Plato and the Invention of Life

PLATO AND THE INVENTION OF LIFE

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Naas, Michael, author.

Title: Plato and the invention of life / Michael Naas.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054134 | ISBN 9780823279678 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780823279685 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Plato. | Life.

Classification: LCC B395 .N323 2018 | DDC 184—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054134

Printed in the United States of America

20  19  18      5  4  3  2  1

First edition

for DFK

CONTENTS

Introduction: Philosophy’s Gigantomachia over Life and Being

1. The Lifelines of the Statesman

2. Life and Spontaneity

3. The Shepherd and the Weaver: A Foucauldian Fable

4. The Measure of Life and Logos

5. Fruits of the Poisonous Tree: Plato and Alcidamas on the Evils of Writing

6. The Life of Law and the Law of Life

7. Plato and the Invention of Life Itself

Conclusion: Life on the Line

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Philosophy’s Gigantomachia over Life and Being

In a word, zōē is a word for being …

—DAVID FARRELL KRELL¹

Being—we have no idea of it apart from the idea of living.—How can anything dead be?

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE²

In his 1997 book devoted to the work of his long-time friend Hélène Cixous, a book whose title, H. C. for Life, at once names its theme and pronounces its dedication, Jacques Derrida writes the following about the question of life in the Western philosophical tradition:

in the philosophical gigantomachia [that runs] from Plato to Descartes, from Nietzsche to Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger, among others, the only big question whose stakes remain undecided would be to know whether it is necessary to think being [l’être] before life [la vie], beings [l’étant] before the living [le vivant], or the reverse.³

It is a rather sweeping, ambitious claim, to be sure. Derrida is asserting here that in the long philosophical tradition that runs from Plato to Heidegger, the only big question, la seule grande question, he says, that has yet to be settled, the only question whose stakes remain undecided, is the question of the relationship between being and life. Derrida will go on in this book, using especially the literary works of Cixous, interestingly, to provide a radical rethinking of this relationship, a rethinking of power or puissance in relationship to both being and life. It is in this way that Derrida not only names the gigantomachia but himself joins into the fray, trying to displace and reinscribe, it could be shown, the terms of both an ontological and a vitalist account of this relationship.

Now in speaking here of a gigantomachia, Derrida is, of course, alluding to the famous passage from Plato’s Sophist where the Eleatic Stranger says that, when it comes to the nature of being or not-being, "there seems to be a battle like that of the gods and the giants [gigantomachia] going on among them, because of their disagreement about existence" (246a).⁴ As the Stranger will go on to tell the tale, the battle pits those whose weapons are derived from the invisible world alone, in short, the idealists or the friends of the forms, against those who drag down everything from heaven and the invisible to earth, namely, the atomists or the materialists more generally (Sophist 246a–b).⁵ It is a gigantomachia that was well underway when Plato wrote the Sophist and it is one that would continue to rage, it seems, all the way up to Heidegger and beyond. It is no coincidence, then, that Heidegger himself would refer to this well-known passage on the gigantomachia of philosophy in the very first paragraph of the Introduction to Being and Time, just half a page after his opening epigraph to the entire work, which is also from the Sophist and is today probably just as well known as that other passage: it is clear that you have known all along [what you wish to designate when you say ‘being’], whereas we formerly thought we knew, but are now perplexed (Sophist 244a).

In its philosophical context, then, or at least in its Platonic inscription, the term gigantomachia designates the battle between those who begin with what is empirical or material, visible or touchable—that is, the giants—and those who believe that everything is derived from some invisible, ideal realm, the Olympians. The struggle is over the nature of what is, the nature of existence, ousia, or being, to on, and, by extension, non-being. But it is not, notice, as Derrida suggests in H. C. for Life, over the relationship between being and life. The name gigantomachia may thus go back to Plato but not necessarily the thing as Derrida has characterized it. One might therefore argue that Derrida has projected onto Plato a theme or a question that is central, in one way or another, for the Pre-Socratics, for Aristotle, or for the neo-Platonist tradition, beginning with Plotinus, but not necessarily for Plato himself, who is, to be sure, always concerned with what it means to lead a good or virtuous life but who does not seem so concerned with the question of life itself or the relationship between being and life.

