Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life. Letters I-IV. Translated with introduction and interpretive essay by Ariel Helfer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023.
In his introduction to Plato’s Letters, Ariel Helfer recounts Plato’s three visits to Syracuse. In 387 B.C., when that city-state was ruled by Dionysius the Elder, Plato met the tyrant’s brother-in-law, Dion, whom he converted to philosophy or, perhaps, merely convinced of philosophy’s worth. “Converted” translates the word Socrates uses as he converses with Plato’s brother, Glaucon, in the Republic. Socrates describes the way in which a human soul, chained in place by the rulers, can be “turned around,” away from the idols’ shadows on the walls of the cave. The cave represents the confines of the polis, the idols being the artifacts designed by the rulers to keep the people, shackled in place, in their thrall, taking the shadows of those idols, the opinions given them by the ruler/priests, as truths. The opinions derive from the various stories describing the founding of the polis (often said to have been blessed by the gods) and the alleged heroic actions of its subsequent rulers. Philosophy breaks the shackles and reorients the soul toward the light, nature, outside the cave ruled by conventions.
Twenty years later, Dionysius having died, and his son having taken the throne, Dion asked Plato to return, reporting that Dionysius the Younger might also be converted to philosophy if Plato tutored him in it while advising him on politics. Rivals of Dion raised suspicions that he and Plato were conspiring against the twenty-year-old ruler; Dionysius believed them, exiled Dion and eventually acceded to allowing Plato to return to Athens. But in 362 B.C., Plato returned, having been told that Dionysius might indeed be brought to philosophize under his guidance. This effort was no more successful than the first. Plato escaped, and Dion returned to Syracuse, fought a civil war, and deposed the tyrant, only to be assassinated by his own false friends.
The thirteen letters in which Plato describes these events, explaining and defending his motives for acting as he did, may or may not be genuine in whole or in part. Helfer argues not only that they are genuine but that they form a unified whole, a book—indeed, the first known epistolary novel. As such, they give students of Plato a unique “glimpse of Plato in action,” addressing “a distinctive and essential feature of Plato’s political philosophy that, at its peak,” has as its theme “the relationship between philosophy and politics as such.” Whereas the Republic addresses this theme in theory, the Letters addresses it in practice, and, as the proverb goes, actions speak louder than words. This “literary unity thesis” was advanced in 1934 by Franz Dornseiff, a German classicist who held that the letters constitute a fictional or semi-fictional book, its elements “carefully arranged, not in chronological order or by addressee, but in accordance with a more complex plan whereby themes, motifs and lessons are developed or juxtaposed to suit the author’s various intentions.”
Your reviewer can claim none of the qualifications that would be needed to weigh in on the facts of the matter in any sensible way. He is happy to go along with the Dornseiff/Helfer thesis, however, because it makes the Letters so much more interesting.
Helfer observes that the Letters is the one work in which Plato writes in his own voice, albeit a voice that shifts its tone depending upon whom he addresses. He presents himself as a man who has failed; Dionysius did not convert to philosophy. He acted as he did “to serve the cause of philosophy in Sicily,” but in so doing hardly mentions Socrates, his own philosophic mentor, the central figure in his dialogues; and even then, he describes Socrates not as a philosopher but as an elderly friend, a man of justice and piety, simply. “If not by the light of Socratic wisdom, how did Plato think it best to approach and to manage practical and political affairs?” This turns out not to be an easy question to answer. Though brief, the Letters is complex, indeed as convoluted as a Platonic dialogue. Helfer excellently clarifies the intention behind Plato’s “confusing and paradoxical” manner of writing by dividing his inquiry into three parts: Plato’s political counsel; his “defense and promotion of philosophy”; and the causes and implications of “the disaster that unfolded for Plato in Sicily.” The central inquiry turns up Plato’s “two distinct ways of presenting or discussing philosophy in the Letters, namely, as the need for “a regime of philosophic rulers,” which “Plato presents as the key to humanity’s political salvation,” and, less but in a sense more ambitiously, “the activity of philosophy as a quest for clarity and understanding, and thus for individual fulfillment, without reference to its political utility.” These two ways of thinking about philosophy “roughly correspond to Plato’s relationships with Dion and Dionysius, respectively. To understand “these two different—sometimes even incompatible—portraits” of philosophy, Helfer points especially to the five letters in which philosophy is explicitly discussed: letters Two, Six, Seven, and Ten. He keeps his eyes on the overarching questions: Why did Plato journey to Syracuse, and not only once but three times? How did these journeys, one of which Plato compares to the Odysseus’ dangerous voyage between Scylla and Charybdis, benefit philosophy, the way of life chosen once one’s soul has turned around?
