Platonic Political Research Articles

Platonic Politics of Moderation and Contemporary Civic Theory

This paper examines Plato’s later model of civic participation in relation to contemporary civic theories. It argues that, although the Platonic model satisfies such common criteria for civic theories as equality, autonomy, and empowerment, the key concept to understand this project is moderation. It is moderation that structures and unifies the constituent elements of this model (the rule of law, the persuasion of the preambles, the empowering economy and education). It also explains what kind of personal disposition is central to achieving a stable and rational political order.

Foucault's Use of Socrates

Foucault's Use of Socrates Ramona Naddaff (bio) "… ce 'trip' gréco-latin qui a duré plusieurs années." —Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres The beginning of Paul Miller's Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth recalls the possible uses of Foucault in the present moment: "Michel Foucault is one of the most radical voices of the twentieth-century. … Foucault's histories uncover a fossil record of our practices of truth, of our desires, pleasures and intensities, which have been, and therefore can be, repurposed and re-elaborated from one struggle to the next" (Miller 2022, 1). One of Foucault's "histories" interests me—the history of Socrates' use of parrēsia, sketched in his fall 1983 lectures at University of California, Berkeley (Foucault 2019). Foucault's use of Socrates here, I hope to suggest, is itself a sign of his own "struggle" to "repurpose" and "re-elaborate" a Socratic practice of truth disentangled from Platonic politics, ethics, and ideology. The Use of Pleasure does indeed put Plato to good use in Foucault's reconceptualization of the history of sexuality—"And now I would like to show how, in classical antiquity, sexual activity and sexual pleasures were problematized through practices of the self, bringing into play the criteria of an 'aesthetics of existence'" (Foucault 1986, 12). So too do Foucault's Berkeley lectures repurpose and use "Socrates" for diverse, but not necessarily disconnected, ends in Foucault's critical project to provide an account of the histories of critique. Plato's "Socrates," the truth-teller, a symptom of a flat epistemology and ontology, is not the object of Foucault's concern as he neared the end of his life. Rather, the particular speech acts, the "dire-vrai," of this singular character, Socrates, whom Plato attempted to entrap, even silence, preoccupies Foucault as he seeks to contend with the problem of the truth-teller and truth-telling. Foucault is less interested in the "aesthetics of existence" than in how a certain form of radical Socratic critique may be resurrected in a culture and politics of protestation. [End Page 413] Miller reminds us that already in his 1970–71 lectures on the will to know at the Collège de France, Foucault was investigating archaic and classical Greece, where, influenced by Marcel Detienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, "he examined how the concept of truth that we recognize today became established during the fifth and fourth centuries," a "discursive event, the product of social and political struggles in archaic Greece" (Miller 2022, 5). Only in the 1980s will Foucault appear to make a radical, decisive break with his earlier work, not only moving from early modern texts and archives to ancient ones but also in terms of his philosophical preoccupations. "While truth had been a central preoccupation from the beginning," Miller argues, "his later work focuses increasingly on the individual as a speaker of truth both to himself and to others." The "ethical turn," the return to subjectivity, marks the return of a figure largely invisible from Foucault's first lectures—namely, Socrates. Miller explains further: "Radical Socratic questioning occupies Foucault for the last five years of his life, not as an antiquarian interest, but as a way of thinking in a sustained manner about how the subject comes to speak the truth, and about the courage needed to speak the truth while risking marginalization, misunderstanding, or even death" (Miller 2022, 4). I offer a hypothesis—perhaps ungrounded, even unfounded, but a necessary condition for Foucault's use of Socrates. Foucault enacts a separation of Socrates from Plato in his 1983 lectures at Berkeley, titled Discourse and Truth. This "Socrates" differs from that of The Use of Pleasure, where Foucault works on and with the dialogues canonically connected with Plato as he emerges as a singular author of Platonism. Foucault invents this 1983 Socrates in order to arrest the domination of Plato over Socrates' representation and his ideological uses of his teacher. Let us recall here Foucault's analysis of the difference between power and domination in the interview "The Ethics of the Concern for the...

Politics of the Idea: (Anti-)Platonic Politics in Arendt and Badiou

ABSTRACT This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou are shown to share an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end.

