BMCR 2008.12.22, Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical

Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing.
Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2007.  Pp. ix, 290.
ISBN 9780521859325.  $99.00.

Reviewed by Peter C. Meilaender, Houghton College
([email protected])
Word count:  3401 words
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Table of Contents
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0810/2008271044-t.html)

Plato is the great philosophical flirt.  He is the philosophical critic
of poetry and the most poetic of philosophers, the defender of justice
whose apparent model of the good man shuns political participation, the
critic of writing who writes--never, however, in his own voice, but
typically through that of a man known for his irony.  Plato is always
tempting the reader with apparent morsels of knowledge, then skittering
gingerly away from quite endorsing them, all the while compelling the
reader somehow to hunt for Plato's own views through the thickets of
the philosophical conversations he reports.  The question of what Plato
wishes to teach us cannot be answered apart from the question of how we
ought to read him in the first place.  Christopher Rowe's new book is a
challenging, insightful, and provocative discussion of this
relationship between what Plato believed and the literary form in which
he chose to present it.

>From the outset Rowe pits his reading of Plato against a pair of common
interpretive approaches: the "skeptical" interpretation, which treats
Plato as primarily interested in prodding us to think for ourselves,
rather than promoting any particular set of doctrines; and the
"doctrinalist" interpretation, which takes exactly the opposite view
and regards Plato as advancing characteristic doctrines of his own.
(See esp. pp. 1-7, though contrasts between Rowe's and these
alternative readings are ubiquitous.)  Rowe delights in portraying his
own interpretation as a kind of underdog trying to pull off an upset
against these established contenders.  But his chief target is a view
of Plato held, in different ways, by both these approaches: the
"developmentalist" claim that the Republic in particular marks a break
in Plato's writings, separating off the earlier "Socratic" dialogues
from the later, more genuinely "Platonic" ones.  The "skeptics" view
this change "as marking Plato's break with Socrates," whereas the
"doctrinalists" either regard the earlier dialogues as "of relatively
little interest in themselves" or "assimilate [them] to the Republic"
(6).  Rowe attacks the developmentalist interpretation in either of
these forms and directs at it his strongest criticism: "Perhaps as much
as anything else, it will be my aim in the present book to replace this
way of dividing up Plato's work, which in my view has become the single
greatest obstacle to a proper understanding of Plato and Platonism"
(4-5).

Rowe sets out the essentials of his own approach to reading Plato in a
lengthy introductory chapter on "Preliminaries," which accounts for
almost a fifth of the volume.  His interpretive method rests upon
several important claims, some of which are implicit in the attack on
developmentalism.  First, he argues that Plato's body of work can be
read as an internally consistent whole, incorporating some shifts of
emphasis and development of ideas, but containing no radical break, no
set of dialogues whose critical arguments or concepts are incompatible
with those of some other set of dialogues.  Rather, Rowe suggests,
readers of multiple dialogues find repeated a familiar set of ideas
about human motivation, knowledge, the soul, and other matters.  This
claim entails a pair of corollaries: (a) The reader is entitled to read
across dialogues, drawing upon insights from one to aid in
understanding another.  (b) There is no sharp distinction between the
views of "Socrates" and those of "Plato"--Socrates' beliefs are also
Plato's own.

Attached to this argument about the broad consistency of Plato's view
is another about how we ought to read his works.  What may at first
glance appear to be inconsistencies among dialogues, Rowe argues, are
typically the result of Plato's having chosen to cast his ideas in the
dialogue form.  We must think of the Socrates of the dialogues as
operating in much the same way that we ourselves do in conversation
(with, needless to say, considerably greater philosophical
sophistication).  He does not necessarily say all that he thinks about
a given topic any time he touches upon it.  His arguments are always
adapted to his immediate audience, sensitive to their own
presuppositions and tendencies, attentive to what they are capable of
understanding or likely to find persuasive, as Socrates attempts
gradually to lead his various interlocutors (and Plato his readers)
step-by-step towards a more adequate understanding of truth.  Socrates
will even adopt premises--though only for the sake of argument, without
explicitly endorsing them--that are his interlocutors' rather than his
own, when doing so is likely to make an unexpected conclusion more
palatable.  In this sense, says Rowe, "Plato has a fair claim to be the
inventor, as well as the finest proponent, of philosophical rhetoric"
(268; emphasis in original).