Helfer’s brilliant and, as far as I can see, accurate interpretation leaves his reader with one important task: to put his insights back into Plato’s letters as they unfold within the book, beginning with Letter One, “a portrait of Plato slamming the door shut behind him on his way out of Syracuse,” or, more precisely, from the safety of Athens upon his return. Plato begins the letter to Dionysius with his characteristic citation, “Do well!”—itself a formula worth inquiring into. Is it encouraging or admonitory? What is “well”? And what is the relation of doing to wellness, whatever wellness might be? Plato has already set himself a task.
Whatever wellness is, Plato rebukes Dionysius for failing to do it, in fact for wasting the philosopher’s time, and “such a long time,” at that (309a). Although Plato “had become most trusted of all in managing your rule, you were receiving the benefits while I was enduring the slanders” concocted by envious courtiers (309a). “Brutal things” were done in your regime, and Plato had not “gone along with them” (309b). But even so, “I was sent away more dishonorably than would be proper if you were dispatching a vagrant and directing him to sail away after having been occupied for so long a time with you” (309b). Dionysius’ parting bestowal of a gold coin upon his philosophic guest only added insult to injustice, as it didn’t even cover travel his travel expenses and, besides, gold isn’t as valuable as “the intellect of good, like-minded men” (310a). In parting, Plato offers some stern free advice: “Be strong, and recognize how greatly you have erred with us, so that you may bear yourself better toward others” (310a). To do well, one first needs strength of soul, not the tyrant’s command of physical force.
Well. What are to make of this “sententious reprimand,” as Helfer calls it? Plato has introduced several of the most important topics he will address in the book. The relation between doing and thinking (both the practical thinking a political man needs to undertake and the theoretical thinking of philosophers); the question of how to spend both time and money (that is, the question of one’s way of life); the question of honor, reputation, among both political and philosophic men; the question of how to discern truth, first of all in the political realm, where conspiracies real and imagined (imagined sincerely or cunningly) abound; the question of right or just conduct: none of these matters will be neglected in the letters to come.
Letter Two, the first to discuss philosophy explicitly, also addresses Dionysius. The young tyrant evidently has replied to Plato’s adjuration with one of his own, demanding that Plato restrain his “associates”—evidently, Dion and his friends—from “doing or saying anything nasty” to or about Dionysius. Regime change is afoot, he suspects, not without reason. Plato denies that he rules his associates and, it must be noted, Dionysius, an erstwhile associate, had decided against Plato as an adviser and ruler. “For if I were thus ruling the others, and you, and Dion, then would there be more good things for us and all the other Greeks,” as “I myself am great by rendering myself a follower of my own reason,” rather than the whisperings of the slanderers you consulted before exiling me (310c-d). “In the future,” you ought to test your advisers, especially those ‘conspiracy theorists,’ by checking with me, first. “Send me a note to ask,” for “I shall neither shrink from, nor be ashamed of, speaking the truth” (310d). Speech and reason, the modes of philosophy par excellence, have their limits as means of rule; qua philosopher, one cannot be a king, since not all of one’s subjects will be ruled by you by their consent.
