between opinion and knowledge. I would like to suggest that the different representations of eros in the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium correspond to three different philosophic orientations or hypotheses concerning the relation between human discursive activity and the intelligible realm. (By "human discursive activity" I mean to comprehend both discursive rationality and poetic activity.) These three orientations are: (1) human discursive activity is considered relatively autonomous and conceived as radically separate from the intelligible realm, which is the orientation I associate with the Republic; (2) human discursive activity is considered directly dependent upon and revelatory of the intelligible realm, which is the orientation I associate with the Phaedrus; and (3) human discursive activity is indirectly revelatory of the intelligible realm, which can only be apprehended through human discursive activity but is not directly apprehended in that activity, which orientation I associate with the Symposium. I do not mean to suggest by this claim that each of these dialogues contains no reference to the perspectives represented by the other two dialogues. Instead, I believe that each dialogue gestures toward possible limitations with its given orientation. Moreover, although I believe that Plato viewed these three hypotheses as the most significant alternatives regarding the relation between human discursive activity and the intelligible, I do not believe that Plato viewed them as equally valid. Hence, after exploring the opposition between the immanent perspective of the Republic and the transcendent perspective of the Phaedrus, and indicating how a recognition of this opposition can shed interpretive light on the Republic in particular, I will conclude by offering some brief reflections on the Symposium intended to suggest reasons for believing that the view of human discursive activity and its relation to the divine presented in that dialogue is closest to Plato's own views on the matter. However, I will devote the greater part of this essay to making plausible the most controversial aspect of my thesis, that the Republic presents us with a hypothesis of immanence wherein the world disclosed by our everyday discursive activity is conceived of as radically separate from the realm of the intelligible and the divine.

Before turning to the details of the transition between opinion and knowledge in these different accounts I would like to show the ways in which the difference between the tyrannic eros of the Republic and the divine eros of the Phaedrus points us toward systematic differences between the two dialogues concerning the connection or lack of connection between the everyday world of our experience and the intelligible and divine realm. I will try to show these systematic differences between these two dialogues with reference to a number of issues. First, I will discuss the character and assessment of madness. Second, I will treat the representation of the gods in each and its relation to their divergent accounts of poetic activity. Third, I will present, briefly and schematically, differences between the two dialogues in their representation of the Forms, their description of philosophic method, and their account of the sources of human character.

II

At Memorabilia 1.1.16 Xenophon differentiates Socrates from those who speculate on "the whole of nature" by listing those "human things" about which Socrates was "always conversing." He writes: He was always speaking about the human things, considering what is pious, what is impious; what is beautiful, what is ugly; what is just; what is unjust; what is sanity ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), what is madness; what is courage, what is cowardice; what is a city, what is a citizen; what is rule of human beings, what is a ruler of human beings.

Xenophon's inclusion of the opposition between "sanity" and "madness" among (indeed, central among) those questions about which Socrates habitually conversed presents a problem for what has become a relatively standard account of the Socratic elenctic method and its relation to "Socratic Intellectualism." This is an account most centrally associated with Gregory Vlastos and his students but endorsed in one form or another by such disparate commentators as Terence Irwin, Jonathan Lear, and C. D. C. Reeve, among others. Speaking about the "intellectualist theory of desire" he finds in the Socratic dialogues, Terry Penner writes: According to this theory, all desires are rational desires, in that they always automatically adjust to the agent's beliefs about what is the best means to the ultimate end ... Rational desires adjust to the agents' beliefs. In fact, on this view the only way to influence my conduct is to change my opinion about what is best. (5)

Clearly, this intellectualist understanding, not only of rational desires but of persuasion and education, is deeply at odds with the understanding which informs the account of the musical education of the guardians put forth by the Socrates of the Republic. For this very reason many commentators consider the intricate psychological reflections of the Republic to signal the decisive break between Socratic and Platonic views of the soul. Writing about the Republic, Jonathan Lear presents the case in this way: Socrates, as he comes to us in the earlier dialogues, did not have a psychology. Knowledge, for Socrates, was sufficient for virtue. Bad acts could only be committed out of ignorance and thus akrasia was impossible. Although a person might have conflicting beliefs, and thus there might be conflict within the psyche, there was no room for relations of the psyche with itself. Overcoming conflict was a matter of eliciting and expelling false belief. There was, therefore, no conceptual need for an account of psychological structure. It is meditating on the failure of the Socratic project that psychology is born? (6)

This notion of the Socratic project and of Socrates' elenctic activity, however, is difficult to reconcile with Xenophon's claim that the question "what is madness" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) was central to Socrates' concerns. If, as Xenophon suggests, Socrates considered the question of madness as significant and puzzling as he considered the other human questions Xenophon enumerates, it seems extremely unlikely that he could have been guilty of the relatively simple-minded understanding of the process of overcoming all varieties of false belief that has often been attributed to him. For, whatever madness is, in whatever way it could be assimilated to error, it is surely different, at some level, from simply having the wrong account of the road to Larissa.

I believe that madness, and in particular the distinction between divine madness and human madness adduced by Socrates in the Phaedrus, is of central significance to our understanding of Socratic philosophy and Socratic elenctic method even, or especially, in those dialogues which seem to lack any reference to the notion of divine forms of madness. The Republic is one such dialogue, and by comparing Socrates' treatment of madness there to his account of it in the Phaedrus and other dialogues we can begin to see the outlines of the immanent hypothesis I have claimed characterizes the Republic.

Madness first arises in the Republic in Socrates' book 1 conversation with Cephalus. Hard on the heels of his questionable reformulation of Cephalus' views Socrates presents a counterexample that encapsulates in a few words the most profound problems that any account of justice must confront. He says, I mean something of this sort: everyone would surely say that if someone were to take weapons from a friend who is sane and that friend, becoming mad, demands them back, one must not give such things back, nor would the one who gives them back be just, nor again should one wish to tell the whole truth to a person in this state. (7)

Without going into Socrates' dialogic motivation for posing to Cephalus such a devastating counterexample to a definition that Cephalus never, in fact, offered, it is sufficient for now to recognize that the introduction of madness brings along with it deep questions about intentionality, objectivity, and responsibility that, if they are answered at all in the Republic, are only answered by the Republic in its entirety; that is, with this example Socrates already frames the question of justice in terms which could only be adequately resolved by the introduction of philosopher-rulers and the ascent out of the cave. For, as the account of the decline of the regimes in book 8 indicates, the Republic presents degenerate cities as in some sense pathological. Given this fact, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least some tyrannical regimes will be as "mad" as the tyrannical individual of book 9. However, from the perspective of such a degenerate regime, it is the philosopher, the just man, and the just action that will appear insane. Consider, for example, Glaucon's claim that the person who is able to do injustice "would never set down a compact with anyone not to do injustice and not to suffer it." To do so, Glaucon claims, such a person would have to be mad. (8) Consider Socrates' claim at the beginning of the Sophist that it is not much easier to discern the class of true philosophers than that of the gods. Thanks to the ignorance of the rest of human kind, he says, the true philosophers can appear "disguised in all sorts of ways" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]); they can appear as statesmen, or as sophists, or sometimes "they may give people the impression that they are altogether mad" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). (9)

Now, let us put Socrates' challenge to Cephalus in the broader context of madness as it is treated in the dialogues as a whole. A friend has given you a weapon to hold while he is away from town and when he returns and demands it back he is, it seems to you, not himself anymore. In fact, he seems quite mad. It may be reasonable--or at least prudent (in our sense of that term)--not to return these things to this person. However, it also seems that one could only know that one was acting justly in refusing to return the weapons if one knew that he had become, as we would say, mentally ill. But what if he had become inspired by a god or become a true philosopher?

