Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues

Turning from recent reinterpretations of Plato to the dialogues, I immediately faced a huge problem: Plato never says anything in his own name. How do we know what he—as opposed to any of the characters he presents speaking in the dialogues—actually thought? It was common for readers to take a short cut and identify Plato with Socrates, who is obviously the dominant philosophical character and speaker. But there remained the disquieting fact: Plato did not always present a man named Socrates as the philosopher speaking. Why not? And what should we make of that fact? In the nineteenth century scholars, especially in Germany, attempted to make the presentation of philosophy in the dialogues more consistent by arguing that many of the dialogues traditionally attributed to Plato were inauthentic. There was, however, little agreement on which dialogues had been improperly attributed to Plato or why. A greater consensus emerged around another explanation of the observed differences among the dialogues: they pointed to Plato's development from “early” dialogues in which Socrates merely questioned the opinions of others to “middle” dialogues in which Plato put his own “theory of the ideas” into the mouth of Socrates to “late dialogues” in which Socrates is often not the major philosophical spokesman. But this approach, too, ran aground in the late twentieth century, because no one actually knows when or in what order Plato wrote the dialogues.Footnote ³¹

Enter Catherine Zuckert circa 1994. I had been trained by Leo Strauss and his “first generation” students to read each of the dialogues as an artistic whole, characterized by “logographic necessity.” I thus approached the problem of Plato's not saying anything in his own name by observing that, even though he did not say anything in his own name, he was responsible for the topic, selection of characters, setting, time, and outcome of each of the conversations he related. In other words, I thought one could see his hand and perhaps identify his thought in the organization of each of the dialogues taken singly—and ultimately in the relation of each to the others.

I took my “Platonic turn,” as Kevin Cherry dubs it—that is, I discovered that Plato was not attributing the same positions to all the philosophers he presented in the dialogues—when teaching a graduate seminar on the trilogy at Fordham University. In the last class, a student kept talking about the Eleatic Stranger's “idea of the good,” and I responded that the Eleatic does not recognize or appeal to any such idea. The “greatest” ideas about which he speaks are of being, rest, motion, same and different—not of the good, just, or noble like Socrates. Unlike the Socratic ideas, moreover, the Eleatic's ideas do not exist purely “in themselves”; some of them coexist with others. I wrote an article detailing the apparent similarities, but fundamental differences, between Socrates and the Eleatic, and then turned to studying the Parmenides, the dialogue in which the Eleatic's philosophical “father” or “teacher” examines the young Socrates. Because the Eleatic states explicitly that he has modified the doctrines of his famous predecessor, and Parmenides just as explicitly criticizes Socrates's argument about the ideas, I then had three different philosophical positions advocated by three different characters. I knew that there was another dialogue in which a philosopher-statesman named Timaeus presents an account of the intelligible construction of the visible cosmos to Socrates, who merely listens, and that the philosopher in the Laws and Epinomis is called the Athenian Stranger. (This latter I initially thought might be Socrates. But after I noticed that the Athenian never mentions the Peloponnesian War, which forms the backdrop of most, if not all, of the Socratic dialogues, cites the epic poets Homer and Hesiod positively and uncritically, and proposes a view of the cosmos in which good and bad souls are constantly at war, I concluded that he, too, articulated a different comprehensive view.)

But then I confronted another problem: Plato's depiction of each of these non-Socratic philosophers is limited to one or two dialogues. That was manageable. But how was I going to deal with Socrates, the philosopher who appears in thirty-three of the thirty-five? Having worked on the Parmenides, in which Plato gives us our first view of a very young Socrates, I wondered: might it be possible to line the dialogues up in terms of their dramatic dates? In fact, I found that it was. To be sure, the evidence concerning the dramatic dates of many of the dialogues is slight and in some cases contradictory. As presented, some of the most important conversations, for instance, those related in the Republic and Phaedrus, could not actually have taken place, because the characters shown were not all in Athens at the time indicated. The dating, according to the time at which Plato indicates the conversation occurred—and not, I should emphasize, a hypothetical estimate of the date at which Plato wrote the dialogue in question—had to be somewhat tenuous. As I studied the dialogues further, I changed my mind about the dramatic dates of some, and concluded in the end that the references to historical events and people served only as hints or indications of the order in which the conversations took place. More important than the dramatic date of any particular dialogue was the narrative that emerged from trying to line up the dialogues according to the indications of their dates: they traced the emergence, development, and limitations of Socrates as a distinctive kind of philosopher.

Because Michael Davis's remarks “On the Coherence of Plato's Philosophers” are so elegantly and artfully written, I am not certain that I have understood them. I believe, however, that he is implicitly questioning the adequacy of my attempt, and perhaps any attempt, to show that there is a unity or principle of coherence in Plato's corpus—particularly on the basis of the dramatic dates of the individual dialogues.