“By nature,” thus beyond but also within the walls of the cave, “practical wisdom and great power come together in the same place, and they always pursue and seek each other and come to be together” (310c). Those who rule need practical wisdom, phronēsis, at a minimum to sustain themselves in rule. And “human beings” as such, not only rulers, “enjoy both conversing about these themselves and hearing others do so, both in private intercourse and in poems” (310c-d). Plato recalls four such instances of partnerships known from histories between the wise and the powerful: Hiero and Pausanias, both of whom conversed with the poet Simonides; Periander of Corinth and Thales the Milesian philosopher; the Athenian Pericles and the philosopher Anaxagoras. Wise Croesus, Solon, and Cyrus, however, are distinctive, in Helfer’s words, because they were lawgivers, “more self-sufficient” than those who needed the wise counsel of others; they combined wisdom and power in one person. Plato also recalls stories of poets concerning Creon and the blind prophet Tiresias, Polyidus and the lawgiver, Minos, Agamenon and wise Nestor, Odysseus and Palamedes, and finally, “as it seems to me,” Prometheus and Zeus (311b). “There is a critical shift in the meaning of phronēsis when we cross over to the poets’ presentations,” Helfer observes; the wise men the poets portray “possess their wisdom through divine revelation or the at of divination,” a wisdom “compatible with, because it is dictated by, their piety; and their usefulness as political advisers lies in their ability to communicate what the gods want or intend.” This raises “a great and abiding question of political philosophy: Is the highest wisdom, and therefore the ultimate guide for human action, accessible to reason and the senses unaided by revelation, or is divine revelation necessary for the most prudent human life and therefore for the best possible regime and laws (cf. Meno 99b1-d5)”?
Whether philosophic or divinely inspired, some of these wise men came “into conflict with one another” (most spectacularly, Prometheus and Zeus), some became “friends,” others “like-minded about some things and conflicting about others” (311c). Given the lasting fame of such stories—fame brought about by nature, by the human nature of rulers, of the wise, and indeed of everyone–you and I, Dionysius, are likely to be remembered in speeches, long after we are dead. Men such as ourselves should “care about the time to come” and the speeches about us that will be made about us; unlike the propensity for listening to such speeches, care about them is not human, by nature, but in accordance with “a certain nature,” the nature of “decent” men as contrasted with the nature of “the most servile” men (311c). They want to “hear well of themselves,” not only now but in the future; Plato even professes that he “make[s] this out to be evidence that those who have died have some perception of things here; for the best souls divine that these things are so, while the most depraved ones don’t say so, but the divinations of the most divine men are more authoritative than those of the men who aren’t” (311d). If Dionysius will not be ruled by the speech of a philosopher, perhaps he might be ruled by the speeches of prophets, by divinely-inspired poets, having something of a longing for immortality in his soul? As for Plato, “I myself say that opinion and speech about the true philosophy will be better if we are decent, but if we are petty, the opposite”; he hastens to add that “we could act no more piously than to take care, nor more impiously than to be careless” (311e). Unlike Anaxagoras, the pre-Socratic materialist philosopher who advised Pericles, adding to the suspicions among Athenian citizens that philosophers are dangerous atheists—very much including Socrates, whose teachings were confusedly associated with materialism by one of his accusers at trial—Plato will not suffer philosophy to be tarred with the atheist brush.