And yet references to life, words and ideas related to life, can be found everywhere throughout the dialogues. In the Sophist itself, for example, at the precise point where the gigantomachia between the idealists and the materialists over the nature of being is invoked, it is a reference to life that is chosen to draw out and so distinguish the two parties. In order to see who will affirm the existence of an invisible as well as a visible realm, the Stranger says they should ask each party "whether they say there is such a thing as a mortal animal [thnēton zōon], understood as a body with a soul in it [sōma empsychon], and whether the two sides give to soul a place among things which exist" (Sophist 246e).⁶ In order to distinguish the ideal from the material, therefore, Stranger introduces, at least implicitly through this reference to a zōon, the question of life. He could have asked any number of other questions; for instance, he could have asked both sides (following the Euthyphro) whether one does not need a form of piety in order to call some particular person or action pious, or he could have asked (following Book 10 of the Republic) whether a craftsman does not need an idea or model of a table before his mind in order to make an actual table. But the Stranger chose instead the example of a zōon. He did so, it seems, because that example presented the best, clearest, quickest, least contentious, and perhaps liveliest way of getting both sides to admit that there must be both a visible and an invisible realm, a realm of bodies and a realm of bodiless things such as the soul, or at least of qualities such as wisdom and justice that are traditionally attributed to the soul. The Stranger’s explicit aim is surely not to introduce the notion of life into the discussion by means of this example. He does not, after all, go on to ask about the nature of this life, whether it resides in the soul, in the body, or only in the conjunction of the two. He is merely trying to distinguish a realm of invisible, ideal things, from material ones, and opposing soul and body seemed like the best or quickest way of achieving that end. And yet the words zōon and empsychon manage nonetheless to introduce the question of life into the dialogue and, once introduced, the question never simply disappears.

This, I will argue, is precisely how Plato introduces the notion of life into most of his dialogues, using rather than mentioning it in one dialogue after another, particularly in early and middle dialogues, but then mentioning it as well as using it, zōē as well as bios, in later dialogues. While the question of life is thus never the explicit focus of any Platonic dialogue, while it appears to be of minor importance next to the great Platonic questions regarding justice or the Good, the existence of the forms or the immortality of the soul, it is, we will see, an absolutely central, structuring question in all of Plato’s dialogues. If there is, therefore, no Platonic dialogue that has or that really deserves the subtitle On Life (peri biou or peri zōēs), no dialogue that poses the famous ti esti or what is question with regard to life, I will argue here that almost everything in Plato’s dialogues can and should be read through this question. From the question of how best to live a uniquely human life to the question of what distinguishes human life from other kinds of life, whether that of plants, other animals, or the gods, almost all of Plato’s ethical, political, and even epistemological questions revolve around the theme or question of life.

In this work, however, it is especially the relationship between life and ontology that will be of most concern, the way in which Plato’s dialogues tend to characterize being itself, albeit almost never directly and almost always just in passing, in terms of life or the living. It is this association of being with life that will allow Plato to oppose life not just to death but to everything that is typically opposed to being, everything from becoming and phenomenality to corporeality and animality, everything, in short, that we commonly call life. We will thus see that the life that Plato privileges in several of his most important later dialogues is, in the end, not bare life (though there is, as we will see, such a notion in Plato) but not a good life either, a good human life in excess of that bare life, but something like real life or life itself—that is, a life beyond or in excess of what we call life. By thinking being (whether in the form of the Forms or the immortal soul) in terms of life, Plato is ultimately able to discover (or, as I will argue, to invent) this notion of life itself—that is, a real or true life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life, then, that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived.⁷ As we will see, it is Plato’s initial separation of bare life from human life, mere life from a truly worthy human life, that will facilitate this transformation and elevation of bare life into real life. In other words, it will be the line that is drawn between bare life and human life that will allow Plato to reinscribe the first of these two terms into a new, higher register—that is, into the register of life itself.

