The Platonic quest has often been characterized by a famous passage from the Theaetetus: “we ought to try to flee from here to there [the seat of the gods] and flight is to become like God, as far as this is possible” (176a–b). Yet, according to Socrates in the Phaedrus, the dilemma is that Socrates does not know whether he is “really a beast more complex and violent than Typhon … or a simpler animal, participating by nature in some divine, non-typhonic portion” (230a: θείας τινὸς καὶ ἀτύφου μοίρας φύσει μετέχον). In short, “I am not yet capable … of knowing myself.”

I noted at the outset that A Less Familiar Plato is not meant to exclude the many thinkers whose works this book seeks to emulate but rather to think through some of the dialogues in order to uncover several ideas that have helped my own understanding of Plato, ideas that I wanted to share with others even if they did not agree with me.

How does the picture outlined in Chapter 7 fit into the broader view of love and friendship from the Lysis and Alcibiades I to the Phaedrus?1 Is there a progression of thought from the Lysis and Alcibiades through the Symposium to the Phaedrus that shows, in part, why the Neoplatonists could adopt the Alcibiades as the first introductory dialogue in their curriculum? Furthermore, is a common modern view, associated with Gregory Vlastos principally, that Platonic love rejects love of real individuals in favor of ideals true? I shall take each of these questions in turn.

Any reading of the Phaedrus presents many questions, some of which have arguably never received an answer from antiquity down to the modern age, despite recent fine commentaries, those, for example, of Capra, , and especially Werner, . Among these questions are the following: What is the structure of the Phaedrus? Is it really a divided dialogue that contradicts its own stipulations for good writing (264b–c: “every speech should be put together like a living creature with a body of its own … not without head or feet … with middle parts and extremities, written as appropriate to each other and to the whole”)? The Phaedrus, by contrast, seems puzzling. If there is a principle of structural unity in it, what is this principle or principles? Why does the first part of the dialogue – namely, the three early speeches about love culminating in Socrates’ great palinode, not carry over into the second part that deals much more prosaically, first, with rhetoric and, second, with living speech and a critique of writing?1

As noted above, the Republic has got to be one of the most revolutionary works ever written. Some of its provocative theses are still shocking: the banishment of imitative poetry from the polis, its proto-communist structure with wives and children to be held in common, its program of eugenics. To this we can add Socrates’ insistence that philosophers should be rulers (despite his wry acknowledgement that they look like a sorry bunch), that rulers could be both women and men, that the “noble lie” or “fiction” is to be told to its citizens, and that there are certain natural “metals” in each person’s soul: gold for the rulers, silver for the guardians, iron and bronze for everyone else. Not only, it appears, is Plato in favor of brainwashing; he is, for Karl Popper and others,1 racist, totalitarian, and tyrannical. In addition, Socrates’ emphasis on the need for virtue seems to make the city not a place of happiness but a Victorian or Spartan nightmare: how can the iron-souled people doing what they are best fitted for be really happy without proper education or entertainment? Above all, how could the philosopher-rulers be happy with their lives of service to the good of the whole city? Yet, for Socrates, this is the model for happiness, the only form of life that can judge the other honor-loving and money-making lives and come out on top for happiness. How then are we to think of the Republic?

The Phaedo has long been read as a paean to the disembodied soul. In the view of many scholars, the dialogue portrays “an unhappy partnership between body and soul” that only looks forward to the separation of soul from body in death;1 it even provides “a dangerously negative point of view in which no allowance is made for the development of the human emotions.” In the words of one prominent reader, “there is good reason to regard the teaching of the Phaedo, splendid though it be, as pure intellectualism divorced from life, its final aim being the eternal preservation of the soul in the cold storage of eternally frozen absolute Forms.”2 While it is true that Socrates argues powerfully for the separation of soul from body, and of intellect from feeling, in the early part of the dialogue, this is only one important feature of a broader question. Indeed, Socrates does not so much eliminate feeling from soul as elevate ordered feeling into the soul as real agent. Separation as philosophical practice, then, is one crucial part of a bigger picture. I will argue here that in the second half of the Phaedo, we find at least three models of positive embodiment: in the final argument, in the myth (which is by no means a redundant appendix but an articulation of the possible consequences of the dialogue’s major hypotheses), and, finally, in the death scene of Socrates, sections that pick up important motifs already present in the earlier sections. These models open up the question of self and agency, especially as represented in the figure of Socrates himself. The Phaedo, then, is very much about this life and about how to live well in this world; it provides a meditation on the soul not as belonging to some cold storage unit of frozen forms but rather as the life-giver capable of waking up the slumbering self to a different axis of being even in embodied existence.

