Platonic Ideals

A STORY IN ANTIQUITY tells how Plato dreamt that upon his death, his soul rose up like a swan. The bird was so beautiful that onlookers attempted to shoot it down but succeeded only in dislodging a feather or two.

For Platonic philosophy, the moral of this allegory is the belief that subsequent generations have grasped only aspects of Plato’s thought without comprehending its totality. The dominant view has found in Plato a spiritual thinker–a mystic and idealist, for whom true reality could only be thought, not seen or heard. In Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, Plato points up towards the heavens, while for William Butler Yeats, “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays / Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.” A more sinister Plato emerged during World War II, when Karl Popper criticized him as an enemy of “open societies”–a totalitarian thinker whose artistry only thinly disguises a puritanical self-righteousness and will to power. But others, such as Alfred North Whitehead, commended Plato for the first resolute commitment to the mathematization of nature, and the rationalization of society: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

A welcome addition to this “series of footnotes” comes in the form of Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic. Brann is a senior tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. An archaeologist by training, she has over a long career published full-length books on an impressive variety of topics–Greek pottery, Homer, the imagination, ontology, time, education–as well as three translations from German and ancient Greek. Such a broad background makes her well qualified to speak on the multifarious topics in Plato’s Republic. In The Music of the Republic, Brann offers a collection of fourteen essays on a variety of Platonic dialogues and themes. Short essays deal with the Apology, the Charmides, and the definition of time in the Timaeus–along with Plato’s theory of ideas and the challenge of teaching Plato to undergraduates. More extensive and intricate are the two pieces on the Phaedo, three on the Sophist, and four on the Republic.

The overall voice is that of a teacher speaking to like-minded teachers. At another level, the book serves as a companion piece for someone intent on reading Plato with slow deliberation. Brann maintains a running commentary: Following the general order of the Phaedo, the Republic, or the Sophist, she gives overviews and surveys, summarizes arguments, paraphrases passages, explicates underlying images and themes, and peppers the whole with references to other works.

Here Brann is at her strongest. She has a literary critic’s eye for significant detail and is generous with her ideas about the construction, themes, and wordplay of the dialogues. The Phaedo, for instance, is set during the Athenian festival of the Theseia, in which a ship was sent to Crete in commemoration of Theseus’ original expedition, when he killed the Minotaur and freed Athens from Minos’ yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens. Brann uniquely (to my knowledge) explicates in detail how this setting is no mere backdrop: The dialogue is divided into fourteen sections; Socrates is depicted as the new Theseus; various Minotaurs are confronted, if not defeated–including death itself, the fear of death, misology or hatred of rational argument, and even the excessive attachment to one master or teacher, in this case Socrates himself with his “bull-like” glances.

Similarly, the title essay, “The Music of the Republic,” has a remarkable discussion of the architecture of the Platonic dialogue: Brann sees the Republic as a descent into and ascent from the underworld, with the transforming vision of the “Good beyond essence” at its center. There are innumerable other observations and details that in themselves make The Music of the Republic rewarding. Brann brings a lifetime of experience, reading, and teaching to bear upon her subject, and as a good teacher, she is clear and unstinting with her insights. There is no hiding behind cluttered prose or scholarly name-dropping. She seems conversational and relaxed, serious yet not pedantic or without a sense of fun. Her detailed observations leave one with a renewed respect for Plato’s subtle artistry: Seemingly irrelevant details appear as a strand in the whole tapestry; an apparently chance word, name, or remark is imbued with some greater importance.

This attention to detail, however, can at times prove confusing, and if the book suffers from a flaw, it is that it occupies the ambiguous ground between running textual commentary and a more global interpretation of the Platonic philosophy. Brann can leap from, say, an etymology to “pretty confident interpretive conclusions” in ways that can be disorienting. Startling conclusions are fired off, then dropped again as the commentary speeds on.

So, for example, Brann claims that the Republic is a clarion call to “dialogic community.” But one has to jump to and fro in order to gather together Brann’s major reasons for this contention. They include the following: First, contrary to Popper, it is unfair and false to label Plato a proto-Fascist or Marxist, or a reactionary aristocrat whose political ideas blindly follow the prejudices of his class. Second, contrary to the literalism of many philosophical interpreters, the Platonic philosophy cannot be reduced to a putative “Theory of Forms” extracted from a few passages. For Plato, philosophy itself is more process than a set of fixed conclusions; philosophy is a process of dialogue between diverse interlocutors united in their search for a single idea. Finally, Plato saw his utopia not as a practical possibility but simply as a regulative ideal to inspire one as one navigates the turbulent multiplicities and dialogues of democratic Athens.

BUT DESPITE some plausible arguments in her favor, Brann’s conclusions on this central question are unorthodox and unconvincing. First, it requires some spectacular interpretative somersaults to explain away the sharp criticism (in Book Eight of the Republic, notably) of mass democracy for such vices as indecision, lack of discipline, lack of respect for expertise, false egalitarianism, and susceptibility to tyranny. Furthermore, the fact that Plato expresses his thought in dialogue form does not necessarily make him a dialogical thinker. Dialogue is for Plato one major avenue to knowledge, but insights can also be solitary affairs–difficult, if not impossible, to communicate. Brann must consistently downplay the striving for unity of thought that is evident in Plato’s stress upon mathematics and systematic dialectic.

TO EXPLAIN HER VIEW of Plato as a dialogical philosopher, Brann might have included some comparative remarks on thinkers for whom dialogue is important, such as Buber, Marcel, Habermas, Hermans, and others. In such omissions, it is as if Brann, on the verge of taking flight after her Plato, demurs and refuses to leave the more solid ground of commentary. This is unfortunate, given that she does not see her book as simply a work of antiquarian piety or the Platonic dialogues as curious relics of a culture that is gone forever. On the contrary, Brann finds in Plato possible solutions to contemporary problems–a refutation of nihilism, for instance, as well as a healthy response to the “postmodern theory of images that breaks off their connection to an original in favor of an infinite self-mirroring.”

Perhaps most important in this regard is Plato’s lifelong effort to understand the phenomenon of sophistry–that uncanny rhetorical ability to make the false appear true. Ours is very much a time for fast-talkers and spin-doctors, not only in politics but also in those quarters of academia that have called into question the constraints of fact and objective truth.

Brann’s nuanced discussion of the concept of appearances in the Republic and Sophist acknowledges an almost inevitable slippage between reality and image–yet at the same time refuses to jettison the Platonic faith in a single constant reality behind the kaleidoscopes of images. Thus, for Brann, Plato’s variegated dialogues (with their wealth of personality sketches, conversations, arguments, metaphors, and myths) should recall us to the complex multiplicity of reality, while at the same time offering encouragement not to abandon the struggle to formulate coherent accounts of reality. For catching this one feather, Brann’s book is worth reading. But it also catches many other feathers from the rising Plato–and The Music of the Republic should be applauded as a stimulating treatment of a perennially fascinating thinker.

Will Desmond is a lecturer in the Department of Classics at Yale University.