Eco-republic: what the ancients can teach us about ethics, virtue, and sustainable living

Acknowledgements vii Part I INERTIA 1 Prologue to Chapter 1: Plato's Cave 3 Chapter 1: Introduction: Inertia as Failure of the Political Imagination 7 An Unconsciously Platonic Prologue to Chapter 2: Carbon Detox 27 Chapter 2:From Greed to Glory: Ancient to Modern Ethics - and Back Again? 29 Prologue to Chapter 3: Plato's Ring of Gyges 47 Chapter 3: Underpinning Inertia: The Idea of Negligibility 51 Part II IMAGINATION 77 Prologue to Chapter 4: Post-Platonic Perspectives on the Republic 79 Chapter 4: Meet Plato's Republic 83 Prologue to Chapter 5: Plato on Why Virtue Matters 99 Chapter 5: The City and the Soul 101 Prologue to Chapter 6: Plato's Idea of the Good 127 Chapter 6: The Idea of the Good 133 Part III INITIATIVE 157 Prologue to Chapter 7: Revisiting Plato's Cave 159 Chapter 7: Initiative and Individuals: A (Partly) Platonic Political Project 163 Notes 187 Works Cited 219 Index 235

Plato's revenge: politics in the age of ecology

In this provocative call for a new ecological politics, William Ophuls starts from a radical premise: sustainability is impossible. We are on an industrial Titanic, fueled by rapidly depleting stocks of fossil hydrocarbons. Making the deck chairs from recyclable materials and feeding the boilers with biofuels is futile. In the end, the ship is doomed by the laws of thermodynamics and by the implacable biological and geological limits that are already beginning to pinch. Ophuls warns us that we are headed for a postindustrial future that, however technologically sophisticated, will resemble the preindustrial past in many important respects. With Plato's Revenge, Ophuls, author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, envisions political and social transformations that will lead to a new natural-law politics based on the realities of ecology, physics, and psychology. In a discussion that ranges widely -- from ecology to quantum physics to Jungian psychology to Eastern religion to Western political philosophy -- Ophuls argues for an essentially Platonic politics of consciousness dedicated to inner cultivation rather than outward expansion and the pursuit of perpetual growth. We would then achieve a way of life that is materially and institutionally simple but culturally and spiritually rich, one in which humanity flourishes in harmony with nature.

Reversing Plato’s Anti-Democratism: Castoriadis' Quirky Plato

This paper considers the conflicting "loves" of Cornelius Castoriadis--his love for the ancients, and especially Plato, and for the common person of the demos. A detailed study of Castoriadis' analysis of Plato's Statesman exposes that Castoriadis attempts to resolve the paradox by rereading Plato as a radical democrat. I argue that this unorthodox reading is at best "quirky, " (a charge Castoriadis levels at Plato) at worst a groundless sophism. However, I conjecture that Castoriadis' reading may not constitute a serious attempt to describe a Platonic politics, so much as a prescriptive reading of what otherwise might have been, given certain strands of political generosity evident elsewhere in Plato's corpus.

The Theopolitical Foundations of Strauss's Criticism of Modernity

Abstract I Philosophers and Prophets The tradition of the Falasifa (medieval Platonic-Aristotelian Muslim philosophers) tends to refute Plato's ideal of the “philosopher-king”, in which the philosopher is distinguished as the highest human type. In contrast to the philosopher, whose knowledge is incomplete and indirect, the prophet, through revelation, attains profound knowledge and truth. According to the Falasifa version of Platonic politics, the prophet, who represents the highest form of human wisdom conditioned by divine providence, is a founder of political community and a lawgiver.

Subordinating Courage to Justice: Statecraft and Soulcraft in Fourth-Century Athenian Rhetoric and Platonic Political Philosophy

Abstract After discussing the relationship of courage to justice in modern and ancient political thought, this paper explores the debate between Athenian democratic orators and Plato on the subject of andreia, or “manly courage.” While the orators set andreia in a particular relation to justice by embedding andreia within a salvific narrative of the city's history, Plato used the figure of Callicles to draw attention to the democrats' self-serving construal of andreia within their own politics. Plato's arguments suggest that statecraft must begin with a deeper “soulcraft” than Athenian politics is capable of.

