Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life. Translated, with introduction, notes and interpretive essay by Ariel Helfer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. Letters V-XIII.
Having shown how the tyrant, Dionysius the Younger, and the aspiring philosopher-king, Dion, failed as philosophers but especially as rulers, Plato turns in Letters Five and Six to corresponding with two more sober men, the young Perdiccas III of Macedon, then under the regency of his brother-in-law, and Hermias of Atarneus, a former student of Plato and friend of Aristotle, who is said to have arranged Aristotle’s marriage to his daughter. In some respects, Perdiccas serves as a parallel life to that of Dionysius, both of them young men, Hermias to that of Dion, both of them mature men.
To Perdiccas, Plato offers counsel on the customs of guest-friendship and of sacred counsel. Plato has sent one of his students to him, as he had done for Dionysius. According to one account, the student, Euphraeus, inspired a love of philosophy in the young king, and Perdiccas reciprocated by raising Euphraeus to a position of honor in his court. A guest-friend, indeed. As to sacred counsel, Plato advises Perdiccas on the nature of political regimes—that is, on ruling, the divine action par excellence. Political life is ‘polytheistic’ in the sense that each regime has “a certain voice,” even as certain animals have distinctive calls (321d). But whereas animals call to other animals, regimes call to other rational beings. Yet only “a very few” observers understand what democracies, oligarchies, and monarchies are saying as they speak to gods and human beings, with actions that “follow” their voices (321e). When regimes follow their voices they flourish, but if they imitate the voices of other regimes they are ruined. Euphraeus can help you to find the right voice for your regime, “the speeches befitting monarchy” (322a).
“But if someone, having heard these things, should say, ‘Plato, it seems, pretends to know what things are advantageous to a democracy, but when it was possible to speak to the demos and to counsel the things best for it, he never went up to utter a sound,'” how to reply (322a)? True enough, but the Athens of Plato’s own time (having already executed Socrates, among other actions) saw “a demos already elderly and habituated by those who came before to do many things unlike to his own counsel”; the philosopher would have been foolish to attempt to advise it, “taking risks in vain and doing nothing more” in a regime that had descended into “an incurable state” (322b). “Political wisdom is likely to be as much an object of suspicion in a democracy as in a monarchy,” Helfer rightly observes. Plato makes no mention of philosophy itself in this letter, content to recommend his philosophically-minded student, with good effect. Perdiccas ruled for five years, killed in a disastrous military expedition against Illyria, which had seized upper Macedonia. It would be helpful to know what we do not know—what Euphraeus advised in regard to the venture—but it is at least clear that this was no imperialist lunge, rather an attempt to counter an act of imperialism.
Plato sends students to Hermias, introducing them as persons likely to benefit the tyrant and likely to benefit from him in turn. His letter is addressed to all three men. “Friends who are steadfast who have healthy character” are more valuable than a multitude of horses or an additional military alliance or additional gold (322d). Young Erastus and Coriscus will prove to be such friends to Hermias, as Plato has tested them and found them of moderate and trustworthy character. For his part, Hermias can protect them, as “they are inexperienced on account of having been occupied with us…for a long part of their life” (322e). It will be recalled that Plato had regarded his time spent in Syracuse with Dionysius a waste of his time and Dionysius regarded the beginnings of a liberal education at the feet of Plato a waste of his time; as a ruler, Hermias spends his time deliberating and acting, not philosophizing, whereas the young philosophers have spent their time becoming liberally educated, not in ruling. As Helfer suggests, “the study of philosophy in Plato’s Academy has rendered them perfectly upright but desperately vulnerable; by attending for so long to the attainment of ‘true wisdom,’ they have failed sufficiently to acquire ‘the human and compulsory’ wisdom that would allow them to fend off the ‘wicked and unjust.'” This being so, these two human types should “hold fast” to one another, “arriv[ing] at a single braid of friendship” (323b).
If, however, one of you becomes disgruntled with this bond and you “resolve to dissolve it,” write a letter of accusation to me, and I will attempt to reconcile you (323b). If you do this, “unless the dissolution happens to have been great,” our joint philosophizing should succeed better “than any incantation whatsoever,” any pious utterance, to “naturally implant and bind you together again” in “friendship and community” (323b-c). Plato playfully calls this “a good prophecy,” claiming “that we will do all these good things, if a god should be willing” (323c). More seriously, he calls this “a compact and sovereign law” among the four of them,” as “playfulness…is a sister of seriousness, and swearing by the god who is leader of all things”—perhaps the “first by nature,” mentioned in his letter to Dionysius?—both “the things that are and the things that will be,” can be known to us, provided “we really philosophize,” as “clearly as is within the power of happy human beings” to know that god (323d). If the tyrant consents, he will be less a tyrant, having submitted to a form of the rule of law.
