Everyone seeks what is good. No one willingly does wrong. All virtues amount to one, namely wisdom, so that all vice is the effect of ignorance while knowledge stands behind every virtue. These paradoxes at the gateway to philosophy are promising enough that they draw the newcomer in, so false to experience they repel. Plato's interpreters need to confront the paradoxes in a way that mitigates their offence to good sense without undermining their valuable challenge to unreflective moralising.
One approach makes the paradoxes strategic. Socrates does not put his claims forward in full voice but deploys them among particular interlocutors, for particular purposes. P. develops a variation on this approach, bringing interpretative pressure to bear on the dialogues associated with the paradoxes in order to find them something other than doctrinal presentations that everyone seeks the good, etc.
P. opens with the Apology, closes with the Laws, but dwells on the Gorgias, Meno and Protagoras, in three long chapters that constitute the bulk of this book. Although it is hard to pin down the results exactly, she seems to conclude that according to Plato's Socrates people do not always seek the good and knowledge does not carry the day. Instead Socrates brings tempered, Aristotelian-sounding versions of those principles into moral philosophy. Even bad choices reveal judgement at work; phronêsis while not moral knowledge can guide human life (p. 200). Virtue is knowledge, but only given the diligence and the thirst for truth that are not themselves items of knowledge (p. 130). For wisdom joins with action inasmuch as some volitional ‘subrational’ core persists even in Socratic wisdom (pp. 113, 197). The knowledge that pilots life carries motive force, and motive force contains insight (p. 208).
The theory sounds plausible enough as a view about human beings and even perhaps as a view that Plato might have held. It is a bit denatured for my taste as readings of Plato go, but other readers might not share my taste. And this book's passages of exposition, and its explorations of moral theory, are compelling. P. meditates helpfully on the stingray in the Meno (p. 96). She is thoughtful in elucidating the difference between two conceptions of reason (p. 184), or pointing out our confused attitudes towards punishment (p. 79). What keeps interfering is the methodology with which P. moves towards the meanings of the dialogues she reads. However plausible the conclusion, it emerges out of so many contestable inferences that one is left unsure of the result as a reading of Plato.
Straussian elements create one distraction: P.'s nod towards an esoteric reading that has philosophers allying themselves with a society's elite (p. 163), and the convention of turning idiomatic phrases ta kala and ta agatha into unidiomatic English ‘the noble things’, ‘the good things’ (pp. 46, 48, 54, 90, 187, 223). One might take issue with the importation of doctrines from one dialogue into another, as when P. explicates Gorgias and Protagoras using the Republic's tripartite psychology (pp. 50–2, 206) and its definition of justice (p. 61). Some claims call for support they do not receive: that Socrates interprets the Simonides poem with intentionally ‘crazy’ suggestions (pp. 166, 259 n. 24); that an analogy to walking statues implies deceptive mimêsis (pp. 121–2); that for Plato lying is injustice (p. 159).
Individual points of disagreement aside, my main concern has to do with P.'s principal interpretative technique of carrying a claim beyond the form in which a dialogue asserts it. In its more plausible version this is the way of reading in which one notices a shift in the way a dialogue defines a view, and follows that shift to pass from stark claims towards the trickier form they take later in the same conversation. Thus the Meno moves between epithumeô ‘desire’ and boulomai ‘wish, want’ as it prepares a foundation for virtue (pp. 91–3). The Laws drifts away from non-retributive conceptions of punishment (pp. 78–9).
Less plausibly P. finds an argument faulty and calls this Plato's intentional presentation of a faulty argument, and as such an incitement to further reasoning. The reader is meant to take the argument and fix it; what comes of that repair is the considered theory underlying the dialogue. ‘Perhaps the arguments’ very defectiveness serves a constructive purpose as well … [Socrates] leaves a great deal of work to the interlocutor or onlooker' (p. 31; cf. p. 249 n. 21). ‘This form of incomplete argumentation is Plato's and apparently Socrates’ preferred method of sparking the thought even of the most promising' (p. 67).
An example that P. does not give occurs in the Protagoras. Socrates goes from a sentence of the form ‘All A are B’ to ‘All B are A’, and Protagoras diagnoses that error at length (350c–d). Later Socrates wins agreement from Protagoras that everything pleasant is good and honourable (358a), and then referring back to this agreement says fallaciously that everything honourable is pleasant (360a). This time Protagoras does not notice. Here I can agree that an argument goes intentionally awry.
But exactly what makes it reasonable to read that case as a pointed lapse in logic distinguishes it from most fallacies in Plato. For Socrates does not prevail – his error is caught – and we can call the passage self-conscious. Where are the comparable indicators of self-consciousness in P.'s examples, the sign that errors are there on purpose? She says Socrates ‘denies’ the possibility of ‘radical evil’ (pp. 54, 90), thereby inviting a reply from Meno that does not come (p. 254 n. 10). But Socrates would never have heard of radical evil. P. says Socrates ‘egregiously fails to define justice’ in Plato's Gorgias. As all dialectic depends on definitions, he must be practising an imitation of dialectic, not the real thing (p. 66). This apparently means that Socrates is not practising dialectic as the Eleatic Stranger does – no surprise there, and nothing egregious. The test for bad logic comes to feel subjective, as does the inference that the faulty reasoning has a specific intended effect. ‘Socrates deliberately leaves [Meno] with an unsatisfactory conclusion as the best way to keep him thinking’ (p. 128). ‘So poor is this proof of the soul's immortality that it throws us back upon the question of what serious thought Socrates could mean to convey’ by recollection (p. 103), as if only a fool could take him to mean a serious thought about innate ideas, and Plato's true student moves on to a less evident conclusion.
Complaining about the method of esoteric reading runs the risk of making the more straightforward reader look like a babe in arms. So it is tiresome to complain and not likely to persuade. But maybe we can set aside pieties about Plato the pedagogue who developed a cryptographic way of writing in order to teach his readers. If faulty arguments really had that superb pedagogical effect, humanity has had no shortage of educators. I imagined Socrates teaching by positive example instead, with an eye to clarity and rigour. Anyway, suppose that Plato does educate by having his readers try out his arguments, see where they fail and deduce deeper claims about virtue. What would it mean that until recently he had no readers who responded to his dialogues in the appropriate way; that the bad arguments went unnoticed for thousands of years and by millions of readers? Writers may have existed all of whose readers failed to grasp what their works really meant. (I leave it to others to say whether being so cryptic makes the writers better or worse.) But there have been no great teachers all of whose students failed to learn. That is the Plato that these esoteric interpretations leave us with, the ineptest educator in the history of thought.
