Humanisms, Old and New: Plato’s Myths as 21st Century Philosophy
Stefan Dolgert
University of Connecticut
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association
Portland, Oregon
March 23, 2012
Abstract:
Plato is often considered to be a founder of the humanist tradition and is therefore something of a
bête noire to the poststructuralists of the “New Humanism.” I challenge this interpretation of
Plato’s humanism via a close reading of two of the central myths from Republic and Statesman,
the Myth of Er and the Golden Age, to highlight an irony heretofore unnoticed: Plato’s purported
elevation of the human is intimately connected with a mythic thinking that destabilizes the very
animal/human distinction that most interpreters assert he assumes. The humanist imperative to
divide the world into humans and “other” animals is thus destabilized in his dialogues, disclosing
an alternative conception of the cosmos/polis relationship in which myth and philosophy are
allies rather than enemies, and which is not premised on the (human) sacrifice of animality. My
reading of Plato therefore pushes against the limits of both the “mortalist humanism” of Judith
Butler and the “agonist humanism” of Bonnie Honig. When viewed in light of the nonsacrificial Plato, the foundations of these rival approaches (death, voice, kinship vs. natality and
pleasure) should be viewed not as the bases for a deeper notion of humanist politics, but instead
as a calling to a non-anthropocentric vision of ethics and the political.
Each time that philosophy confines itself to humanity as it has been historically constituted and
defined, it diminishes itself, and in the end suppresses itself.
Alain Badiou (Badiou and Zizek 2009, 75)
It is always that which strikes us as commonplace or absurd which indicates that we are not open
to one of the mysteries…
Allan Bloom (Bloom 1968, PREFACE iii)
Plato’s Republic asks us to ponder the meaning of justice, and is usually taken to offer a
vision of moral optimism by affirming that living justly offers us the possibility of a selfsufficient happiness (Bloom 1968, 436). It may be surprising to point out, then, that the text
ends on a rather morbid note. People who eat meat are actually eating people when they eat
meat: those who formerly lived the just life affirmed throughout the bulk of the dialogue, to be
1
precise. Via the “Myth of Er” that Socrates narrates in Book X, the text ends with the
Pythagorean spectacle of an afterlife in which the immortal souls of just humans return to the
world of the living in the bodies of tame (hêmeros) animals (620d). While today we might
interpret this to mean that my great aunt Else may return in the form of a loyal St. Bernard, in
Plato’s day the concept of ‘pet’ was rather undeveloped; to be a domesticated animal in Athens
circa 360 BCE meant that you were a goat, pig, or ox, most likely, which meant that you were
destined to be sacrificed at a civic festival and subsequently consumed as meat. If Socrates
endorses this at the close of the Republic, as he appears to, he seems a cannibal as well as a
justicide and justivore. The Republic’s teaching then is that the ultimate payment for living
justly is a trip to the sacrificial altar in your next life.1
What are we to make of this? If we are “eaters of the just,” does this say something
important about Platonic political philosophy, or about the relationship of political theory to
democratic politics?2 What does it mean to speak of the ethical life of the demos if we take the
myth seriously? Is Plato oblivious to this justicide, or does he present Er’s tale as a subtle
stratagem designed to destabilize his audience’s commitment to practices of animal sacrifice?
What does this tell us about the status of myth in Plato’s texts? Does placing this idea in a myth
render it profound or simply ridiculous? More provocatively, does this make animals relevant to
the Platonic concept of justice? If Aristotle was not restating Plato’s views when he
distinguished humans as the political animal, the only one that discusses matters of the
1
I will defend this claim more fully later, but let me emphasize here that this view of the ending of the Republic,
while surely a minoritarian one today, was the dominant one from 300-600 CE. The Neoplatonic philosophers
Porphyry, Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus, Damascius, and Dicaearchus all held to a rough version of this
interpretation, though with important differences between them (Vidal-Naquet 1978; Sorabji 1993; Dillon 1995).
2
In “Eating Well” Derrida provocatively says that we eat “the Good,” by which he indicates that introjection is the
fundamental experience of Western subjectivity… certainly no small claim (Derrida 1991). Is Plato getting at
something similar here?
2
“beneficial or harmful, and hence also what is just or unjust,” (Politics I.ii, 1253a15),3 does that
imply there is a secret Platonic teaching regarding the status of animals?
Perhaps it is not so much a question of a secret teaching, of a hidden Platonic wisdom, as
it is looking again at Plato with an eye to catching sight of what our preconceptions might have
caused us to overlook. In this piece I will challenge the assumption that Plato’s philosophy
establishes or grounds a radical separation between humans and other animals. I will also
contend that this assumption is connected to another troubling interpretive move common among
Platonic scholars: the presumption that myth and philosophy are radically distinct genres or
modes of thought, and that myth is decidedly inferior to philosophy. I will argue that neither
philosophy/myth nor human/animal is a stable, hierarchical, dichotomy, and that the best and
noblest in Plato’s vision of the philosopher is crucially linked to myth and animality. But it is
important from the outset to also say that I am not claiming to have rediscovered a lost Platonic
doctrine that makes these mythic animals the centerpiece of his oeuvre; his denigration of
nonhumans animals remains in place, as we shall see. Instead of replacing Plato the
anthropocentrist with Plato the vegan, therefore, we will now have to contend with a Plato of
variegated hue. Like the democratic city he was so agonistically engaged with, Plato’s animal
politics display first one aspect and then another depending upon the lens we bring to his texts. I
will not argue that my ambiguous Plato dictates that we follow a new set of directives, but rather
that we cannot continue to affirm a monological anthropocentric Plato. His mythic animals call
to us, or perhaps growl to us, to think of the promise of philosophy and politics in a different
3
Though even Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics must be qualified. He does not say that humans are uniquely
political, but merely that they are “more of a political animal” than other creatures (1253a7); also, in the History of
Animals and elsewhere he discusses cranes as intelligent, political creatures whose flying formations display
geometrical knowledge (Aristotle 1998; and see Skemp’s notes to Plato 1957, 13).
3
register. Plato’s animals also have much for us to ponder about the animals outside the text as
well – the animals of the polis and the steppe and the ocean and the forest – but to appreciate this
we will have to take another look at the myths that animate his key political texts.
I will begin this exercise in listening by exploring the conjunction of two political
dialogues of Plato,4 the Republic and the Statesman, via the Myths of Er and the Golden Age,
respectively.5 There is a powerful resonance between these two dichotomies and the way that
they partition the world – between myth and philosophy (and reason), and animal and human –
which serves to create an interference pattern that obscures violence by naturalizing domination.
Thinking in terms of myth/reason, like thinking via animal/human, invites us to imagine a world
in which virtue, clarity, and power lie solely on the right side of each pair. They resonant with
and amplify each other, as myth draws its negative associations from the animal-like illusion and
simplicity that fables (which so frequently use animal characters) traffic in, while reason gilds its
lily through an operation by which it secures for itself the lone marker of humanity. This creates
and stabilizes the pattern of white noise that is the other side of the resonance (Euben 2003, 1213). The noise is white noise because, like static, it can fall into the background as an audible
hum that hides in plain side. It is so pervasive but so steady, so unobtrusive, that it is difficult
4
There is some controversy over the interpretive strategy of reading multiple Platonic works synchronically vis a vis
one particular concept or theme. Plato wrote his dialogues over the course of many years, and it is not clear that
there is sufficient unity among the dialogues to legitimate such an approach (though for a contrary view see Zuckert
2009). It was also a frequent practice in the past to assume Platonic unity rather uncritically, which resulted in
solving problematic passages in one dialogue via a “magic bullet” from another; a passage taken out of context from
the latter work was simply said to solve the ambiguity in the first text (for an example of this see Cornford 1903).
The reaction against this method is certainly understandable, but it does not require that we only discuss a single
dialogue at a time. Rather, we must acknowledge that the ambiguity within a text is echoed and amplified by
ambiguity between texts, and that our best efforts to create resonance between texts cannot deny the gaps that
remain betwixt them.
5
The relationship between the political import of these texts is subject to debate, and I do not enter into the
controversy here except to the extent that I assume the two dialogues can be fruitfully compared. I assume neither
fundamental harmony nor disharmony; neither “maturation” nor “realism” to explain the transition from Republic to
Statesman. For a summary of the issues see (Kahn 1995).
4
after a while to even realize that it is there at all. But also like white noise it screens us off from
an entire register of sounds that cannot penetrate its cottony thickness. Reason tells us that we
should not trouble ourselves over the plight of animals, since animals lack reason. In myths and
fairy tales we may hear the voices of animals as they ponder, persuade, and pester, but only
children take these seriously. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human qualities to animal
figures, is the special forte of the mythic consciousness, but logos should purge us of such
category-blurring horrors.