Helfer contrasts the real Platonists with Dion. “Dion did not really understand what philosophy means for Plato.” Erastus and Coriscus do, but as a result of their ardent and laborious studies they are helpless in any polis, needing the political protection of one such as Hermias. Philosophy alone is not a solution to politics, although Euphraeus’ Platonic political science can be helpful to a young ruler like Perdiccas. Letter Six “is a bridge between [the] drastically truncated presentation of philosophy” moralizing Dion embodied “and the correction of that distortion.” Letter Six both “upholds the notion of philosophy as the basis of trustworthy friendship” and acknowledges philosophy’s “essentially dynamic and transpolitical character.” While insisting on the pious character of philosophy, Plato takes care to propose the covenantal law as a hedge against “the danger of human inconstancy.” After all, will Hermias, with his “limited capacity for philosophy,” sustain the friendship? The young philosophers will be loyal, but how useful can they be to this ruler, beyond their trustworthy friendship? After all, “the philosopher does not wish to spend time in, or even think about, the practical requirements of political activity,” even if he comes to be capable of doing so, in time. And indeed “the real lesson of the letter…is the demonstration of the practical infeasibility of this ideal arrangement,” “the regime” within the regime in Atareneus “that [Plato] has founded.” While he has written “a critical safeguard” into the sovereign covenant—the three philosophers outnumber the lone non-philosopher—the unphilosophic ruler will retain all the physical power, leaving “the philosopher at the mercy of the ruler,” should the tyrant turn especially tyrannical. “Plato cannot rule by means of fear because he can muster no threat of force against the powerful Hermias”; persuasion is his only available means of rule. Worse, this “solution to the philosopher’s need for protection is inappropriate in any real circumstances, since the philosophers must always constitute a tiny minority of the political community.” Letter Six serves as “an introduction to the central political challenge of Plato’s political-philosophic writings.” The “doctrine of philosophic rule is necessarily mythical.” Letter Seven will address this matter, showing much more elaborately “how Plato calls into question the political efficacy of philosophy.”
Plato addresses the seventh letter to “intimates and comrades of Dion,” who by now had been assassinated (323e). These men carry on a civil war against the rule of the assassins. Letter Seven is the central letter in the book, and also the longest.
Plato recalls that Dion “supposed that the Syracusans should be free, dwelling under the best laws” (324b). His opinion originated from his association with Plato, who explains his own political career. Even before reaching the age of full citizenship, Athenian Plato expected to engage in “the common affairs of the city” (324c). But the regime of the Thirty Tyrants, effectively installed by the Spartans after their defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, with some “intimates and acquaintances of mine” among its number, did not “manage the city by leading it from a certain unjust life to a just way,” as Plato had hoped, but instead imposed a violent purge of those Athenians who had opposed the surrender (324d). The leader of the Thirty, Critias, had been a student of “my friend, the elderly Socrates, whom I would scarcely be ashamed to say was the most just of those in that time” (324e). That is, the worry that the conduct of Dionysius, Plato’s student-tyrant, might reflect badly upon his teacher was a possibility Plato had seen in Athens, decades earlier. This, despite the fact that when the regime commanded Socrates to “carry off one of the citizens by force to be put to death in order that he should participate in their affairs whether he should wish to or not,” Socrates courageously refused the command, “risked suffering everything rather than become a partner in their impious deeds” (324e-325a). As for Plato, “I was disgusted and I withdrew myself from the evils of that time” (325a). The subsequent democratic regime that replaced the brief rule of the Thirty Tyrants was even worse, at least regarding to philosophy, killing Socrates “on grounds of a lack of pious veneration” (325c). As Helfer remarks, Plato passes over in silence the second charge against Socrates, that of corrupting the young. One reason for that may be that the addressees of the Seventh Letter are young men.
Upon reflection, and with further observation of politics in Athens and elsewhere, Socrates came to understand how hard it is “to manage the political things correctly” (325d). This is because it is hard to find “men who are friends and faithful comrades,” without whom one can do nothing politically, as the reign of Dionysius, that man alone, confirmed (325d). The corruption of existing regimes, with their “written laws and customs,” makes this nearly impossible, inasmuch as bad regimes foster bad character in rulers and ruled alike (325d). Being a philosopher, Plato continued to consider how regimes might be improved, but “with respect to acting I was always waiting for propitious moments” (326a). They never came. I “ended up thinking, concerning all the cities now, that all of them are being governed badly—for what is of their laws in in a nearly incurable state without some amazing artifice [or preparation] together with fortune” (326a). Echoing the words of the Republic 473c, Plato then concluded that “the human tribes will not cease from evils until either the tribe of those philosophizing (correctly and truly, that is) should come into the positions of political rule, or that of those who are in power in the cities should, by some divine fate, really philosophize” (326b). Plato tacitly invites the late Dion’s allies, and perhaps especially those reading his book, to measure the odds of either eventuality.
Journeying to Italy and Sicily for the first time, he found that “the life that is there called happy” consists of eating and copulating, habits that prevent the young from “becoming practically wise,” men of phronēsis (326b), or indeed to cultivate any other virtue. Here is where Dion came in. His association with Plato, his attempt to philosophize, was the “beginning” of “the problems that have now come to be concerning Dion and of those concerning the Syracusans”—namely, civil war—and, “it is to be dreaded, of still more, unless you would now obey my counsel, given now for the second time” (326e). For when Plato revealed to Dion “through speeches the things that seemed to me to be best for human beings and counseling him to do them, I was ignorant that I, without noticing myself, was in a certain way contriving what would come to be a dissolution of a tyranny” (327a). Dion “hearkened keenly and intently such as none of the young I have ever met,” choosing to “over the rest of his life in a manner differing from that of the many Italiotes and Siceliotes,” “cherish[ing] virtue more than pleasure and the rest of luxury” (327a). This annoyed “those living according to what is lawful convention in a tyranny” (327b).