Finally, Rowe argues that although Socrates presents himself as a
"know-nothing," he (and through him, Plato) appears to hold a number of
fairly consistent positions, which he is prepared to treat, for all
practical purposes, as equivalent to knowledge (in the sense that they
have repeatedly withstood dialectical challenge and bested competing
alternatives).  As Rowe puts it, "Plato's Socrates always has a
positive, and substantive, agenda" (21; emphasis omitted).  The content
of these consistent positions will not come as a surprise to a reader
of the dialogues.  They include such familiar and repeated Socratic
views as the following: people always desire their own (real) good;
they go wrong, therefore, only through ignorance; in order to achieve
their (real) good, people require a special kind of expertise,
knowledge about the good; the good man never acts to harm someone else;
the soul is, fundamentally, a unity.  (On this last point Rowe concedes
that Plato's thought does undergo a significant development or
revision, but not in such a way as to undermine his underlying claim of
consistency.)  Indeed, the frequency and consistency with which the
self-professed "know-nothing" Socrates, in a range of tremendously
diverse dialogues on various topics, reiterates these fundamental
convictions is itself part of the supporting evidence that Rowe offers
to buttress his argument for the overall unity of Plato's corpus.

But if Plato (like Socrates) in fact holds a number of consistent
positions that can be summarized in a paragraph, why not just say so?
Why put his views into the mouth of someone else (assuming that this is
what he has done) and bury them beneath layers of complex dialectic?
Rowe's suggestion is that Plato must follow a strategy of indirection
precisely because Socrates' views are so odd, so very different from
those generally held by his interlocutors--as well as by us, Plato's
readers.  "Understanding that difference between Plato and his intended
audience, and between Plato and ourselves," writes Rowe, "is an
essential part of understanding how to read his dialogues" (29).  This
may sound peculiar to those who read Plato's dialogues for a living and
are, as it were, inured to his oddness.  What Rowe means, however, is
that Socrates' opinions are so contrary to commonly held views that
stating them baldly would fail to persuade anyone.  The evidence for
this is in the verisimilitude of the dialogic conversations.  Socrates'
conversation partners regularly express surprise and bewilderment at
the notion, for instance, that the good man would never harm anyone, or
that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.  Unlike
Socrates, they simply don't believe these things.  Or, better, they
don't believe that they believe them--since the purpose of Socrates'
questioning is to reveal, to their confusion, that at some level they
actually do.  "The dialogues generally exhibit at least two levels of
understanding, Socrates' and that of the interlocutor, and the reader
is in effect invited to ask himself or herself whether to side with the
one or with the other" (31).  It is because of this "mismatch between
the speakers in a dialogue" (30) that Socrates approaches his subjects
by so many twists and turns.  His views on ethical matters are so
unexpected that neither his contemporaries nor we can take them in all
at once; rather, we need to be addressed first on our own ground, and
gradually brought round to what Socrates considers more defensible
positions.  In this respect, however, we have an advantage over
Socrates' interlocutors, because we possess the dialogues, in which
Socrates comes at us again and again from different directions and
which we can read and re-read in light of Plato's overall output.

In laying out his interpretation, Rowe discusses, sometimes briefly but
often at some length, a considerable number of dialogues: the Apology,
Phaedo, Charmides, First Alcibiades, Meno, Euthyphro, Phaedrus,
Gorgias, Theaetetus, and Timaeus.  In the course of his discussions he
touches on a wide range of important problems: Plato's moral
psychology, his views on the nature of the soul and immortality, his
cosmology, his theory of the forms, the concept of recollection, and
others.  Practically all of these, however, tie in at one point or
another with his much longer treatment of the dialogue to which he
devotes by far the most attention (over a third of the book): the
Republic.  The Republic takes center stage not only because of its own
intrinsic significance, but also because it is a kind of test case for
Rowe's thesis.  His developmentalist opponents regard the Republic as
the dialogue in which Plato, by adopting the theory of the forms, makes
his break with Socrates.  Rowe is thus at pains to show that the
discussions of the soul, of knowledge, or of the afterlife in the
Republic are not fundamentally at odds with the views expressed in
other (and especially earlier) dialogues, and that apparent
discrepancies can be explained by Plato's "art of philosophical
writing": by the need to adapt his arguments to the perspectives and
presuppositions of different audiences at different times.