Davis raises the question explicitly in terms of the relation of the parts to the whole and suggests, following Heidegger, that we mortals have to begin with a part and that both our beginning point and our final view of that part as well as of the whole will be limited by the fact that we are mortal and live in time. With regard to reading Plato specifically, that means that all of us necessarily begin with a single dialogue and that we initially read that dialogue as a whole. In a sense, this is true; each dialogue is presented as a discrete conversation. Davis acknowledges that some of the dialogues are explicitly linked to each other, but he observes that each of the dialogues most obviously related to one another in the so-called trilogy points to a fundamental duality between being and becoming that appears in different forms. Plato shows that “try as we must to know the whole, we nevertheless only ever get parts masquerading as the whole. And yet at the same time, Plato's account shows us that and why, since it is not possible for mortals to live apart from some version of the whole in some way born of some version of ‘the desire to know,’ grasping these parts sequentially and seeing their interrelation, we come to be aware of a partiality that would not be available to us without some intimation of the whole of which it is only a part.” Davis thus concludes that “understanding the necessary, albeit problematic, togetherness of this pair—of what moves us, on the one hand, to treat the Theatetus as a whole and, at the same time, to understand it as the bridge between the Meno and the Euthyphro, on the other—is self-knowledge. This is the goal of Socratic philosophy, which is to say, for Plato, and (if I have understood her correctly) for Catherine Zuckert too, it is the goal of philosophy simply.”

There is clearly a significant overlap between the way in which Davis reads the dialogues and the way I do. But I also think there are some important differences. He emphasizes the fact that all human inquiry has to begin somewhere; and he suggests, like Heidegger, that we are thrown into circumstances not of our own choosing as a result, one might say, of dispensation or chance. I agree that we begin all inquiries, therefore, somewhat arbitrarily when, like the interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues, we question opinions we have absorbed from our immediate environment. Davis may also be correct in suggesting that “the explicit question of a dialogue may never truly be answered” adequately in that dialogue. However, I am not certain what exactly Davis means when he writes that “the true origin of this question is nevertheless always disclosed.” He seems to be referring to the inescapably dual nature of all things that provokes us to continue thinking by preventing us from coming to an altogether satisfactory answer to our questions. If so, all the dialogues show basically the same thing. I don't think they do. Nor do I think that “self-knowledge stands in for knowledge,” that self-knowledge is the goal of philosophy, or that Socrates and Plato thought that it was. Asking why we seek knowledge and of what constitutes the necessary first step, but it is only a first step. What is first for us is not necessarily first in itself. And to acquire self-knowledge, we have to come to understand what is not-self. We are all wholes to a certain extent as individuals and even as communities, but we are clearly also only parts of a broader whole, the only parts that may have access, however dimly, to the whole as a whole. In Plato's Philosophers, I argue that Plato shows that Socratic philosophy is the best form of philosophy, but by presenting the other philosophers, who give different arguments in addressing different sorts of interlocutors, he also shows that Socratic philosophy is by no means completely adequate. A clear sign of this inadequacy is Socrates's failure to articulate a cosmology. His search for self-knowledge would presumably include knowledge of what kind of being he is or of what we call human nature; but one cannot know human nature without understanding the relation between this specific kind of nature and nature as a whole. The other philosophers featured in the dialogues do not therefore merely represent “supporting characters” in the overall narrative; they represent real alternatives, each having advantages or taking account of points that Socrates's philosophy does not, but each having its own faults or limitations as well. The narrative or story indicated by the dramatic dates that I argue enables us to see the dialogues in relation to one another does not indicate the order in which any student should read the dialogues. I suspect that students will continue to begin with the Apology of Socrates, often taken to be first, even though it clearly constitutes a speech Socrates gave very late in his life. The importance of the order that emerges from the dramatic dating becomes evident to those who have read and studied a great many, if not all of the dialogues and begin to ask: what does Plato think about the characters and arguments he has presented? If he does not simply agree with Socrates and use his teacher as spokesman for his own ideas, does he agree with Timaeus? Or the Eleatic Stranger? Or the Athenian? Or, as Joseph Cropsey came to think, with Parmenides? Plato's Philosophers concludes with a description of the particular problems Plato highlights in his presentations of each of these “other” philosophers.

Like Davis, Collins emphasizes the importance or question of the beginning—in this case of my book. She focuses, in particular, on problems that arise from what she calls the “double-frame”: (1) the presentation of the dialogues in accord with their dramatic dating, and (2) my contention that Plato presents the life of Socrates and the distinctive form of philosophy he practices as best in comparison with the other philosophers we encounter in the dialogues, even though he shows that Socratic philosophy is not perfectly adequate.

I suggest that the dramatic dates of the dialogues enable us to string them together to form an account of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. But, Collins observes, I almost immediately break from that format by considering parts of three dialogues—Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium—separated from the dramatic dates and general content of those dialogues taken as wholes. I use these parts to construct an account of Socrates's development of a distinctive form of philosophy in response to the problems Plato dramatized in earlier politics, poetry, and philosophy. How, she asks, can I justify such a break?

