[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This volume stems from the 2019 University of Edinburgh Leventis Conference, itself the outgrowth of a decade-long “first reading” of the Republic convened by Mary Margaret McCabe and Verity Harte from 2007–2016 at King’s College London and Yale. As Brad Inwood explains in his heartfelt “summing up” of the essays, its participants aimed to read the text as though for the first time, not prejudging any passage to be more philosophically significant than any other, refusing to appeal to moments later in the dialogue when faced with interpretive difficulties, and (I would add) leaving scholarly axes at the door.[1] The guiding exegetical principle, for the seminar and the conference, was “presumptive Platonic perfection” (466)—or, to quote McCabe’s dictum, the working assumption that “Plato does nothing in vain.” The point is not to revere Plato as an all-knowing sophos, but to trust that Plato the author has total control of his artistic material.[2] So, if the text seems disjointed, illogical, simplistic, or pointlessly digressive, we should suspect that we are missing something; that we’ve failed to attend with adequate care to the parts in relation to the whole, or to the potential import of absences and ellipses; that we need to go back and try harder to meet the demands the dialogue makes on us. Reading Plato this way is an exercise in interpretive humility, an ethical no less than an intellectual task (an admittedly un-Platonic distinction).
The present collection testifies impressively to the value of such an approach.[3] Not all the essays stick closely to the exegetical guidelines, yet each does justice to the richness of Plato’s writing and provides new insight into the text. The volume is notable for its mix of junior and senior scholars and for its spirit of collaboration, discussed in the editors’ introduction and frequently evidenced in the footnotes. Nearly all Greek is translated, in several chapters (Woolf, de Waal, Lane, Aufderheide, Leigh, Barney) it is transliterated, and key Greek terms are transliterated throughout. Most of the essays would be accessible to advanced undergraduates.[4] I will highlight some chapters that exemplify the volume’s methodology and diverse topical range.
Part I (“Rereading”) consists mostly of close analyses of specific passages, arranged sequentially. The theme of “rereading” plays out in a few different ways. Several chapters show how a remark or episode that may seem incidental at first blush assumes a larger significance when reread within the dialogical whole, illuminating or complicating other parts of the dialogue. Tad Brennan and Saloni de Souza both focus on the role of Cephalus, Socrates’ initial interlocutor, who exits the conversation just five pages in. For Brennan, the Cephalus episode reveals the continuity between folk reflection and the philosophical methods pursued elsewhere in the Republic, while de Souza sees an oblique challenge to Socrates’ claim six books later that older people are bad at learning (536d). Through Cephalus’ conspicuous absence, de Souza suggests, Plato asks us to consider how the inquiry into justice might have profited from the epistemic resources of old age. Further examples of this type of rereading include Allison Piñeros Glasscock on the “philosophical dog” of Book 2 (376a–b) and Margaret Hampson on Socrates’ Book 9 remark that the tyrannical man is necessarily aphilos (580a; cf. 575e–576a). Hampson argues that the full-grown tyrant’s incapacity for friendship is not simply explained by his pleonectic psychology; rather, the passage’s larger biographical narrative suggests that his upbringing failed to teach him to value others in the first place. Pleonectic desires are not simply “natural” to us but are “a feature of our badly developed condition” (255)—just as the guardians’ prosocial desires are produced by good nurture and education.
Other chapters focus on moments when the Republic invites us to reread itself—when we are prompted to reconsider an earlier passage from a new vantage, informed by the conversation’s progress since that point. Timothy Clarke takes up Socrates’ surprising claim in Book 4 that justice—the elusive object of the interlocutors’ (and implicitly the reader’s) search—had been “rolling around at our feet from the beginning” (432d), i.e., from when it was first agreed that the members of a community should do only the jobs for which they are naturally suited. Socrates will go on to argue that this principle of “doing one’s own” explains the justice in their model city and in a well-governed human soul. But Clarke proposes that we are also meant to look backward to the description of the first city in Book 2 (the “city of pigs”). If justice really was with us all along, then we didn’t need the second city to find it. This suggests that the simpler first city, which Glaucon so derided, is in fact a paradeigma of justice—even if the second city is superior, both because it is better protected and because its class structure allows for “superlatively happy philosophical lives” (50) as well as complete virtue (51 n.32). In a similar vein, Tamsin de Waal examines Socrates’ Book 7 instructions to Glaucon first to apply the Cave image to (presumably but ambiguously) the Sun and the Line (517a–b) and then to reflect on the Cave once more in light of the guardians’ mathematical education (532b–d). De Waal accepts the verdict of previous commentators that there is no “consistent overall interpretation” (170) that shows how the three images and the guardians’ curriculum all fit together. But she sees the puzzlement as the point: Plato calls attention to the cognitive value of images but also to their inadequacy with respect to the realities they represent. Like the Republic as a whole—“itself an image” (164)—the Sun, Line, and Cave are meant to “summon” (cf. 523c) the reader “to think beyond the images and beyond the text, and to think for themselves” (170). (Hugh Benson offers a more determinate yet broadly compatible reading of the same puzzle in his own chapter.)
