Plato. - Soul, world, and idea: an interpretation of Platos Republic and Phaedo

Soul, World, and Idea

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Soul, world, and idea : an interpretation of Plato's "Republic" and "Phaedo" / Daniel Sherman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-7232-2 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8530-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-7233-9 (electronic)

1. Plato. 2. Soul. 3. Plato. Republic. 4. Plato. Phaedo. I. Title.

B398.S7S48 2013

184--dc23

2013024292

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

The following interpretation of Plato reflects an ongoing philosophical dialogue about who we are, or can beat our best, our worst, and everything in between. As a participant in this dialogical exchange I have benefited from various discussions with teachers, colleagues, and students, and I take this opportunity to express my gratitude. One figure stands out in particular, that of Jacob Klein, whose interpretation of Plato was the starting point for my own. For all I know, Mr. Klein would have smiled indulgently on reading my interpretation. But I feel safe in saying that he would have endorsed my view of engaged dialogue (dialegesthai) as having ontological significance for Plato. I was a young student at St. Johns College many years ago by now, where Klein taught, though I should stress that my serious study of his interpretation occurred only after I had graduated. But both while I was there and ever more deeply since, Klein influenced me as a model for what it means to take teaching, learning, and dialogue seriouslyboth as a way of life and as an activity having itself philosophical significance. And the thesis of the present work is that these activities have their ground in a platonic ontology. This ontology or metaphysics is traced out in my explication of two dialogues, primarily the Republic, with extended help from the Phaedo. It is often remarked that each generation, each epoch, has its Plato. While it has not been my goal to present a so-called modern Plato, some will find it so, to the point of distortion or misrepresentation. I ask only that they hear me out, that at least my reading is tied to a careful explication of text. Concerning style, on the whole I have tried to stick with the language that has served me well in teaching young students. Some few passages in these two dialogues are dense enough without encumbering the interpretation with too technical a vocabulary.

I would also like to thank the following for their written and/or oral comments on earlier versions of the text and my reading of Plato: Eva Brann, David Lachterman, H.S. Harris, David Savan, Joe Gonda, and the publishers anonymous readers. At various times along the way, others have offered a critical response, either to select sections in an exchange of emails, or in conversation, and while I have not always agreed with their comments I am grateful for their having taken the time to thoughtfully respond: among them I recall Drew Hyland, Bert Dreyfus, Nick Smith, Allan Silverman, Mary Margaret McCabe, and Verity Harte. A thank you as well to my kind and patient editor, Jana Hodges-Kluck. Finally, I thank my wife, Yvette, for her encouragement and for putting up with the many hours that I spent hidden away in my study reading, writing, and making long comments on student papers.

The main topic of this book is an examination of the interrelation for Plato of soul, the world of its experience, and the Ideas. I explore this relationship as developed in the Republic and Phaedo. But this exposition also reveals that images and our capacity for image-making play a key role in that triadic interrelationship. For it is in the exercise of this capacity that our world takes on its shape and meaning. In effect, we interpret our experience by telling ourselves a story about it. And some stories are more successful than otherssome are more confining or limiting, some more illuminating and liberating. But these stories, these images, are not made out of whole cloth, as it were. They are not simply fictions, however rational, not simply subjective, useful impositions. For the world presents itself to us in its readability, it meets us halfway, so to speak. The question is which stories, which images, give a better account and why. Note that I am not claiming that we construct reality, impose identities. Rather, that identities are a result of successive, ever improving, interactions between soul (the interpretive agent), the world(s) of its experience, and the Ideas that give it meaning (the activities of dianoia and nosis).

The simple, and certainly true, view of what Plato thought about images, of course, is that they are less real than their originals, less real, less true, etc. This negative view, I argue, needs to be supplemented by a positive one. A recurrent theme in what follows is an attempt to look at what else Plato thought about images, and our capacity for image-making taken in a larger sense. I examine Platos use of specific imageslooking at why and how in a given context he uses them, offering interpretations of the key images themselvesas well as Platos view of images per se. It will turn out (particularly in the latter case) that the human capacity for interpreting images and for image-making of various sorts is rather differentmore complex and philosophically important to Platos ontologythan the simple view would suggest. Images, and image-making, in short, will be seen to play an unexpectedly positive role in determining what is ontologically real. Paradoxically, the everyday version of the same activity, carried out unaware, is the pervasive source of just what keeps us from progressing towards knowledge, and changing the way we live. It keeps us in chains, as it were. Reading images is a basic activity of the soul. Reading them correctly is what in a sense distinguishes the philosopher from the lover of sights and sounds, knowledge from opinion. Learning to read them correctly is what underlies the education of the philosopher. The first and most important step in this, the fundamental ontological shift, is learning to see the many kinds of images precisely as images. By images, of course, I do not mean simply the literally visible, as will become clear in the development of my argument. The notion of image that I will claim for Plato is as far removed from the sense of visible/visual image (though beginning with that) as sight is from insight, speech, and speech acts from discourse as dialegesthaithat is to say, the dialogue of the soul with others, and with itself, about the various objects of its varied experience.