After announcing my thesis with regard to the story that emerges if we attend to the indications provided by the dramatic dates, in the introduction to Plato's Philosophers I observe that there are different kinds of dialogues. Some do not even have dramatic dates, but can be incorporated into the story on the basis of their thematic content. Most are written as prose dramas in which we read accounts of the conversations that occurred without any other frame or commentary. But, as Strauss pointed out, nine of the dialogues are narrated—four entirely by Socrates (Lysis, Lovers, Charmides, Republic), two by Socrates after a dramatic introduction (Protagoras and Euthydemus), three and only three (Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium) by other characters. And these happen to be the three dialogues which contain segments with dramatic dates different from the conversations in which they are recounted that describe stages in Socrates's philosophical development. In other words, it is not I, but Plato (and Strauss) who point out the exceptional character of these dialogues. I was using the same basic form of analysis when I put these segments together to trace that development as I did using the dramatic dates to string the dialogues taken as wholes together. I explain why I think Plato shows Socrates admitting that he once studied natural philosophy only on the day of his death, after he was convicted of the capital crime of not believing in the gods of the city. In the defense speech Plato has him give at his trial he denied investigating such questions. The account Phaedo gives of Socrates's description of the reasons he developed his “hypothesis” concerning the ideas is, moreover, not presented directly by Socrates himself, but in a later description of Socrates's last conversation by one of his admirers to another. In other words, like the later recitation of the exchange between Socrates and Zeno as well as that between Parmenides and Socrates, the narrative is two times removed from the conversations described.

By presenting Parmenides's critique of Socrates's “hypothesis” concerning the ideas as occurring in approximately 450 BCE, Plato indicates that Socrates turned away from his study of natural philosophy before he was twenty years old. However, he also shows that Socrates learned that his “turn” to examining the logoi (apparently of other philosophers such as Anaxagoras and Zeno) and the “hypothesis” concerning the ideas he developed in order to do so were not adequate. Socrates does not relate Parmenides's critique of his argument about the ideas to the friends who have assembled in his cell on the last day of his life, because he is trying to convince them that they will be able to continue to philosophize in his absence. Seeking to encourage rather than to discourage, he does not point out the problems Parmenides identified when he presents his hypothesis about the ideas as a branch to which his younger friends can safely cling. As Collins observes, that hypothesis includes Eleatic elements insofar as it suggests that only purely intelligible, unchanging beings such as the ideas can be truly known; but it also represents an important break from Parmenides in maintaining that there is more than one such being.

Asking why Socrates does not mention Eleatic philosophy and his relation to it in the “intellectual autobiography” he presents in the Phaedo, Collins takes that statement to constitute a full account of his development as a philosopher. I argue, on the contrary, that when we look back from Socrates's statement of where and why he began to philosophize as he does in the Phaedo to the conversations Plato depicts as having occurred before this final statement, we see that Socrates developed his distinctive way of philosophizing in stages. In his first depiction of Socrates as a young philosopher in the Parmenides, Plato shows that Socrates was unable to respond to the elderly Eleatic's criticisms of his argument concerning the ideas and was, therefore, necessarily aware of its inadequacies. But in the dialogues that follow the Parmenides dramatically, Plato also shows that Socrates did not follow Parmenides's advice. He does not practice arguing in the Eleatic style in terms of the “is” and “is not” (although he does occasionally employ such sophistical arguments). Instead, we are told in the Symposium that Socrates learned how to avoid the aporiai resulting from the Eleatic opposition between what is and what is not (exemplified by the elder Eleatic's demonstration of his mode of philosophizing in the Parmenides) by examining opinion as that which is between knowledge and ignorance. He suggests that he learned this from a priestess named Diotima at least ten years before the plague which occurred in 429 BCE and thus after the conversation related in the Parmenides. The opinions he began to investigate concerned especially the noble or the beautiful and the good, because Socrates also learned from Diotima that the good is what human beings most desire. As a result of her instruction Socrates became a “philosopher” who claims to know only “the erotic things,” that is, what human beings desire and thus by extension what we most want to learn in order to satisfy our deepest desire. He emphatically does not claim to be a “wise guy” (sophos) who possesses such knowledge. In the Apology he explains that his investigations of the opinions of the politicians, poets, and artisans concerning the noble and good angered the fathers of the young men who not only enjoyed seeing Socrates refute their elders but also went home and imitated him. Only after he is convicted does Socrates make it clear that he cannot explain why he does what he does to the Athenian demos. To learn why Socrates proceeds as he does, we readers have to look back at the dialogues in which Plato shows him examining a variety of other individuals and the fragmented narrative account others provide of his development.

In the “dramatic” dialogues, Plato relates what Socrates asked and the answers he received to his queries, but not the reasons why he came to ask such questions instead of engaging in either natural or Eleatic philosophy in the mode of his predecessors. In writing narrated as well as dramatic dialogues, Plato thus preserves a distinction between philosophical questioning and argumentation, on the one hand, and a narrative account or history of the way and reasons why something—in this case, a certain kind of philosophical practice—emerged. Socrates himself usually asks what something is, not how or why it came to be what it is.Footnote ³² That is both the advantage and the limitation of Socratic philosophy. It is the reason he cannot explain the way in which the ever-changing sensible things “participate” in the purely intelligible, eternally unchanging ideas, that is, why he does not have a cosmology. It is also the reason that he can provide better answers to the question about what human beings truly seek in life—the good, the noble, and the just—than the other philosophers.

Collins does not restrict her questions about my account of Plato's depiction of the emergence, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy to what seems to be a break from the indications provided by the dramatic dates of the dialogues in my treatment of Socrates's “becoming.” Acknowledging that there has been a great deal of controversy about the status of the ideas or “forms” in Plato's thought from the time Aristotle wrote, she also wonders “whether Plato's Socrates does or could set aside the question of the cause of the whole—that he does or could rely so much on a hypothesis [concerning the ideas]—in establishing the possibility and goodness of the philosophic life as the life of independent reason. … At the very least,” she thinks, “his setting aside of this question would cast a dark shadow over the latter claim.”