By contesting the reification of these dichotomies, my essay provides important insight
into two areas of contemporary political theory. First, Plato’s contemporary interlocutors,
whether they believe him to be a friendly critic of democracy (Monoson 2000; Euben 2003), a
skeptic of popular rule in the name of philosophy (Strauss 1964; Rosen 1995), or an outright
totalitarian (Popper 1962), have sometimes noted the relation of myth to political philosophy but
have not taken up the challenge of connecting this relationship to the status of the nonhuman
world.6 Taking Plato’s myths seriously encourages us to expand our notion of his philosophic
project, and interrogates our assumptions about the meaning and value of the concept of
humanity by placing it in counterpoint to a vibrant mythic world of politically-charged animals.
Animal bodies are important to political philosophy precisely because our age is basically the era
of biopower (Foucault 2008). State regulation, capitalist discipline, academic industry, and the
entirety of the biomedical sciences are entirely dependent upon the organization of vast
quantities of animal life. Perhaps, as Badiou says, philosophy at its best has always been about
6
Vidal-Naquet (1978) and Clark (1995) are notable exceptions, though neither pushes very far to develop a broader
notion of environmental or interspecies ethics.
5
the inhuman; today philosophy cannot be political unless it takes the nonhuman as its subject par
excellence (Derrida 2002; Shukin 2009).
Opening up the status of myth and nonhumans in Plato can also give us a unique vantage
on a second set of discourses in contemporary theory, whose overlapping borders could be
termed a “new humanism.” Judith Butler’s “mortalist humanism” and the “agonist humanism”
of Bonnie Honig both seek to rescue humanism from its rationalist pedigree by refracting it
through poststructuralist lenses.7 Butler (along with Nicole Loraux, among others) privileges the
woundedness of the body, its liability to suffering, as the basis for a humanism that no longer
grounds itself in reason and autonomy (Honig 2010). This susceptibility to pain and death is
communicated through the voice (though the cry need not be articulate), which links us to the
suffering of others through a complicated and unstable set of kinship relations (a kinship that
explodes the normal limitations of consanguineous bonds or contractual ties). The upshot of this
“ethical turn” in Butler is that we return with a renewed confidence in “the human” to restore us
from barbarism, though why death, voice, and kinship should not push us toward a
“nonhumanism,” given that all of these are not exclusive to humans, is not clear.
Honig’s critique of Butler would seem to place her “agonist humanism” closer to my
version of variegated Platonism, but her criticism ends up stopping far short of Plato’s vision.
She contends that Butler’s “universal or principled suffering” (Honig 2010, 4) is a reductive
move that simplifies the complexity of the human experience of the body, but also that it takes us
toward an anti-politics that is intolerant of the tensions that tear but also sustain political life.
Honig instead argues that natality, pleasure/desire, and power must be added to the mortalist
story (leaving me to wonder whether her agonism is really just mortality plus pleasure) if we are
7
The terms are Honig’s. See Honig 2010.
6
to give politics its due, which is also to say that she wants us to remain “in the world” rather than
searching for some form of quixotic transcendence into “the ethical” (Honig 2010, 26). But,
troublingly from my vantage, while Honig hints that her agonism is “posthumanist” at points, she
never indicates any real acknowledgement of what this might mean for those beings not currently
classified as nonhuman.
If it seems odd to claim that Plato has anything to tell us about either of these strands of
poststructuralist humanism, this has to do with the truncated vision of Plato that many
contemporary (especially poststructuralist) scholars take as gospel. Butler, largely under the
influence of Luce Irigaray, contends that we continue to struggle to get out from under the
shadow of Platonism, since it is Plato who creates the basic template of Western philosophy’s
patriarchal, heteronormative, humanism (Butler 1993). According to Irigaray and Butler it is
Plato who sets up mimesis as the basic theme for Western humanism, an imitation that is
predicated upon the superiority of the male/Father, whose ability to create is dependent upon the
existence of an inert, docile female substance upon which to imprint his copies (of himself).
Whether this is a compelling reading of the Timaeus is debatable (see Hyland 2004 for why it is
not), but it is especially dubious as a totalizing interpretation of Plato’s oeuvre. Plato’s leadcharacters cannot simply be assumed to be his mouthpieces, and, following Honig’s criticism of
Butler’s tendency to reduce ambiguity, we could also say that exegesis of Plato calls for an ear
similarly attuned to polyphony and seeming disharmony.
As I will be arguing through the rest of the essay, this new (old) Plato interrogates the
subtle anthropocentrism that insinuates itself into both the mortalist and agonist humanisms. His
challenge to the hegemonic assumption of human centrality will be contentious, no doubt, but the
mythic component in Plato shifts the ground of contention and renders anthropocentrism less
7
tractable as a default position. That said, there is also a greater opportunity for respect across
these very borders of contention. As we shall see, the particular lessons of these myths indicate
that the Other’s perspective, to the exact extent that I do not share it (or even find it odious), is
precisely the signal for respect. Plato’s animals highlight the importance of alterity and mutual
limitation, and the myths become a kind of methodological clue for bringing our epistemic
disabilities to light and encouraging us to seek ever better means of expanding our knowledge
across these intervals.8
Reading Plato’s Myths
It seems like the place to start in unraveling the humanist skein is with the status of myth
in Plato. What is it doing there, and is there a method that can guide us in solving its functions?
One way, which expresses the weight of philosophic exegesis in the 20th century, is to claim that
his myths makes no difference whatsoever to how we should understand Plato or politics. The
Myth of Er is generally given short shrift by analytically inclined philosophers as part of a larger
interpretive strategy which denigrates the importance of myths in Plato’s dialogues. Julia Annas
calls the Myth of Er “lame” and a “messy ending” (Annas 1981, 353),9 and most of the standard
interpretations of the Republic, including Cross and Woozley (1964) and Bloom (1968), ignore it
or devoted only marginal commentary to it. To the extent it was considered at all it was seen as
concession to the failure of the main argument of the Republic; it was designed to shore up the
traditional beliefs of those like old Cephalus, in whose home the dialogue is set, who were too
simple-minded to understand the philosophic doctrines propounded. They are given the
8
Honig (2010) is particularly sensitive to the importance of “the interval,” though she does not make the
human/animal interval a central theme in her work.
9
Though she later revised this evaluation, to be fair (Annas 1982). The earlier formulation stands out as a classic
formulation of the puzzlement common to a broad swath of Plato scholars.
8
equivalent of a children’s fable at the end of the dialogue, assuring them that justice really does
pay, even though the manner of its rewards seems at odds with the actual burden of Socrates’
reply to the challenge of Gyges’ Ring. As Allan Bloom puts it: “the philosopher has no need of
the myth” (Bloom 1968, 436).10 Thus Annas’ notion of a messy ending: if the Myth of Er is
needed it seems a scandal – if not then what is it doing?
A second strategy, adopted by Melissa Lane among others, understands Plato’s uses of
myths to be crucially linked with his philosophic method, though it views the myths more as
conveyors of negative lessons rather than as carries of a positive philosophic message (Lane
1998, 112-117).11 Lane argues that the “Golden Age” myth from the Statesman, which I discuss
below, is an important part of the larger argument in the text, but its importance derives from the
errors that the interlocutors entertain in the myth. Mary McCabe goes a step farther when she
claims that, to the extent a doctrine appears in Plato via a myth, that doctrine is specifically being
repudiated. Through her notion of “absent partners” – rival philosophic position’s to Plato’s own
– McCabe argues that doctrines such as Heraclitus’ cosmic flux, which are so self-contradictory
as to be incapable of rendered into actual philosophic argument, can only be included into the
dialogue by their presentation in a myth (McCabe 2000). When Plato shows his audience an idea
through a myth, he is therefore implicitly criticizing this concept by showing its resistance to
logos.
10
Though Bloom, unlike Annas, is not bothered by the need for the myth. It is for him a sign of the wisdom of
Plato’s rhetorical structuring of the text in that he is ever aware of the precarious predicament of philosophy in the
city. Writing a dialogue is as political an act as making a speech in the Assembly, and requires that Plato account
for the need to persuade those amenable to his argument, as well as the need to satisfy those too unphilosophical to
understand the argument. Hence Bloom’s claim about the need for myths in the dialogue even though philosophers
themselves do not need myths. It is exactly this idea of anti-mythic philosophy that is one of the main targets of my
essay.
11
Though Lane does not seem to think this true of the myths in the Laws, she does not explain how to reconcile the
conflict (Lane 1998, 116).
9
The first path, which sees in Plato’s myths nothing but embarrassment, or noble lies to
make the distasteful philosophic medicine go down easier, has found as many critics as
supporters lately (Dorter 2003; Halliwell 2007; White 2007). It is also difficult to purge Plato’s
dialogues of muthos without purging them of a number of quite important ideas that almost
everyone takes to be “Platonic,” since, for example, we learn of the Ideas via the myth of the
Cave in the Republic, and the tripartite soul via the myth of the soul’s charioteer in the Phaedrus.