That is, Plato evidently has concluded that if the tyrant will not or cannot philosophize, remaining immune to appeals to the rational part of his soul, then he might respond more favorably to the call to honor, an appeal to the thumotic, the spirited, part of his soul. If Dionysius does not philosophize, might he join Plato in building a good reputation for those who do? “I myself came to Sicily with a reputation of being quite distinguished among those in philosophy; and I wished, by coming to Syracuse, to get you as a fellow-witness in order that, through me, philosophy would be honored even among the multitude” (311e-312a). Plato evidently sees a political alliance between ‘the one’ in Syracuse, its tyrant, and ‘the many,’ the people, an alliance typically made against ‘the few,’ rich and often high-born. But the tyrant’s distrust prevailed, largely because “many” were “making noise” about the philosopher, even as they did in Athens, regarding Socrates (312b). Despite his previous reprimand, he offers Dionysius another chance: “If you have come to disdain philosophy altogether, bid it farewell,” but “if the things from us are agreeable to you, then I also should be honored most” (312b-c). This will “honor philosophy” but also, Plato claims, bring “good repute” to you, “in the view of many,” who will consider you “a real philosopher” for having compared and contrasted the distinguished Plato with unnamed others, even as Socratic philosophers compare and contrast opinions, dialectically (312c). Plato takes care to bring honor under the rule of justice: If you honor me, I will honor you; if you don’t honor me, “I will keep quiet”; “but if I honor you without you giving honor, I will seem to admire and pursue riches, and we know that this, among everyone has no beautiful name” (312c), as it is what the greedy, logic-chopping Sophists do, not the philosophers. Honor begets honor; if you give it, “it is an adornment to us both,” a reciprocally beneficial thing, but if I give it without reciprocity (in Aristotle, the specifically political, non-tyrannical relationship), then “it is a reproach to us both” (312d). Tyrants rule unreasonably and dishonorably; Plato invites this tyrant to elevate his rule, if not to reason then at least to lasting good repute. If he does not, so much the worse for him, and as for Plato and philosophy, they have their own defenders, Plato first among them. As Helfer remarks, “it is not enough for Plato to cut ties and wash his hands of the whole Sicilian affair; he must attend to the rippling effects upon his reputation of having involved himself so openly in an ordeal that is becoming increasingly messy.”
But Plato is not done with holding out the attractions of philosophy to Dionysius. He changes the subject, abruptly, addressing a question Dionysius had raised. “The little sphere is not in the correct condition,” Plato writes (312d). “This is the first indication in the Letters of what Plato’s education of the tyrant Dionysius may have contained,” Helfer remarks, and this is “the only passage in the Platonic corpus in which Plato himself explicitly undertakes to teach someone the highest principles of his philosophy.” But what is the “little sphere”? Helfer suggests that it is an orrery, a model of the cosmos used to teach astronomy and the geometry that underlies it, pursuant to “an education in the mathematical necessities underlying reality as we know it, which has the power of liberating the student from superstition by suggesting the possibility of a comprehensive causal account of the cosmos that is naturalistic or does not have recourse to supranational divinities or other supernatural elements.” More, and more cryptically, Plato mentions “the nature of the first”—the first cause, the archē of the cosmos?—the “king of all things” around whom all things orbit and move “for the sake of him” (312d). Plato links “the first” ruler of all to nobility; he is “responsible for all the noble things” (312d). Helfer cautions that “Platonic interpreters over the millennia have espoused such a great variety of unprovable hypotheses regarding the identity of Plato’s ‘king of all things’ as should make us wary of offering yet another attempt at deciphering the enigmas.” Plato complicates rather than clarifying the enigma by mentioning “second things” that “are around a second” and “third things around a third” (312e). The enigma, Helfer prudently observes, may be the point; these truths, if they are truths, are far from self-evident. “The human soul reaches out to learn about them, what sort of things they are, looking to the things akin to itself, of which none is in sufficient condition” (313a). Mystery induces wonder, and wonder induces a certain kind of erotic longing, a longing not for bodies or even for souls but for the truth about the whole; here philosophy or the love of wisdom begins, whether or not fear of God or gods is where wisdom begins. But human souls do not begin as beings capable of approaching these mysterious things, and many will never be capable. Still, the soul asks, “What sort of thing” is the cosmos, with its first, second, and third orbits and causes? Just as Dionysius was ’caused’ by his parents, born of his mother, Doris, in pain, so one result of the erotic longing of philosophy produces “labor pains” not in the body but in the soul (313a). These labor pains are “responsible for all evils,” and “until one is relieved of them, one never really hits upon the truth” (313a). All evils? This might mean that the strife of politics, caused not only by eros misdirected towards physical pleasure, not only by eros misdirected towards false honor, towards ‘lording it over’ other human beings, can also derive from wrongful understanding of the divine and of nature, misunderstandings concerning “the nature of the first.”