I do not think that Plato shows Socrates simply putting aside the question of the cause of the whole in the Phaedo or later. In the “intellectual biography” he presents in the Phaedo Socrates explains that he had hoped to find such an account in Anaxagoras, who had claimed that nous was the source or cause of all. Socrates tells his interlocutors, moreover, that he thought that such an account would consist in an explanation of why it was best that everything be as it is. Sadly he did not find such an account or explanation in Anaxagoras or anyone else, so he took a different tack. That “tack” consisted, first, in using his “hypothesis” about the ideas in asking what each of the kinds of being is. However, I argue, he modified his initial examinations of the logoi of previous philosophers when he learned from Diotima to examine the opinions (doxai) other human beings had about the good, the noble, and the just. In the Symposium, Socrates claims only to know ta erōtika, that is, the things human beings desire but lack. And what human beings desire, Socrates insists in both the Symposium and Republic, is “the good.” As Socrates recognizes explicitly in responding to Aristophanes's understanding of erōs as a desire to become whole, the good is not necessarily the same as the whole. As he describes himself in the Phaedo, Socrates had wanted the whole to be good; but he recognizes a difference in the Symposium. He also recognizes that the fact that human beings want everything that is to be good does not mean that it is so; in fact, most of us perceive the world as not simply or entirely good. In the Republic, Socrates reminds Plato's brother Glaucon that many human beings would be willing to accept what only appears to be noble or just, but that no one wants anything that is only apparently but not truly good. The “greatest” and most important knowledge human beings can obtain is, therefore, of what is purely “good in itself” or the “idea of the good.” But he also informs Glaucon that very few human beings are willing or able to undertake such a study. Socrates cannot even explain his own opinions about what is good in a way that Glaucon will be able to understand. He thus presents only the “children” or “interest” of his understanding of the “idea of the good” in the three famous images of the sun, line, and cave. By drawing an analogy between the sun, which produces the light that constitutes a necessary condition for both sight and growth of sensible things, and the idea of the good as the cause of both the intelligible beings and our knowledge of them, Socrates might seem to be equating the idea of the good with the “sun” he suggested in the Phaedo would blind those who sought to view being directly. Perhaps like the Eleatic stranger Socrates had come to see that lacking any qualities, undifferentiated being would be impossible to cognize or define. In any case, the division Socrates draws between the intelligible and the sensible suggests that the good, insofar as it is the cause of the first but perhaps not of the second, may be not the cause of all. If the cosmos is composed of essentially different kinds of things, as Socrates's argument concerning the ideas seems to suggest, it is not clear that there is or could be a single cause. Socrates makes the suggestion that the “idea of the good” may be the cause of everything only in the Republic; in other dialogues, he lists the good as one among a variety of other ideas (and the list is never exactly the same). But in no instance does he claim to know what is good in itself; he claims only to know that this is what human beings most desire—and need—to discover. He does not put aside the question of the character of the whole, I thus submit; he does raise questions about whether there is a single cause and, if there is, whether it can be known by human beings.

If Socrates is not able to answer this absolutely fundamental question, Collins then asks, how can he know (or Plato suggest) that his form of philosophizing constitutes the best form of existence for a human being? The general form of this question would be whether Socrates or Plato thinks that it is possible to have knowledge of a part, absent knowledge of the whole. Strictly speaking, I would say, they do not. Knowledge of any part might be modified by additional knowledge of the whole. That is the reason Plato has Socrates state in the Apology that the Delphic oracle told his friend Chaerophon that no one was wiser than Socrates: Socrates possesses a certain kind of “human” wisdom in recognizing that he does not know. But as Strauss observes, knowing that you do not know is not to lack knowledge simply. It amounts at least to a claim to know what knowledge is. Later in the dialogue Socrates assures the jurors that he knows that it is wrong not to serve the god and remain at his station. He has tried to persuade his fellow Athenians that they should not fear death, because they do not and cannot know that it is something to be feared. Likewise, he has urged his fellow citizens to seek the good of their soul, truth and practical wisdom, rather than try to amass ever more wealth and honor, because the desires for these more worldly goods can never be satisfied; there will always be more wealth or honor to be gained. And after he is convicted he tells his fellow Athenians “that this even happens to be a very great good for a human being—to make speeches every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me conversing and examining both myself and others—and that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (38a). How does Socrates know this? Why isn't the happiness he has experienced merely a dream or illusion? Plato shows that Socrates has experienced this “very great good” in conversations he has held with a variety of other human beings repeatedly for more than fifty years; both he and others can testify to his evident perception of the goodness of these conversations. In contrast to Descartes, however, Socrates does not claim to know this or anything else with certainty. In his Meditations Descartes urges his readers to begin from radical doubt, as he does, instead of examining the opinions of others, as Socrates did, because there can and will be no end to such examinations. Socrates agrees. Lacking knowledge of the whole, he understands that any conclusion to which he has come may need to be revised. After his trial, he thus insists to his friend Crito that they must always be willing to re-examine opinions they hold.