Had Dion left it there, had he simply lived a virtuous private life, he might have been written off as a peculiar character but deserving of no more than contempt. But Dion “apprehended” that his way of life was being emulated in others, if not in many (327c). More, he “held” (note well, not apprehending) that even the ruler, “even Dionysius could perhaps become one of these with the assistance of gods,” and if so, “both his life and that of other Syracusans would turn out to become one of indomitable bliss” (327c). And he further “supposed” that his good old teacher, Plato, might be brought in “as a partner in these things,” turn Dionysius toward philosophy and thus to found, “without slaughters, deaths, and the evils that have come to be, a happy and true life throughout the land,” a regime ruled by the philosopher-king in practice, not merely in theory, as in the Republic (327d). Does this not substitute Plato for the gods, or does it merely assume that Plato’s arrival has become possible thanks to a divinely arranged, rare circumstance? In the event, it was not a god who called Plato but Dionysius, having been persuaded by Dion to do so. Plato was rightly cautious about Dion’s bright hopes, but he eventually decided to journey to Syracuse, thinking that “if ever someone was to undertake to bring these intentions concerning both laws and regime to completion, it must be attempted also now” (328c). To that dubious hope, Plato added the worry that he might be “in danger of betraying, in the first place, the guest-friendship and comradeship of Dion, who had really come to be in no small dangers” (328d). More, what if Plato did not come and Dion were exiled, arriving in Athens (under the terms of guest-friendship) to rebuke Plato but even more philosophy itself for having betrayed him and having betrayed this unique opportunity to put philosophic theory into practice? In the words Plato puts into the mouth of Dion in this fictional scenario, “will you ever escape a reputation for vice? Far from it.” (329a). There would be no answer to this accusation against himself and philosophy, Plato claims.
“I went, in accordance with reason and in justice as much as can be for a human being,” who lacks godlike foresight (329b). “I left behind my occupations, which were not indecorous”—as we know, his teaching in the Academy he had founded—in order to live “under a tyranny that didn’t seem to be fitting with respect to my things or to me” (329b). This nonetheless acquitted him “in relation to Zeus Xenios,” that is, the god of gods in his aspect of guardian of guest-friendship, while “rendering the philosopher’s part impeachable” (329b). That is, by showing himself both pious and philosophic, he defended himself and philosophy against one of the charges the Athenian demos had leveled against Socrates.
Upon arrival in Syracuse, however, he found not philosophic or friendly speech but “everything around Dionysius full of strife and slanders about Dion in relation to the tyranny” (329c). His concerns about Dion’s safety confirmed, he defended him “to the extent I was capable,” which wasn’t very far; Dionysius soon accused Dion of “plotting against the tyranny”—of a form of thought animated by philosophic principles, if not by the virtue of prudence (329c). In exiling Dion, Dionysius begged, or rather insisted, that Plato stay behind. Did he find something of value in the philosopher, or was he simply ensuring that his putative regime enemies could not reunite and continue their supposed conspiring against him? “While he did grow ever fonder of me as time went on during his intercourse with my way and character, he also wished for me to praise him more than Dion and to hold him to be more especially a friend than him,” spurred on by the “amazing love of victory” typical of a thumotic soul (330a). In this, Dionysius never came to pursue the regime, the way of life, of philosophy; worse, “he shrank from it, fearing, on account of the slanderers’ speeches, lest he should become ensnared in some way and Dion come to accomplish everything for himself” (330b). Plato persevered in his efforts but Dionysius, “resisting, won out,” not in persuading Plato to prefer him to Dion but in resisting philosophy (330b).
Should Plato have persevered instead of getting out of town? No: “One who is counseling a sick man adhering to a regimen that is depraved with respect to health ought first to change his life into something else, and if he is willing to obey, at that point to suggest other things too; but if he is not willing, I would hold one who flees from counseling such a one to be both a man and a doctor, and one who remains to be the opposite: unmanly and artless. It is indeed the same with respect to a city as well, whether it has one sovereign authority or more.” (330c-d). With a slave, it is another matter; in that case, one can use force. But there is no sense in “mak[ing] myself hateful by admonishing in vain” or in flattering them either (331c). Yet isn’t that what Dion did, in Syracuse? Making himself hateful by admonishing in vain? His followers should take note. One should speak to one’s city “if it does not appear to him to be nobly governed, if he is neither going to be talking in vain nor to be put to death for speaking; but he should not bring force against a fatherland to produce a change of regime when it is not possible for it to come to be the vest without exile and slaughter of men; rather, he should keep quiet and pray for the good things for both himself and the city” (331d). Plato makes it explicit: “In this same way, indeed, I would counsel you,” and this is how Dion and I counseled Dionysius; govern yourself, first, then “acquire faithful friends and comrades” attracted to you by your virtue before attempting to reform Syracuse or to recolonize Sicilian cities misruled by barbarians, the latter task undertaken but never achieved by his father (331d-e).
