Philosopher in Plato's Statesman

Mitchell Miller

Description

In the Statesman, Plato brings together--only to challenge and displace--his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean. The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and the "unwritten teachings."

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Parmenides Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781930972438
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE PHILOSOPHER IN PLATO S STATESMAN
together with
Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato s Statesman
THE PHILOSOPHER IN PLATO S STATESMAN
together with
Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato s Statesman
Mitchell Miller
PARMENIDES PUBLISHING Las Vegas 89109 1980, 2004 by Mitchell Miller All rights reserved
Originally published in 1980 in the Netherlands by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Dialectic Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato s Statesman 1999 by The Catholic University of America Press. Reprinted with permission.
This paperback edition, with a new preface, and the above essay published in 2004 by Parmenides Publishing in the United States of America
ISBN: 1-930972-16-4
Printed in the United States of America
Publisher s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Mitchell H. The philosopher in Plato s Statesman : together with Dialectical education and unwritten teachings in Plato s Statesman / Mitchell Miller.
p. : ill. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN: 1-930972-16-4
1. Plato. Statesman. I. Title. II. Title: Dialectical education and unwritten teachings in Plato s Statesman.
JC71.P314 M541 2004 321/.07
PARMENIDES PUBLISHING 3753 Howard Hughes Pkwy #200 Las Vegas, NV 89109 1-888-PARMENIDES www.parmenides.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his study has benefited from timely help, direct and indirect, from a number of friends. I owe deep thanks to Jonathan Ketchum, Tracy Taft, Michael Anderson, William Yoder, and Marion Miller for work we shared through Oakstone Farm; to Jesse Kalin, Michael McCarthy, and Michael Murray of Vassar College for many provocative discussions; and to Mrs. Norma Mausolf for her exceptional care and good spirits in preparing the typescript. I am also grateful for the generous support which Vassar College, in the form of a year s sabbatical and a grant from the Lucy Maynard Salmon Fund, has given me.
Above all, this work is for Chris.
M.H.M. April 2, 1979
For their kind permission to include Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato s Statesman in this volume, my thanks to Catholic University of America Press, publishers of Plato and Platonism (1999), and also to Daniel Conway and Jacob Howland, editors of the forthcoming The Sovereignty of Construction: Essays in the Thought of David Lachterman (Rodopi).
For their support in the form of excellent critical conversation about Plato and the concerns of this expanding study, I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues at Vassar-especially Rachel Kitzinger in Classics, John McCleary in Mathematics, and, in Philosophy, Jesse Kalin, Michael McCarthy, and Michael Murray, also Giovanna Borradori, Jennifer Church, Uma Narayan, and Doug Winblad; to a host of fellow students of Plato with whom, over a long period, differences have always proven fruitful, especially Michael Anderson, Brad Bassler, Ruby Blondell, Charles Griswold, Ed Halper, Drew Hyland, Ken Sayre, Tom Tuozzo, Jeff Turner, and Jeff Wattles; and to three friends and teachers, now departed, whose encouragement has been seminal for my work, Ron Brady, Jon Ketchum, and David Lachterman.
My thanks and hopes, finally, to those who have in different ways shown me the reality of the idea of writing as a response to the future: Benjamin Knox, Daniel Handel, Stephen Mitchell, and a generation of Vassar students.
M.M. May 22, 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
Notes
THE PHILOSOPHER IN PLATO S STATESMAN
Introduction: Problems of Interpretation
1. Difficulties in the standard view
2. An alternative heuristic thesis for interpretation
a. The essence of the dialogue
b. Formal treatise versus genuine dialogue
3. The program for interpretation
I. The Dramatic Context
1. Dramatic situation: the trial of Socrates
2. Dramatis personae : antipathy, eagerness, silence
a. Theodorus: geometry and philosophy
b. Young Socrates: the test to discover kinship
c. The elder Socrates: silence and unheardness
3. The stranger from Elea
a. Judge and mediator
b. Alienation and mediation, some clues
(i) The mean
(ii) The Homeric allusions: homecoming and disguise
(iii) The stranger s Parmenidean heritage: education and irony
4. The agreement to begin
II. The Initial Diairesis (258b-267c)
1. Formal structure of the method; the apparent accord (258b-261e)
2. Young Socrates error; the value of bifurcatory diairesis (261e-264b)
a. The refutation: halving and forms (261e-263b)
Note : panhellenist partisanship
b. The correction; the status of diairesis (263c-264b)
3. The closing bifurcations; jokes and problems (264b-267c)
III. The Digressions on Substance and Method (267c-287b)