As Kevin Cherry points out at the beginning of his remarks, many readers have thought that “Plato made Socrates his hero,” and such a reading “generally leads to an emphasis on Plato's use of the dialogue form. This would have been a more radical claim a few decades ago, but the importance of the dialogue form is no longer in much dispute. Studies of Plato's dialogues which emphasize the action as well as the argument are now the norm.” Zuckert's study suggests “that the real genius of Plato is not that he wrote dialogues … but that he wrote only dialogues that incorporated different, competing philosophers.” Cherry calls this the “metadialogue” or conversation. Since Plato never shows his philosophers actually conversing with one another, I describe it as a comparison and contrast of five different comprehensive views, methods of argumentation, kinds of interlocutors, and problems that cannot simply be melded into one. And, I argue, these differences, summarized in a table on pages 44–45 of Plato's Philosophers, show why philosophy continues to be a search for wisdom rather than the possession of knowledge.

As Cherry also sees, this reading of Plato leads me to question the accuracy and adequacy not merely of Aristotle's presentation of the thought of his teacher, but of his claim to possess knowledge or science. I am by no means the first to do either. As Church observes, the success of modern natural science has led most educated people today to dismiss Aristotelian physics and metaphysics. In Plato's Philosophers, I suggest that the skepticism of our contemporaries about the existence of a consistent rational account of the whole makes the tension Plato presents between the investigations of “the human things” and cosmology more revealing of and relevant to the situation in which we find ourselves than Aristotle's claim to have a science of the whole. To be sure, Aristotle explicitly recognizes that we have different kinds of knowledge of the different parts of the whole. That is one of the reasons that his teaching about politics comes as close as it does to Plato's.

Cherry asks: If I think that Plato's philosophical problematics are superior to Aristotle's more comprehensive and coherent vision, why did I publish two such praising accounts of Aristotle's political science? As Cherry observes, in both of my early articles I emphasize not only the importance of participating in politics, according to Aristotle, but also the limits on what we should expect to achieve by doing so, thus bringing him closer to Plato. In this context, I could also add that in studying ethics and politics, Aristotle follows a quasi-Socratic method of beginning with the opinions his contemporaries hold about them, finding contradictions, and seeking a more consistent, comprehensive view. He thus begins with what is “first for us,” although he does not think that it is first in itself. What I have come to doubt is whether one can finally separate such investigations of “the human things” which entail a view of “human nature” from a conception of nature as a whole. Aristotle did not. I have thus criticized some of the contemporary students of “virtue ethics” for trying to revive an Aristotelian conception of human excellence or virtue explicitly shorn of his “metaphysical” or “teleological” view of nature as a whole. In trying to revive not merely such an understanding of “ethics,” but more importantly the practice and achievement of “human flourishing” in the context of a liberal democracy, I have also suggested that they could pay more attention to their own work as educators.Footnote ³³ They could learn from Aristotle's analysis of the many different forms of regimes that citizens of a democracy will not tolerate much if any regulation of their private lives. Because much of the formation of a person's character occurs in private, the sort of habituation Aristotle maintains constitutes a necessary foundation for the acquisition of virtue in a liberal democracy does not and cannot be a direct result of public mandate or law. Some such habituation or training to virtue—we might say responsible behavior—might be fostered indirectly, however, through regulations concerning the care and education of children in and outside of their families. Aristotle argues that freedom of choice is a necessary prerequisite of virtue, and in liberal democracies, most citizens enjoy a good deal of freedom. But Aristotle also argues that freely choosing it is not sufficient to make an action virtuous. No action is truly virtuous unless it is freely chosen solely because it is virtuous and not for any other reason. And to choose to act as one does solely because the act is virtuous, one has to know what virtue is. It is—or ought to be—the responsibility of teachers to try to help their students learn what true human excellence is.

Because I conclude Machiavelli's Politics by pointing out the differences between his understanding and Aristotle's, it may be appropriate to turn now to the comments on that book, the title of which was intended to suggest a comparison and contrast with Aristotle's Politics.

Machiavelli's Politics

I began teaching Machiavelli at the University of Notre Dame for somewhat accidental reasons. I had taught Machiavelli at Carleton earlier. Like many other instructors, I suspect, I had found that many more American undergraduate students were attracted by the apparent immorality or “realism” of The Prince than were repelled by it. I thus continued to teach The Prince in the introduction to political theory; but I also wanted to help an entering graduate student develop her senior thesis into a master's paper. So I began teaching graduate seminars on Machiavelli's political thought. In those seminars, I gradually discovered that in studying Machiavelli, I was, in fact, investigating the alternative, as the ancient Socratics saw it, to philosophy as the best form of human existence. And I concluded, disagreeing with Strauss to this extent, that Machiavelli proposed his new understanding of politics not ultimately to save philosophy from the ire and envy of the many, but in an attempt to benefit everyone, himself included. In other words, for Machiavelli, politics was more important than philosophy.

Sullivan begins by situating my work in the context of contemporary debates in the scholarly literature. As she observes, I try to bridge the current divide between those who read Machiavelli's works primarily in terms of their historical context, literary form, and republican commitments, and those who follow Strauss in arguing that Machiavelli is the founder of modernity. Strauss does not ignore the historical context in which Machiavelli wrote to the extent to which members of the so-called Cambridge school have claimed, nor is his Machiavelli as antidemocratic as other commentators have maintained. However, having praised the moderate character of my work, Sullivan then contrasts her own readings of Machiavelli and Montesquieu with mine. In particular, she disagrees with me concerning the importance of religion in Machiavelli's thought. And, although she agrees with me that Montesquieu was an admiring student of Machiavelli, she emphasizes his criticism of “Machiavellianism.”