If myth and reason are simply enemies then we have a very truncated Plato on our hands. The
second approach has a number of merits over the first, among them that it does not force us to
decapitate Plato in order to save philosophy from myth, but it greatly restricts the scope and
ambit of the mythical domain. Myths are still subservient to reason, to logos, in this view, since
it is logos that issues the directives beforehand and enlists myth to serve in the right place at the
right time.12 But if, as Jacques Derrida has argued, logos and muthos are not the antagonists we
think, and if reason itself is constrained by structures indebted to myth (Derrida 1981), then we
cannot so easily presume that reason sits comfortably in the captain’s chair as we live our lives.
I am therefore arguing for a third approach, which contends that myth and philosophy are
allies rather than enemies, and that neither party is epistemically prior to the other (Blumenberg
1985; Heidegger 1992; Barrachi 2002). Derrida argues in “Plato’s Pharmacy” that Plato was
forced, by a structural necessity inherent in language, both to critique the contingency and
motility of mythic language while simultaneously using this very language to defend his project
(Derrida 1981). Plato is compelled to deride the derivative and dumb qualities of the written
word through a myth, and a written one at that. Derrida claim is that Plato is compelled to try to
12
So even those who see positive value in Plato’s myths like Dorter (2003) remain somewhat limited, in my view,
because the truths revealed in myth have always already been laid out via reason. Myth never exceeds the marching
orders of its commanding officer.
10
tame myth’s wildness, its resistance to discipline, its slipperiness that threatens to destroy the
very possibility of meaning (Derrida 1981); Plato is in good company given the many thinkers
who have similarly been alarmed by myth’s dangerous obscurity, and even moreso its ability to
mimic reason or even make reason turn into its opposite, i.e. myth (Horkheimer and Adorno
1987). Myth’s slipperiness is said to cloak the violence of everyday politics (Benjamin
1986;Van Rooden 2009), and worse yet, Plato himself is even blamed for creating the porous
border between myth and reason because he polluted his philosophy with…myths (Trainer
2007)!
But where Horkheimer and Adorno (1987) see only contamination, we should instead see
the fertility that results from cross-pollination. Myth, as Charles Segal says, opens our eyes to
the possibilities of the world: myths “‘are the interpreters of reality’…the educator of the soul’s
loves” (Segal 1978, 330). Myth is, in effect, a part of the faculty of active perception. While
some the early mechanistic philosophies of perception took it to be a passive faculty, one which
awaits a stimulus from a world external to us, phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty see
perception as a faculty that co-constitutes the world because it solicits bodies outside the self into
a encounter of mutual participation. Myth too solicits the participation of the world in a way that
exceeds the mere given-ness of things. (Blumenberg 1985; Heidegger 1992; Barrachi 2002)
Proclus 1970; Blumenberg 1985; Heidegger 1992; Dillon 1995; Barrachi 2002;
Of course we already know of this intimacy between myth and reason, though we rarely
attend to it. The canon of political philosophy is indebted to myth – indeed is inseparable from it
– but telling someone in political theory circles that they are dealing in myths is hardly taken to
be complimentary. Yet Plato’s Cave (as I have already mentioned), Hobbes’s state of nature,
Jefferson’s “all men are created equal,” and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance are all at heart mythic
11
constructions that imaginatively reshape and reconstitute our relationship to the real. Plato’s
Cave is surely one of the most enduring images, and is probably the most famous in philosophy.
It has been called an analogy, a simile, an allegory, a metaphor, and it is all of these things. But
over and above those it is a myth, indebted, as Segal has shown, to the Greek tradition of the
katabasis, the descent into the underworld (Segal 1978, 315). Just as Orpheus goes to the
underworld to find Eurydice, and Odysseus summons the shades of Hades in the Odyssey, the
Republic is pervaded from beginning to end by the theme of “going down.” It is structured by
three descents, beginning, as is well known, with Socrates’ saying “Kateben,” “I went down…to
the Piraeus,” ending with Er’s descent into Hades, and centered by the Cave in Book VII and the
imaginative descent that is the focus of the myth.
If the myth of the Cave has become the core of Western philosophy’s self-identity, and
Hobbes’s warning about the fictitious bellum omnium contra omnes is heeded as if it were a
statement of fact, perhaps it will not be so strange to ponder what we might see if we look more
closely at Er’s story and the Golden Age of Kronos.
Beginning with Plato
We commonly think of Plato’s philosophy as an inheritance of the rejection of natural
philosophy by his mentor Socrates. Socrates, we see in the Phaedo, was attracted at an early age
to the likes of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras, but he was disappointed in the
fruitlessness of their endeavor. Instead he was moved to seek ask about the nature of the Good
for humans, and in this is often created with the creation of the first political philosophy.
Richard Sorabji places Plato squarely in the tradition of those who deny that non-human animals
are the proper subject of morality, since they lack of reason and therefore lack the ability to order
their lives by the Idea of the Good (Sorabji 1993). Animals may be made better or worse (think
12
of Socrates’ discussion of training horses) by humans, but this isn’t so much a matter for
philosophy as it is a subsidiary issue of the technique of husbandry.13
From the first book of the Republic Plato indicates that there is something philosophically
significant about the difference between humans and non-humans. Socrates begins his
discussion on the nature of justice with Cephalus and his son Polemarchus, but clearly the main
antagonist in Book I (until he is essentially silenced) is the sophist Thrasymachus. Even after he
is forced into a sullen state of submission, the main tack of the argument adopted by Glaucon and
Adeimantus follows on the general position of Thrasymachus, that justice is really the right of
the stronger, and that injustice as conventionally understood (this same right of the stronger) is
more powerful and choiceworthy (342b-344d). In taking up the argument for injustice (through
the Ring of Gyges analogy) Glaucon especially pushes the claims for flouting the conventional
definition of justice, which is largely construed as a sop to the weak and which does not
represent the true desires of men, who would do anything and everything they could as long as
they could avoid punishment. The Republic is thus crafted as an extended refutation of the
position originally staked out by Thrasymachus, and significantly the first appearance (one wants
to say irruption) of this figure into the Socratic colloquy is marked by the comparison of the
sophist to a beast of prey: “He gathered himself together and sprang at us, like a wild beast at its
prey” (336b). Socrates adds to this by directly linking Thrasymachus to the wolf of the proverb,
“if I hadn’t looked at the wolf before he looked at me, I’d have been struck dumb” (336d). The
main argument to be rebutted, one might say the central task of the Republic, is placed in the
mouth of man who is imagined via the language of the violent beast of prey.
13
Though perhaps there are implications for philosophy if the poor training of horses leads to the worsening of
character in humans, just as cookery, while not itself a branch of philosophy, can touch on matters of import insofar
as it may ruin good men (and therefore it needs to under the general control of the Guardians in a Kallipolis.
13
This line of thought is picked up again but dramatically amplified when we finally arrive
at the description of the tyrant’s soul in Book IX (which one could see as a representation of the
soul as Thrasymachus would like his to be seen or become). While the rational faculties of the
soul sleep the “bestial, savage part” (571c) emerges and seeks to glut itself by satisfying all its
perverted desires, sexual and otherwise. The recklessness of this part of the soul is summed up
through an image of cannibalism that again evokes the beast of prey, “There is no murder it will
not commit, no meat it will not eat” (571d). The tyrant’s soul, in leading a life of injustice, is
then later described by adding animal imagery to the earlier picture of the tripartite soul. What
had been, in Book IV, a simple division based on the faculties of reason, spirit, and appetite,
emerges in Book IX as a war between man and beast for the control of the soul. The rational
faculty is now depicted as the essentially human part, an inner man dwarfed by the other two
faculties, now represented by a lion (spirit) and a chimera (appetite). Injustice reverses the
natural (human) hierarchy within the soul, weakening the inner man (reason) and forcing him to
go wherever the lion and chimera drag him: “he is unable to control the creatures within him, but
instead becomes their servant” (590c). To be truly unjust and to live as a tyrant, Socrates says, is
to live a less-than-human life by allowing one to become the slave of the inner animals that
populate the human psyche. It would seem that Plato’s Socrates views soulcraft as a kind of
domestication.
Animals of the Republic
This project of domestication is attenuated, however by considering four Platonic textual
moments, two from the Republic and two from the Statesman, where the bright line between
humans and nonhumans becomes rather murky. The first of these moments I want to discuss is
the famous “noble dog” passage in Republic II, in which Plato compares the Guardians favorably
14
with high-spirited canines. This has prompted much discussion, and in a notable article some
years ago Arlene Saxonhouse claimed that Plato used such animal imagery as a way of
demonstrating the ridiculousness of the political program of the Kallipolis (Saxonhouse 1978). I
think there is much reason to be wary of this claim, especially when the larger context of Plato’s
animal philosophy is taken into account.