We will come to see in what follows that the gigantomachia that Derrida speaks of in H. C. for Life as taking place between Plato and others—all the way up to Heidegger and beyond—is already raging in or within Plato himself. The gigantomachia is more or less everywhere, just below the surface, and it is responsible for the division not only between bare life, the good life, and life itself, but between so many time-honored terms in the Platonic corpus, beginning with soul and body, being and becoming, the invisible and the visible, the ideal and the material, the one and the many, in other words, the entire matrix we call Platonism. This question of life in the Platonic dialogues will not only illuminate the structural relationship between all these terms and distinctions in Plato but will help to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought will have exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition. It will help explain, to cite an example to which I will return at the very end of this work, the Neo-Platonists’ very explicit identification of Being, Logos, and the One with Life itself, a decisive moment for Western philosophy and theology.

To broach this question or these questions of life in Plato—this swarm of questions, to use a figure from the Republic (450b)—I will range far and wide throughout the Platonic corpus, reading passages from many dialogues, from Alcibiades I, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Phaedrus, to Theaetetus, Sophist, Philebus, Timaeus, and Laws, to name just a few. But much of this work will be devoted to the reading of a single dialogue, the Statesman, and, especially, the famous myth of the two ages where Plato seems to sketch out not only two conceptions of political rule but two different valences, values, or even types of life. A focus on life in the Statesman will thus be my starting point for asking the question of life in Plato more generally, the question of what distinguishes different forms of life from one another and the question of whether there is not some complicity between the ontological question what is life? and life itself.

The choice of the Statesman is, admittedly, not an obvious one. While no Platonic dialogue, as I said, asks the question What is life? (ti esti ho bios or ti esti hē zōē) in an explicit or sustained fashion, other dialogues would seem better suited for posing this question. There is the Philebus, for example, which asks not just, as in the Apology, whether the examined life is the only life worth living but whether a life of pleasure is preferable to a life of the mind, or whether a mixture of the two is preferable to the pure version of either. There is also, of course, the Timaeus, which offers an account of the origin of both the universe, itself a living being, and all the other living beings or creatures within it. And then there is the Phaedo, where, in the course of an inquiry into the nature and immortality of the soul, Socrates seems to posit a form of life—a life form—that is responsible for making everything it takes hold of or everything that participates in it alive. These are, as we will see, all important dialogues for the question of life in Plato and I will have occasion to look in some detail at key moments in them all. But none of these dialogues offer us, I will try to argue, as powerful a point of entry into the question of life in Plato’s dialogues as the Statesman.

The theme and vocabulary of life are woven throughout the entirety of the Statesman, even if this may not be evident at first glance. An implicit notion of life is in the background animating, as it were, all of Plato’s arguments and distinctions, from the initial division to define the statesman to the myth of the two ages to the separation of two forms of measure to the distinction between unwritten and written law. It is this largely unspoken but nonetheless nearly omnipresent preoccupation with life that will motivate Plato to draw the line not just between life and non-life but between the human and the animal, soul and body, speech and writing, presence and absence, legitimacy and illegitimacy, the Age of Kronos and the Age of Zeus, an age of life and fecundity and an age of death and forgetting. It is, I will argue, the theme of life in all these different contexts, this common reference to life, that will allow me to think together the various themes and movements of what has often been considered to be a rather disjointed or even ill-fashioned dialogue. As I will show, none of the parts of this dialogue can be fully understood in relation to the whole, and none of the above-mentioned terms and oppositions can be understood in relation to one another, without reference to this underlying theme of life.

What follows is not, however, a line-by-line commentary on the Statesman, even if I do hope to provide, in the course of this work, a relatively full and coherent reading of this dialogue. The last two or three decades have seen the publication of several important commentaries on this—up until then—much neglected dialogue. I will consider several of these commentaries, but I will focus especially on three—those of Stanley Rosen, Mitchell Miller, and my colleague at DePaul, David White.⁸ I will not dispute that the Statesman can and should be read as a dialogue that attempts to demonstrate that the true statesman is a philosopher, as Stanley Rosen argues, or that it is essentially a dialogue about philosophical pedagogy, as Mitchell Miller claims, or that it is a thoroughly aporetic dialogue that calls for a reading of other dialogues, and particularly the Philebus, on the nature of the Good, as David White maintains.⁹ I will instead try to show that the Statesman is even more significantly a dialogue about Plato’s conception of life and everything that goes along with it in his philosophy, beginning with statesmanship and pedagogy within human life and ending with the Good as the very source—perhaps the living source—of life itself.