What is a reasonable interpretation of Socrates’ statement that the Good is “beyond being?” Does this mean that the Good has no being at all, as Rafael Ferber and Gregor Damschen maintain?2 This would mean that the Idea of the Good is ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας in the sense of being beyond being altogether: ἐπέκεινα τοῦ ὄντος. This is a position (when the Good is identified with the One) espoused by Plotinus, later Neoplatonists, and many others, including Schleiermacher, and more recently the Tübingen school. Hans Joachim Krämer, one of the major figures of the Tübingen school, for instance, emphasizes the testimonies of Aristotle, Iamblichus, and Proclus about the One of Speusippus, that it is “not even a being” and sees this as an account of the beyond-beingness of the One in Plato’s thought (, 41).3

The nature of love and the role of myth in Plato’s dialogues are, to put it mildly, highly contested issues. Platonic love has been characterized in many ways: as the spiritual love of ideal forms, far removed from mundane concerns;1 as a kind of Freudian sublimation of physical drives;2 as a search for wholeness in our divided constitution, much as Aristophanes represents this in the Symposium;3 as characterized by Diotima-Socrates’ speech in the Symposium, particularly in terms of the “greater mysteries” or ladder of ascent;4 or, again, as represented by Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus, namely, the great myth of the soul that has captured the imaginations of so many different generations over nearly two and a half thousand years, or as represented in parts of that speech, love as divine madness, for instance;5 or, yet again, as manifesting something like Pausanias’ distinction between a heavenly and a vulgar love, according to which the heavenly lover strives for wisdom and virtue at all costs, an aspiration that seems to resemble the Platonic thirst for spiritual wisdom.6 I will return to this question and to the vocabulary of love after establishing some basis for understanding the logos-myth distinction.

In Republic Book 6, we encounter philosophical art for the first time in its fullest register. I start with three initial texts that help, in part, to frame Book 6, but that do not perhaps receive the attention they deserve.

Plato is often represented as an essentialist thinker who believed in abstract entities known as the Forms, a thinker who privileged universals over particulars, thought over sensation, the disembodied soul or mind over both the embodied mind and the body, and who rejected art in favor of censorship and rigid authoritarianism. This book argues for a rather different understanding – a less familiar Plato for many in the modern world – a Plato who believes in Forms but is not an essentialist in any abstract or simple universalist way.1 This “less familiar Plato” thinks in new ways about thought models but develops a positive, scientific view of perception in the middle and late dialogues (before Aristotle), offers positive models of art and science that need to be evaluated together with the critique he provides in the Republic and maintains in the Laws, and articulates a broader view of intelligible reality within which the mind–soul–body continuum has an eidetic structure and in which even failure and the imperfect are included. This less familiar Plato develops an ideal and yet finely layered view of friendship and love that provided throughout antiquity a practical guide. He does not so much split the disembodied from the embodied mind as see both as forming a dynamic, coextensive continuum with a model of separation in life before death. He thinks of the problem of classification, so important for the development of modern scientific thinking, in new ways and provides a depth framework for understanding fundamental issues connected with what we today regard as problems of ecology and sustainability. Above all, Plato provides posterity with a framework for understanding and articulating the mystical imagination, ranging from what we might call the intellective imagination to the vision and touch of the beautiful and the good – which are not abstract principles open only to the educated but the invisible religious and philosophical bases of life.

The Philebus is an important commentary upon the Republic, not simply because it features the question of the Good but more precisely because it answers questions that must have been asked by Plato’s readers. I see it therefore as a companion piece to the Republic. The Philebus is to be dated after the Parmenides, and it has thus often been read after the critique of Forms in the first part of the Parmenides as reflecting Plato’s rejection of a theory of Forms or at least as holding a different view of Forms from that expressed in earlier dialogues such as the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus. Since I do not believe that Plato held a systematic “Theory of Forms” that could be thoroughly unpacked by discursive means (as is a typical modern view) and since I also believe that the second part of the Parmenides shows in practice the necessity for Forms, I see the Philebus not as rejecting Forms or developing a new mathematical approach to the One and the Many but rather as returning to an old problem that requires reexamination in a new way continuous with the concerns of Plato’s earlier works. The reason I need to treat the Philebus at this point (before coming explicitly to the Symposium and Phaedrus) is not only because of its clear connection with the Republic and the reappearance of Socrates but also because it is one of Plato’s most revolutionary works that shows, I think, a new way of reunderstanding the Republic.