These, however, are not possibilities that arise in the context of the Republic, where madness is unequivocally presented as a bad thing. This is due to the fact that the goods that are associated with madness elsewhere in Plato's dialogues--prophecy, divine and poetic inspiration, even recollection--are, at least on the surface, systematically excluded from the Republic, as I hope to show. The valorization of madness in the Phaedrus depends on countenancing the possibility that within our everyday experience of the world there are moments that are decisively informed by something that transcends that experience. Central among these moments in the account of the Phaedrus is our perception of someone as beautiful and the experience of falling in love. Love, in the Phaedrus, is a divine madness, which reminds us of that time, before we were embodied, when we followed in the train of a god and caught some glimpse of the beings beyond heaven. It is my contention that this kind of transcendence is absent from the "city in speech" that Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus found, if not entirely so from the dialogue in which they found it.

According to the account Socrates gives in the Republic there are only two routes of access to the intelligible and divine realm: first, through the educational program of the philosopher-rulers and the ascent out of the cave; second, (in the myth of Er) through the report of an experience of life after death. At one level we can see this aspect of Socrates' account as an exemplification of the problem divine madness poses for the possibility of a wholly just rule, already alluded to in Socrates' counterexample to Cephalus. If divine madness in its poetic, erotic, or philosophic guises were to be countenanced in the "city in speech" it would bring with it the possibility of threats to the legitimacy of the philosopher-kings' attempt at imaging the intelligible and divine realm in the world of becoming. Insofar as the character of such instantiation is ex hypothesi partial and imperfect, as long as there remained the possibility of access to the divine realm by figures other than the philosopher-rulers there could be potentially legitimate alternate visions of how to best imitate the divine. The only way to ensure that in any conflict between the rulers and the ruled in Kallipolis justice is on the side of the rulers, access to the divine and intelligible must be, in some sense, controlled.

However, at an even more fundamental level, I believe that the exclusion of divine madness and divine eros can be ascribed to what I have called the philosophical orientation of the Republic. Much of the Republic is concerned with presenting an account of the social and cultural forces which lead to the development of the character of the both individuals and constitutions. I will try to show that this account is part of a larger attempt to work through a hypothesis of immanence, which contends that the world of our everyday experience is constituted by and through human discursive activity. The Republic contains, I believe, the most complete working through of this hypothesis we are given in Plato's dialogues, and the most complete assessment of the limitations of that hypothesis. It is for this reason that divine inspiration, poetic and prophetic madness, indeed the gods in general, are excluded from the Republic to the degree possible. (10)

III

In the Phaedrus Socrates distinguishes between four parts ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of divine madness allotting each part to the inspiration of a god: prophetic madness to Apollo, the mysteries to Dionysus, poetic madness to the muses, and love to Eros and Aphrodite. In three out of the four kinds of madness (the rights of purification are excepted) Socrates explicitly denigrates the power of merely human art and sanity in comparison to divine madness. Of the poets in particular Socrates says "the man who arrives at the doors of poetry without madness from the muses persuaded that art is sufficient to make him a poet, imperfect [or incomplete], both he and his poetry are eclipsed, that of the sane by that of the mad." (11) The inspiration of the Muses is not only praised in the Phaedrus; it is also enacted in play or earnest by Socrates himself, who begins his first speech with an elaborate invocation of the Muses. While Socrates' second speech begins without an invocation to the Muses, it ends with a direct address to the god Eros. Even more significantly, Socrates' Stesichorean Ode contains a mythic account of the Olympian gods as they travel to the summit of heaven.

Now compare the Phaedrus' account of poetry to that given in Republic books 2 and 3, where poetry is discussed entirely as an art of imitation, a discussion from which the notion of divine inspiration is entirely absent. The absence of any account of divine inspiration in the Republic conflicts not only with the Phaedrus but also with most treatments of poetry in Plato's dialogues. It is, in fact, something of a Socratic cliche to say that the poets compose their poems through divine inspiration and not by means of wisdom. (12) Moreover, the absence of the Muses from the account of book 2 and 3 is gestured toward at various points in the dialogue. When Socrates is introducing the distinction between simple narration and imitation in his discussion of the poet's manner of speaking, Adeimantus is at a loss to understand what Socrates means. To make matters clearer, Socrates chooses as an example what he calls "the first things of the Iliad" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) "in which the poet tells of Chryses' entreating Agamemnon to release his daughter, and Agamemnon's anger, and Chryses' prayer to the god against the Achaeans when he failed." Socrates claims that before Homer represents Chryses as speaking, "the poet himself speaks and does not try to turn our thought elsewhere as though someone other than he were speaking." (13) This claim, however, is false. Socrates has left out of his account Homer's invocation to the Muse, an invocation in which he calls upon the goddess to sing of Achilles rage and how "the plan of Zeus came to fulfillment, from the time when first ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) they parted in strife Atreus' son, king of men, and brilliant Achilles." (14) In his invocation, Homer does precisely that which Socrates claims he does not do, he directs our thoughts away from himself as author and toward the goddess whom he represents as the true source of his inspired poetry.

An even more obvious sign that something has been left out of the account of poetry occurs when Socrates is telling Adeimantus that the guardians will let no private man tell a lie in their city. He claims that the ruler will punish anyone in the city found lying, "among those who are craftsmen, whether prophet or healer of illness or worker in wood." (15) The quotation is taken from the Odyssey, book 17. Eumaeus is the speaker, and he is defending the fact that he has brought a beggar, Odysseus in disguise, to Odysseus' halls. He complains that no one will accept a beggar or anyone else from a foreign land unless he is a craftsman, doctor, carpenter, or (and this is what Socrates leaves out) a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a singer filled with the words of god. (16)

The clearest indication of Socrates' conscious exclusion of divinely inspired poetry, however, comes at the end of his discussion with Adeimantus of the art of imitation in book 3. There Socrates claims that if a man "who is able by wisdom to become every sort of thing and to imitate all things" should arrive in the city-in-speech, they would "revere him as one sacred and holy and pleasing." But, saying that it is not ordained ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) for such a man to come to be in their city, they would send him out to another city, anointed with myrrh and crowned with garlands. (17) In this remarkable passage, the poet is first honored like a statue of a deity, and then expelled from the city like a sacred scapegoat. (18) The divinity of the poet is appealed to, in Socrates' account, only at the moment when he is sent beyond the limits of the city. I believe that we can see a similar gesture at the beginning of book 8, where in direct contradiction to Socrates' claims in book 3, Homer's invocation of the Muse is allowed to reappear only with the dissolution of the best city and the degeneration into timocracy. Indeed, it is the Muses now who tell us how "faction first attacked" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). (19)

Both more revolutionary and more significant for the argument of the Republic, however, are Socrates' earlier restrictions in book 2 on how the gods may be represented in poetry or, rather, how they may not be represented. Socrates argues that "however the god happens to be, so must he always be described." (20) Since, however, the god is wholly simple and unchanging, it seems that he cannot be represented at all. We can see this in two ways. First, as the argument about the lovers of sights and sounds at the end of book 5 makes clear, the objects of poetry are entirely in the realm of becoming. Therefore, it seems that there can be no strictly poetic representation of the god as he truly is. Second, to borrow an argument from the Theaetetus, if the god is wholly simple and pure, he is like an element that does not enter into any combination, a letter that forms no part of any syllable, and as such remains wholly unspeakable and unknowable. (21)

Socrates continues his argument by asking Adeimantus whether the gods, though themselves incapable of transformation, "make it seem to us that they appear ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) in every way, deceiving and beguiling us?" (22) To this question Adeimantus answers "Perhaps"--and it is easy to see why. Defenders of god's simplicity who nonetheless consider it impious to exclude any possibility of god's communication with human beings have often argued in similar fashion. Socrates claims, however, that the god would never want to lie, either in speech or in deed, by presenting a phantasm. His argument is as follows:

(1) A lie is only useful against enemies or, like a preventative drug for so-called friends, when from madness or folly they attempt to do something bad.