Plato tells Dionysius that these considerations indicate “how we need to be disposed to one another” (313c). He does not propose a return to Syracuse. The philosopher and the tyrant should instead communicate through an intermediary, Archedemus, with Dionysius continuing to ask such questions, and any other “perplexities” that may “seize you” (313d). “And if you do this two or three times, and sufficiently test the things sent from me,” in the Platonic-Socratic way, “I would be amazed if the things that are presently perplexing will not come to be very different for you than they are now. Take heart, therefore, and do thus; for never did you dispatch, nor will Archedemus ever transport, a thing nobler and dearer to the gods than this cargo.” (313e-314a). Helfer writes, “If this letter should inspire Dionysius to believe that Plato can help him resolve his philosophic problem”—a decidedly big “if,” Helfer ventures to observe—than “Plato will be in a better position to dictate the future terms of their relationship and thereby to manage the problems he identified in the letter’s first half.” Given the pains one must endure in philosophizing, and given Plato’s rather forbidding remark that some of his students have taken “no fewer than thirty years” to experience what Helfer calls “the shift in perspective Plato unrealistically proposes.” Dionysius “may remain in a kind of intellectual limbo of partial understanding for the rest of his life.”
Plato ends his second letter to Dionysius with a warning about their means of reciprocation, their means of long-distance philosophic dialogue through an intermediary. “Beware lest these things ever be exposed to uneducated human beings” (314a). While “many” might conceivably learn to respect philosophy, that will never happen if they learn the thoughts generated by philosophizing, which seem “ridiculous” to them (314a). And even those of “good natures” may distort them, making them seem “inspired” instead of rationally achieved in a laborious process Plato likens to the purification of gold (314a). Again, beware: “Beware in examining these things lest you come someday to regret their having been unworthily exposed now,” an evil that can be avoided if you learn them “by heart” instead of writing them down (314c). Despite all Plato has written in all of his complex, often aporetic, sometimes lengthy dialogues, “I have never written anything at all about these things,” nor shall I (314c). My Socratic dialogues do not portray the elderly Socrates, who was my friend, but “a Socrates become beautiful and strong” (314c), as it were a mythological Socrates, one who, he hints, is no “mouthpiece for Plato himself,” as Helfer puts it. Do not rely on my writings for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, you jurors who read this letter. Instead, he writes to the tyrant, “read this letter many times,” committing it to memory, putting it into your soul, then “burn it up” (314c).
Helfer raises a skeptical eyebrow. Dionysius evidently did not burn the letter. Perhaps he did not want ardent but arduous philosophy to get too far into his heart. Nor did Plato necessarily expect him to burn it, or to burn with curiosity about the nature of the first, or at least to burn long enough to raise his mind to it. Readers of Plato’s writings will not find truths laid out for them; his writings, are dialogic and fictionalized, dramas of philosophic dialectic (itself a sort of drama), whose golden words must be purified by persistently inquiring minds. “It is only in Letter Two that Plato provides an honest acknowledgment of the ‘labor pains’ brought about by the deepest philosophic questioning,” the “psychological obstacles to the pursuit of Platonic philosophy” as distinguished from the logical challenges addressed in the famous Letter Seven. These psychological obstacles include the human-all-too human inclination to reason only a bit, only until it becomes painful—too difficult, too challenging to one’s own prior attachments.