Subordinating Courage to Justice: Statecraft and Soulcraft in Fourth-Century Athenian Rhetoric and Platonic Political Philosophy

Subordinating Courage to Justice: Statecraft and Soulcraft in Fourth-Century Athenian Rhetoric and Platonic Political Philosophy

Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity Peter Lautner Dominic J. O'Meara . Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 249. $55.00. ISBN 0-19-925758-2. It is quite difficult to give a detailed account of the political theories of the Neoplatonists. In his book, O'Meara attempts to trace down these theories, and he makes it clear that they must have played a subservient role within the whole body of philosophy. Their role was to contribute to the divinization of man. He emphasizes that Neoplatonic schools attracted many aristocrats and high government officials, taking it as evidence for the influence of Neoplatonism in political spheres. In Iamblichus' curriculum, students had the opportunity to discuss practical sciences when reading the Alcibiades Major and the Gorgias. The interest in such theories is evidenced by the fact that we know of sixteen commentaries on the Republic, Alcibiades Major, Gorgias, and Laws, as well as oral lectures on these dialogues. The proper politician is the sage who descends to the cave with the aim of helping the captives to get rid of their bonds. To reach that goal, however, what kind of activity is he supposed to display? The distinction between legislative and judicial parts of Platonic political science is informative. The eschatological myths in Plato's dialogues were taken to illustrate the latter. Inclusion of this sort of penology in the themes of political philosophy signals how great the divergence was between Neoplatonic political theories and their counterparts in Plato and Aristotle. An important lesson is that Proclus constructed a model for the three levels of political reform and tied it to the three levels of demiurgy. This hierarchy of divine models was used to illustrate the ideal "city of gods" of the Republic, the second best city of the Laws, and the third best city. Proper emphasis has been given to the effort by Boethius to express political structures in terms of mathematical ratios. Three constitutional structures are related to the three kinds of mathematical proportion: oligarchy to arithmetical proportion, aristocracy to harmonic proportion, and democracy to geometric proportion. Boethius' sources must have been as much Platonic as Pythagorean. The last part of the book focuses on the influence of Neoplatonic political thinking on Christian and Muslim authors. Eusebius and, to a lesser extent, the anonymous author of the dialogue On Political Science took over many elements, while the Augustine of the City of God rejected it altogether. Al-Farabi was also familiar with many Neoplatonic theses on politics, as his Perfect State shows. O'Meara refers to a dispute on the purpose of the Alcibiades Major (64): whether it concerns self-knowledge, thus giving a starting point for all sorts of philosophy, as Proclus thought, or whether it deals with political virtues, as Damascius assumed. If this is the case, then Proclus' work may not be taken to signal the importance of political philosophy in the Athenian school. What we know of that commentary may discourage one to call it political in any sense. We also read that in Iamblichus' view human souls are bound to matter more intimately than Plotinus supposed it, which entails that political and religious life must be of much greater instrumental value in Iamblichus than in Plotinus (125). One might ask, however, why we hear so much about theurgy in Iamblichus, and almost nothing about political action. One might get the impression that theurgical practices supersede or even replace political activity as a means to ascend to the higher world. Political activity may not have been so compelling under these circumstances. It remains a theoretical possibility only. [End Page 196] All in all, O'Meara demonstrates that politics was a bigger issue for the Neoplatonics than hitherto assumed. But in comparison to the elaborate theories in Plato's Republic and Laws and in Aristotle's Politics, respectively, the evidence that we have for the Neoplatonic approaches is meagre. To be sure, from this it would be unwise to draw the conclusion that the doctrines themselves were also inferior. But they may not have occupied such an important role in philosophy as the one that...

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws and A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws . By Randall Baldwin Clark. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 192p. $55.00. A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws . By Albert Keith Whitaker. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 254p. $39.00. Plato's Laws, his longest and most comprehensive work on politics, is a conversation about the purposes and limits of legislation among three old men: an Athenian Stranger, Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. The three speak while ascending to the cave-shrine of Zeus where Kleinias hopes to receive the blessing of the god for his appointed task of drawing up a law code to govern a new colony. Until recently, the Laws was very little read, and there is still relatively little useful secondary literature on it, especially when compared to the ocean of scholarly treatments available on the far better known Republic.

Socrates' Discursive Democracy: Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy. Gerald M. Mara

<i>Socrates' Discursive Democracy: Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy</i>. Gerald M. Mara

Socrates' Discursive Democracy. Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy. By Gerald Mara. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 324p. $21.95.

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Platonic Politics and the Good

L'A. etudie le fondement de la politique platonicienne du philosophe-roi dans la connaissance du Bien en soi («La Republique», livres V et X). Parce que la forme est aussi modele et parce que le bien en soi est aussi l'ordre rationnel, le philosophe-roi est le seul a posseder la connaissance de ce qui est bon pour la cite

From Themistius to al-Farabi: Platonic Political Philosophy and Aristotle's Rhetoric in the East

Abstract: Aristotie's Rhetoric appears to have had little influence on rhetorical theory in Greek or Latin during late antiquity or the early Middle Ages, but it was closely studied by some Islamic philosophers, notably al-Farabi. Behind al-Farabi's interest in Aristotle's Rhetoric lay his adoption of Plato's doctrine of the philosopher-king, Whitch had an eloquent exponent in late antiquity in the philosopher-orator Themistius. An allusion to the Rhetoric in an oration of Themistius suggests that al-Farabi's assessment of the Rhetoric also had roots in late antiquity, possibly in circles around Themistius. The content of the Syriac Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit confirms the likelihood that in thèse matters, as in many others, the Syrians were the intermediaries between Greek late antiquity and the classical renaissance in Islam.