(2) The god is not afraid of enemies.

(3) None of the foolish or the mad is a friend of the god.

Therefore, the god never lies.

The argument concludes: "The god, then, is entirely simple and true in deed and in speech, and neither changes himself nor deceives others, by phantasms, speeches, or the sending of signs--either in waking or in dreams." (23) This argument is strange in many ways. It undermines the Oracle at Delphi, from whom the city is to receive its most sovereign musical practices. It makes a liar of Socrates with his daimonic sign and his dream messages of the Phaedo, the Apology, and the Crito. Strangest of all, in denying the god access to the medicinal lie, the same kind of lie the rulers will use later, it either does not consider the idea that every human being is foolish when compared to the god, or it accepts this possibility but denies that the gods are friends to any human. (24) I believe it is difficult to overestimate the significance of the fact that in the Republic the ruler and lawgiver can and must lie for the good of the city, but the god is forbidden to lie for the sake of any human being.

IV

Before turning to the Republic's account of the transition from opinion to knowledge in books 6 and 7, I would like simply to present what I see as the most significant remaining contrasts between the picture of transcendence we are offered in the Phaedrus and the picture of immanence we are offered in the Republic.

In the Phaedrus differences in human character ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) are said to be the result of the different gods each of us followed before we fell to earth and became embodied. As opposed to the account of the Republic, such differences in human character are not directly equated with better and worse kinds of life. Instead, there are nine kinds of life, determined by how recent and comprehensive was our glimpse of the beings beyond the heavens, and eleven kinds of human character corresponding to the eleven Olympian deities who made the ascent to the summit of heaven. (25)

In the Republic differences in human character are said to be the result of a combination of natural aptitude, education, and the formative familial and socio-cultural experiences an individual encounters. In Socrates' description of the decline of the regimes these first two largely drop out of the picture. Thus, on the account of the Republic, the character of human beings who do not happen to live in Kallipolis is largely socially and culturally determined.

In the Phaedrus' account of the procedure of collection and division, collection is described as a "seeing together" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and the process of division aims at "being able to cut it up again according to its natural joints," likening the process to anatomical analysis of an organism. (26) The virtues are classed among "the beings beyond heaven" and are said to be recollected. The gods stand on the vault of heaven and contemplate the beings. Education to philosophy is described as "leading the beloved to the likeness of the god."

In the Republic, the upward path of dialectic uses hypotheses as starting points and impelling forces ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), while the downward path is likened to geometry and related arts. (27) "Seeing together" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) refers, in the Republic, not to the unification of many disparate perceptions under one form, but rather to the integration of the disparate mathematical studies ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) undertaken by guardians in order to demonstrate the kinship of these studies to one another and to what is. (28) The forms of the virtues are found through the construction of a city in speech, and the subsequent analysis of that construction, a process that has been likened to geometrical analysis. The most extensive treatment of the forms is in book 10, where they are forms of artificial objects, the form of table and bed. At no point in the education of the guardians do they study organisms or natural bodies. Insofar as we are made privy to it, the distinctly philosophical education of the guardians in books 6 and 7 is devoted to the mathematical sciences severed from their appearances in the natural world.

These differences between the two dialogues are summarized in the table below: The Republic and the Phaedrus on Immanence and Transcendence Republic Phaedrus Eros Eros as Tyrant Eros as God Madness Human Madness Human and Divine Madness Poetry All poets are imitators The best poets are divinely inspired The Gods "The god is entirely simple The four types of Divine and true in deed and in Madness are each attributed speech, and neither changes to the inspiration of a god. himself nor deceives others Socrates' second speech by phantasms, speeches, or describes the ascent of the the sending of signs either gods to the summit of heaven. waking or dreaming." Human A combination of natural Some aspects of character Character aptitude, education, and seem to be innate. In socio-cultural influences. Socrates' second speech we The lawgiver "wipes clean" are said to derive our the city and the disposi- character from the god in tions of human beings. whose train we followed. Philosophy Mathematical education Recollection and Wonder The Ascent Compulsion Awe and Desire Dialectic Up and Down from Hypotheses. Method of Collection and The upward path uses Division. Collection is hypotheses as "starting described as "seeing points" and "impelling together" ([GREEK TEXT NOT forces" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), while the proper method of while the downward path is division is likened to likened to geometry and anatomical analysis of an related arts. organism. Forms The Forms of the virtues Insofar as the "Forms" as are found through a objects of contemplation process of construction are discussed (they are not and subsequent analysis referred to as [GREEK TEXT of that construction, The NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) most extended discussion they are such things as of the Forms (in book 10) knowledge, justice, wisdom, deals with the Forms of and beauty. The gods do not human artifacts (the bed make these "beings beyond and table) and treats the heaven"; the gods Forms themselves as divine contemplate them. artifacts.

V

At the end of book 5 of the Republic, Socrates separates the lovers of seeing ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and the lovers of hearing ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) from philosophers by making a radical distinction between opinion and knowledge, a distinction which, I will argue, carries over into the analogies of the Sun and the Cave in books 6 and 7 and which has profound implications for the account of the transition between opinion and knowledge given there. Socrates makes the following distinction between different capacities ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]): With a capacity I consider only this, what it is set over and what it accomplishes, and this is how it is I call each of the capacities a capacity--that which is set over the same thing and accomplishes the same thing, I call the same capacity, and that set over something else and accomplishing something else, I call a different capacity. (29)

In this context, Socrates gives sight and hearing as examples of what he means by capacities. We will say that capacities are a certain class of beings by which we are capable of what we are capable, and also everything else is capable of whatever it is capable. I say, for instance, that sight and hearing are capacities--if you understand the form of which I want to speak. (30)

The examples of sight and hearing are significant because of the radical heterogeneity of their objects. If the powers Socrates had chosen were sight and touch, we could imagine someone claiming that some of the proper objects of touch, the rough and the smooth for example, can be perceived in a different way by sight. One might even argue that sight perceives these more clearly than touch. This, however, is not the case with sight and hearing; sight can no more perceive the proper objects of hearing than hearing can perceive the proper objects of sight. (31)

Just a few lines later, Glaucon affirms that the same radical heterogeneity applies to the objects of opinion and knowledge. After it is established that opinion and knowledge are different powers, and Socrates and Glaucon have agreed that each naturally is directed toward or set over different things ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Socrates asks Glaucon whether opinion opines the same thing that knowledge knows and whether the knowable will be the same as the opinable. Or, Socrates asks, is this impossible? To this Glaucon responds that on the basis of what has been said before, it is impossible.

The definition of opinion as a power or capacity is, I believe, the crucial move that sets up everything that follows. The question we must ask is: What does it mean to conceive of opinion as a distinct capacity? Why not think of opinion, instead, as a relative incapacity when compared with knowledge? This seems to be the route taken in the Meno where the difference between having true opinion and having knowledge seems to depend on whether or not one is able to give an account of one's true opinions. Thus, true belief is marked off from knowledge by the fact that the possessor of true opinion lacks a specific capacity that the possessor of knowledge has, the capacity to give an account. I even think that Plato (and/or his Socrates) is gesturing toward this alternative account of opinion with a bit of wordplay. When Socrates asks Glaucon whether opinion could opine the same things that knowledge knows or whether that is impossible, the words translated as "Or, is this impossible?" are [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. I think there is a pun on [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] here gesturing toward [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] that is, powerlessness or lack of capacity.