In this, philosophizing shares something in common with tyrannizing, although not in Nietzsche’s sense of being the most spiritual manifestation of the will to power, or in Augustine’s related sense of the libido dominandi. Socrates was charged not only with impiety, with claiming that the earth is nothing but a stone, with nothing divine about it, but with corrupting the young, making them into immoralists. In a sense, philosophizing does indeed ‘corrupt’ the young in the estimation of the rulers of the polis, insofar as it makes them deviate from unquestioning belief in the nobility and veracity of the idols of the cave. Tyrants also challenge convention; in antiquity, a tyrant was often defined as a monarch who came into power without the blessing of law. But to found any regime, to change the existing regime, requires tyranny so defined, such lawbreaking, as Helfer sees. And would not Plato’s efforts to reform the tyrant, to turn his soul to philosophy, if seriously intended, not change the regime of Syracuse, at very least making Dionysius a just if not legitimate ruler, or, if the turn is complete, leading him away from ruling the polis altogether, preparing the way for Dion’s planned revolution? At the end of the letter, after his instruction to burn it, Plato (Helfer notices) advises Dionysius on “more mundane” matters than the nature of the first. It transpires that Plato and Dionysius have been engaged in a sort of commerce in human beings, as Plato sends some of his philosophic companions to Dionysius’ court, where they enjoy the same dangerous patronage he had enjoyed, for a while. Why send philosophic youths to the tyrant? As Helfer remarks, democratic Athens was not necessarily safer for philosophers than tyrannized Syracuse. And it was Dionysius, not respectable Dion nor the Athenian polloi, who did engage in philosophy “somewhat seriously for some period of time.”
By the time of Plato’s third consecutive letter to Dionysius, circumstances have changed. Plato signals this immediately, shifting from his characteristic salutation, “Do well!” to “Rejoice!” That sounds quite buoyant, until one learns that Plato has heard that Dionysius has written to the Delphic oracle, “Rejoice and preserve a tyrant’s life of pleasure” (315b-c). That is no way to address a god. “I, on the other hand, would not, in a call to a human being—let alone a god—encourage anyone to do this: to a god, because I would be commanding against nature, for the divine lies far away from pleasure and pain; to a human being, because pleasure and pain engender much harm, the pair of them begetting badness at learning, forgetfulness, imprudence, and hubris in the soul” (313c). For Plato, a god is limited to his nature; the Delphic god, Apollo, in particular, has a rational nature. To ascribe a life of pleasure to a god, and especially that god, is to contradict, to misunderstand, his nature and indeed the natural order, the cosmos itself, and perhaps “the nature of the first,” whatever that might be. In Helfer’s words, “according to Plato, gods are constrained by nature; knowledge of nature can indicate to us such limitations as may exist on the power of the gods.” It is also to misunderstand philosophy and to ignore the natural limits of human beings. Readiness to learn, memory, prudence, and the intention to follow a rational inquiry wherever it leads, without preening oneself on one’s intelligence or on what one has learned so far are all indispensable to philosophy as a way of life, as a sort of regime. As Helfer remarks, “pleasure is not simply the good, nor is pain simply the bad (though it is bad). Each must be evaluated according to its utility in fostering intellectual virtue, and both pleasure and pain are found to be positively harmful when measured by this standard.” Plato’s salutation is therefore ironic, biting; if Dionysius knew himself, knew his own nature as a human being, he would neither address a god as if a god were a pleasure-seeking tyrant nor expect any god to bless him for being one.
Helfer associates Plato’s salutation and admonition with his concern for the reputation of philosophy, since “Dionysius’ attitude toward the gods might well be thought to be a reflection of the education he received from Plato,” including Plato’s teaching on the nature of the first. Dionysius’ greeting to Apollo “is driven by the tyrant’s regrettable lack of prudence or practical wisdom”—characteristic of the hubristic soul. And there is more, an indication that Plato has the prudence Dionysius lacks. Since, as we know, Plato expects anything written down to circulate beyond its immediate readership, this defense of philosophy will convince more of its future readers than Socrates’ public apologia. “A man who publicly defends himself in writing against slander and rumor will be suspected of distorting the facts in his own favor,” so “he stands a better chance of winning the trust and favor of his judges if his private correspondence concerning the very matters in which he requires a defense appears to exonerate him.” Dionysius may never achieve such prudence, which is indispensable to any ruler. He will fail not only at philosophizing but at ruling. His incapacity to “do well” as a ruler, his rejoicing in pleasure, confuses him with respect to the nature of the ‘final’ rulers, the gods; his character prevents him from thinking, from living, from ruling well.