Socrates is at the point in the Republic where he is discussing how to select the proper
disposition for the prospective young guardian when he asserts, rather baldly, that the most
promising youth will be “like a young pedigree hound” in possessing “acute senses, speed in
pursuit of what they detect, and strength as well…plus courage, of course, if he is to fight well”
(375a). We will see a similar description when we reach the Statesman’s Golden Age
philosophers, with one seemingly glaring exception. Here the young guardians are said to need
acute senses and to be lovers of knowledge (375a-376b), which squares with the Golden Agers
whose philosophy is rooted in perceptual acuity, and who seek out others whose perceptions may
complement or supplement their own. Knowledge for both sets remains rooted in sensory
perception, but with this major difference: that the Noble Dogs retain the distinction between
friend and enemy in their epistemology, hating those whom they do not already know, while in
the Golden Age the task is precisely to search for knowledge where ignorance or non-knowledge
prevails. This view of knowledge (defining friend and enemy by the criteria of knowledge and
ignorance) had led Saxonhouse to argue that Plato is not serious here, as I have mentioned
earlier, and it certainly seems to reflect a somewhat truncated view of the task of knowing – how
else to learn new truths but by exploring what is unfamiliar? But we can take Plato seriously in
this, as many other have done, since much depends on how we construct the metaphor. If it
simply means that philosophers desire to know and in that quest take flight from ignorance, it
15
does not seem a particularly controversial statement. It is rather by interpreting the metaphor too
finely that it comes to appear ridiculous, but recall that Glaucon and Adeimantus are themselves
akin to the youths who are being educated in the Kallipolis, and that the passage immediately
following the Noble Dog section discusses the need to begin teaching the young with legends
that are both true and false – that have some truth in them but also much falsity (376d-377b). So
transposing the imagery from dog to human too literally may explain most of what seems
ridiculous here, leaving the basic analogy standing.
The passages from the Golden Age in the Statesman thus work over some of the same
terrain as in Republic II, but with a revision in the status of friend and enemy. While the Kronosphilosophers may still hate ignorance in the sense the banal sense that they love knowledge, they
have a much more liberal view of the sites of non-knowledge that they encounter. They do not
seem to hold the friend/enemy distinction in much regard as a useful category, which allows
them to view the various other perceiving beings as co-knowers whose private knowledge (to the
species, at least) they want to share in. This is a rather major emendation of the moral
psychology of the Republic, since it also stands as a potential criticism of that text’s presentation
of courage and the overly aggressive thumos that often oversteps this virtue’s boundaries. This
view of spirit goes along with the frequent use of hunting as a metaphor for knowing in the
Republic, as well as the general using of battle imagery in the colloquy with Glaucon and
Adeimantus. None of these tropes are particularly important for the Kronos-philosophers – why
not? One reason is that the dramatic situation of the Statesman is very different from that of the
Republic. Socrates speaks to his young listeners in ways that they can hear him, and using
martial imagery is one way to appeal to pupils whose upbringing has, to this point, focused on
developing in them a love for glory. The Stranger has no need for this. Second, the Stranger can
16
give his interlocutors a different image of philosophy because systemic violence and the war
between species are not present in the Golden Age. Dialogue replaces battle as the key image.
Reworking the Republic’s dogs and their ways of knowing with the Kronos-philosophers shows
an important difference between the texts, which I do not think admits of any overall
reconciliation. Still, in this particular refashioning we do not stray far from Plato’s tendencies in
the Republic, since it the subject of friend and enemy in the discussion of justice that provides
the fodder for Plato’s critique. If the Republic indicates that friend/enemy is not relevant to the
virtue of justice, one reading of the Kronos-philosophers is that they reveal the irrelevance of this
distinction to the virtue of wisdom as well.
We Eat the Just
The next passage in the Republic I want to consider is the Myth of Er, where Plato
employs both specific and general references to animal species in the cycle of reincarnation that
Er witnesses. While this section on trans-species metempsychosis is not surprising given the
general consensus on the influence of Pythagoras on Plato (Cornford 1903; Proclus 1970;
O’Meara 1989; Schilis 1993; Dillon 1995; Kingsley 1995; Porphyry 2000), what is most notable
here is what has gone least-observed in recent Platonic scholarship: Plato quite literally tells us
(at least if the plain words of the Myth are considered) that we are killing the ensouled bodies of
the just when we kill domestic animals.14 Perhaps because Book X has caused such
consternation among Platonic scholars this has gone unrecognized, but we can see important
details about the animal/human relationship if we read this somewhat naively instead of
dismissing the importance of the Myth from the beginning. There is ample reason for being
14
Though this is noticed by Proclus (1970) and Porphyry (2000), but, here as elsewhere the Neoplatonists are
generally ignored. Dillon (1995) is an important exception to this general trend.
17
wary of the naïve reading, of course, but the point is that it is only after a careful study of the
“credulous” narrative that we should then employ a more suspicious hermeneutic.15 Both
moments coexist in the text, and while the structure of this chapter indicates which side I am
inclined to favor in the end, one cannot ever be quite sure – the text maintains both aspects
without allowing us to comfortably collapse one into the other.
Recall that Er has crossed into the afterlife, and is observing the process by which souls
emerge from the heavens or hell and then choose their next life. To the extent that any
commentators take the Myth at all seriously, the common interpretive theme is to highlight
Odysseus’ choice of the life of a common man, particularly as this contrasts with those who
mistakenly choose tyrannical lives in the erroneous belief that this will be the most pleasurable
(as Glaucon and Adeimantus have been half-arguing from the Book II onward). While this is
surely important, consider the text that bookends this revelation. First, Er witnesses several
Greeks from the heroic past make their choices. It is important here that an unnamed prophet
marks the crucial nature of choice rather than selection by lot at this point: the gods are not
responsible for the new form of life that will be chosen, as “Virtue knows no master… The
choice makes you responsible” (617e). This is broadly consonant with the intellectualist bent of
the Socrates of the Republic’s moral doctrine, and is the time where “the whole danger lies for a
man” (618c) since the choice at this one brief moment will set the bounds to an entire mortal life
and may well bring retribution for the entirety of the thousand-year sojourn in the underworld.
Unjust deeds done in the course of a tyrannical life are “countless” and also have “no remedy”
(618e), so the choice is doubly important for the chooser (who may suffer later) as well as his or
15
Much as Žižek counsels when assessing Hitchcock (and social theory!): it is the only the one who is credulous
who is not fooled (Žižek 1991, 69-87).
18
her potential future victims.16 The salience of philosophy to this choice is immediately
demonstrated when Er sees the first person to choose, a nameless man whose goodness was a
product of habit rather than thought, pick the life of “greatest tyranny” (619b). Er describes a
number of other unnamed choosers as a group and the general nature of their choices, but does
not mention any crossing of species boundaries until he reaches the descriptions of the heroes of
Greek myth. At this point the choices of the heroes of the mythic past are revealed, and the first
four named legends in succession choose an animal life: Orpheus that of a swan, Thamyris a
nightingale, Ajax a lion, and Agamemnon an eagle. Each choice of an animal life is based in an
aversion to humanity rooted in that particular soul’s prior life: for example, Orpheus does not
want to be carried by a human female before birth due to his death at the hands of women (620ad). That the humans only choose animal lives because of a hostility toward other humans would
seem to indicate that Plato is still functioning within the standard sacrificial framework at this
point: these first figures of metempsychosis across the species border are not particularly friendly
images of the human/animal relation, though they do not necessarily imply that the animal lives
themselves hold any antipathy toward human lives.17
We may also be inclined to read Er’s documentation of these choices, particularly by the
morally troublesome figures of Ajax and Agamemnon, as a further critique by Plato of the
deformed ethical schema of the poets. Ajax and Agamemnon lived their lives fully committed to
the warrior’s ethos, and their unpleasant deaths (by suicide and by mariticide, respectively) are
16
Perhaps the lack of remedy for these crimes partially explains the necessity of a thousand years of punishment
(paying “ten times over for each offense” [615b]). But it is significant that Plato’s theory of justice here is not a
remedial one – though a thousand years of retribution may fall on the head of the doer of injustice, the injustice itself
cannot be remedied or righted. I will attend to this later in considering the fate of animals in Platonic justice.
17
Indeed just after Thamyris a swan is followed by several other unnamed “musical creatures” in choosing a human
life. So the life of an animal may be an implicit rejection of human life, but it doesn’t indicate that animalized souls
will bear any ill will towards human life.
19
directly related to the deeds they performed under the aegis of that ethic: Ajax’s madness stems
from an inability to accept the perceived slight to his aidos when Achilles’ armor is given to
Odysseus and his slaughter of the sheep only heightens his dishonor; Agamemnon’s blind hubris
led him to sacrifice his daughter for the sake of the expedition to Troy, as well as defile the
Trojan altars after the sack of the city. Each lived his life without facing up to the questions that
philosophy forces one to confront about the nature of the best life, and so it may appear that
Plato’s Socrates is adding another level of symbolic criticism to what has already become a fairly
damning indictment of the education provided by the poets. Homer’s men did not live fully
human lives, and in choosing to live their next lives as predatory beasts they simply replicate the
poor choices they made while ensouled in human bodies.