But neither did the virtuous Dion succeed in founding a good regime in Syracuse after returning to the city and expelling the tyrant. Dion’s virtue attracted friends, to be sure. In this enterprise, he brought with him two brothers from Athens who had “come to be [his friends] not from philosophy but from the promiscuous comradeship belonging to most friends, which they work out through hosting someone as a guest-friend or through initiation into the lesser and greater mysteries” (333e). Once victorious in Syracuse, they betrayed Dion, participating in his assassination. This was a “shameful and impious thing” to do, but it must be noticed that although Plato makes much of the congruence of traditional customs, piety, and philosophy, rational inquiry shows that such customs and piety do not guard a man from false friends as well as philosophy—in particular political philosophy, which ought to alert its students to the importance of prudence. Plato immediately displays such prudence, observing that just because the two men in question were Athenians they did not necessarily represent the ethos of that city. I, Plato, am also an Athenian, but never betrayed him, even when tempted by the blandishments of the Syracusan tyrants. Plato “had become a friend to Dion not through vulgar friendship, but through partnership in liberal education” (334b). As for Syracuse, and your continued attempt to rule it in line with Dion’s intentions, but not with his folly, his wish “to make use of justice” without considering the ethos of Syracusans (335c). “Let not Sicily, nor any other city, be enslaved to human masters, but as my speech [logos] has it at least, to laws; for otherwise it is better neither for the enslavers nor the enslaved,” nor for their descendants (334c-d). And, now recurring to a pious thought, “one really ought to be persuaded by the ancient and sacred speeches, which indeed reveal to us that the soul is deathless, and it has judges, and that it suffers the greatest penalties whenever it is rid of its bodies; wherefore ought one to believe that it is a smaller evil to suffer even the great sins and injustices than to do them” (335a).
How, then, to rule Syracuse? Imitate Dion’s personal moderation, be alert to those among you who are “not capable of living in the Dorian way” (336d), do not seek vengeance against your defeated enemies but make them, “by a pair of compulsions, awe and fear,” and make yourselves too, in your prudence, “slaves of the laws” (337a). Select fifty elders and offer them “the greatest possible honors” in framing good laws (337c)—in marked contrast to the Spartans’ imposition of the Thirty Tyrants on conquered Athens. “The laws having been given, everything comes down to this: if those who have won victory should render themselves, more than the vanquished, subservient to the laws, everything will be full of salvation and happiness and there will be refuge from all evils; but if they do not, neither call upon me nor upon another partner for help against whoever is unpersuaded by the letter that has now been sent to you” (336e-337a).
All very good, sage philosopher, but if you had taken Dionysius’ measure in your second visit to Syracuse, why did you return yet again? And if the only reliable friends are the philosophic ones, and philosophic souls are so rare, why would you risk falling into the clutches of this tyrant a second time, inasmuch as he had not heeded the advice of you and your friend Dion the previous time? It isn’t hard to see that Dionysius might invite him back; as a point of honor, he did not want people to think he’d learned nothing from Plato—or so Plato surmises. But why would you accept his invitation?
We have reached what Helfer identifies as the midway point of Letter Seven, “which is to say the midway point of the entire Letters.” As Fortune or some other god or gods would have it, another philosopher, and indeed a philosopher-king of sorts, the mathematician Archytas of Tarentum, had spent time with Dionysius, writing to assure Plato that the young tyrant “had advanced in philosophy” (339b). For his part, Dionysius wrote, too, promising Plato to follow Plato’s wishes regarding Dion. Once again, Plato chose to put the thing to the test, for “if things really be as had been said, in no way [would he] betray this very thing,” philosophy, and thereby put himself under “so great a reproach” (439e). And although fearful and “divining not very nobly,” he set out; once again, his increasingly wan hopes were disappointed, but at least Dionysius, “next after a god,” did prevent “many who wished to destroy me” from doing so, perhaps out of a certain “awe” or shame (340a). Helfer observes that at least Plato had come to the assistance of Archytas and the other Pythagorean philosophers at Syracuse by appeasing Dionysius’ request; “it was to avoid jeopardizing them and their work that Plato once more ‘veiled himself.” But why was Archytas fired with false hopes for the tyrant? Here Plato unfolds the difficulties of the philosophic life, perhaps the main reason so few continue in it.