Pleasure knows no limits; tyrannical love of pleasure comports with rule without limit, over one’s own people and over others. Tyranny is imperialistic. Plato rebukes Dionysius for telling some ambassadors that he, Plato, had “prevented” him from liberating Greek city-states in Syracuse from barbarian rule and from “replacing the rule of tyranny with kingship” in Syracuse and had later urged Dion to overthrow his rule (315d). On the contrary, as “you yourself know,” while in Syracuse “I was taking seriously, in a measured way”—a non-tyrannical way—some “other, minor things and the preludes to the laws” (316a)—an introductory explanation, as Americans would place a preamble to their constitution. Measure and law characterize kingship, not tyranny; Dionysius has slandered Plato in an attempt to deflect blame for his own bad acts of omission and commission. So, let’s set the record straight. “I came to Syracuse, having been called by both you and Dion” (316c). Plato had known Dion, his guest-friend and a mature man; Dionysius was then young, inexperienced, and “very unknown to me” (316d). Once you had exiled Dion, “the sensible partner,” I was stuck with you (316d). There being no genuine reciprocity, no political relations, with a tyrant, “by necessity” I could only “bid farewell to the political things for the remainder of the time” I spent in Syracuse, prudently “bewar[ing] the slanders of the envious” and continuing to serve as a friend to you “as much as possible” (316e). When Dionysius undertook a war, Plato finally negotiated his release; Plato does not associate himself or philosophy with physical warfare. Thus ended his first expedition to Syracuse.
Once peace returned, Dionysius repeatedly wrote to Plato, urging him to return and promising to bring Dion back, too. Dion himself wanted Plato to accede to these requests, “to sail and not become soft” (317c). But by now (some two decades on), Plato could make the excuse of advanced age and also point to the continued slanders of himself and of Dion by those Syracusans who wanted none of their own pleasures, gratified by the “riches and the power of the rest of excessive property,” the licentiousness, of the Syracusan way of life, reflecting as it did the character of the tyrant (317d). Part of the property in question belonged to Dion, and there were those who had their eyes on it. Plato finally yielded, as “there was need that no one of my friends ever accuse me on the grounds that, because of my faintness of heart, all that was his”—Dion’s—though “it might not have been lost, was utterly destroyed” (317e). Upon arriving, I requested that you “reconcile with Dion and recall him,” and “had you then obeyed me,” things might have turned out better “for you, and for the Syracusans, and for the other Greeks” (317e). But as it happened, you allowed others to appropriate his property, bringing on Dion’s military invasion and the ongoing civil war. For his part, you, Dionysius, accused Plato of being Dion’s ally against him, and in your clouded vision as a “doer of injustice,” acting “for the sake of money,” this is true; I would not be “persuaded by the greatness of your rule to betray an old friend and guest-friend who was doing badly because of you—someone in no way worse than you, if I may so so—and choose you,” doing “everything in whatever way you commanded” in “your wolf-friendship” (318d-e). Dionysius took the occasion to scorn Plato and his teaching, saying, cuttingly, “So it’s once I had been educated, to do geometry? Or what?” (319c). So much for the utility of a liberal education. In his hubris, the tyrant remains tyrannical. What is the point of continuing to advise him?