Two more preliminary remarks, one related to the theme of this work and one to the methodology or approach it takes to its subject. This work focuses on the question of life in Plato because this question can illuminate a great deal—indeed almost everything, as I have suggested—about Plato’s work. But I also focus on it because the most insistent question over the past two or three decades in contemporary European philosophy or what is known as Continental Philosophy has no doubt been the question of life: the question of the limits of life, the relationship between life and its others (death, the inorganic, the technological, the machinic), the question of biopower and the regulation of life, the relationship between various kinds of life (the human, the animal, the plant), even the question of life itself in recent discourses of so-called new materialism. In a recently published volume on Philosophy in France Today, Frédéric Worms documents this concern with life in contemporary French philosophy in its relationship to science, politics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy, and he remarks on the fact, which he takes to be hardly a coincidence, that the final texts of Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida were all concerned with the question or theme of life.¹⁰ I thus hope to provide some contribution, through this reading of Plato, to a discussion about life in contemporary philosophy.

With regard to methodology, I will be working here essentially with the Platonic text, in its arguments, its themes, its dramatic context, and its letter. But no one, of course, ever approaches a text without some orientation or methodological presuppositions, some interpretative horizon.¹¹ My approach to the question of life in Plato’s dialogues will thus be informed, in part, by the recent commentaries on the Statesman that I just mentioned, as well as by Jacques Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy.¹² In that seminal essay of 1968, Derrida demonstrated, in effect, that Plato was able to develop—indeed, to invent—a conception of speech without or before writing only by means of what he calls the supplement of writing. I will deploy this same logic of the supplement, as Derrida called it, in order to show how Plato was able to discover—indeed, to invent—a notion of life that would supposedly come without or before all death and, thus, without or before everything that is called life, an Age of Kronos that would precede and exceed every Age of Zeus. Just as Derrida in Plato’s Pharmacy focuses on the myth regarding the nature of writing at the end of the Phaedrus as a way of entering into Plato’s thinking about speech and writing more generally, so I begin with the Statesman, and particularly its myth of the two ages, in order to approach the question of life and death more generally in the Platonic corpus.

My reference to Plato’s Pharmacy suggests yet another reason for focusing on the Statesman in this work. It, not the Phaedrus, is the dialogue with which Derrida actually begins his long, hundred-and-twenty page essay. After evoking in its opening lines the image of the text as a web (rather than as an organic being—that is, as a zōon), Derrida writes: "The example we shall propose of this will not, seeing that we are dealing with Plato, be the Statesman, which will have come to mind first, no doubt because of the paradigm of the weaver, and especially because of the paradigm of the paradigm, the example of the example—writing—which immediately precedes it. We will come back to that only after a long detour (PP" 65/74). Derrida will indeed return to the Statesman at the very end of Plato’s Pharmacy, but just for a line or two, as he looks at the notion of the symplokē in Plato’s later dialogues (PP 165/191, 166n82/192n77). He could have said much more about the Statesman, however, insofar as it turns around many of the same themes as the Phaedrus, including the question of writing as a supplement and, as we will see, the question of life. Plato and the Invention of Life thus tries to fill out, as it were, some of the ideas that are only suggested or left in outline form in Derrida’s 1968 essay. It offers a reading of the Statesman that is inspired by Derrida’s analyses in Plato’s Pharmacy but that also draws from Derrida’s writing and thinking more generally.