It is possible to be more precise, however, about the core of our disagreement. In Machiavelli's Politics I do not, as she and Alexander Duff seem to think, “abstract from religion.” No reasonably competent reader of the Discourses could, confronted with Machiavelli's explicit criticisms of the deleterious political effects of Christian beliefs and the Catholic Church and his praise of the Roman patricians’ prudent manipulation of the religious beliefs of the plebs to maintain control of the city and their armies. However, one of the questions I do explicitly raise is whether Machiavelli's chief goal in writing was to undermine the Christian faith, as Sullivan argues it was. (In Discourses 2.5 he suggests that it may be dissolving as a result of the rampant corruption in the church without his help.) Sullivan and I agree that Machiavelli treats religion as a useful instrument in the hands of rulers. And I acknowledge that some of the chapter titles and incidents reported in his Discourses can be read, as she, Strauss, and Harvey Mansfield read them, as “metaphorically” referring not to their seeming ancient sources, but as indirect criticisms of Christianity. But I argue that that these titles and reports also make sense as referring to actual incidents in ancient and Florentine politics. And I ask, what justifies this metaphorical reading, if and when “reading what is on the lines,” as Strauss used to say, makes sense. In suggesting that Machiavelli thought that “Christianity has had insights into human behavior and that on their basis he suggests specific political responses,” Sullivan follows Mansfield's analysis of the Discourses in Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders, but not Strauss. Strauss claimed that “there is in the whole work of Machiavelli not a single true observation regarding the nature of man and of human affairs with which the classics were not thoroughly familiar”; and that “the only element of Christianity which Machiavelli took over was the idea of propaganda. This idea is the only link between his thought and Christianity. He attempts to destroy Christianity by the same means by which Christianity was originally established.”Footnote ³⁴

The contrast Duff draws between the ways in which Strauss and I approach the “surface” of Machiavelli's writings would have been better and more accurate if he had contrasted my reading of the Discourses with that which Strauss gives instead of confining his remarks to our respective readings of The Prince. The differences come out more clearly there, and at the beginning of my chapter on the Discourses, I explain how and why I have departed from Strauss. “Observing that the Discourses are explicitly related only to the first ten books of Livy's history, but that like Livy's history as a whole, Machiavelli's work has 142 chapters and so presumably covers the whole, Strauss contends that ‘Machiavelli's use and nonuse of Livy is the key to the understanding of the work.’” Acknowledging that “Livy was much more widely read and better known by educated readers in Machiavelli's time than now,” I nevertheless suggest that “it is difficult to believe that Machiavelli expected his readers to follow the intricate way in which he, according to Strauss, used (and changed) Livy's history not merely to convey his own understanding of politics in the spaces created between the two texts, but to present a covert critique of the Bible by questioning the authority of Livy. There is no evidence, in fact, that anyone before Strauss read Machiavelli this way—brilliant as his reading is.” I acknowledge that I have “learned a great deal from Strauss.” But “in light of the evidence that Machiavelli hoped to have an effect on his immediate audience as well as possible later readers, and that his primary concern was not a critique of Christianity so much as an improved understanding and practice of politics,” I have tried “to show that Machiavelli's Discourses constitute a coherent argument about the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a free way of life by means of a republican form of government.” And in a footnote to that passage I observe that “in doing so, somewhat ironically, I am heeding Strauss's admonition in Persecution and the Art of Writing … [that] ‘reading between the lines is strictly prohibited in all cases where it would be less exact than not doing so. Only such reading between the lines as starts from an exact consideration of the explicit statements of the author is legitimate. The context in which a statement occurs, and the literary character of the whole work as well as its plan, must be perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can reasonably claim to be adequate or even correct. One is not entitled to delete a passage, nor to emend its text, before one has fully considered all reasonable possibilities of understanding the passage as it stands—one of these possibilities being that the passage may be ironic.’” And I remind readers that “I am arguing that Machiavelli was not merely an artful but an ironic writer. He was addressing more than one audience—not only his immediate but also future readers—and that he had reasons to be less than perfectly open about the revolutionary character of his praise of the Roman republic and its institutions. I do not deny that he was critical not merely of the Church but of the effects of Christian teachings more generally (as in D 3.1). However, I am arguing that these criticisms were for the sake of introducing a better political order that would benefit most people (including rare individuals like Machiavelli himself). Like [Heinrich] Meier, I think that Strauss was trying to revive philosophy. Machiavelli, however, was trying to improve the lives of as many human beings as possible by improving their understanding and practice of politics.”Footnote ³⁵