This is view reinforced by the description Odysseus’ choice that follows upon the earlier
Iliadic figures. There Er sees Odysseus placed by lot in the final spot18 (just after Thersites
tellingly picks the life of a monkey), and rejecting a life of ambition he finds a life discarded by
all the others, “the life of a private citizen who minded his own business… When he saw it, he
chose it gladly, saying he would have done the same even if he had drawn the first lot” (620c-d).
This has been widely interpreted as the final rejection of the Iliadic ethic of glory in favor of
Socratic philosophizing, as Bloom and others have argued (Bloom 1968, 435-6). The life of the
common man who refrains from politics is finally shown to be the best because unlike the
warrior or tyrant he can actually pursue wisdom, as philosophy demands, and is not forced to live
unjustly in order to achieve the aims that ambition variously dictates.
18
Socrates says that he had drawn “the last lot of all,” though he goes on to describe the choices made by wild
animals after he has described Odysseus’ choice. Whether this means that this lot was simply the last one chosen by
a formerly-human soul and not the last is not entirely clear, since in 619e it is left open to doubt whether “the last”
one really has very good options: “provided the way the lot falls out does not put him among the last to choose, the
chances are, if Er’s report is correct, not only that he will be happy here…[etc.]”
20
There is something to this interpretation, and the choice of Odysseus (and the “silencing”
of Achilles, whose shade appears next after Agamemnon in the Odyssey but who does get the
privilege of a hearing in Er’s tale) confirms in mythic form much that has already appeared in the
logos-centered earlier portions of the Republic (Bloom 1968). But what if we consider the
passage that immediately follows upon this signal choice? Here Er/Socrates says: “Similarly
among the wild animals there were moves into human beings, and into one another – the unjust
changing into savage creatures, the just into gentle ones. Every kind of intermingling was taking
place” (620d-e). So the transformations between human and non-human continue, following the
changes seen in the earlier descriptions of Orpheus et al. But here Plato has added a rather
important detail: savage lives are taken up by the unjust, while gentle animal lives are taken up
by the just. The first part of this statement seems obvious enough, as we have just seen Ajax and
Agamemnon turn themselves into predators for their next go-round, but what has generated little
attention is the significance of the second part.
We have already noted the frequent scholarly attention to the Pythagorean influence on
Plato, and this is particularly emphasized in discussing his sometimes bizarre fascination with
mathematics (and number more generally) as well as the doctrine of metempsychosis that Er’s
tale assumes. But there is this added element of Pythagorean influence that becomes all the more
clear if we look at the Katharmoi (“Purifications”) of the Pythagorean Empedocles, who was
born about sixty years prior to Plato and who flourished in Sicily, where Plato journeyed several
times.19 It is precisely the transmigration of souls that provides the moral foundation for
Empedocles’ radical critique of Hellenistic sacrificial ritual, as the implications of trans-species
metempsychosis lead to the most horrible of results:
19
All quotations from Fairbanks 1898, 204-211.
21
A father takes up his dear son who has changed his form and slays him with a prayer, so great is
his folly! They are borne along beseeching the sacrificer; but he does not hear their cries of
reproach, but slays them and makes ready the evil feast. Then in the same manner son takes
father and daughters their mother, and devour the dear flesh when they have deprived them of
life. Fr. 430
Empedocles enjoins his fellow humans to “cease from evil slaughter” since they are “devouring
each other in heedlessness of mind” (Fr. 427), in contrast to an earlier age where “it was the
greatest defilement among men, to deprive animals of life and to eat their goodly bodies” (Fr.
405) and human/nonhuman relations were marked by comity: “all were gentle and obedient
toward men, both animals and birds, and they burned with kindly love; and trees grew with
leaves and fruit ever on them, burdened with abundant fruit all the year” (Fr. 421) As in Er’s tale
from beyond the grave, Empedocles also claims that acts of injustice committed during a lifetime
will follow the doer for many more years, though he specifically links this punishment to the
sacrifice and eating of animals:
There is an utterance of Necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, eternal, sealed fast with broad
oaths whenever any one defiles his body sinfully with bloody gore or perjures himself in regard
to wrong-doing, one of those spirits who are heir to long life, thrice ten thousand seasons shall he
wander apart from the blessed, being born meantime in all sorts of mortal forms, changing one
bitter path of life for another. (Fr. 369)
Empedocles mentions his own role in these cosmic cycles, “born once a boy, and a maiden, and a
plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea” (Fr. 383), in which he has played the part of the
spectator horrified at the immorality of his fellow creatures, as he “wept and shrieked on
beholding the unwonted land where are Murder and Wrath, and other species of Fates, and
wasting diseases, and putrefaction and fluxes” (Fr. 385), and also his implication as a doer of
these very same evil deeds: “One of these now am I too, a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer,
at the mercy of raging Strife” (Fr. 369).
22
Comparing these passages to Plato’s Er-tale is instructive, as it makes sense of what
otherwise appears an odd addendum to Socrates’ capstone morality-play for those too dense to
understand the actual philosophic argument of the Republic. It also helps to explain why Plato
would use a such a dissident doctrine like Pythagorean transmigration in making his ideas more
palatable to the masses, as Bloom (1968) and Dorter (2003) among others suggest. If Plato
trying to render the abstruse philosophy of the Republic more legible (or at least make himself
seem less dangerous to the demos), then Pythagoreanism is hardly the way to go. We must view
these myths as something other than the rhetorical equivalents of a sugar cube in a glass of bitter
medicine if we attend precisely to the strangeness that the idea of metempsychosis brings to
these tales of katabasis. But more than this, it adds a compelling philosophic punch line to
Empedocles’ religious story – it is not just our fathers, mothers, sons, or daughters whom we
may be killing on the altar, but (worse, from Plato’s vantage) it is the souls of the just who meet
with the sacrificer’s knife. It is only the just whose souls go into gentle animals, and Greek
sacrifice was never (not that I have found, at least) performed on wild animals. The gentle
animal is the one sacrificed, and so we kill and eat the just. Perhaps the deed seems less horrific
given that souls themselves are not really killed, as we see in both Empedocles’ and Er’s tales.
But this does not lessen the moral implications from either Plato or Empedocles standpoint, since
both are fully committed to metempsychosis but still maintain the necessity of severe
punishments for malefactors.
The Interpretive Turn in the Statesman
These passages from the Republic are suggestive of an alternative relationship between
humans and non-humans, though their implicit critique has been so subtle that it could remain
basically unremarked throughout the history of Platonic interpretation, with the notable
23
exception of Neoplatonists (Proclus 1970, Dillon 1995, Porphyry 2000). If these ideas are muted
and suggestive rather than dispositive in the Republic, we see a more pronounced presentation of
some of the same issues in the later Statesman, where, significantly, Plato discusses his own
version of Empedocles’ mythic Golden Age through the voice of the Eleatic Stranger.
There is, however, a crucial passage in the Statesman that sets the stage for telling of the
Golden Age, and may be even more important in establishing the existence of “the Other Plato”
when it comes to animals and humans.20 The Eleatic Stranger has been asked to define the
Statesman, subsequent to having defined the Sophist and prior to defining the Philosopher. He
has engaged Socrates (a youth, not the Socrates) in a discussion and have established, thought
the method of division first seen in the Sophist, that the subject of their inquiry is something akin
to the “art of tending many animals together, the art of managing a herd”. The colloquy moves
as an orderly progression to this point, as the Stranger places questions to Young Socrates
without needing to contradict his naïve interlocutor. But this linear movement is interrupted just
as the Stranger cautions Young Socrates about the danger of mistaking names for the things
themselves:21
Stranger: Excellently said, Socrates. If you hold fast to this principle of avoiding contention
over names you will turn out to be rich with an ever greater store of wisdom as you approach old
age. We will apply this sound principle to the present case and do as you bid me. Do you see
how we can divide the nurture of herds into twin sections, so as to cordon off the object of our
search in one of them and leave him an area only half the size of the one he is free to roam at
present?
Young Socrates: I will try my hardest to cordon him off. I think the division is to be made
between nurture of men and nurture of beasts.
Stranger: You certainly made the division most promptly and bravely; but I think we must not
let this happen again if we can help it. (261e-262a)
20
References to the Statesman are to the translation of J. B. Skemp (Plato 1957).
Though it is not essential to my argument, the work of Michel Serres in The Parasite is instructive here.
Parasites, according Serres, always serve to interrupt whatever ordered system they invade, creating a new system
that functions via this interrupting-dysfunction.