By conceiving of opinion and knowledge as separate capacities, set over different things and accomplishing different things, Socrates and Glaucon have taken a crucial step toward conceiving the world disclosed in our everyday discourse about the world as radically separate from the world as conceived outside of that discourse. If opinion and knowledge are not set over the same things--forms or class characters or objects or events or states of affairs in the world--it is hard to see how it is at all possible to move from one to the other. Opinion and knowledge come to seem like two separate tracks, moving alongside of one another and never intersecting.

I have suggested that the Republic is a working out of the hypothesis that everyday human discursive activity is relatively autonomous and radically separate from the intelligible realm. I believe that the conception introduced in book 5 of opinion as an independent capacity that has its own proper objects is a crucial aspect of this hypothesis--indeed, I believe some such account is a necessary aspect of any theory that wants to present human language and thought as autonomous. Coherence theories of truth and/or knowledge provide familiar examples of this kind of theory, and indeed, some interpreters of the central books of the Republic have argued that Plato is explicating there an essentially coherentist account of knowledge. (32) However, I believe a more illuminating comparison can be drawn between the Republic and Kant's account of the autonomy of human discursive activity; not least of Kant's virtues for this purpose is that he lifts his terminology right out of the Republic. According to Kant's transcendental idealism we can consider all objects in the world either as phenomena, insofar as they can be objects of possible experience for us, or as noumena, insofar as they can be thought abstracted from the conditions of possible experience. The noumenal or intelligible character of an object is merely this abstraction from the conditions under which it can be an appearance for us. As Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason: "But this something, thus conceived, is only the transcendental object; and by that is meant something x, of which we know, and with the present constitution of our understanding can know nothing whatsoever." (33) Despite Kant's claim, however, that we cannot know "things in themselves," Kant argues that we can know, and know a priori, the transcendental conditions that make our experience possible.

In what follows, I will begin to sketch out a reading of the Sun, the Cave, and the mathematical education of the guardians that is Kantian in two respects. (34) First, I will argue that the analogy of the Cave gives us an account wherein the phenomena of our everyday world of experience are radically separate from the intelligible realm. Second, I will argue that the mathematical education of the philosopher-rulers in book 7 begins with a hypothesis that implicitly denies any direct access to the intelligible realm and attempts, instead, to delineate the logical conditions under which any phenomenal experience of the world can be apprehended.

VI

We are all familiar with the basic situation--the prisoners chained from childhood, the wall, the human beings carrying artifacts, the shadows, the fire, and above and behind it all the opening of the cave. As I have by now made clear, I want to emphasize what I see as the radical separation between the visible and intelligible worlds we are offered in this image. The first thing I would like to note is the fact that what the prisoners see before them are shadows, that is, gaps in the light created by the statues and artifacts dancing on the wall behind them. In the original analogy between the Sun and the Good, Socrates stressed the role of light as the yoke that binds together the sense of sight and the power of being seen. Surely, when sight is in the eyes and the man possessing them tries to make use of it, and color is present in what is to be seen, in the absence of a third class of thing whose nature is specifically directed to this very purpose, you know that the sight will see nothing and the color will be unseen. (35)

In contradistinction to the image of the Sun/Good, in which the light/ truth discloses things seen/things known to the sight/intellect, in the image of the Cave the prisoners see not an object in the light but rather an absence of light caused by an unseen object. The prisoners see no color, no object, indeed in some sense what they see is a nothing, an artificial gap in an artificial light. This artificiality is the second point I would like to stress, the shadows are shadows of artifacts, all sorts of implements, we are told, and statues of men and animals. We are not told who made these artifacts or how they made them. Yet the answers to these questions are of the utmost importance because, it seems, the only thing that connects these artifacts to the intelligible beings outside the cave is the mimetic capacity of whoever fashioned these statues. Unless we know that the sculptors have been out of the cave, seen the intelligible realm, and have at least some "true" mimetic capacity (however that is to be conceived), there is no reason to think that these statues correspond in any way to the beings outside the cave. This problem is particularly troubling in a dialogue that casts mimesis in such an unfavorable light.

There is, of course, a great deal of controversy over who makes and who carries these statues. I believe that we should count among the sculptors poets such as Homer and Hesiod. However, it also seems likely that among the shadows and echoes the prisoners perceive we should also include less conscious artifacts and artificers of culture including conventional accounts of the virtues and vices. This would be consistent with Socrates' imagining that there would be "honors, praises and awards among them" for the person who proved "sharpest at discerning the things passing by." Indeed, insofar as the Cave is said to be an image of "the effect of education and lack of education on our nature," and the fire seems to represent the power of human artifice therein, (36) I believe all of the artifacts of human culture and language are intended, including the concepts embedded in any natural language. This would be consistent with the fact that the one natural thing the cave denizens could be said truly to perceive, albeit indirectly, are the voices of human beings echoing off the wall.

Turning now to Socrates' description of the journey up out of the cave, and returning for a moment to the theme of eros or its lack, I note that there is no mention at any point of that account of anything beckoning the prisoner to the world outside the cave. Instead the cave dweller has to be dragged every inch of the "steep upward path" and pulled out into the light of the Sun. Nor is there any description of any awe or pleasure he experiences when he is becoming accustomed to the outside world. It is only when he recollects his experiences in the cave and the pity he feels for those still below that he is said to consider himself happy for the change.

Once he finally becomes accustomed to the intelligible realm, our potential philosopher-king stares directly at the Sun/Good and "infers ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) that this provides for the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place and is in a certain way ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing." (37) The way in which the Good is the cause of those things is left deliberately vague, and from Socrates' description it is hard to see what relation the knowledge he receives in the intelligible world could have to his former home. The things specifically mentioned outside the cave are all natural things: human beings, the heavens, the stars, the moon, and finally, the sun. The conclusions he draws about the "intelligible sun" are about how it is the source of the seasons and the years. He is not said to discern anything that could play the role of bridging the gap between the natural world outside the cave and the artifice dominated world within it. He does not see anything that would seem to correspond to the "true city," nor, more significantly, is he said to catch a glimpse inside the human soul. (38) He sees neither the two horses and charioteer of the Phaedrus nor the hydra/lion/human composite of the Republic. According to the Phaedrus, unless a speaker knows both the truth of the things that are and the nature and variety of human souls, he will not be able to persuade anyone who does not already know the truth of the things that are. If this is correct even in part, then it remains mysterious how any of what is seen outside the cave will help the philosopher-ruler in his contest with the perpetual cave dweller over the phenomena inside the cave, phenomena which are, as Socrates says, "the shadows of artificial things." (39)

VII

I have been arguing that the Republic presents a vision of the world based on the hypothesis of a radical separation between the world of human discursive activity and the intelligible and divine realm, between the world inside the cave and the world outside the cave. This hypothesis, which I have described as a hypothesis of immanence, precludes any direct intuition of the world outside of our ways of speaking and thinking about the world. This does not mean that we have no apprehension that there is a world outside of the world constituted by our discursive activity; rather, we are presented with just such an apprehension in Socrates' discussion of the presentiment every soul has about the good. However, as we will see, this presentiment is not a direct intuition of what lies beyond our customary ways of thinking and speaking of the world. It does not specify a limit to the world of our experience; rather, it is presented as merely an inchoate sense that the world of our experience has limits.