Duff is correct that Strauss begins Thoughts on Machiavelli by highlighting a problem that lies on the surface: Machiavelli writes two books that appear to be quite different, but states in the dedication to each that it contains everything he knows. Strauss makes that observation, however, to establish a point that is not on the surface—namely, that in the works said to contain everything that Machiavelli has learned, there is no mention of the soul or the devil. I explicitly acknowledge that Strauss concludes from the fact that there are 142 chapters in both Livy's history and the Discourses that, contrary to the full title of Machiavelli's book, it concerns the entire history, not merely the first ten books. (Reading the Discourses confirms that suspicion about the contents.) Strauss also emphasizes the importance of the literary “conceit” that The Prince is addressed to Lorenzo. He pays less attention to the specific characteristics of the two young men to whom Machiavelli dedicated the Discourses than I do, but he also notes the difference in the character of the dedicatees of Machiavelli's two major prose works. We do not disagree, therefore, so much about the “surface” of these books as Duff suggests. Like most commentators, we see that the Discourses is clearly divided into three books concerning the domestic politics of the Roman people, their foreign policies, and their leaders, but that the order of the particular discussions contained within each of these three books is far from clear. Where we differ is in the way we proceed to deal with the lack of clarity in Machiavelli's ordering of the topics. Strauss looks to the chapter numbers, especially multiples of thirteen. As Duff observes about my reading of The Prince, so too in analyzing the Discourses I ask why every chapter follows from the previous one and understand the whole book as addressed simultaneously to two different audiences. First, Machiavelli addresses the two young Florentine aristocrats to whom he dedicates the book, and shows how they could revive republican politics in their city. As in The Prince, however, so in his characterization of these two young men in the Art of War, Machiavelli indicates that he does not think that they will actually heed his advice. He thus also addresses future readers who may have the good fortune to be able to implement his advice. Moreover, that advice does not consist, as it at first appears, merely in showing them how they can imitate the ancient Romans; it consists, rather, in a new understanding of a new form of republican politics that will benefit everyone. Unlike Duff, I do not think that constitutes a “prosaic” project.

Faisal Baluch raises another question that has been fiercely debated by commentators on Machiavelli's work, one that concerns his relation not to Christianity, but rather to philosophy. As Baluch observes, because of his concentration on practical political affairs, most commentators have concluded that Machiavelli was not a philosopher. There are exceptions, however; commentators like Strauss and Erica Benner have observed that Socrates also concentrated on “the human things,” and Socrates is generally acknowledged to have been a philosopher. I, too, suggest that Machiavelli displays a surprising number of traits in common with Socrates. Like Socrates, Machiavelli not merely associates with the young, but seeks to attract them. Further like Socrates, he not only challenges current or dominant opinions; he is even willing to appear to be ridiculous in doing so. Baluch does not mention my observation that like Socrates, Machiavelli is able to make up stories to illustrate his points. But Baluch usefully adds that, as well as addressing the young, Machiavelli, also like Socrates, seeks to learn from “the old.” In describing the way in which he spends his days in a letter he sent to Vettori, Machiavelli famously reports that in the evening he retires to his library where, clothed in regal garments, he enters “the ancient courts of ancient men” and asks “them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply.” And in many of his works, he not merely looks to, but emphatically recommends imitating, the example of the ancient Romans. It is not clear to me, however, that Socrates and Machiavelli seek to learn the same kinds of lessons from the same kinds of “old” men. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates praises his philosophical predecessors Parmenides and, to a lesser extent, Heraclitus; but he (unlike the Athenian Stranger and Timaeus) does not look to famous legislators such as Lycurgus or Solon for guidance. Both in his letter to Vettori and in the dedication to The Prince, Machiavelli writes of learning about the reasons for the actions of great men. Nor does he seem to meditate on them. Like Socrates, Machiavelli seems to question and ultimately seeks to supersede his predecessors. But the “old” men he wishes to supersede do not appear to be philosophers, whom he rarely mentions; they are the statesmen and generals whose deeds are recorded by the historians. Most importantly, Baluch observes, in the central chapters of The Prince Machiavelli both asks and answers the Socratic question, “what is virtue?” Baluch thus concludes that for Machiavelli as for Socrates, virtue (or human excellence) consists in knowledge. But I think one has to ask, knowledge of what?