21
24
Young Socrates of course does exactly what the Stranger says not to do – he takes it to be
obvious that the distinction between “man” and “beast” is salient for this discussion of rulership
because he accepts that these two names provide some kind of real access to the things
themselves. There is also an irony in the way that the Stranger responds, since the
“straightforward” and “manly” method adopted by Young Socrates turns out to be exactly the
wrong approach because it is too wrapped up in the common-sense importance about the
distinction between man and beast. As the Stranger explains:
Stranger: We must beware lest we break off one small fragment of a class and then contrast it
with the many important sections left behind. We must only divide where there is a real
cleavage between specific forms. The section must always possess a specific form. It is
splendid if one really can divide off the class sought for immediately from all the rest – that is, if
such immediate division is correctly made. You had such direct tactics in mind just now and
hastened the argument to its conclusion. You saw that our search led us to men, and so you
thought you had found the real division. But it is dangerous, Socrates, to chop reality up into
small portions. It is always safer to go down the middle to make our cuts: we are more likely to
find the specific form in this way; and that makes all the difference in an investigation. (262a-c)
Young Socrates was determined from the beginning to focus on “man” without thinking whether
this was really appropriate to the question at hand – his methodological anthropocentrism led
him astray almost immediately, and it is only here that the dialogue of the Statesman really takes
off – the presumption of the significance of the category of “human” is the moment where the
Stranger’s questioning can bear fruit. The Stranger explains that Socrates’ error is akin to the
ethnocentrism of Greeks who categorize humans by isolating themselves as a special group:
“they separate the Greeks from all other nations, assuming that they are a class apart, and they
group all other nations together as a class, ignoring the fact that it is an intermediary class made
up of peoples who have no intercourse with each other and speak different languages. Lumping
this entire non-Greek residue together, they think it must constitute one real class because they
25
have a common name, “barbarian,” to attach to it” (262d). So the name “barbarian” is as useful
as the name “beast”, apparently because the Stranger sees little utility in lumping together beings
who have no common link, other than the singular name in the Greek language that ties them
together.22
If it seems that I am overvaluing this moment in the text, the Stranger himself points out
the importance of this “exact place” when he returns from the tangent the argument has taken
(though the discussion of the barbarian/animal analogy is far from trivial):
Stranger: Consider what caused us to stray from the argument and brought us to this point. I
think that the trouble began at the moment when you were asked how we were to divide the
science of tending herds and you answered with alacrity that there are two classes of living
creature, one of them being mankind, and the other the rest of the animals lumped together.
Young Socrates: True.
Stranger: It became clear to me then that you were breaking off a mere portion, and that
because you were able to give the common name “animals” to what was left – namely, to all
creatures other than man – you thought that these creatures do in actual fact make up one class.
Young Socrates: Yes, that was so. (263c-d)
The Stranger highlights this moment, reemphasizing to the reader the care that must be taken in
discerning how to correctly categorize the world. But more is at stake here than the merely
methodological question of how to properly divide things, what is really similar and what is
really distinct. If it were just the method of division at issue the animal and barbarian examples
would not be so telling, nor would Plato foreground the importance of standpoint, in particular
the standpoint that presumes that “the human” is the central point from which such decisions
issue. The thing about a standpoint is that depending upon where one stands, the initial
22
Derrida does not cite this text in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (Derrida 2002), but he
certainly could have. The sentiment is almost exactly the same where Derrida discusses “the Animal” – “what a
word!” That all animals are somehow encompassed within this single term, and that this particular designation is
instrumental to denying the ethical significance of the beings so designated, provides the primary motivation for his
essay. Perhaps he does not note this resonance because militates against the generalized reading of the Western
canon as anthropocentric, though such a reading would be in line with the deconstructive method pursued in “Plato’s
Pharmacy,” for instance (Derrida 1981).
26
classification can be turned on its head because the new vantage may perform the same
marginalization or reduction upon the first standpoint as was enacted on the Other of that center:
Stranger: But, my gallant young friend, look at it this way. This kind of classification might be
undertaken by any other creature capable of rational thought – for instance, cranes are reputed to
be rational and there may be others. They might invest themselves with a unique and proper
dignity and classify the race of cranes as being distinct from all other creatures; the rest they
might well lump together, men included, giving them the common appellation of “the beasts.”
So let us try to be on the watch against mistakes of that kind. (263d—e)
This shift to the crane’s perspective is an epistemological revolution that has both moral and
political consequences. If the birds simply imitate what Socrates has done, if they turn his
actions into a universal maxim, the result is that humans are toppled from their place at the
summit of creation and relegated to the status of mere “beasts” along with the rest of the animal
world. While the Stranger does not extend his commentary on the cranes’ revolution, the
implications of shifting the taxonomic center would dramatically restructure the moral and
political world as well, as humans would no longer be entitled to their uniquely privileged status.
Furthermore, the Stranger will soon implicitly criticize this “special glorification” and the
subsequent de-legitimation of this “knowledge of the Other” in the Myth of the Golden Age, as
will be seen. There the point will be to say that all species may contribute something to the
common fund of worldly wisdom because their diverse perceptual faculties allow them access to
unique portions of the truth of the world. This contrasts with the hubris found in the Greek view
of the barbarians, the cranes’ hypothetical classification of humans, and the implicit schema for
separating humans from nonhumans. Plato reminds his readers that the Stranger is employing
the “method of division” in this context for a larger purpose – it is the philosophic understanding
of politics that provides the motivation for this undertaking in the first place: “Let us avoid
27
making divisions in the way we did just now, in a desperate hurry and with our attention fixed
only on the whole class. Only thus shall we reach the statesman’s art in good time” 264a-b).
Futures Past?
This discussion of method has provided a methodological and narratological justification
for thinking that animals are important to the working of the text. They provide the moment of
tension, the interrupting mistake that the Stranger must challenge in order to clear the path to
understand what a statesman is. But all this leads up to an even more important moment in the
text that I have already mentioned several times – the Myth of the Golden Age of Kronos.
During this time humans apparently aged in reverse, and most of their needs were provided for
since they did not need to toil to earn their sustenance, nor did they require property or political
constitutions. This apolitical aspect leads commentators to deny the import of this era for our
contemporary “Age of Zeus” (which is the current rotation of the cosmos, without the direct
guidance of the god)23 since it appears to share so few characteristics with our rudderless world
and whose humans appear to be barely human at all (Saxonhouse 1992; Lane 1998; McCabe
2000). But holding that issue in abeyance for the moment, let us examine the question that the
Stranger himself poses regarding the human life of this era:
Stranger: The crucial question is – did the nurslings of Kronos make a right use of their time?24
They had abundance of leisure and the ability to converse with the animals as well as with one
23
Though Brisson and Carone are convinced that there are actually three eras of rotation, a primary movement under
Kronos, a reversal that wreaks havoc, and then a counter-rotation back in the same direction as the first, but this time
under Zeus (Brisson 1998; Carone 2006). While the interpretation of the Myth is notably hazy on this point, this
seems a stretch of imagination which is primarily sought because the traditional interpretation, in which the age of
Zeus seems unguided, goes against much of the rest of the Platonic corpus vis a vis the question of divine
providence, the Timaeus especially. Still, even admitting that the Age of Zeus is (largely) unguided is not fatal to
my case. As Vidal-Naquet and Ferrari argue, it remains the case that Kronos is still the standard, even in our age of
Zeus (Vidal-Naquet 1978; Ferrari 1995). This will become important to my argument later, and their claim echoes
what the Stranger says in the Laws regarding the exemplarity of the rule of Kronos CITE.
24
This question, THE question for the Stranger, points us to use of time as the criterion. Interestingly this dovetails
with the emphasis on the correct knowledge of the moment, the kairos, that Lane directs us to as dialogue’s main
teaching on the political art par excellence (Lane 1998).
28
another. Did they use all these advantages for philosophical ends?25 As they associated with one
another and with the animals, did they seek to learn from each several tribe of creatures whether
its special faculties enabled it to apprehend some distinctive truth not available to the rest which
it could bring as its contribution to swell the common treasure store of wisdom? If they really
did all this, it is easy to decide that the happiness of men of that era was a thousandfold greater
than ours. But if, when they had taken their fill of eating and of drinking, the discussions they
had with each other and with the animals were of the kind that the surviving stories make them
out to have been, then, according to my judgement at any rate, it is equally clear what our verdict
must be. (272b-d)
Given that the Stranger points out how important it is to attend to which world we live in (i.e.
that exemplars from the prior guided-world are not to be relied upon in non-guided world) in
determining our definitions and course of action, how relevant is the Myth, especially the events
from the age of Kronos, for life after that age? One could fairly argue that this earlier time
provides as much help in orienting philosophy or politics as the prelapsarian world of Genesis.