For example, throughout his seminars and his writings, Derrida would often ask himself, as he was reading a text, the question of where a thinker or text is trying to draw the line. Where, for instance, he asks repeatedly throughout his final seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, is Heidegger trying to draw the line between man and the animal in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics? Or, already back in Plato’s Pharmacy, where does Plato draw the line in the Phaedrus between two forms of repetition or two forms of memory, corresponding, perhaps, to two forms of life? The question posed in this work will also be, then, where, when, why, and how does Plato draw the line between life and its others, the line between life and being, at the outset of this great gigantomachia, but then also the line between life and non-life, life and death, the living and the dead, human life and its others, though also, and this will be my most speculative moment, the line between a life beyond life—life itself—and what we call life? Where does Plato or where do Plato’s dialogues draw the line between true life, between what is most real and most living in life, and this mortal life that always ends in death? Where do Plato’s dialogues draw the line in each of these cases in order to define and to know? But then also, where do these ontological or epistemological lines become political or ethical—that is, where does Plato, as we say, draw the line not just in order to distinguish between two things, concepts, or categories, but in order to stake out a boundary or limit so as to affirm or deny, say yes or no, in order to value some things, like life and especially human life, and reject or devalue others, such as non-life or non-human life, though also, and this will be, again, my most speculative moment, the life of being as opposed to the non-life or the quasi-life of becoming? It will be my contention that we can learn a lot about Plato by asking with persistence and penetration the question of where the line is to be drawn, and then, finally, what it is that eludes or else makes possible any drawing of a line in the first place. While one might be tempted to call such a reading a deconstruction of Plato’s text, I would simply prefer to call it an exercise in drawing the line, an exercise in asking why Plato thought he had to draw the line in such a way so as to include some things and exclude others, value some things and devalue others, elevate some things and reject others.

I say I get this practice or this discipline of drawing or following lines from Derrida, but it would be right to point out that it goes all the way back to Plato and has been an essential part of philosophy ever since. The method of diairesis, for example, which is so central to the Statesman, as we will see in Chapter 1, is nothing but a sophisticated practice of drawing lines. One of the most studied and celebrated figures in all of Plato’s dialogues is also, of course, a line, a divided line, which establishes hierarchies between different levels of being, knowledge, clarity, goodness, and so on.¹³ It is by means of this simple line that Plato gives us a stunningly clear and yet extremely sophisticated vision of his entire ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and, insofar as this line is introduced in a section of the Republic devoted to the philosopher king, ethics and politics. Though we are not going to analyze in any detail that divided line in this work, we will inevitably catch a glimpse of it at almost every turn, especially as we try to think near the end of this work what it is that makes this line possible without itself having a place on the line—a certain conception not of the good life or of life itself but of the Good as Life. Every time Plato draws a line, I will argue, even the most banal and seemingly insignificant, we catch a glimpse of that which exceeds the line and all the distinctions that are made on the basis of it, the source of all difference and—as I will argue in conclusion—all life.

We will thus remain perfectly faithful to a central aspect of Plato’s thought if we simply persist in asking the question of where we do or should draw the line between one term, concept, or idea and another. This is the case not only for already well-known and highly valued relations but for those that are less well-known and appear much less valued. As such, we will become better able to understand Plato’s entire ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and so on by asking how and why Plato draws the line not just between the intelligible, invisible realm, on the one hand, and the sensible, visible one, on the other, or between being and becoming, the one and the many, but between life and its others, life and death, to be sure, but also spontaneity and automatic movement, living memory and mechanical recollection, legitimate heirs and bastard offspring, the organic and the inorganic, fertility and sterility, human life and animal life, animal life and plant life, to name just a few. In each of these lines we can find, if we look closely enough, all these other distinctions, all these other lines, from the most noble and traditional to what seem to be the most trivial or banal. It is Plato, well before Derrida, who showed us that every line is implicated in every other line. We will thus want to multiply these lines in order to see the relationships between them but then also, as I have suggested, in order to locate a notion of life that exceeds them, a notion of life that might itself account for this prodigious proliferation of differences, this quickening of differences and relations in the dialogues.

If I thus often argue in this work for a rather Platonic or Platonist reading of Plato, I will get there through what are some rather atypical Platonic or Platonist questions, and I will do so in order to arrive at something that escapes Platonic categories altogether. I will, of course, look at the arguments presented in Plato’s dialogues, the distinctions he appears to affirm and the ideas he seems to endorse. But I will tend to focus even more on Plato’s language, on his vocabulary, his rhetoric, his use of myth, on the matrix of terms he uses as much as mentions. It is in this way that I hope to expose both an undeniable Platonism in Plato’s dialogues and that which contributes always to the undoing of that Platonism—right down to and including the category of life.