A. The first digression: the myth of the divine shepherd (267c-277a)
1. The stranger s objection (267c-268d)
2. The manifold function of the myth (268d-274e)
a. The logos of cosmic history
b. The critique of traditions
(1) Traditional images
(i) The Homeric shepherd of the people and the Hesiodic age of Cronus
(ii) Tyranny, democracy, and sophistic humanism
(iii) Re-emergence of the shepherd
(2) The stranger s critique
(i) The initial remembrance : the ancient despot
(ii) Forgetfulness : homo mensura and the new despotism
(iii) Philosophical recollection: deus mensura and the art of statesmanship
3. The revisions of the initial definition (274e-277a); Young Socrates and the Academy
B. The second digression: paradigm and the mean (277a-287b)
1. The paradigm of paradigm (277a-279a)
2. The paradigm of the weaver (279a-283a)
3. The stranger s preventative doctrine of essential measure (283b-287b)
a. The diairetic revelation of essential measure (283b-285c)
b. The purposes of the dialogue; its value as a paradigm for Young Socrates (285c-286b)
c. The application of essential measure (286b-287b)
IV. The Final Diairesis (287b-311c)
a. The change in the form of diairesis (287b ff.)
(i) The difficulty and the new form
(ii) The self-overcoming of bifurcation
(iii) The stranger s-and Plato s-reticence
b. The first phase: the indirectly responsible arts, makers of instruments (287b-289c)
c. The second phase, part one: the directly responsible arts, subaltern servants (289c-290e)
d. The digression: philosophy and ordinary opinion; statesmanship and actual political order (291a-303d)
(1) The sole true criterion: the statesman s (291a-293e)
(2) The ways of mediation (293e-301a)
(i) Statesmanship and the law: the best way and the ridiculousness of the doctrine of the many (293e-297c)
(ii) The imitative polities: the second best way and the relative justification of the doctrine of the many (297c-301a)
(3) The return to the diaireses of polity: knowledge of ignorance and the political means (301a-303d)
e. Resumption of the diairesis (second phase, part two): the true aides (303d-305e)
f. The third phase: the statesman as weaver; the virtues and the mean (305e-311c)
(i) The application of the paradigm
(ii) The statesman s and the stranger s realizations of the mean
Epilogue: The Statesman Itself as a Mean
Notes
DIALECTICAL EDUCATION AND UNWRITTEN TEACHINGS IN PLATO S STATESMAN
I. An orienting interpretive thesis: the Statesman as a microcosmic exhibition of the long-term process of philosophical education
II. Five unwritten teachings
III. Related passages in the Parmenides and the Philebus
A. The account of participation in the Parmenides , hypothesis III
B. The gift from the gods, Philebus 16c-18d
C. Peras and apeiron in Philebus 23c-27c
D. Implications of the Philebus passages for the account of participation in the Parmenides
(i) Forms of parts and the mathematical sense of peras
(ii) The Great and the Small and the apeiron
E. The five unwritten teachings in the Parmenides and the Philebus
(i) The Great and the Small as a case of the broader apeiron
(ii) The five unwritten teachings in interplay
IV. The exhibition of the unwritten teachings in the diairesis of the fifteen kinds of art in the Statesman
A. The One and its instantiation in the single form : care
B. The apeiron and its instantiation in the continuum traced by the series of fifteen kinds
(i) The list as a series
(ii) The opposites and mid-point
(iii) The continuum of proportions of material and spiritual
C. The normative status of the ratios on the continuum-the city with the fifteen kinds of art as sacred
V. Implications
Supplementary Diagrams
Notes
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
Bibliography
Appendix: Structural Outline of the Statesman
PREFACE
W ith one major and two minor additions, this is a reprinting of The Philosopher in Plato s Statesman as it was first published by Martinus Nijhoff in 1980. The minor additions are this preface and an updated bibliography. The major addition, on which I shall comment shortly, is the essay Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato s Statesman, first published in Plato and Platonism , edited by Johannes M. van Ophuijsen, Catholic University Press, 1999.
* * *
When I first began work on the Statesman in the early 1970 s, I both dearly hoped for and would hardly have believed possible the transformation that the Anglo-American community of Plato scholarship has in fact undergone in the years since.
At that time the developmentalist program was in the ascendancy, and its concerns to extract an historical Socrates from the early dialogues and to resolve differences in formulations of doctrine by assigning them to different stages in the development of Plato s thinking fit closely with the paradigmatic mode of inquiry, the logical analysis and critical reconstruction of particular arguments. The yield of these commitments has been impressive-one thinks of the vast literatures on, for instance, Socratic elenchus, the unity of the virtues, the object of eros, and the Third Man. But, to my way of thinking, these achievements too often have come at a high