‘VIRTUOSOS OF CONTEMPT’: AN INVESTIGATION OF NIETZSCHE’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY THROUGH CERTAIN PLATONIC POLITICAL IDEAS

Article ‘VIRTUOSOS OF CONTEMPT’: AN INVESTIGATION OF NIETZSCHE’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY THROUGH CERTAIN PLATONIC POLITICAL IDEAS was published on December 31, 1992 in the journal Nietzsche-Studien (volume 21, issue 1).

Leo Strauss, Platonic Political Philosophy, and the Teaching of Political Science

Leo Strauss, Platonic Political Philosophy, and the Teaching of Political Science

“Those Beautiful Characters of Sense”: Classical Deities and the Court Masque

“Those Beautiful Characters of Sense”: Classical Deities and the Court Masque Judith Dundas The flight into the imagination which was implicit in the whole production of court masques took courage from two sources, classical allusion and moral significance. However fan­ tastic the thinly spun plots or however marvellous the stage machinery and costuming, these received some sort of anchoring to reality through recognizable myths and morally sound princi­ ples. The didactic no less than the political function of these myths has been stressed in recent criticism; in the words of Stephen Orgel, the masque fictions served to create “heroic roles for the leaders of society.”! Such an interpretation tends to emphasize the political and ethical goals of the masque, its “Platonic Politics,” at the expense perhaps of the aesthetic purpose, the kind of enjoyment offered by an art that is above all ornamental—an art that, for the sake of pleasure, imposes a decorative form even upon the moral message and makes pattern an imperative. To this requirement, myth itself, without losing dignity, must conform; so Daedalus as dancing master instructs the court in the virtuous life, “And doth in sacred harmony comprise/ His precepts.”2 Perhaps the true purpose of the masques lies not altogether in their political or Platonic significance but in the beauty with which they adorned the lives of king and court. To associate the King with Neptune or Jupiter is not only to supply him with a heroic mould for future action but to enrich the present moment for him and the rest of the audience by allusion to a world of delightful imagination. When Ben Jonson speaks of the “sound JUDITH DUNDAS is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include articles on Spenser, George Herbert, and Ben Jonson as well as essays on the theory and practice of ut pictura poesis. 166 Judith Dundas 167 meats” and the “more remov’d mysteries” that his masques have to offer,3 he is, like any Renaissance writer, pointing to the meaning of his work. As artist, he sees himself as the servant of truth, but to limit this truth to either political or moral mes­ sages is to engage in an almost commercial literalizing of the value in a work of art. A survey of the classical mythology in the masques could reveal more poetry and less expediency than current criticism is in the habit of discovering. Even the some­ times complex allegories serve for delight; they are the aliquid salis, without which the masque would be vapid. We need, I believe, to redefine the seriousness of the genre, to place in perspective both political and moral goals instead of making them the sole justification for so much extravagance. In other words, we need to recover some of the playfulness involved in this particular type of play-acting, in which gorgeously attired courtiers move in an elaborately choreographed world of fantasy based on that classical past to which the Renaissance had given its heart. We may not fully realize to what extent classical mythology was viewed as the subject matter of beauty, but rhetoricians and poets knew this, as did the great Renaissance painters. Fracastoro, for example, says that the only kind of writing that is absolutely beautiful is about gods and heroes.4 Once freed from the medieval necessity of posing as personifications of good and evil, the mythological figures could appear clothed in their own beauty of form. So it was that Rubens aspired to bring the classical gods to life in his painting, not merely by imitating the ancient statues but by seeing the spirit imprisoned in the stone and depicting that. In a remarkable statement in his De imitatione statuarum, he notes that “many neophytes and even some experts do not distinguish stuff from form, stone from figure, nor the exigencies of the marble from its artistic use. . . . Whoever can make this distinction with wise discretion should indeed welcome the statues in a loving embrace; for what can we, decadent children of this erring century, accom­ plish? What vile spirit keeps us weaklings fettered to the ground, far away from that heroic stature and...