Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Abstract

“Who died and made you king?” Many philosophers and followers of Plato will, without blinking, respond that Plato made them philosopher-kings. Some disciples of Plato acknowledge that this position can be embarrassing. Thus, we have texts like Jonny Thakkar's Plato as Critical Theorist, which struggles to justify philosophers as rulers by squeezing Plato's assertions under Lady Liberty's aegis, as if they had been part of her inclusive couture all along. Parallel projects to keep Plato as high priest include jettisoning the philosopher-king model while peddling the eminence of a Platonic process; say, the Socratic method. For example, Jill Frank in Poetic Justice reads the Republic (577a) as a repudiation of philosopher-kings in favor of people who want a little informed “conversation” with those “awakened to reflection.” The “awakened” seem to include gentle souls like Wayne Booth but not critics of Plato like Kojin Karatani, who denies that Plato and Socrates converse. In Transcritique, Karatani rejects the notion of Platonic “dialogues.” Karatani calls works like the Republic “dramatic monologues,” where Socrates gets to set up the rules for interaction, and woe awaits anyone who contradicts himself or Socrates.Tae-Yeoun Keum's book falls into the second category in Plato fandom. She is interested in process, in how Plato uses myths. That is the first portion of her work. The second portion lays out a history of great thinkers who modeled their political treatises on a myth-enriched Plato. She accomplishes her task in a thorough and unabrasive fashion. Keum's extraction and examination of myths from the Republic sometimes seem like teeth floating in water on a nightstand where an elderly scholar might also place spectacles; we obtain thereby a new perspective on the topic. Recognizing that myths “may be much more deeply entrenched in our way of life than we might think,” Keum balks at the interpretive tradition that insists Plato's is “a rational and critical enterprise divorced from myth.”As one of her guides for reconnecting Plato's myths to the Republic's aims, Keum turns to Hans Blumenberg, a key philosopher who argues that mythos and logos are synonyms. For Blumenberg myth counts as a response to a primal scene of terror. Myth is a rational response to questions that do not, at first, have answers. Keum: “Philosophy's reliance on mythological expressions revealed a deeper need to impart meaning to reality through narratives that are reworked, time and again, to frame the unfamiliar and inexplicable in terms of the familiar and significant.” Myths depend on topoi, commonplaces that feel comfortable. Keum is attuned to the role figuration plays in politics. Thus she is swimming against the scholarly tide that wants to rinse philosophy and politics clean of elements that seem to contribute to opacity or to irrationality. Keum advocates “an inclusive stance on what counts as philosophical writing,” so that Plato's myths remain part of the Platonic corpus. Her faith in pluralism might appear admirable—ill will is not a characteristic of Keum's book—but needs to be juxtaposed to some work off of Keum's radar. For example, it would be illuminating had Keum's lengthy consideration of Ernst Cassirer, including Cassirer's famous meeting with Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929, been juxtaposed to Geoff Waite's reading of that meeting (see Political Theory, October 1998). With Waite in the picture, Keum could have leaned into Heidegger's statement: “The ‘doctrine’ of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying.” Even after parsing Plato's myths with care, we are still not at the “doctrine.”