The space of a single review is not adequate to consider the full range
of themes addressed by Rowe.  So I shall follow his own lead by
focusing briefly on some aspects of his discussion of the Republic.  An
excellent example of his approach can be found in a section that he
labels the "Appendix to Chapter 5," in which he takes up the argument
between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Book I of the Republic.  He
focuses in particular on a Socratic argument often regarded as weak,
perhaps even embarrassingly so.  This is the "like/unlike" argument:
Thrasymachus claims that the unjust man wants to "get the better of"
everyone, whereas the just man only wants to get the better of those
who are unlike him (the unjust); in other arts, however, the expert
practitioner only wants to get the better of those who are unlike him
(the inexpert), not of other experts; it is therefore the just, not the
unjust, man who resembles the wise expert, whereas the unjust resembles
the ignorant; but because Thrasymachus has also claimed that both are
of the same sort as that which they resemble, the just man turns out to
be wise, the unjust foolish.

The difficulty with this argument is that Socrates and Thrasymachus
have very different things in mind when they speak of "getting the
better of" someone.  Thrasymachus is thinking of acquiring those things
commonly held to be goods, common objects of human striving: money,
pleasure, glory, power.  Socrates, however, by introducing the model of
the expert craftsman, relies upon a non-scarce good for which we must
not compete with others: knowledge.  Little wonder that Thrasymachus,
though bested in argument, is unpersuaded.  Yet Rowe argues that the
mismatch between Socrates' and Thrasymachus' real premises does not
itself make Socrates' argument a bad one.  It means only that he is not
likely ultimately to satisfy Thrasymachus--as of course he does not.
(Recall here Rowe's earlier claim that Socrates' actual views are, by
the standards of his interlocutors and by our own, quite odd.)  Rowe's
point is that we must understand the argument here as proceeding on two
levels, one based on the premises of Thrasymachus, the other on those
of Socrates.  Each argument works on its own terms: Thrasymachus is
brought to admit Socrates' conclusions, while Socrates himself really
does believe what he is saying: that the just man is wise and good.
The awkwardness of the argument arises from the overlapping sets of
conflicting premises, not all of which are explicitly stated.
Thrasymachus' premises are clear enough: he thinks that life is full of
perfectly obvious good things, of which we should try to accumulate as
much as possible, while avoiding equally obvious harms.  But even
though the argument "works," its conclusion rests somewhat uneasily
with these views.  Its conclusion hangs much more naturally with
Socrates' premises: that the wise man never does harm, that it is
better to suffer injustice than to commit it.  But those premises are,
as it were, partially submerged, because Thrasymachus--like
us?--regards them as simply preposterous.  As Rowe puts it, "The
position Socrates is defending is not the same as the one Thrasymachus
is attacking, or thinks he is attacking, because their
perspectives...are quite different.  Most obviously, Socrates doesn't
think the just to be simple-minded, as Thrasymachus does....  They
simply have a different idea of what they want out of life, of what is
good; and so also of what it is to have more than someone else.  The
reason why Socrates hold this view hasn't yet been articulated, but
then neither has Thrasymachus told us why he thinks unlimited power and
money a good thing."  And then Rowe continues with the main point he
wishes to make about Republic I, a point that seems to me entirely
correct: "This first part of the argument...is, I propose, as important
for what it begins to tell us about Socrates' own position, and the
difference between it and Thrasymachus', as it is for the ammunition it
provides for Thrasymachus' dialectical defeat....  Socrates starts from
what he himself believes..." (189).

This summary of a portion of Rowe's argument nicely illustrates his
overall interpretive approach to the Republic (and to Plato's corpus as
a whole).  The entire dialogue, for Rowe, is shaped by this distinctive
philosophical style, conveying an argument that moves consistently in a
Socratic direction but whose particular twists, turns, and even
conclusions are marked always by Socrates' attentiveness to the
assumptions and desires of his partners.  Rowe's treatment of Socrates'
description of the soul, for example, suggests that Socrates devotes
much of the dialogue to developing an argument that--though it prepares
his interlocutors to accept a more adequate view of the human
good--Socrates himself does not fully accept.  The Republic's founding
of the just city in speech and its parallel within the individual
person rest upon the tripartite division of the soul into reason, the
desires, and spiritedness.  Yet in Book X  Socrates indicates to
Glaucon that their earlier discussion of the soul was inadequate,
because they had considered it only as it appears distorted and even
mutilated by the conditions of a disordered life, not as it truly is in
its own nature (cf. Rowe, 140-141).  This admission, however, should
not really surprise the reader, since Socrates had indicated earlier,
in Book IV, that he was taking a philosophical shortcut, and that a
proper investigation of their subjects would require a longer and more
difficult road; and already in Book II, as he set off on the argument
that was to discern the nature of justice and injustice as well as the
divided soul, Socrates had warned us that this argument was based upon
a "feverish" city, rather than the "true" one that Glaucon had
dismissed as a city of pigs.  Socrates takes this approach, despite his
warnings that it will not reveal the full truth, because it is better
suited to persuade the young men with whom he is conversing of the
desirability of justice.  Socrates may not believe that justice is best
discerned in feverish soul, or city, torn between reason and desire,
but that is how Glaucon and Adeimantus perceive humans to be (it is
their own condition, as we see in their speeches at the beginning of
Book II), and it is in a city of such people that they expect justice
to make its advantageousness or disadvantageousness known.  In order to
win them to the side of justice, Socrates must work with premises that
make sense to them.  (For Rowe's full treatment of the issues in this
paragraph, to which I have not done justice, see in particular his very
interesting chapter 5.)