A few chapters represent a more familiar type of rereading: fresh cracks at old chestnuts. Fiona Leigh develops a promising new approach to the Book 10 critique of mimesis, arguing that the danger of art, for Plato, is not metaphysical and systematic but contingent and specific to the performance culture of his time and place. In the sole chapter devoted to the myth of Er, Ursula Coope reexamines the prophet’s enigmatic remark that “virtue has no master” (ἀρετὴ δὲ ἀδέσποτον, 617e). On one ancient interpretation, found in Plutarch, the claim is that virtue depends on us—and so, it can be inferred, does vice. Whether we live virtuous or vicious lives is our responsibility. A second line of interpretation, common among Neoplatonists, takes the claim to be that virtue, unlike vice, makes its possessor free. Coope rejects both readings as well as a third, hybrid interpretation from Proclus. A study of the term adespoton and a closer look at the logic and grammar of the Republic 10 passage support her conclusion—to my mind wholly convincing—that the prophet is really saying that virtue cannot be owned. A human being can never truly possess it. Hence the prophet says that each soul will have virtue “more or less” to the extent that she honors or dishonors it. It is not enough for a soul, before attaching itself to a body, to choose the kind of life that conduces to virtue; she must stay actively committed to cultivating virtue throughout her embodied life. Coope sees an important asymmetry between virtue and vice, on Plato’s understanding: whereas living virtuously requires valuing virtue as such, one can become vicious without honoring vice—“through inadvertence or laziness” (343). And perhaps vice can be “owned” in the sense that a person can be incurably bad, though it is impossible to become safely and securely good.
The essays in Part II (“Images, Education and the Good”) take a wider view of the dialogue’s aims and argument. Rachel Barney and Verity Harte both reconsider the Republic’s political-philosophical project. Barney begins by noting that, for all its memorable imagery, the dialogue is remarkably thin on vivid description of the ideally just city—its topography, its infrastructure and architecture, the food and dress and rituals of its inhabitants. This separates the Republic generically from Utopia literature, which tries to persuade the reader of the perfection and possibility of a society through detailed ekphrasis instead of argument. For Barney, Plato’s rigorous avoidance of ekphrasis “shows that he is up to something fundamentally different: a radical project of critique and normative theory in a non-Utopian mode” (359). What the Republic does provide is a “minimalist template” (368) for a just, successful, long-lasting society that could in principle emerge anywhere at any time (see 499c–d)—with the city’s culturally specific elements (Homer, the Delphic oracle, Panhellenism) serving only exempli gratia. Possibility is demonstrated through arguments that the city’s educational and cultural framework accords with “the deepest structural features of human nature” (364). This reading nicely accounts for the tentativeness and provisionality of Socrates’ proposals (see 501b–c) and for his tendency to leave constitutional details to be filled out by the guardians. As Barney puts it, “Platonically just cities founded in various cultures might do things quite differently—within certain strict parameters, of course” (367). I would venture that even these parameters—division of labor, rule by a wise elite, control of artistic production—are open to revision, provided that a compelling enough argument comes along. The Republic’s only fixed principle, it seems to me, is the absolute commitment to dialectic—to the giving and taking of reasons in pursuit of the good, in a spirit of friendship and trust—over force and manipulation (see 327c).