In The Prince Machiavelli does provide a new understanding, if not definition, of “virtue.” However, as he presents it, virtù is not something purely “in itself” or an eternally intelligible “idea,” as it would be for Socrates. Machiavellian virtù consists rather in knowing how to be able not to be good and to use that knowledge according to necessity. As we learn from reading the treatise as a whole, virtù consists in the ability to see and use an opportunity to free oneself and one's people from oppression, as the four legendary founders are said to have done in chapter 6. It requires a leader to be able to attract, train, and arm followers who will enable him to seize control and keep it in the face of inevitable opposition. It also requires a leader to know how to use “cruelty” well, not continually, so as to arouse hatred or contempt. Having seized control and established order, a leader must furthermore know how to maintain it by showing his people that his government acts to secure their lives, families, and property. In the best case, he will institute laws that also secure their liberty, including the opportunity for an able individual to gain wealth and honor by rising to a position of preeminence. Machiavelli observes that the virtues are the qualities that are praised; and he concludes: “Let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone. For the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world there is no one but the vulgar.”Footnote ³⁶ In other words, Machiavelli recognizes that glory is ultimately merely a reflection of public opinion; in general he sees that the public honors individuals who serve its interests, by, for example, founding an order that not merely protects them, but enables them and their heirs to prosper. However, he also sees (D 3.34) that the people are sometimes impressed by what appear to be extraordinary deeds of self-sacrifice more than by ordinary military victories and legislative acts that contribute more substantially to the common good. Machiavelli understands full well that human beings act on the basis of what they deem to be good. In his writings, he thus not merely challenges the coherence of common opinions; he seeks to persuade his readers to change their opinions, especially concerning what they should do. In contrast to Socrates, however, he does not seek to engage his interlocutors or readers in an ongoing conversation or inquiry about what is truly good or virtuous. Nor does he claim to be happy and satisfied himself. Claiming to have found the “effectual truth,” he seeks to have an effect on the politics not only of Florence, Italy, or contemporary Europe, but also of future nations and their leaders by reminding them of the importance of establishing and maintaining political order as the necessary condition for all other forms of human achievement. Rather than seeking to make themselves or others good and virtuous, they should see human beings as they are: weak, fearful, and characterized by constantly expanding desires that can never be satisfied but that necessarily put them at odds with others. It is futile to seek personal happiness or satisfaction in this life; and claiming to have knowledge solely of worldly affairs, Machiavelli remains generally silent about any life thereafter. The best one can do is to recognize the passions that naturally make human beings hostile to one another and create a system of laws that balance the “humors” against each other in order to give individuals the maximal freedom possible to pursue their own goals. In doing so, however, one needs to understand that it will always be necessary to devise new “remedies,” because in this world everything that comes into being also decays. Pace Baluch, Machiavelli does not seek, therefore, to be “reputed” as a founder. He explicitly seeks merely to be an adviser to “princes,” who include the leaders of republics. Even if the recommendations of an adviser are followed and prove successful, he observes (D 3.35), the adviser will at most receive half the credit. If the policy he recommends fails, he will be blamed, but he will be blamed even more if he shows that he knew what should have been done under any particular set of circumstances, but did not inform the parties able to act.

Like Socrates and his students Plato and Xenophon, Machiavelli presents himself and his teaching “ironically.” But the form of his dissimulation differs from theirs—as do the contents and form of his works. In contrast particularly to Plato, who merely reports the speeches and deeds of others in his dialogues, Machiavelli reminds his readers of himself and his own immediate concerns at the beginning of most of his works. By presenting himself as a poor man seeking a job from his “aristocratic” superiors in order to support himself and his family, he shows that he shares the concerns that animate most people most of the time. Unlike either the people or their rulers, he also shows in the body of his work that he knows and is seeking to teach them how their desires can best, although never entirely, be satisfied. In the democratic republic he advocates, an exceptionally talented young man like Machiavelli would be able to rise and prosper in a way he could not in the “aristocratic” republics of the past. His proposals are thus in what could be called his “self-interest,” but he does not make them simply for the sake of securing his own life, wealth, or honor. On the contrary, he indicates rather clearly that he does not think that his contemporaries will heed his advice. He does not appeal to their good will towards him or others, because he does not think that most people act on the basis of such benevolent feelings most of the time. He appeals first to the desire most people have for security and then to the ambitions most display when their basic fears are assuaged. He does not deny that some rare individuals do act benevolently upon occasion. Indeed, he proves himself to be one such individual. Acting on the basis of his understanding of the liabilities of our shared human condition, he attempts to persuade his readers to limit the goals of politics to securing the lives, properties, and liberties of most.

Machiavelli does not fit neatly into either of the two forms of eros Strauss finds in Xenophon's Hiero. His attachments to other human beings are not loosened by his love of the truth about all things; attempting to benefit everyone, he seeks the effectual truth. He may be said, therefore, to love the demos; but he does not demand or perhaps even desire the love of the people in return. He understands too well that they, like everything else in this world, are changeable; there is no such thing as immortal fame.

The picture of philosophy Plato presents in his dialogues is much more beautiful and, in that sense, more noble than the analysis of the requirements of political life that Machiavelli presents. It is not clear, however, that Plato's philosopher is as generous as Machiavelli. He does not harm anyone, but he does not try to benefit everyone. He is arguably, therefore, less humane.

Summing Up

At the conclusion of the conference at which these papers were first presented, Michael Zuckert gave a talk about the work I had done on politics and literature. Most of that work was published while we were teaching at Carleton College before we moved to Notre Dame. But as Michael presents it, one can see a certain continuity in both content and method. In studying American novels, he observes, I was trying to expand our understanding and study of American political thought by extending its questions about the basis and fundamental principles of the regime. Novelists raise such questions, I argued, not directly by presenting arguments either in their own name or in the mouths of their characters so much as indirectly, by showing how various characters acting on different passions and sets of beliefs in given circumstances interact with others. In effect, novelists present thought experiments which depict the inner life of human beings we all experience, but which is not directly observable externally or “objectively” using the methods of contemporary social science. One can easily see the overlap between the political-philosophical approach I took to the study of literature and the literary approach I have taken to studying philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche that Michael notes at the end of his talk.

In the coming years, I hope to extend the combination of literary with philosophical and scientific methods and content in a study of “the search for self-knowledge.” As an eminent sociologist recently observed, one would think that no knowledge should be easier for us to acquire; is there anything closer to us than ourselves? In fact, however, the search continues because no one has found satisfactory answers to the questions that almost immediately arise in conjunction with this search: What if any relation is there between who each of us is as an individual and the distinctive kind of being we all are as “human”? Are we really or significantly different from all the rest of nature—or the universe? What if, as “string theory” suggests, there is no “fit” between the intelligible order of the universe and the operations of the human mind?