Melissa Lane has argued to this effect in her study of the Statesman,26 though she also
acknowledges that the discussion of the Golden Age in the Laws (713-714) is based on the
opposite premise, that we must endeavor to emulate Kronos’ reign as much as we can.27 Still, I
do not think that her claims, even if true, invalidate the importance of the elements in the myth I
have selected. The brunt of my case does not depend on an esoteric Plato-as-Peter-Singer, and
would remain happily the same were it shown that such a fabulous hybrid creature was an
absolute impossibility. That said, the presence of Pythagorean transmigration in the Phaedo,
Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Republic, and the Golden Age in the Statesman, Critias, and Laws
seems to indicate that Plato’s interest in animals is more than a passing fancy (Plato 1997).
25
Even Lane agrees that this notion of philosophy carries through to our current era. In that sense the issue of
whether or not the nurslings were actually capable of this philosophical activity, as McCabe and others deny, is
beside the point (Lane 1998; McCabe 2000).
26
See Lane (1998). Rosen’s analysis of the text is similar to Lane’s on this issue (Rosen 1995).
27
Carone (2004) argues against Lane (at 1998, 116), and though Vidal-Naquet (1978) discusses the discrepancy
between the Laws and Statesman he does not go so far as to endorse my normative proposals.
29
The issue is not so much Plato’s intentions as the vision of the possible that he discloses.
Even if he (and the Stranger presumably speaking in his stead) believes that animals and humans
no longer (if ever – did Plato really believe his own Myth?)28 can live in mutual concord, his
version of the Golden Age opens a horizon that few, if any thinkers, have ever glimpsed, even if
the image to his readers appears more like reality viewer through a funhouse mirror. For with
this tale-within-a-tale we see a highly sophisticated depiction of human-nonhuman harmony that
goes well beyond the bounds of animal rights – indeed it transcends a number of ideas that we
see prominent in human-human political affairs, including the important notion of toleration that
stems from liberal political thought. Granted that two preconditions, as we might call them, must
first exist for this vision to lift off the ground – leisure and the “power of intercourse” – but
given these the Stranger lays out a vision of the human good that is inseparable from a radically
different picture of interspecies relations – one that shifts the loci of power and knowledge
outside the realm of the merely human. For it is philosophy itself that calls for this reconfiguring
of the mode of the good life, and this reformulation begins with a distinctive method for
discovering what we could call “the truth of the world.”
This new (old) philosophy sees truth as continuous with perception, rather than being
something essentially distinct from or superior to the perceptual faculties. While this may seem
at odds with some interpretations of the “doctrine” of Ideas of Republic VI-VII, the gulf between
the visible and invisible worlds even there has been overstated, as Irwin and others have argued.
Taking those passages seriously does not require the sundering of ideal/sensible that thinkers like
Nietzsche presume, and it is clear from other Platonic works such as the Symposium (and the
28
See Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths for more on this question and the possible relation of
Plato to “his” myth (Veyne 1988).
30
“ladder of being” in Diotima’s discussion of Beauty) that Plato could present the relation
between Ideas and matter in terms of a continuum rather than simply (good) Idea and (bad)
sensible form.29 With the Stranger’s Myth we see a further push in this direction, as
philosophy’s quest for knowledge includes “learning of every nature which was gifted with any
special power, and was able to contribute some special experience to the store of wisdom”. The
differing perceptual faculties of nonhumans are no longer seen as necessarily inferior to those of
humans – in fact they are now viewed as diverse powers (though we should not push this
translation too far). Differing perceptions are differing capabilities, they are not different species
of incapacity vis a vis the presumed superiority of human logos. Philosophy’s quest for wisdom
therefore takes on an explosive character, as it now challenges the fundamentally humancentered polis by placing the most needful thing (to the lover of wisdom, the philosopher)
outside the conventional borders of the human community. Humans are the now seen as the
ones incapacitated, though they are not “less-than” other creatures in this regard. All are
similarly enabled and disabled when considered solely from their individual vantage point, since
none (at least without this version of philosophy) have the ability to transcend the limitations of
their perceptual horizon. This species-based solipsism haunts all in their efforts to know the
world, since the world is accessible to each perceiving species in a unique manner and is unable
to grasp the total share of truth.30
29
The Middle Platonists (Albinus/Alcinous) and Neoplatonists take up this suggestion with their notion of the
Plenum Formarum – the “being” of the Forms requires that they be expressed in every possible permutation
imaginable, so that for every Form there is an almost infinite set of modulated relations derivative of it, but all with
some kind of continuous relation to the original. That this notion, like Plato’s, may still involve a basic hierarchy
between original and copy, is an important qualification, and I am not arguing that Plato or Albinus should be seen
as early versions of the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition. Some hierarchy probably remains in this re-vamped
Platonic ontology, though it is far less extreme than is often thought.
30
Though not related to the thread of the argument here, it is important to see that the notion of truth being used in
the Myth appears far closer to Heidegger’s idea of truth as aletheia – as disclosure or unconcealing – than it does to
31
This mutual incapacity becomes the basis for an interdependence between human and
nonhuman that supplants the (later, in terms of the Myth) interdependence based on the body
(animals for food, clothing, and food production) with a new interdependence that is also bodily
based, but this time the body is the basis for knowledge of the good life (via perceptual faculties)
rather than merely a labor-generating device. If we now couple this vision with the other
moments from the Statesman and Republic, what do we see? In the Republic dogs are seen to
have traits that are similar to those of the philosopher, but more importantly they and other
animals are beings ensouled just as are humans, and thus require from our polities as much
justice as do humans. Those who are wild are left out of such consideration, since they are
presumed to be inhabited by unjust souls, but the Statesman provides a much more appreciative
account of the duties we may owe to wildness. The commonsense view of nonhumans is part of
an unreflective view of the world that mistakes names for species, and the Stranger’s use of
animality becomes a kind of hermeneutic principle of interruption – an instantiation of the gadfly
impulse – that brings us around to look again at the things we thought we understood. And
finally the Myth’s story of harmony-in-difference sees the possibility of peaceful interspecies
relation based in a pursuit of wisdom that is at its core a necessarily symbiotic procedure. Other
species are other-knowers, and are as caught up in the whorl of time as are “we” humans.
The impulse to sacrifice, whether animals or other humans, is undercut in this Age of
Kronos, and presages a different logic of politics from the Age of Zeus (where we dwell now).31
Most importantly, the cosmos is not viewed as inhabited by mutually antagonistic creatures
the traditional interpretation of Plato’s vision of truth being homoorthotes – “correctness” or correspondence
(Barrachi 2002).
31
Again I will note that I am reading the Myth against the literal grain at this juncture, since the Stranger says
explicitly that one must be careful about drawing examples from the one Age and applying them to another.
32
whose survival is based on inter-specific predation. No one need be sacrificed because there are
abundant resources for all, and the Myth implies that an herbivorous diet rules the day, though
what this means for lions, tigers, etc., is far from clear. Perhaps there were no predators, or
perhaps they were constituted so differently as to resemble lions of the Age of Zeus in only the
most superficial sense. In any case humans are imagined as herbivores, and furthermore there is
no reason to sacrifice animals in religious rituals since the connection between gods and men has
not yet been broken. Since gods still rule the cosmos in some fashion there is no need to
propitiate their anger or gain their particular goodwill to obtain some favor – the life that
sacrificers tries to secure for themselves under the reign of Zeus already exists for these
imagined people.
Conclusion
There are object lessons to be drawn from each of the moments that I have highlighted:
the turn of the argument in the Statesman, the “eating of the just” in the Republic, and the Golden
Age vision of philosophy. If, following Proclus and Charles Segal, we allow that myths “‘are the
interpreters of reality’…the educator of the soul’s loves” (Segal 1978:330) then we must inquire
into precisely how these moments can serve to teach us about “reality.” The first moment, from
which the real discussion of the Statesman begins, serves as a kind of methodological warning by
telling us that our basic intuitions about the “stuff” of the world need to be critically interrogated.
This first lesson is a teaching about doubt, and comes as an initial distancing between our
vantage and the givenness our beliefs. We look out upon a world whose basic divisions are
predetermined long before we have come into existence, and we largely take the dichotomies
between public/private, or persons/things, or human/animal, or familiar/foreign, for granted. So
too does Young Socrates, which necessitates the correction by the Eleatic Stranger. In order to
33
really begin to philosophize, in order to know, we need to learn to become strangers to our basic
set of beliefs. The stranger is able to achieve this by forcing Young Socrates to see the world
from the perspective of the others that he so comfortably lumps into a single category, since YS
can easily see that the categorization of cranes and barbarians would leave would do an
epistemic injustice to Young Socrates himself. So the first lesson is a restatement of the warning
on similarities from the Sophist, “And between a wolf and a dog, the wildest thing there is and
the gentlest. If you’re going to be safe, you have to be especially careful about similarities”
(Sophist 231A), but one that now takes up the playful reference to dogs and wolves and forces us
to ponder why we think all nonhuman animals can be so easily encapsulated in one lump.
