Plato’s Phaedrus and his Laws

 

Since the early twentieth century the Platonic studies have adhered to the doctrine according to which Plato began to write his dialogues after the death of Socrates. But the comparison of the Meno with the Apology indicates that the Meno was written during Socrates’ lifetime. This means that all that has been written since then – since Max Pohlenz’s Aus Platos Werdezeit, published in 1913 – requires rethinking. This rethinking concerns not only the dialogues in which Socrates figures as a spokesman, but even the Laws. This claim requires a thorough argument, for in the Laws Socrates is not even mentioned.

In Laws V, 730c1-4 Plato says that ‘Truth heads the list of all things good, for gods and men alike. Let anyone who intends to be happy be its partner from the start, so that he may live as much of his life as possible a man of truth’. (Translation Trevor J. Saunders)

This leads us to the question, what was Plato’s first dialog. The ‘Life of Plato’ in Diogenes Laertius mentions a story (lo/goj) ‘that the Phaedrus was Plato’s first dialog’. This logos has been rejected by modern Platonists, without proper consideration. The ancient admirers and followers of Plato had undoubtedly well inscribed in their minds the passage in the Laws, in which Plato maintains that ‘whoever is to be blessed and happy should take part in truth from the beginning’. They undoubtedly believed that Plato derived these words from the reflection on his own life; in this light we should read the logos that the Phaedrus was Plato’s first dialogue.

Furthermore, we may believe Plato viewed it as important that his readers should view the Phaedrus in this light; accordingly, in the Laws he proposed as the most important item the most important announcement he made in the Phaedrus.

In the Phaedrus Plato writes: ‘All soul is immortal. For that which is always in movement is immortal; that which moves something else and is moved by something else, in ceasing from movement, ceases from living. Only that which moves itself, because it does not abandon itself, never stops moving. It is also source and first principle of movement for the other things which move. A first principle is something which does not come into being. For all that comes into being comes into being must come into being from a first principle, but a first principle itself cannot come into being from anything at all; for if a first principle came into being from anything, it would not do so from a first principle. Since it does not come into being, it must also be something which does not perish. For if a first principle is destroyed, neither will it ever come into being from anything nor anything else from it, given that all things must come into being from a first principle. It is in this way, then, that that which moves itself is first principle of movement. It is not possible for this either to be destroyed or to come into being, or else the whole universe and the whole of that which comes to be might collapse together and come to a halt, and never again have a source from which things will come to be moved. And since that which is moved by itself has been shown to be immortal, it will incur no shame to say that this is the essence and the definition of soul. For all body which has its source of motion outside itself is soulless, whereas that which has it within itself and from itself is ensouled, this being the nature of soul; and if this is so – that that which moves itself is nothing other than soul, soul will be necessarily something which neither comes into being nor dies.(Phaedrus 245c6-246a2, translation C. J. Rowe)

In the Laws An Athenian Stranger proclaims: ‘No one wo believes in gods as the law directs ever voluntarily commits an unholy act or lets any lawless word pass his lips. If he does it is because of one of three possible misapprehensions: either he believes (1) the gods do not exist, or (2) that they exist but take no thought for the human race, or (3) that they are influenced by sacrifices and supplications and can easily be won over.’

Cleinias, his Cretan interlocutor, asks: ‘Well sir, don’t you think that the god’s existence is an easy thing to explain?’

Athenian: ‘How?’

Cleinias: ‘Well, just look at the earth and the sun and the stars and the universe in general; look at the wonderful processions of the seasons and its articulation into years and months! Anyway, you know that all Greeks and all foreigners are unanimous in recognising the existence of gods.’

Athenian: ‘When you and I present our proofs for the existence of gods and adduce what you have adduced – sun, moon, stars and earth – and argue they are gods and divine beings, these clever fellows will say that these things are just earth and stones, and are incapable of caring for human affairs.’

The Athenian proves that the heretics are wrong. He begins his investigation on their ground, considering movements and rests observable in the universe, such as the movement of objects from place to place, such as the circular motion of those objects that are moving in one location, such as collisions of objects that meet, which may result in their coalescence and thus in an increase of their bulk, or in their destruction.

After having inspected eight such occurrences, the Athenian asks: ‘Haven’t we now classified and numbered all forms of motion except two?’ Cleinias: ‘Which two?’ Athenian: ‘The two which constitute the real purpose of our investigation.’ Cleinias: ‘Try to be more explicit.’ Athenian: ‘ What we really had in view was soul, wasn’t it?’ Cleinias: ‘Certainly.’  Athenian: ‘The one kind of motion is that which is permanently capable of moving other things but not itself; the other is permanently capable of moving both itself and other things. Let these stand as two further distinct types in our complete list of motions. So we shall put ninth the kind which always imparts motion to something else and is itself changed by another thing. Then there is motion that moves both itself and other things, the source of change and motion in all things that exist. I suppose we’ll call that the tenth.’  Cleinias: ‘Certainly.’  Athenian: ‘Shouldn’t we correct one or two inaccuracies in the points we’ve just made? It wasn’t quite right to call that motion the ‘tenth’. Cleinias: ‘Why not?’ Athenian: ‘It can be shown to be first, in ancestry as well as in power; the next kind – although a moment ago we called ‘ninth’ – we’ll put second.’

Athenian: ‘Now let’s put the point in a different way. Suppose the whole universe were somehow to coalesce and come to a standstill – the theory which most of our philosopher-fellows are actually bold enough to maintain – which of the motions we have enumerated would inevitably be the first to arise in it? Self-generating motion, surely, because no antecedent impulse can ever be transmitted from something else in a situation where no antecedent impulse exists. Self-generating motion, then, is the source of all motions, and the primary force in both stationary and moving objects, and we shan’t be able to avoid the conclusion that it is the most ancient and the most potent of all changes. This is the definition of soul: ‘motion capable of moving itself’. The entity which we all call soul is precisely that which is defined by the expression ‘self-generating motion’. (Plato Laws, 893a-896a, translation T. J. Saunders; the text is  abbreviated)