Students need to understand “what sort of thing the whole problem is and through how many problems and how much toil it lies” for those who undertake to solve it (340c). To “really be a philosopher, being both intimate with and worthy of the divine problem” one must “strain to follow” the path toward it (340c). Such persons, and such persons alone, consider “that life would not be worth living for one who would do otherwise,” and “will not let up until he should either bring everything to completion or obtain such a power that, separately from the one who has shown him, he is incapable of being a guide himself” (340c). On the other hand, “those who are not really philosophers, but have been tinctured by opinions just as those whose bodies have been burnt by the sun, once they have seen how many are the subjects of learning, and the extent of the toil, and the ordered daily regimen that befits the problem, hold it to be hard and impossible for themselves” (340d). Even worse are those “who persuade themselves that they have heard the whole sufficiently and have no further need of any problems” (341a). Such a one was Dionysius, who “pretended both to know and sufficiently to have a hold on many, even the greatest, things because of hearsay from other,” even to the point of writing “about the things he had heard, composing as though it were his own treatise,” although Plato himself professes to “know nothing of these writings” (341b). Even I, Plato, who have written extensively on Socratic and other efforts of philosophic inquiry, have written nothing about the divine problem, for “it is no way speakable as are the other subjects of learning, but rather, from the coming to be of much intercourse concerning the problem itself, and living together, suddenly, as from a jumping fire a light is kindled, and having come to be in the soul, it straightaway nourishes itself” (341c-d). Genuine philosophizing about the divine problem, if writable and speakable “to the many,” would be of the greatest benefit to them, as it would “lead nature forth into the light for all” (341d-e). But “I do not hold [that] to be good for human beings unless for some few—however many are themselves capable of finding them out through a small indication” (341e). Others will view such discoveries either with “incorrect disdain” or worse, “a lofty and empty hope as though they had learned some august things” (341-342a).
Why so? Plato lists five levels of knowing. The first is naming, the first sort of knowledge children learn, once they begin to understand words: for example, ‘this is a circle.’ The second is definition; rationally explaining the thing named in verbal terms: a circle is “that which is everywhere equally distant from the extremes to the middle”—an account, however, which remains ambiguous, inasmuch as it could refer as easily to something called a ‘ring’ (342b). For more precision, one needs an image, “what is drawn and erased, and what is turned on a lathe and destroyed” (342c). Scientific knowledge comes after that, when “all this [is] set down in turn as one, being not in sounds, nor in shapes and of bodies, but within souls” as “the nature of the circle,” its species (342c). And there is still a fifth level, knowledge of “the very thing that is knowable and is truly a being” (342b). The need for this level, as Helfer remarks, is that it “makes it possible to say that the objects of our experience belong objectively and really to species or classes.” Overall, “this amounts to a far-reaching critique of any thoroughgoing materialism” and, one might add, any ‘subjectivism.’ [1]
It is easy to see the daunting features of this path of philosophic ascent. One needs to be “good-natured” to gain the “scientific knowledge of the good-natured” (344e). Aptness to learn and a good memory will not suffice to gain such knowledge. This suggests that the divine problem has to do with “the good,” which Plato’s Socrates mentions as somehow both the origin and ‘end’ or purpose of all natural phenomena. This may be why Plato now emphasizes in his account of inquiring into the nature of the whole the task of “learn[ing] the truth about virtue to the extent possible,” and of vice (344b). “It is necessary to learn them simultaneously, and also the false and true of the whole being simultaneously, with total occupation and a great deal of time” (344b). The difficulty comes with the necessary task of “rubbing against one another: the names, definitions, sights, and perceptions,” the dialectic that process with “kindly refutations,” “making use of questions and answers being without envy,” whereby, when considering what is good and what bad, “practical wisdom shines forth, as well as mind, straining to the utmost extent of human power” (344b-c). This is why a serious man considering “the serious beings” will not write about them, “cast them down amid the envy and perplexity of human beings” who, for the most part, will sneer, snicker, or become enraged at whatever has been discovered in the inquiry, and inquiry for the rigors of which they have neither taste, nor time, nor patience, nor the courage to persevere in (344c). Things that are written down—laws, to give the politically important example—are “not the most serious things” to the lawgiver, “if indeed he himself was serious,” philosophic (344c). For his part, Dionysius wrote about the divine problem “for love of honor” (344e). He was not a serious man, although he was a dangerous one, to others and to himself.
With this, Plato brings matters down to earth. What the tyrant also wanted, aside from honor, was property, including Dion’s property. He also wanted power, and suspected, as already recounted, that Dion was plotting against him. Dionysius proposed an arrangement whereby Dion would profit from his property in Syracuse but could not withdraw the ‘principle,’ as we now would call it, without Plato’s approval, as the right to withdraw that property would give Dion revenues sufficient to fund a military campaign to overthrow Dionysius. Plato disgustedly saw through that ploy, counter-offering to stay in Syracuse but only if Dionysius put his offer in writing. Dionysius wanted nothing to do with that sort of writing—permanence of obligation being less appealing to the tyrannical soul than permanence of a reputation for wisdom concerning the highest things, however spurious that wisdom might be. In the event, Dionysius simply sold Dion’s property, not surprising Plato when he did it. Plato’s recalcitrance regarding the initial scheme proved “a persuasive argument for enmity against me” (349c), as Dionysius now charged that Plato had sided with Dion. Happily, the philosopher-king Archytas rescued the philosopher he’d persuaded to return to Syracuse.
