Plato's Myths of Judgement

Abstract

I The myths in dialogues have been in general neglected by philosophers; when he moves from argument or exposition into the myth form there is a sharp switching-off of philosophical interest. There have been studies of the myths,1 some of them from a philosophical perspective, but it is broadly true that philosophical analyses of the dialogues have made little or no attempt to relate the content of each myth to the argument of the dialogue in which it occurs. Whether they feel respect for the myths as attempts to express profound truths beyond reason's grasp, or feel contempt for them as holidays from serious thinking, or (most commonly) feel uncomfortable with them and endorse Crombie's, me these myths tremble between the sublime and the tedious,2 philosophers have mostly not thought to include the myths as part of Plato's thought.3 This is a pity, for some of the myths at least are worth non-literary study, and this is especially true of the long and elaborate eschatological myths of the Gorgias, Phaedo and Republic. All three myths come at the end of a major dialogue full of controversial claims about the right way to live, and impassioned rejections of conventional beliefs about good and evil, and what is in one's interests. In this context an eschatological myth about the ultimate fate of the good and the bad can hardly fail to be relevant to the dialogue's main moral argument, and may well be revealing about the form of that argument, and any appeal in it to the agent's interests. To treat such a myth as an optional extra for those who like stories is to risk missing something of significance about the form of arguments, as well as interesting contrasts between dialogues; for differences between two myths may point to differences in what the dialogues are arguing, or may illustrate a major shift of emphasis. The philosophical myth mixes genres, and so is disliked by philosophers who want philosophy to be professional, with its own uniform and distinct medium, preferably as transparent as possible so that philosophical argument cannot be confused with more literary modes of persuading. We can find this attitude in Aristotle, who faults the Phaedo myth by reading it literally and then complaining that its geography and hydraulics are impossible. The account of Tartarus, he says, makes nonsense of the way rivers flow, and of the phenomenon of rain; and anyway it