Socrates claims that while many people would choose to do, have, and enjoy the reputation for things that are opined to be just and beautiful even if they are not, things are quite different in regard to the good. Here people are not satisfied with mere opinions about the good but seek out what really is good, and this is what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything it does. Every soul has, Socrates claims, "a presentiment that the good is something," but since the soul is unable sufficiently to grasp what this something is and cannot attain the kind of "stable trust" that it has about other things, it "loses whatever advantage it might have had in those others." (40) Thus, Socrates makes quite clear that this presentiment by itself offers us no guidance in our inquiry into the nature or character of the good. The best it can do is instill in us the conviction that there indeed is some such good toward which we can direct our inquiries.

This hypothesized lack of any direct intuition into the nature of the beings can, I believe, also account for the character of the educational program Socrates prescribes for the guardians in book 7. As Socrates and Glaucon begin to consider what studies would have the power of turning the soul away from becoming and toward being, their first step is to exclude the entire education of the guardians up to that point as "wholly engaged with coming into being and passing away." (41) They put aside music, gymnastic, and the arts as all having, in the language of the image of the Cave, the status of the shadows of artificial things. When Glaucon despairs of finding any study besides these, Socrates suggests that they take something that applies to them all, "that small matter of distinguishing the one, the two and the three, I mean in sum ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), number and calculation." (42)

I would like to point out one salient feature of the way Socrates introduces the studies of number and calculation and then offer an interpretation of its significance. Throughout this passage Socrates puts a great deal of stress, first, on the universality, and second, on the absolute necessity, of number and calculation in all areas of human thinking. Socrates says that number and calculation are common to all kinds of art, thought, and knowledge; that they are something necessary for everyone to learn from the first; that every kind of art and knowledge is compelled to participate in them. Most significantly for my reading, when Socrates asks Glaucon whether the study of calculation and number is a necessary study for a warrior, Glaucon responds, "Most of all, if he's going have any understanding whatsoever of how to order the troops, or rather, if he is even going to be a human being." (43)

What I want to suggest is that number and calculation are being presented as necessary or logical conditions for the possibility of any human thinking, conditions which have objective status even in the cave. These are conditions that must apply to our perception of the world regardless of whether or not the shadows we see in the world of our everyday experience correspond to any objects in the world outside the cave. Thus, whether or not there is any reality which corresponds to our concept "finger," and whether or not we are mistaken in the particular predicates we unify under that concept, the very fact that we can perceive them as a unity depends upon there being some unity that is not given to us in sense perception. I suggest that we should understand all of the mathematical studies prescribed for the guardians in book 7 as explicating necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, and that these necessary conditions include not only number, calculation, and proportion but also space--in the study of solid geometry--and time--in the study of astronomy abstracted from the actual motion of the heavens. Time is the only content that I, at least, can give to a study of those movements in which the "really fast" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and the "really slow" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) are moved in relation to one another and move in turn those thing which are "in them" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). (44)

This "conditions of the possibility of experience" reading of the mathematical education of the guardians can only go so far. It cannot give us any clear sense of the dialectical studies the guardians are to take up after they have been fully trained in mathematics. But, of course, the Republic gives us no clear sense of the content of those studies either, and it is my contention that in Plato's view the philosophical orientation of the Republic cannot give any content to those studies. This is the way Socrates summarizes everything he has talked about prior to the introduction of dialectics: All of the other arts are turned toward human opinions and desires, or to generation and composition, or to the tending of everything that is grown or put together. And for those remaining, which we said did grasp something of what is--geometry and the things following it--we see that they dream about what is but are unable ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) to see it itself in waking as long as they leave unmoved the hypotheses they use and are incapable of giving an account of them ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). (45)

He completes this summary with what seems to be a direct statement of the problem we have been following throughout, the problem of the radical heterogeneity of human discursive activity and intelligible realm as it is presented in the Republic. He says, For, when the beginning is what one doesn't know, and the end and what is in between is woven from what one doesn't know, what contrivance could ever turn this sort of agreement into knowledge? (46)

VIII

I have been arguing that the Republic is a working through of a philosophical hypothesis of immanence, which conceives of human discourse as relatively autonomous and radically separate from the intelligible realm. I have also suggested that this hypothesis is inherently limited, that it leaves out aspects of human experience that Plato considered central to an adequate account of the philosophic life. (47) That something is left out of the central books of the Republic and that something is lacking in the approach taken there is signaled from the very moment Socrates introduces the idea of the Good into the discussion, where Socrates says, "Blessed men, what the good itself is, let us let it go for now, for my current opinions about the good appear to me to be more than our present impulse can attain." (48) Shortly thereafter we have this exchange between Glaucon and Socrates: "Don't in any case stop," he said. "Not at least until you've gone through the likeness with the sun, if you leave out anything." "But I am leaving out much," I said. "Don't," he said, "leave out even a bit." "I believe I will," I said. "Probably, a lot. But nonetheless, at least insofar as it is possible in the present case, I won't willingly leave anything out." (49)

As I have suggested above, I think the crucial move that compels Socrates to leave something out "in the present case" is the identification of opinion and knowledge as different capacities dependent upon or set over different things. The question now is, what is it that Socrates is leaving out.

The answer to this question leads us back to the issues of eros and madness. Madness, I suggest, is what is left out of the philosophic education of the guardians in book 7, specifically its philosophic variety, which Alcibiades calls in the Symposium "the Bacchic frenzy and madness" of Socratic philosophy. In my discussion of divine madness in the Phaedrus I referred to the idea that there are moments in our experience that seem to be informed by something that transcends that experience. Put in another way, it is an experience of something which seems at once wholly strange and somehow recognizably our own. This experience Plato and Aristotle seem to have referred to as the experience of wonder, and both Plato and Aristotle seem to have thought that philosophy begins in wonder. In the Theaetetus, for example, Socrates claims "this feeling of wonder very much belongs to the philosopher, for there is no other beginning to philosophy than this." (50)

Again, wonder is systematically excluded from Socrates' account of the Good, the Sun, the Line, the Cave, and the philosophic education of the guardians. There are only six occurrences of a form of the words [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] between the introduction of the likeness between the Sun and the Good and Socrates and Glaucon's agreement that "the treatment of the studies is complete." (51) Five of these appear in phrases that explicitly exclude wonder, phrases like "do not be surprised at x" or "is it any wonder that y." (52) The one remaining appearance is especially remarkable. In a phrase used to describe the wall behind the prisoners upon which the human beings carry the artifacts which cast the shadows on the back of the cave, the wall is said to be "just like the screen that wonder-workers ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) set in front of people and over which they show their marvels ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])." (53) This is the only instance of the noun form of wonder in book 7. (54) Here it refers to a conjurer's trick, and it is used to describe the architecture behind the illusions of the cave. I think we can see a similar gesture in the one appearance of "recollection" in the Republic, where the term is used to refer to the memory the philosopher outside the cave has of his former prison home. (55)

I would like to conclude my remarks on the Republic by focusing on another form of divine madness that is essential to Socratic philosophy and essential to the argument of the Republic. I suggested earlier that the goods that are associated with madness elsewhere in Plato's dialogues are systematically excluded from the surface of Plato's Republic. One form of divine madness is, however, very much on display throughout the dialogue. This form is the distinctly Socratic variant of divination or prophecy, [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Fully one third of the occurrences of a form of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (56) in Plato's dialogues, eleven out of thirty-three, are in the Republic, and eight of those eleven surround the account of the Good and the education of the guardians. (57) In each case the meaning is the same. Socrates is prophesying what effect a particular kind of experience is going to have on a particular kind of person, what good or harm will come to them from that experience, and what can be expected of them in the future. That is, Socrates' divinations always have to do with thinking about what kinds of education are appropriate for which kinds of souls. This is precisely the kind of thinking that has been on display throughout the Republic, from the founding of the true city, throughout the musical and gymnastic education of the guardians, the decline of the regimes and down to the critique of poetry in book 10. This is also precisely the kind of thinking that is absent from the mathematical education of the guardians and the ascent out of the cave, a thinking concerned with those human things about which, according to Xenophon, Socrates was always conversing. To put it in something of a formula, what is missing in the philosophical education of the guardians is the reflection on divine and human madness in Socratic philosophy.