Dionysius’ machinations brought on his ruin. Dion would not have marched against him, had Dionysius given him his money back or had reconciled with him. “But as it is they, having set out against one another, have had their fill of every evil” (350e). For his part, Plato declined Dion’s invitation to join him in the expedition to overthrow Dionysius, and Plato concludes his letter to Dion’s admiring followers with a measured eulogy. Their mutual friend nobly “preferred the suffering of impious deeds above the doing of them, yet being very careful not to suffer them; nevertheless he stumbled, having come to the peak of his overcoming of his enemies” (351c). Such a pious, moderate, sensible human being “would never be wholly deceived concerning the souls of such as they,” but although “a coming storm would not altogether escape his notice…the extraordinary and unexpected magnitude of a storm could escape his notice, and having escaped it, inundate him by force” (351d). A basically good but not prudent man, he did not understand the height of their “ignorance, depravity, and gluttony” (351e). He had not rubbed good and bad together long enough, as a genuine philosopher would do.
As Helfer observes, “there is no denying that the whole undertaking in Syracuse appears to have been a debacle.” Making a philosopher-king out of Dionysius was Plan A; Helfer likens this to Socrates’ proposal in the Republic. Had it succeeded, Platonic political philosophy would have been vindicated in the most spectacular way. Putting Dion in as king, with the best laws, was Plan B; Helfer likens this to the plan of the Laws. “Had Dion succeeded in giving good laws to the Syracusans his reputation of being associated with philosophy, more than any ability to govern wisely himself, would have benefited the reputation of philosophy in turn,” although in truth Dion was no philosopher but rather a gentlemanly admirer of it. He was “wrong ever to believe that Plato’s description of philosophic rule in the Republic was a blueprint for political action,” since philosopher have no “wish to rule” and the people have no wish “to be ruled by philosophers.” Plato more reservedly, more prudently, praised philosophy by saying that “human beings would not be free from evils until philosophy and political power should coincide,” but although he was cautiously ready to test the possibility he never wholeheartedly believed in it. Did Plato derive what political prudence he had from his philosophy as such? Helfer doubts it, since philosophy seeks to know the nature of things, and indeed the nature of the divine things, the rigorous inquiry into which more readily brings souls into the condition of Erastus and Coriscus.
Yet, what of Plato himself? He has inquired into both the divine and the human, political things, not without result. With Erastus and Coriscus, might he be holding out the likelihood of the harmlessness of philosophy and of philosophers and their trustworthiness, while concealing their political knowledge—the result of their philosophic inquiry into the human nature that finds a home in nature as a whole? For one thing, as Helfer does not hesitate to cite, “the key failing of Dion’s political thought” is precisely his insufficient “attention to the difficult problem of political foundings.” He expects—and to Dion’s friends and admirers, Plato praises him for it—a bloodless founding, “recoil[ing] instinctively from the ugly business of ‘laying down the law’ for a new regime,” something the Athenian Stranger in the Laws most emphatically does not overlook. At the same time, Plato is no Machiavellian, one who rather takes delight in such ugly business. For one thing, “Plato is much less willing than Machiavelli to encourage the prospective founder to discard his belief in divine providence as a determining factor in human affairs.” Plato would set natural-right limits on founders, while recognizing that “political affairs belong too much to the realm of flux and chance to be mastered,” Machiavelli-like, “that great political undertakings require more good fortune than one can reasonably hope for.”
In Letter Eight, Plato again addresses Dion’s “intimates and comrades,” but much more briefly. With Dionysius’ tyranny removed and Dion assassinated, Syracuse now roils with a regime dispute between those who want a new tyranny and those who want to “escape from tyranny” (352c). The short Dionysian dynasty had first been installed because the city had needed a defender against powerful Carthage, and it found one in the capable Dionysius the Elder, but once the emergency had passed the tyrants did what tyrants often do: turn their untender attentions upon their own people. Plato writes, “My speech urges to everyone: it urges those aiming at tyranny to turn away in flight and flee the purported happiness of insatiably hungry and mindless human beings, and to attempt to change into the form of a king, and to be slaves to kingly laws, having acquired the greatest honors both from human beings voluntarily and from the laws; and those pursuing free ways and fleeing the slavish yoke as being bad, I would counsel to beware lest they should ever fall into the disease of the ancestors out of insatiability for a certain unpropitious freedom, which disease they then suffered because of the excessive anarchy, making use of an unmeasured, passionate love of freedom” (354c-d). Sounding rather like his student, Aristotle, he denigrates the extremes of slavery and freedom, although “if each is in measure” (as in slavery to good laws and freedom understood as the rule of reason over the appetites), they are “altogether good” (354e).