Plato’s friend, Dion, is morally better than Dionysius, but is he better for philosophy? In Letter Four, Plato writes to Dion, following his exchange with Dionysius, and after the tyrant’s overthrow, regarding Dion’s exile, his property, and especially his intention to found a new, more just regime of Syracuse. Plato describes himself as having been “very serious” about seeking a resolution to their affairs in Syracuse and with its ruler, “for the sake of love of honor for the noble things more than anything else,” as “I believe it to be just that those who are in truth decent and who do such things hit upon the proper reputation” (320a-b). While the virtue of courage, and the physical attributes of speed and strength “would seem to belong also to certain others,” truthfulness, justice, magnificence, and decorum concerning truth, justice, and magnificence should be honored even more (320b-c). Honor, good repute, should be Dion’s concern, inasmuch as “you are watched by all” (320d). “Be prepared to show up Lycurgus himself as outdated, as well as Cyrus, and anyone else who ever seemed to be distinguished for his character and regime” (320d-e). But, Plato warns, foreign onlookers have also seen that the very love of honor among eminent Syracusans, including those who have been your allies in the civil war, now threatens Dion’s enterprise with factionalism. Consider that “you seem to some to be rather lacking in the proper courtesy. Let it not escape your notice that it is through being agreeable to human beings that it is possible to act, but stubbornness dwells in loneliness. Good luck.” (321b-c). Dion has his own problem with hubris, and that hubris has made him as much a ‘man alone’ as Dionysius was. As Helfer puts it, “Dion never understood or cared about the animosity he aroused in Syracuse with his rigid, moralistic preaching about philosophy.” This must have been especially irksome to Syracusans, and especially dangerous to Dion and his effort at political founding, given the pleasure-loving ethos of the previous regime, long ingrained in both ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ there. It was a more successful founder, Solon, who conceded that he had given Athenians not the best laws but such laws as they could bear. In his entrancement with the idea of the Platonic philosopher-king, in his hubristic supposition that he could become such a one, Dion may be setting himself up for political failure. And for Plato, he is also discrediting philosophy, albeit in the opposite way Dionysius had done. Whereas Dionysius’ friendship with Plato could be slandered as the corruption of a once-noble youth, a reprise of Anaxagoras’ corruption of Pericles, a case of philosophy inducing a good boy to go bad, Dion’s friendship with Plato could be slandered as the inculcation of priggishness, a case of philosophy making our ruler insufferable. Either way, “the reputation of philosophy” takes a hit; after all, Helfer writes, “the whole doctrine of philosopher-kingship, and in this sense the whole Republic, were conceived out of a necessity Plato felt to praise philosophy in light of his observations of political life,” an attempt “to bolster the public image of philosophy,” especially in view of the dialogic character of Socratic-Platonic philosophy. To engage in dialogue, one needs other people; to perpetuate the philosophic enterprise, the way of life or regime of philosophy, one needs to locate philosophers within political regimes. But if the figure of the philosopher-king is mistaken for a tyrant or as a pest of a priest, philosophers and the philosophy they practice will remain at peril. “In Dion’s zealous love of Platonic philosophy as the truest foundation of justice and virtue, we see something of what Plato hoped people would think and say about philosophy on the basis of his work.” Those hopes are now dimming, now that the not-really-philosophic moralist, also a moralist who lacks one needful virtue, prudence, has managed to boost himself into a position of rule. Helfer calls Letter Four the equivalent of the comic satyr play that traditionally followed the presentation of a series of three tragedies in the Greek theater. While Dionysius’ failure to become a philosopher ended in tragedy, Dion’s impending failure to become a “founding lawgiver” for Syracuse evokes the “poignant humor of this letter.” It, too, will end in the death of the protagonist, but it may be that some deaths are tragic, some comic. Might Dionysius’ story be tragic because in him Plato lost a potential philosopher (as Nietzsche said of Emerson)—eros misdirected is still eros, after all—while more thoroughly tested Dion could never have been a real philosopher?
Machiavelli lauds his prince as a man alone. Plato shows why the sort of thing is not to be praised. An isolato will not do well, by Platonic or even Machiavellian standards, although he may at times rejoice.
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