IX

Before turning to the Symposium I would like to venture a couple of brief suggestions about the way in which the transcendent orientation of the Phaedrus abstracts from Socratic philosophy in ways complementary to the Republic, consonant with its setting outside the city walls in a place dedicated to pastoral deities. As I have suggested, I believe that the divine eros of the Phaedrus corresponds to the hypothesis that human discursive activity is directly dependent on and revelatory of the divine and intelligible realm. In it there seems to be little distinction drawn between Socrates' "second sailing" and a direct inquiry into the beings. This can help to account for Socrates' apparently "pre-Socratic' speculations about the nature of the self-moving soul. (58) The orientation of the Phaedrus also suggests a resolution to the problem posed by the apparent disunity of the two halves of the dialogue. As many commentators have noted that while eros is the dominant theme of the dialogue through Socrates' "palinode," from that point forward the discussion of eros seems to be entirely supplanted by an inquiry into the nature of rhetoric and writing. (59) I suggest that the account of a science of rhetoric given in the latter part of the dialogue depends upon the account of divine eros presented in the former part. A number of features of the argument of the Phaedrus, in particular, the notion of a direct and natural correspondence between forms of soul and forms of rhetoric, (60) the implication that the principle of "logographic necessity" could give to a written speech the organic unity of a living being, (61) and Socrates' claim that when one employs the dialectical art one can sow speeches like living seeds in the soul of the listener, (62) all seem to rely on radically discounting the artificiality which dominated the account of human discursive activity given in the Republic. (63)

The transcendent orientation of the Phaedrus can also help to explain the extraordinary claims about philosophy made in Socrates' second speech. The philosophic lovers, followers in the heavenly procession of Zeus, are said seek out a soul "that is something of a Zeus itself" and hence to look for "a philosophic and commanding nature." In their quest to make their beloved like their god, they "seek in themselves the nature of their god" and "find a way because they have been compelled to look upon the god." (64) Earlier in the speech the thought ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of the philosopher is said to be winged. This is due to the fact that memory, as far as it is capable, always keeps the thought of the philosopher close to the beings--the same beings which make the gods divine because they are close to them. (65) To say the least, these claims seem quite distant from that "human wisdom" which recognizes it is, in truth, worth nothing with respect to wisdom.

X

Alongside the tyrannic hypothesis of the Republic and the divine hypothesis of the Phaedrus there is, I have suggested, a third daimonic hypothesis, which I have associated with the Symposium. This hypothesis contends that insofar as intelligible world can be apprehended, it can only be apprehended through human discursive activity but is not directly revealed within that activity. Of the three hypotheses, it is the one most didactically presented and, I believe, the most difficult to understand. That Socrates presents the education in erotic matters he received from Diotima as containing some such view of the relation between human discursive activity and the divine and intelligible realm is relatively clear. Her account of the ladder of ascent begins with the love of one beautiful body and the production of beautiful speeches and ascends to "a certain single philosophical science," but it is pointedly not for the sake of this philosophical science that the ascent is made. Rather, the initiate who has been correctly educated in erotics and has viewed the beautiful things in the right way will suddenly get a glimpse of "something wonderfully beautiful in its nature" for the sake of which all his previous efforts were undertaken. This is something not to be found in any body or in any speech or knowledge. Indeed, it is not to be found in anything else, "not in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven" but is said to be "by itself with itself always being of a single form."

How we are to understand the scope and limits of the daimonic hypothesis, and what sense we can give to the claim that philosophic discourse is a necessary propaideutic to this wondrous vision which seems to stand so entirely outside that discourse--these are, to say the least, more difficult questions, ones I will not attempt to address here. Instead, I will merely indicate a way in which one aspect of Socrates' speech, Diotima's description of the daimon Eros himself, suggests that this daimonic hypothesis discloses something essential about Socrates' discursive activity as it is presented to us in Plato's dialogues.

The Symposium is set in the home of the tragic poet Agathon at a party celebrating his first victory at the Lenea, one of the two great Athenian dramatic festivals in honor of the god Dionysus. The occasion for speeches on the theme of eros is provided by Eryximachus, who recounts Phaedrus' complaint that neither the poets nor the Sophists have ever made a fitting eulogy to the god Eros. The various encomia to Eros offered by Agathon's guests are intended to make up for this lack. Thus the proper relation between human speech and the divine provides, in some sense, the organizing theme of the dialogue. (66) If we view the six speeches concerning eros from this perspective, we can divide them into two groups. The first three speakers, Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus, center their respective accounts of eros around the authority of a particular kind of existing human discursive activity: Phaedrus is primarily concerned with myth, Pausanias with laws and customs, and Eryximachus with science or craft. The second group of speakers, on the other hand, is made up of individuals famous for producing distinctive kinds of discourse: the comic poet Aristophanes, the tragic poet Agathon, and Socrates--who, according to Alcibiades, makes speeches of a kind wholly unlike those of any other human being, past or present.

It is this Socratic variety of discourse that seems to be at issue in Diotima's description of the birth and nature of the daimon Eros. He is the offspring of Poros and Penia, that is, resource and poverty--though he is, by her account, closer in nature to his impoverished mother than his resourceful father. He is neither wholly wise nor wholly ignorant, which is to say he is wise to the degree that he knows he is ignorant. He is a seeker after wisdom, a philosopher. Having the nature of his mother, he is not tender and beautiful, but tough, dusty, shoeless, and homeless; by virtue of his father he is an awesome hunter of the beautiful and the good as well as a skilled druggist, wizard, and sophist. Clearly this barefoot, daimonic philosopher is meant, at some level, to call to mind Socrates himself; it seems to be an idealized portrait of Socratic philosophy, one which abstracts from what is merely human or contingent about Socrates the individual. Consider in particular Diotima's characterization of Eros as "homeless" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Socrates may be, as Alcibiades suggests, somehow essentially "strange" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), but he is not a stranger ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]); he is an Athenian who, apart from that rare walk outside the city walls, leaves Athens only to fulfill his civic duty in military service. (67) Despite its mythic frame, however, this account of daimonic eros discloses something essential about Socrates as he is represented in Plato's dialogues, a duality that seems to correspond to the dual lineage of the daimon Eros. Like Eros, Socrates is characterized by a seemingly limitless capacity for generating discourses while in conversation with others, a peculiar resourcefulness which seems to be connected with his ability to divine what kinds of education are appropriate for different kinds of human souls. It is in these pedagogic contexts that Socrates makes the strongest claims about his discursive practice, professing to a kind of technical knowledge he variously characterizes as knowledge of erotics, (68) the practice of the one true political art, (69) or his participation in the art of maieutics. (70) It is also in these contexts that we see Socrates associated with the drugs and wizardry Diotima attributes to the resourcefulness of the daimon Eros. (71) However, like daimonic Eros, Socrates seems to be even more fundamentally characterized by a kind of poverty or lack, and it is his recognition of that lack that seems to be his central defining characteristic. As he claims in the Apology, Socrates differs from most human beings in his awareness that he lacks understanding of the greatest and most important matters, and this claim seems to imply both that he can recognize when he lacks understanding, and that he has a sense for what kinds of understanding fail to qualify as understanding the greatest and most important matters. (72) This ability to recognize his lack of understanding seems to include a sense for which questions are prior and which questions are posterior in the order of a given inquiry. Socrates is skilled at seeing when something necessary has been left out of an account, something without which a given avenue of inquiry seems to come to an end. In short, he recognizes that he is at a loss ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and, as Meno suggests, he makes others at a loss when he speaks to them.