Harte makes a complementary case for the indeterminacy—or “multiple realizability” (367), in Barney’s phrase—of Platonic justice, this time in individuals. Her starting point is a practical problem facing the Republic’s audience: since any reader obviously hasn’t been raised in the ideally just city, she cannot hope to replicate the just life as modeled by the philosopher-ruler’s political activity. Then how can she act on the dialogue’s directive to live justly? For Harte, the key to an answer lies in Socrates’ vignette of “the person of sense” (591c) at the close of Book 9, which appears in lieu of any description of the “aristocratic” or perfectly just individual on the pattern of the character-portraits in Books 8–9 (despite what’s affirmed at 544e). The person of sense is “an aspirant just and philosophical individual” and “best understood as a figure for the auditor or reader of the work” (443). On Harte’s interpretation, the vignette concludes with the prospect of genuinely political expressions of justice outside the ideal city. Harte finds two such expressions in Plato’s work itself—“politics” in an unconventional sense but far from quietistic. The first is Socrates’ carrying out of his philosophical mission to “examine [himself] and others” (Apology 28e), as depicted in many of the dialogues, the Republic included. The second is Plato’s own act of writing, performed in the non-ideal civic environment of fourth-century Athens. Each example, Harte suggests, can be understood as an attempt at city-founding (see 592b: heauton katoikizein)—within the geographical and institutional polis, but in the spirit of the ideal city: “a founding in progress, outreach with the potential to build a political community beyond oneself by means of one’s own distinctive political activity” (457).
McCabe and Trépanier’s volume proves that the work of the Republic—“the master’s masterpiece” (1)—is still in progress, the “we” of Socrates and his friends expanding to include new communities of readers as co-participants in their conversation about justice. In this sense, as Inwood aptly concludes (469), the dialogue is unfinished and won’t ever be finished—so long as it is read (and reread) with the openness and attention displayed in these essays.
Authors and Titles
Mary Margaret McCabe and Simon Trépanier: Introduction
Part I. Rereading
- Tad Brennan: Cephalus, patêr tou logou
- Saloni de Souza: Running Before You Can’t Walk: Some Thoughts about Old Age and Epistemic Progress on Rereading the Republic
- Timothy Clarke: Justice in Simpler Times
- Allison Piñeros Glasscock: Loving Learning: Plato’s Philosophical Dogs and the Education of the Guardians
- Alex G. Long: Nature in Politics and Moral Psychology
- Barbara M. Sattler: From the Object to the Subject: Plato’s Version of the Principle of Non-Contradiction in Republic 4
- Raphael Woolf: Dolphins and Dialectic
- Simon Trépanier: The Cave before Plato
- Tamsin de Waal: Reflecting on Images in Plato’s Republic
- Merrick Anderson: A New Role for the Philosopher-Rulers: Situating 519c–521b in Its Argumentative Context
- Hugh H. Benson: Dialectic in the Cave
- Melissa Lane: Plato’s Neglected Critiques of Democratic Cities in Republic 8 and 9: Inside and Outside the Narrative of Representative Fathers and Sons
- Margaret Hampson: The Tyrant and the Failure of Philia: Rereading the Account of the Tyrannical Character
- Katharine R. O’Reilly: Pain and Perspective in Republic 9
- Joachim Aufderheide: “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”: Pleasure and Happiness in Plato’s Republic
- Fiona Leigh: “Mimesis, Art and the Metaphysics of Appearances in Republic 10”
- Ursula Coope: “Virtue Has No Master”
Part II. Images, Education and the Good
- Rachel Barney: Imagery, Utopia and Plato’s Republic
- Sarah Broadie: Why the Rulers’ Mathematical Education?
- Mary Margaret McCabe: Glaucon, Gyges and the Good
- Christopher Rowe: The Good Reread: A Reply to MM
- Verity Harte: Breaking the Frame: Justice and Politics Inside and Outside the Republic’s City
Brad Inwood: Summing Up: “The Dog That Didn’t Bark”
Notes
[1] As a visiting graduate student at KCL, I was fortunate to participate in two of the weeklong seminars, on Books 4 and 5. They provided a true paradeigma for serious, joyful, adventurous, and non-hierarchical collaboration.
[2] Compare H. D. F Kitto, “Pindar and Plato,” in Poiesis: Structure and Thought (Berkeley, 1966), 243–56.
[3] The back cover advertises 24 original essays, but there are 23 chapters in all. Tad Brennan’s chapter appeared in Phronesis in 2022; Sarah Broadie’s chapter reproduces material from two previous books (but works well as a standalone essay); Christopher Rowe’s contribution is a brief but suggestive reply to McCabe’s chapter.
[4] The bibliography reflects the state of the art of (mainly Anglophone) Republic scholarship. The book includes an index locorum and analytical index rerum and is generally well produced. I found about 40 typos, nearly all minor; 458a8 should read 450a8 on page 249 and McCabe 2020 (cited at 299 n.9) is missing from the bibliography.