This first move, a moment of critical negation, prepares the way for the second. If it is
the case that humans and nonhumans are not the most relevant distinction for deciding what is
political and what is not, our second moment, on the transmigration of just souls into tame
animals in the Republic, indicates that there is something amiss in the practices which deny
ethical consideration to nonhuman animals. Notice that for Plato, as for Empedocles before him,
it is the basic similarity of humans to other animals that makes for the problem. If the first
philosophic lesson is one of distancing or making-other, this second moment is complementary
movement in the opposite direction. The first moment makes us strangers to our beliefs, and to
the world that they describe. The second moment begins to re-familiarize us with our world by
reconnecting us to it, but by connections to locales, beings, and ideas to which we had not
previously recognized any kinship.32 Plato’s particular vision is one in which we realize our
32
It is important to see that kinship or similarity need not be based on any particularly strong correspondence of
essence, as Rosen (1998) notes is made clear in both the Sophist and Statesman. One of the main problems in each
dialogue is that virtually every kind of existent in the world can be said to be similar to some other existent,
depending on the perspective one takes and the criteria that it dictates. This suggests that the criteria of similarity
are thin, malleable, and therefore almost infinite. Such a broad conception of “the Same” renders it much friendlier
34
similarity to other sentient life forms, especially those who are tame or domestic. This move of
reattaching us to the world uses something that is already “human” in some sense, since
domesticated animals are the products of a long series of familiarizing operations performed over
the last 10,000 years. While this may seem to fall far short of the needs of a thorough-going
philosophical critique, it is important to see that this second stage is a propadeutic for the more
searching and radical stance that comes from the third moment, the Golden Age vision of
philosophy.
The distancing and familiarizing we experience through the earlier stages have prepared
us to ask more strange questions of the world because we have a place to stand, though not the
place we began. Still, as children need to feel certain of the love of their parents in order to
comfortably explore the new and the strange of the world, it is important as theorists that we not
simply abandon our place in the name of a deracinated/disconnected criticism. But neither
should we entirely embrace the “connected critic” of Michael Walzer; familiarization is a
signpost on the path of radical questioning. Following the Stranger’s lead in the Statesman myth
we must look to other beings if we would become wise, asking them what they know but that we
do not. “Each creature… possesses a unique perspective on the mystery of life that is to some
extent inaccessible to any other being. Everyone, from this vantage, is similarly abled and
disabled with respect to everyone else” (Dolgert 2010). The Golden Age concept of philosophy
requires heterogeneity as the basis for commonality, rather than the reverse as is usually thought.
We must discourse with others, human and nonhuman, because this idea of philosophy is based
in perception rather than in the noetic faculty. As individuals within a species and as species
to postmodern inflected discourses that worry about the denigration of Difference, since a highly arbitrary notion of
similarity is barely distinct from the elevation of Difference.
35
distinct from each other we are all epistemically disabled, since the isolated particular is
constitutively unable to perceive the entirety of (in)finite creation. Rather than thinking that we
can simply think our way to wisdom, we instead see the Stranger pushing us to look to
communication to rectify the limitations imposed upon us by our specific perceptual
limitations.33
There is an ironic sense in which we are already engaged in the Stranger’s Golden Age
project, though in such a distorted fashion as to make of mockery of his vision of interspecies
harmony. Knowledge in the age of biopower and its handmaids, the genomic revolution and
cybernetics, is inseparable from a massive deployment of animal bodies in the biomedical
industry. Even philosophy, the traditional site for the production of wisdom, is itself
increasingly implicated in the animal research complex since philosophy is moving toward
neuroscience as it attempts to refine the meaning of mind (Churchland 2007). Wisdom about
what it means to be human, whether for the philosopher or the evolutionary psychologist or the
doctor of medicine, is precisely dependent on the perceptive faculties of countless species of
nonhuman animals. But of course this dependence, suffused as it is with a denial of the ethical
meaning of the biological kinship that purportedly necessitates such research, is like a nightmare
inversion of the Golden Age. Instead of “asking” other species what their differing and unique
abilities can tell us about the mystery of life, we compel them to relinquish their answers through
cage, knife, electrode, and syringe. Here it is Heidegger’s notion “enframing” as a challengingforth is most apt (Heidegger 1982); our technological worldview allows us to recognize that
33
This impulse to communicate with other species may itself be more anthropocentric than I had realized, in that, to
some extent, we are still acting coercively (implicitly, at least) in asking anything of others. We have the option, for
instance, of leaving nonhumans alone, of not asking them anything at all. While I am not entirely convinced this is
a preferable ethical disposition to the one I have sketched out, it remains to be investigated in more depth. I am
indebted to Ingrid Makus for making this point to me, in a public talk at Brock University in Feb. 2012.
36
nonhuman animals are indeed good for something, but it only by rendering them as ethicallyvacated bodies that they can reveal the secrets that we believe them to contain (Shukin 2009).
Biopower is our constant creation, but must it be our fate? This is what the political
myths of Plato ask us if we but inquire whether the myths themselves, like the animals of the
Golden Age, possess “special faculties…to apprehend some distinctive truth not available”
(272c) that we have not yet availed ourselves of. Asking these questions of Butler and Honig,
we must wonder whether agonists and mortalists must battle over the terrain (or mantle) of
humanism at all. Thinking along with (and pushing against) Butler we might observe that death,
voice, and kinship are shared (in various, heterogeneous ways) by humans and nonhumans alike.
Moving then a Honig-ian vein we might suggest that it is precisely the radical particularity of the
how death, voice and kinship are experienced – how they create subjects and objects in a
tensional space rather than one of neatly divided oppositions (e.g. Antigone the tragic defender
of kin versus Creon the anti-tragic defender of the state) – that calls into question the “human” at
the basis of this humanism. But we might then also inquire why Honig herself stays within
humanism’s ambit, since she so often hints that her agonist leanings incline to “attenuating
rather than resecuring the human/animal distinction on which other humanisms are focused”
(Honig 2010, 4). I would suggest that her agonism looks very different if we take this
attenuation of the human/animal seriously, but that these are steps that Honig is perhaps
unwilling to take. One the one hand, her favored theme of “the feast” then appears as humanist,
all-too-humanist, given the rich cross-cultural traditions that tie feasting to the sacrifice of
nonhuman life. One can certainly imagine a non-anthropocentric or posthumanist version of “the
feast,” of course, but it would take some real conceptual unpacking to get there. On the other
hand, if we were to take up Honig’s agon from the nonhuman perspective we might see her
37
desire/pleasure nexus pushing us to quite radical ethico-politico inversions, for instance: what
would placing animal desire, ALL animal desire, human and nonhuman alike, on a roughly even
footing? Honig does not move in this direction (yet), preferring to stay on the edge of humanism
while toying with something yet edgier, but old Plato was farther out on that limb a long, long
time ago.
I think the best impulses of Honig’s (and Butler’s) humanism actually lead down this
same Platonic path, away from humanism and toward something as yet undefined. Whether we
call this version of Plato “Neoplatonic” or “Pythagorean,” “cosmopolitan” or “antihumanist,” is
not particularly important – what matters is that we allow strangeness, familiarization, and
disability to do their work on us, so that we can do the hard work of philosophy in their wake.
Epilogue
One final thought. Perhaps it is something more felicitous than mere coincidence, though
certainly less than “Platonic doctrine,” when we recall that as Empedocles had said he was “born
once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea” (Fr. 383); so too
do we see Plato’s Socrates inhabiting all of these roles. In the Parmenides he is a youth (127c),
he speaks on behalf of a prophetess in the Symposium (201d), in the Republic he likens the young
philosopher to a plant (492a), he calls himself a gadfly (not quite a bird, but close…) in the
Apology (30e), and is compared to a stingray in the Meno (80a).34 Through his texts Plato
imaginatively recasts his mentor in the roles that Empedocles had believed true of the eternal life
of the soul, and which Er (via Socrates, via Plato) narrates of the afterlife. We are inclined to
treat the difference between Plato’s analogies and myths and Empedocles’ statements as a bright
line: Plato’s playful imagination versus the seriousness of the religious dogmatist; figures of
34
See (Plato 1997) for these texts.
38
speech versus ontological statements. But we need not be so dogmatic ourselves in our
intellectual work. There is an important conceptual space that opens to us when we do not force
Plato into one straightjacket or the other – weaver of fantasy or speaker of reality – since we
know that the line between speech and reality is not so clear-cut after all. Chimera: myth, yes.
Reality, yes, now that too (Tam and Rossant. 2003).35 What work would be wrought on us if, via
Empedocles and Plato, we were to harken to Socrates the boy, Socrates the baby girl
chimpanzee, Socrates the oak, Socrates the shark, Socrates the oil-soaked pelican? Can
philosophy sustain such a transformation? Or, considering Badiou’s epigram, can it continue to
live if it does not?
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