He takes the shorter road, therefore, because of "his awareness of the
needs of his interlocutors" (176).  At the same time, he leaves enough
clues along the way--by warning us that we are studying a feverish
city, and taking a shortcut, as well as in Book I's inconclusive
conversation with Thrasymachus--to indicate the need for further
reflection on our part.  As Rowe puts it, "For those who can follow
[Plato], and his Socrates, with due attention to his various nods and
winks, at least an outline of the proper story is there to be
grasped--and, usually, to be filled out from other dialogues" (176, n.
41).  This comment about Plato's "nods and winks" raises one of my own
questions about Rowe's overall approach.  I am broadly sympathetic to
his method of reading Plato: to the view that Plato can be understood
only with due attention to his method of writing, to the claim that
Socrates often adopts (without endorsing) for persuasive purposes
premises other than his own, to the willingness to read across
dialogues and the anti-"developmentalist" approach.  But I am not sure
this is quite as revolutionary as Rowe claims.  An admonition to pay
attention to Plato's nods and winks is highly reminiscent of one of the
last century's most important interpreters of Plato: Leo Strauss.

Strauss's readings of Plato (like his readings of other philosophers)
are, of course, controversial, and one is not normally surprised to see
them neglected by non-Straussians.  But Rowe's interpretive approach is
so very similar to Strauss's that in this context the omission is
striking.  When Rowe, in his Epilogue, explains that he has not
concerned himself with various "Platonists" because "my interest is
solely in the dialogues themselves, starting from them, and not from
others' interpretations" (273), I hear echoes of my own mostly
Straussian teachers.  Yet Strauss does not appear in the bibliography;
nor do Bloom, Rosen, Benardete, or other notable Straussian
interpreters.  The similarity of method leads one to wonder what Rowe
would make of the most distinctive Straussian claim about the Republic:
that the reluctance of philosophers to become kings, suggested by the
need to compel them to return to the cave, indicates that Socrates does
not actually regard Callipolis as a political possibility, and that its
description is thus really intended to illustrate the limits of the
human quest for justice.  This conclusion relies on giving "due
attention to [Socrates'] various nods and winks."  It appears, however,
that Rowe--though he does not explore the question in detail--takes
Callipolis more seriously as an actual political alternative than
Strauss does.  For he describes the shortcut of Callipolis and the
tripartite soul as the "political option" that Socrates pursues once he
has come to grips with the political reality that "the majority of
souls are already in a non-ideal contition ('feverish', divided)"
(180), requiring rule by the wise, philosophical few in order to lead
the best and most just life possible.  "In short, the Socrates of Books
II-X is one newly ready to meet the challenges posed by the condition
of actual cities and individuals, in which and in whom reason is only
uncertainly in control, if it is in control at all" (180).  Given that
Rowe reaches this conclusion, apparently different from Strauss's, by a
notably similar interpretive method, it would be interesting to see him
engage the Straussian reading directly.

Apart from this omission, however, Rowe--notwithstanding his claim to
be interested only in the dialogues themselves--displays an impressive
grasp of a wide range of literature.  And as I hope the preceding
description has indicated, he will have managed to provoke quite a few
interpretive schools already.  His book offers a penetrating analysis
both of Plato's "philosophical rhetoric" and of various core Socratic
(or Platonic) doctrines.  His closely reasoned arguments are always
grounded carefully in Plato's own texts and repay a second and third
reading.  Even those who disagree with Rowe's conclusions--or, for that
matter, his method--will profit from a thoughtful engagement with his
interpretation.  Rowe's book is further confirmation (not that more is
needed) that Plato has still, after more than two millennia, left us
with more than enough to argue about.