What would Dion say, were he still living? Plato imagines a speech by Dion, for the benefit of his intimates and comrades. Dion would say that there are three things to consider: soul, body, and money. All are good, so long as care for them is sought in that order, in a regime whose laws buttress that proper hierarchy. Syracusan freedom-lovers should accept “freedom under kingly rule” while would-be tyrants should enjoy “kingly rule for which they are accountable, with laws as masters both of the other citizens and of the kings themselves in case they should do anything illegal” (356c). This can be done if the founders of the new regime establish the kind of ruling institutions that will perpetuate the rule of laws—specifically, three kings, vested with military power and religious authority, thereby made capable of defending the city from foreign attack, along with a set of law guardians who would oversee the kings, with the power to block them from violating the law. Plato also recommends a policy: Syracuse should recolonize Sicily, expelling the barbarians. This effort seems directed at uniting the city, now at war with itself, by giving all citizens a noble, common purpose. “These things I intended to come to be for you while I lived,” Plato’s Dion says, “and I intend them now” (357d). Helfer points to the fact that Plato considers this speech a kind of prayer to hint that it may not prove to be practical. It is evident, for example, that enslaving oneself to the laws, which are written and therefore stable but rigid, does not meet the bar of prudential rule, which requires adjustment to ever-changing circumstances. And what “if there is a conflict between the law of the city” which here is obviously human, “and what the gods demand, such as we know from, for example, Sophocles’ Antigone?” In Letter Two, Plato himself “claims that he is ‘great’ because he makes himself ‘a follower’ not of the law, nor indeed of pleasure, but of his ‘own reason.'” Citizen-bodies can’t do that, being non-philosophers.
Letter Nine goes to someone who may be more amenable to reasoned self-rule, the mathematician-ruler of Tarentum, Archytas, whom Helfer identifies as “the closest thing we find in the Letters to a philosopher-ruler.” This is the man who had entertained such hopes for Dionysius. Here, Plato mentions one of the difficulties of philosopher-kingship, citing a report that “you are restless because you are not capable of being released from the lack of leisure connected with the common things” (357e). After all, “the most pleasant thing in life is to do one’s own thing, especially if someone should choose to do things of such a sort as you too have chosen” (357e-358a). This notwithstanding, Plato counsels moderation. “You need to take the following to heart as well: that it is not only for oneself that each of us has been born, but one’s fatherland gets a certain portion of our birth, one’s parents another, and the rest of one’s friends another, and many things are given also to the propitious moment that overtake our life” (358a). In the philosophic life, lest we become defenseless Erastuses and Coriscuses, the virtue of moderation requires us to balance philosophizing with considerations that can, if well managed, protect the philosophic way of life within the regime of the city, the order of the family, and the network of friends, all of which can threaten that way of life, as seen throughout, but all of which can also support it, if philosophers take care to allocate their time prudently. “This theme quietly pervades the Letters from its very first words,” as Helfer recalls, when Plato complained to Dionysius about all the time he’d devoted to him.
Plato addresses the very short Letter Ten to Aristodorus, whom Dion (who was still alive at this point—the letters in the Letters are not chronologically arranged) has described as “a special comrade of his” (358c). Special because he understands philosophy in the Dionian way, “exhibiting a character that is the wisest one with a view to philosophy; for it is steadfast, and faithful, and healthy,” a view that Plato assures him is his own view of what “true philosophy” is (358c). But as we know, and as Helfer emphasizes, philosophy is much more than this, being the love of wisdom and the ardent pursuit of it an inquiry that yields ambiguous results. “Be strong and remain in the very character traits in which you now remain,” Plato writes in his best avuncular manner (358c). Decent readers who don’t read very carefully will come away with the impression that this Plato, and philosophers who follow him, are trustworthy fellows, no threat to the city and even commendable citizens.
The philosophers must not be seen as impious, then. This defense is the burden of Letter Eleven, addressed to the otherwise unknown Laodamas, a Greek colonist who is thinking of founding a new regime. Plato here insists, as he has done previously, that a founding consists in more than lawgiving. A city cannot be “well established without the existence of some authority caring for the daily regimen of both slaves and free in the city, so that it might be both moderate and manly” (359a). If the city already has good men in its politeuma, its ruling body, very well, but “if there is a need of someone to educate them,” who will do it? (359b). “What remains is for you to pray to the gods” (359b). Alternatively, and perhaps marginally more realistically, you will need a founder, “a man both noble and good” who also enjoys “great power” (359b). “Good luck,” indeed (359b).
Letter Twelve is Plato’s final letter to his own philosophic comrade, Archytas. He praises some memoranda Archytas has sent to him, memoranda quite possibly written by Archytas himself. Plato doesn’t mention the topics of the memoranda, which might range from comments on Dionysius the Younger to philosophic considerations. The author reminds Plato of the writer’s “ancient ancestors,” “good men” expelled from Troy by the tyrannical Laomedon, father of Priam (359d). Plato might be alluding to the exiles from Syracuse in the present day. He also mentions some memoranda of his own, which Archytas was waiting for; they are not yet ready, Plato tells him, but he has sent them, anyway, with the proviso that they be guarded from eyes unworthy to see them, reiterating the theme of caution with respect to anything written down, a caution Plato is confident his philosophic confidant shares.
The thirteenth and final letter begins jarringly: “It is denied that this is by Plato” (359e). Helfer draws a parallel between Plato’s disavowal of the full seriousness of his corpus of writings in Letter Two, and also to Plato’s final paragraphs in that letter, where he moves from “lofty philosophic subjects to a hodgepodge of quotidian matters.” Letter Thirteen, the last one to Dionysius, also contrasts sharply with the earlier letters, especially Letter One, “which of course was marked by strident denunciation of tyranny in general and Dionysius’ tyranny in particular.” What’s going on?