Socrates continually asserts, and perhaps overstates, (73) his own sterility and incapacity for giving birth to beautiful discourses that he would call his own. Like the daimon Eros, he continually believes himself to be in need, he philosophizes throughout his life, but his sense of the insufficiency of his understanding of the intelligible and divine makes it such that he never attains anything like the one philosophic science of Diotima's higher mysteries. He is always more in lack than resource with respect to the divine, and it is this poverty, rather than his lack of monetary resources, that I believe Socrates is gesturing to when he characterizes himself in the Apology as "in infinite poverty through service to the god." (74)

XI

One final difference between the three dialogues will help to summarize the interpretive strategy I have been pursuing. This is the divergence between the roles Socrates' "daimonic sign" plays in each dialogue. If, following most scholars, we bracket the Theages as questionably Platonic, the fullest description of Socrates' daimonion occurs at Apology 31c-d. There Socrates claims that a certain daimonic sign has appeared to him from childhood, which when it comes always turns him away from something he is about to do but never urges him forward. As we might now expect, this spiritual voice has a special prominence in the Phaedrus. While Socrates refers in the Apology to numerous occasions in the past when the daimonion came to him to dissuade him from a course of action, only in the Phaedrus does it come to Socrates, as he claims, in the course of the dialogue itself. When it does so, moreover, it is a little more voluble than his description of it in the Apology would seem to allow. It not only dissuades him from what he is about to do, but demands he make atonement for an offense against the god. (75) In the Republic, on the other hand, Socrates' daimonic sign is gestured toward only to be dismissed as something "not worthy of speech" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) for the enigmatic reason that "it may have come to pass, perhaps, to some one other, or no one before." (76)

By contrast to both these accounts, in the Symposium Socrates himself is identified with the daimonic. This can indicate one respect in which Plato intended his own discursive activity to have a "daimonic," mediating role. As Julius Moravcsik has argued, Plato's poetic representation of Socrates in the dialogues is meant to play a particular role in a reader's philosophic education. (77) As Socrates presented an idealized portrait of Socratic philosophy in his account of his dialogue with Diotima, Plato presents an idealized portrait of Socrates in the dialogues, and the beautified Socrates of the Symposium seems to gesture toward this Platonic idealization. (78) Plato is suggesting, I believe, that essential to our reflections on the good are reflections concerning what a good human being is like. This activity is necessarily an imaginative, poetic activity; we think about the good by imagining to ourselves what a good human being would do in a particular situation, or by thinking about what we ourselves would do if we were that good human being. Socrates as he is presented in the dialogues is a mediating figure whose poetic representation is meant to aid us in our reflections about the beautiful and the good. Yet, as the Symposium shows, such idealizations are inherently problematic. There is with all such poetic representations a danger that we will become stuck on the beauty of the image and become lovers of philosophy rather than lovers of wisdom--lovers of Socrates rather than lovers of the good toward which Socrates points us. Alcibiades, who thinks he has seen "mind" inside Socrates' "most divine" speeches and glimpsed inside Socrates himself to find statues "divine and golden and entirely beautiful," reminds us that this was by no means a danger that Socrates was simply able to overcome. (79)

Berlin, Germany

Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA 50112.

(1) Republic 572e-573b. All citations from Plato are from John Burnet, Platonis Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Translations are the author's unless otherwise cited.

(2) Phaedrus 242e.

(3) In the Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that Eros is "a great daimon" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and as such is "between god and mortal" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). See Symposium 202d.

(4) See especially Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chaps. 6 and 7; Anthony W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 55-8; Gerasimos Santos, Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 64; Francis M. Cornford, "The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium," in Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays. Volume 2, Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy of Art, ed. Gregory Vlastos (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971). An important exception is Leo Strauss's claim, in The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 111, that the depiction of eros in the Republic is the artifact of "a deliberate abstraction from eros" in that dialogue. Compare Stanley Rosen, "The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic," The Review of Metaphysics 18 (1965): 452-75. Rosen claims that in the Republic "Plato camouflages Eros, or bends it to political use" (469), in effect arguing that thumos is a mask for eros. Contrary to Rosen's interpretation, and consistent with Strauss's claim, I would contend that the "politicized" eros of the Republic is a mask for thumos. On my divergence from Strauss's interpretation, however, see note 10 below.

(5) Terry Penner, "Socrates and the Early Dialogues," in Richard Kraut, The Cambridge Companion to Plato (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 121.

(6) Jonathan Lear, "Plato's Politics of Narcissism," in Terence Irwin, Martha Craven Nussbaum, and Gregory Vlastos, Virtue, Love and Form: Essays in Memory of Gregory Vlastos (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1994), 139.

(7) Republic 331c.

(8) Republic 359b.

(9) Sophist 216c-d.

(10) By characterizing the tyrannic or immanent philosophic orientation of the Republic as more fundamental than the problem of a wholly just rule in determining the exclusion of divine eros and divine madness from the "city-in-speech," I mean to distinguish the reading I am offering here from Strauss's reading as presented in his essay on the Republic in Strauss's The City and Man--or at least one plausible interpretation of that very difficult essay. At least initially, Strauss seems to present the "deliberate abstraction from eros" which he claims characterizes the Republic as following from the political concerns of the dialogue, and in particular, following from the requirements of Socrates' attempt to realize perfect justice in the "city in speech." On this view, once Socrates has embarked on the question of whether the just or the unjust life is superior, this very question leads to that perspective from which justice might be perfectly realized, and this perspective is one which must, of necessity, abstract from eros. Therefore, on Strauss's presentation, it is the positing of justice as the highest virtue that leads to the presentation of eros as a tyrant. (A particular clear presentation of this view can be found in Drew Hyland's Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues [Albany: State University of New York Press: 1995], 150-1.)

In my view, to the contrary, the Republic begins from a certain perspective on eros, a perspective I have called the tyrannic perspective. This perspective holds that human eros is not essentially directed to the intelligible and the divine. Eros, on this view, is a polymorphous outward striving and something drive-like ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) which seeks to assimilate all things to the self; as such, tyrannic eros in the Republic appears to be an instantiation or modification of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. On this interpretation, it is less the case that the Republic abstracts from eros than it is the case that eros as represented in the Republic abstracts from the divine. And, in contradistinction to the above presentation of Strauss's view, I believe that it is on the basis of this hypothesis that justice is posited as the highest virtue. That is, if the tyrannic hypothesis were true, if the world of human thought and experience were constituted by autonomous human discursive activity and human desires were not essentially directed toward something higher than the merely human, then it would seem that the legislating activity of the philosopher-ruler would represent the perfection of human possibilities. To put the point another way, according to Plato's Socrates, if human beings did not have some intuitive access to the intelligible and divine, the highest political possibilities would be the highest human possibilities simply.

An adequate defense of these claims stands outside the scope of the present essay, and would require an elaboration of certain aspects of what Ferrari, Lear, and Reeves have called the "psycho-political" argument of the Republic, and, in particular, a detailed account of the role of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in that argument, an elaboration I undertake in a forthcoming essay.