What follows, then, is an attempt to read large sections of the Statesman, in conjunction with parts of many other dialogues, on this question of life and the line. By focusing on the question of life, we will come to see that another logic is at work throughout Plato’s Statesman and that this logic is essential to understanding not only the Statesman but Plato’s work as a whole. The first six chapters of the work analyze in detail several sections of the dialogue with a view to this theme or question of life. In Chapter 1, I look at the attempt, in the opening pages of the Statesman, to discover the essence of the statesman through that method known as diairesis, which, as I suggested a moment ago, is nothing if not an exercise in learning how to draw the line or, as the Stranger would have us believe, learning how to cut along the lines that are already drawn in nature. In addition to asking about the place where Plato draws the line between life and its others, human life and its others, I will ask here about Plato’s repeated use of animal metaphors to characterize the very method of philosophy—the dialogue as hunt, diairesis as animal sacrifice, Platonic forms as natural species, and so on.

In Chapter 2, I focus on the myth of the two ages and the pivotal role played by the adjective automatos in the Stranger’s telling of that myth. I argue that Plato’s use of the term automatos to describe both the way in which the fruits of earth come up of their own accord, freely, or spontaneously during the Age of Kronos and the way the universe or cosmos, itself a living being, moves during the Age of Zeus, reveals a tension at the very heart of Plato’s conception of life. By comparing Plato’s use of this term in the Statesman to other uses in the dialogues (in Theaetetus, Sophist, Protagoras, and elsewhere), I argue that the term automatos must be understood as something like—to use Derrida’s vocabulary—an undecidable, akin to the pharmakon of Phaedrus, that is, a fundamentally ambivalent notion around which a whole series of opposing terms (activity/passivity, inside/outside, natural movement/mechanical causality) revolves. I conclude by suggesting that this use of automatos, in conjunction with a somewhat unexpected use of the term mimēsis in the same myth, might indicate an unacknowledged Heraclitean influence on the Statesman and might help explain Plato’s multiple references to Heraclitus in related dialogues (such as Sophist, Theaetetus, and Cratylus). This will allow me to ask whether a (perhaps Heraclitean) notion of mimēsis—another way of describing what I will call Plato’s political anamnesis—is not what links the Age of Zeus to the Age of Kronos, and, perhaps, human life in the Age of Zeus to the true life of the Age of Kronos.

In the following chapter, I look at Michel Foucault’s provocative but very selective reading of this same myth of the Statesman in his 1977–78 seminar Security, Territory, Population. Contra Foucault, who claims that Plato never adhered to the pastoral model of governing—that is, the model of the ruler as shepherd—and that he, in fact, definitively rejects this model in the Statesman in favor of the model of the ruler as weaver, I argue that a more complex relation between the models, as between the two ages, is required. Though Plato never puts it in exactly this way, the statesman in the Age of Zeus is indeed a weaver, but he is a weaver who must, through his weaving, imitate the shepherd in the Age of Kronos. Hence the model of the statesman as weaver—that is, the model of the statesman understood through an image of technical production within the city—must remain, in a way that will have everything to do with the question of life, the statesman as shepherd in a time before technology and before the city.

In Chapter 4, The Measure of Life and Logos, I look at Plato’s distinction between two forms of measure (relative measure and the measure of the mean) and the values of life they ultimately embody or represent. In the Statesman, Plato comes to see—and perhaps for the first time in his dialogues—that all production and, perhaps, all life actually depend on this measure of the mean, a notion that Plato had certainly used or deployed in dialogues before the Statesman but never commented on or analyzed as such. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this measure of the mean for logos or discourse, whether that discourse be merely rhetorical or, as in the Statesman itself, philosophical.

In Chapter 5, I return to the essay that I said inspired much of this work, Derrida’s 1968 essay Plato’s Pharmacy, an essay that begins by focusing on the myth told by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus about the invention of writing. Derrida is able to show there how the relationship or opposition between speech and writing in the Phaedrus brings along with it Plato’s entire philosophical