Plato reminds Dionysius that the tyrant had once said he’d benefited from Plato. He sends some Pythagorean writings along, a further benefit, and announces that he is also sending Helicon, a student of the mathematician Eudoxus. He is someone Archytas might wish to converse with—another example of Plato’s interest in placing philosophically minded persons under the patronage of a ruler who might yet be brought to “honor Platonic philosophy,” as Helfer puts it. Plato judiciously includes some material gifts—a statue of Apollo for Dionysius and some jars of honey for his children. Helfer suggests that this contrasts with the conduct of imprudent Dion, who relied on appeals to moral rectitude alone in his dealings with men.
Plato then gets down to brass tacks: “I will be frank with you concerning money” (362c). He once again adjures the tyrant—who, we recall, has not dealt honestly with Dion’s property—to make sure that his “expenses be correctly spent and correctly returned,” lest he (the honor-lover) be impugned as a man “hard to do business with” (362d). Hard not only for Dion, but just as hard for Plato, it transpires, inasmuch as the wealthy Dion had been donating funds that Plato uses for wholesome “civic and familial duties” in Athens, to say nothing for the expenses Plato incurs in running his Academy. “It was the life of the Academy,” Helfer sees, “the support for his philosophic friends’ ability to live the philosophic life, that put Plato in the position of needing to raise funds in places like Syracuse.” A college president is a college president, then and forever after. Dion, his chief donor, is too high-minded to notice the material needs of philosophers; Dionysius, Plato’s chief worry, is perhaps too honor-minded to appreciate such a purpose. Put another way, Plato has indeed founded a regime, a regime ruled by a philosopher-king who rules within the larger Athenian city, which has seen more than one regime. Although the purpose or telos of Plato’s regime differs substantially from the purposes of any of the regimes of the city, it shares the characteristics of regimes generally: a ruler, a ruling way of life, a ruling purpose, and ruling institutions. The regime also needs a foreign policy, a way of dealing with other regimes in other cities, including a philosophic regime-within-a-regime in Syracuse. All regimes need revenues, philosophic regimes not excepted.
Helfer concludes: “the Letters is Plato’s attempt to clarify the meaning of his lifelong project of promoting and defending the reputation of philosophy, of seeking to make philosophy ‘honored even among the multitude.'” He does so in the course of narrating and commenting on a cautionary tale on the difficulties of philosophizing itself and of philosophizing in a politic manner.
Note
- In the spirit of Socratic inquiry, Helfer cites serious problems with Plato’s account of the levels of knowledge in the Letters. First, Plato does not explain how the changing, perceptible things known at the first three levels relate to the imperceptible but knowable fifth level. Elsewhere, Plato unfolds a theory of “participation” in the forms/Ideas. But “Plato’s own work does not consistently stress this solution,” which he presents as an unquestioned doctrine only in the Phaedo. Although the Parmenides has the young Socrates presenting that theory, “Parmenides there advances a number of trenchant critiques that Plato never attempts to refute in any of his writings.” Second, in the Seventh Letter, the emphasis isn’t on participation of perceptible things in “the fifth” but on the participant. ‘Subjectively,’ Plato elsewhere (e.g., in the Phaedrus) links perceptibles to imperceptibles with his theory of “recollection,” but not here. Finally, the relationship between the fourth and fifth levels isn’t clear. If knowledge of the fourth level is prerequisite to “scientific knowledge of the fifth,” why is this “anything but the incoherent or circular claim that attainment of some scientific knowledge is a prerequisite to attainment of that same scientific knowledge”? What is needed is “an understanding of the nature of mind,” but the mind is hard to understand, a thing that “cannot be known in the same manner as the other beings of which scientific knowledge is possible.” This leads to the question of the question of the existence of “a cosmic mind or deity, knowledge of which is made out to be the goal of philosophy in Letters Two and Six,” but unmentioned here. In the Seventh Letter, then, Plato does not answer “the great questions” of mind so much as he “indicates the basic features—and some of their implications—of our intuitive belief that we know, or can come to know through sense perception together with mind, about the beings that make up the whole”; “some further metaphysical apparatus would be needed to make up a complete explanatory picture.” He has certainly “indicated no avenue along which we might still hope to find access to the ‘what’ of the beings, to any direct grasp of ‘the fifth’ itself.” Is there any divine or cosmic support, then, for justice and the other virtues? There are limits to human knowledge, which makes writing down claims about “the fifth” a misguided enterprise for the philosopher, as only a certain, rare, kind of human soul can live with the knowledge of those limits. “There is doubt or ‘perplexity’ (aporia) involved in philosophy that is generally ill suited to the human constitution.” This doubt opens the possibility that “true knowledge of the divine…is not necessarily compatible with the stories of Homer and Hesiod,” and therefore that true piety, which Plato identifies with true philosophy, may lead in a direction the vast majority of people don’t want to hear. In this, respectable Dion is farther from philosophizing than tyrannical, sneering Dionysius.
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