(11) Phaedrus 245a5-9.

(12) See Apology 22c, Phaedrus 241e, 249d, 253a, Ion 533e, 535c.

(13) Republic 393a.

(14) Iliad 1.4-6, trans. A. T. Murray (London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924). See note 18 below.

(15) Republic 389d.

(16) Odyssey 17.383-5. Compare Bloom's note to Republic 390a-b in The Republic of Plato, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 452.

(17) Republic 398a-b.

(18) See Ferrari's note, in Plato: The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith, Cambridge Texts in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(19) Rep. 545d-e. The passage is taken by Adam, Bloom, and Ferrari to be a reference to Iliad 16.112, but Shorey takes the reference to be Iliad 1.6., that is, Homer's first invocation of the Muse quoted above. In truth, Socrates seems to be combining the two invocations. See notes to the passage in James Adam, The Republic, 2d ed., ed. D. A. Rees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Bloom, The Republic of Plato; and Ferrari, Plato: The Republic.

(20) "[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]"; Republic 379a.

(21) Theaetetus 201e-203c. It seems significant in this context to note that Socrates claims to have heard the doctrine that the elements are unknowable in a dream.

(22) Republic 381e.

(23) Republic 382e.

(24) Compare Republic 352b.

(25) Phaedrus 246e-248e, 252c-253c.

(26) Phaedrus 265d-266b.

(27) Republic 511b-d.

(28) Republic 537c.

(29) Republic 477c-d.

(30) Republic 477c. My translation follows Bloom's.

(31) Compare Theaetetus 184e-185a.

(32) See, especially, Gaff Fine, "Knowledge and Belief in Republic V," Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978): 121-39; and "Knowledge and Belief in Republic V-VII," in Stephen Everson, Epistemology, Companions to Ancient Thought, 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For a brief but persuasive critique of coherence accounts of Plato's epistemology in the Republic, see Francisco J. Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophic Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 229-30.

(33) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), 268.

(34) Despite my appropriation of Kantian terminology, my interpretation differs in a number of obvious respects from the neo-Kantian interpretation made famous by Paul Natorp in his Platos Ideenlehre: eine Einfuhrung in den Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1994), the most obvious differences being my focus on the discontinuity between the accounts of human discursive activity given in the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium, and, of course, my claim that the Republic demonstrates limitations of the hypothesis of the radical autonomy of human discourse.

(35) Republic 507d-e (Bloom translation).

(36) See the myth of the Protagoras (320c-323c), the subject of which is also education and its lack. Protagoras describes how Prometheus stole from Hephaestus and Athena "wisdom in the arts, along with fire--for without fire there was no means for anyone to possess or use art itself--and so gave them to man"; Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, Protagoras, trans. R. E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

(37) Republic 516b-c (Bloom translation with alterations).

(38) Nor, indeed, is he said to see "true justice." At 520c, when Socrates imagines himself and Glaucon speaking to the philosopher-ruler who has been raised in the city-in-speech, he speaks not of "true justice" but rather "the truth about the fair, just and good things." See also 517d-e, where Socrates comes very close to equating the just with the statues rather than with their originals. Compare Adams's note to his 517d29.

(39) Republic 515c.

(40) Republic 505d-e. The word I have translated as "presentiment" is [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], an apparent neologism coined, I suggest, to distinguish it from [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which I will discuss in section 8 below. That this "presentiment" is not meant to be a direct intuition of the character of the world outside the cave is confirmed by the fact that its only other occurrence in the Republic is at 516d, where it is used to refer to the habit-based ability of the cave dwellers to predict the succession of appearances in the cave. See Bosanquet's characterization of this capacity as "induction" in Bernard Bosanquet, A Companion to Plato's Republic for English Readers: Being a Commentary Adapted to Davies and Vaughan's Translation, 2d ed. (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976), 236-7. Compare Sophist 250c1, Lysis 216d3.

(41) Republic 521d-e.

(42)Republic 522c.

(43) Republic 522e.

(44) Republic 529d.

(45) Republic 533b-c.

(46) Republic 533c.

(47) Compare Socrates' claim that the man who has received the right kind of musical education will "have the keenest sense for what has been left out and what isn't a fine product of craft and what isn't a fine product of nature"; Republic 401d-e (Bloom translation).

(48) Republic 506d-e.

(49) Republic 509c.

(50) Theaetetus 155d.

(51) Republic 506d-535a.

(52) Compare Symposium 205b3, 206b5, 208b8 with 205b4, 207c9, 208b4, and 208c3. Diotima's attempt to restrain and channel Socrates' wonder seems both to be an aspect of his education in [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]--she is directing him toward a vision of "something wonderfully beautiful in its nature" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (210e4)--and one reason Socrates compares her to "the most perfect sophists" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (208c1).

(53) Republic 514b.

(54) And one of only two in the Republic--the other occurs, characteristically, in the phrase "it's no wonder" at 498d.

(55) Republic 516c.

(56) See note 38 above.

(57) There are two occurrences at 506a, one at 523e, one at 531d, and four at 538a-b.

(58) See Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Phaedrus, Translated with Introduction and Notes (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995), 29 n. 63.

(59) See Ibid., xxvi-xxix.

(60) Phaedrus 271d.

(61) Phaedrus 263b-c.

(62) Phaedrus 276e-277a.

(63) Consider, also, Socrates' representation of the art of rhetoric and the "arguments approaching to testify against her" as interlocutors (260d-e), his characterization of written and spoken discourse as brothers (276a), his characterization of Lysias' discourse as "Lysias himself" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (228e), and his request that Phaedrus read Lysias' word so that "I may hear the man himself" ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (263e). These last two should be contrasted with Lysias' appearance in the Republic among the mute personae.

(64) Phaedrus 252e-253a.

(65) [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; Phaedrus 249c.

(66) The contrast between their divergent dramatic contexts can suggest another way of formulating the distinction between the tyrannic, daimonic, and divine hypotheses as presented in the three dialogues under consideration, a way which makes more explicit the intimate relation between Plato's conception of human discursive activity and the polis. If the Republic presents the attempted self-perfection of the city, and the Phaedrus begins at the boundary of the city, the Symposium--like the Lenea and the City Dionysia--shows the city pointing beyond itself to the divine.

(67) See Apology 29d-31b, 35b, Crito 50a-54e, Charmides 153d, Meno 70e-71b; compare Timaeus 19d-e.

(68) Symposium 177d-e, Charmides 155c-e, Lysis 206a.

(69) Gorgias 521d.

(70) Theaetetus 149a-151d.

(71) Republic 608a, Phaedo 77e-78a, Theaetetus 149d, Charmides 155c, 156d-157d, Meno 80b.

(72) Apology 21b-23b.

(73) Compare Theaetetus 150c-d with 149c.

(74) Apology 23c.

(75) Phaedrus 242b-c. Compare C. J. Rowe, Plato: Phaedrus, with Translation and Commentary (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986), 164-5.

(76) Republic 496c.

(77) See Julius Moravcsik, Plato and Platonism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 108-15.

(78) Compare Symposium 174a with Letter 2 314c.

(79) An earlier version of this essay was presented to the Ancient Philosophy Workshop at the University of California at Berkeley. I am grateful to Thomas Bartscherer, G. R. F. Ferrari, Robert Pippin, Stewart Umphrey, and Richard Velkley for helpful comments, questions, and criticisms. I am particularly indebted to Michael McShane, whose help was instrumental at every stage from first conception to final draft.