Hutorv ofEuropean Ideas. Vol 16, No. 4-6. PP. 607-612. 1993 Pnnted ,n Great Bntam

0191-6599/93 3600+000 ‘0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd

MYTHOS AND LOGOS IN PLATONIC POLITEIAI

BERNARD D. FREYDBERG*

A close reading of the Platonic dialogs, especially of Republic and the Timaeus, reveals that at the source of Western philosophy there resides a tension in the very nature of a polis (or ‘political unit’). This tension has nothing obvious to do with those more manifest tensions associated with the task of harmonizing disparate interests within a single unit (be that unit a nation or, as is here an underlying issue of the conference, a continent composed of nations). In a sense, however, it underlies all of these other tensions, and even underlies our way of speaking about them as well. I will argue that the interwovenness but incomplete intersection of mythos and logos is the source of this tension-so the Platonic dialogs show in their central passages upon the founding of politeiai (republics). And I will illustrate this interweaving/non-intersecting by means of a synopsis of Books II, III of the Republic, and 20d to 26e of the Timaeus, and a commentary upon the fundamental tension exposed by this synopsis. Then I will draw a few conclusions concerning the darkness at the heart of thepoliteia and of its conception.

In the Republic, it appears that for a just city to come into being, mythos must be entirely subordinated to the apparently rational aims of the state in order for the latter to be realized. But this subordination seems to go even further: not only

are the myths themselves to be supervised and regulated and the mythopoioi (myth-makers) made subject to a rigorous set of rules, but also the very conditions of mythos itself are to be excised by this supervision and regulation. The darkness to which humanity is delivered over and out of which all myths emerge, that darkness which also comprises the central subject-matter of mythology, is precisely what the supervisors will purge from the myths in order that it be purged from the souls of the guardians-in-training who will be the guarantors of the new just city. The following list, taken serially from Books II-III of the Republic, should make clear how thoroughgoing is the purge of dark impulses and actions. Forbidden are:

strife (among the gods and elsewhere) 379e and ff. violation of oaths 379e and f. causing evil 380a and f manyness 380d and ff. lying 382a and ff.

389b and ff. fear of death 386b and ff. crying and lamenting (in general, and for lost loved ones) 388a and ff.

*Philosophy Department, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, PA 16057, U.S.A.

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laughing disobedience excess (in general, and in food, drink and sex) desiring gifts and money comedy and tragedy womanliness (boasting when happy/mourning and wailing

when in misfortune) insulting, making fun of, using shameful language to

one another love gifted wisdom Lydian and other ‘wailing’ musical

modes (and all but military modes) many-toned and panharmonic instruments meters (rhythms) fomenting ‘illiberality and insolence

or madness and the rest of vice’ (licentiousness)

388e and ff. 389d and ff. 389e and ff. 390d and ff.

395d and f.

305e and ff. 396d 397e and f.

398e and ff. 399c and f.

400b and f.

Taken together, this list would clearly do away with far more than merely faction-causing behaviors and the states of soul which give rise to them. Spiritedness in general would be banned. The very quality of spirit which recommended the guardians to the founders in the first place is ironically (and comically, I think) being stripped from them. In short, the young men with the most intense spirits are to be told the sappiest myths, and are to sit still for them as for their physically nourishing food. And still further, the mythopoioiare to sit still for a method of regulation which contradicts much if not all that is at the heart of what they do.

Myths serve as likely accounts of matters which are by nature deeply veiled, matters which are inaccessible to logos understood as a way of giving ‘rational’ accounts. Further, myths serve as bearers of the tradition of a people, keeping alive old stories. ‘Old stories’ here has two senses, both ‘stories of what is old’ and ‘stories which have been told, in various guises, for a long time’. Socrates’ prescription to the mythopoioi would at least severely injure the first and would destroy the second. But the practical impossibility of the latter serves to signal the provisional and ironic character, if not the sheer playfulness, of Socrates’ suggestion that the poets be regulated and censored. To expunge the strife of the gods in the ZIiad or Achilles’ loud and mournful lament at the death of Patroklos, or to editorially delete Odysseus’ lying in the Odyssey (he would hardly have anything at all left to say) would not merely deform (or reform) these individual myths. Such ‘surgery’ would carve whole pieces out of the Greek soul. There is much question about whether such a thing can be done at all-as we seem to know very intimately today.

But the supervision of the mythopozoi has yet an even more absurd dimension. This supervision tacitly assumes that the poets proceed according to some rational design which can be altered m terms of another (presumably better) design, namely the one of the founders who would fashion the new ‘just’city. But few matters have been more unmistakably articulated throughout the Platonic dialogs than the one according to which poets and other artists proceed not by

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reason but by inspiration (enthousiastikos). Their works come not out of knowledge or insight but by means of a gift, out of darkness. Thus the regulation of subject-matter is ridiculous, almost inherently absurd, because the poet (for Plato) simply cannot have control over his/her subject-matter (not to mention the preposterousness of insisting upon inspired works about strait-laced, unfeeling dullards). So from both sides, the side of the subject-matter and the side of the creators of the subject-matter, the supervision of myths must be understood as comically nonsensical.

However, when we invert this absurdity we discover its more serious underside. There is no question that for cities to exist with a modicum of justice, the darker impulses have to be brought to some kind of rule. While the supervision of the poets may be comic in speech and impossible in deed, the need for two kinds of tale is unmistakable. There is a need for tales which arise out of the darkness of human nature in order for the human being to come to see itself truly, to recognise and express itself fully. And there is a need for tales which seek to regulate human behavior for the good of the whole. The two seem hardly incompatible, both in principle and in deed. The word mythos, appropriate to both kinds, was in early Greek synonymous with logos, and even later had the primary significance of ‘anything delivered by word of mouth’. This common origin suggests rather strongly that the comic task discussed above need not be comic if differently framed, i.e. that there can be some accord between the demands of a whole human soul and the demands of a city that would be just, just as there may be between the mythoi which serve each.

But both the nature and the degree of confluence are precisely what are at issue. In the Timaeus we are given, as if as a completion of the comedy which was begun in the Republic, still another comedy in which an attempt is made to render superfluous both mythos and the darkness which is both its origin and outcome. If there is a difference, it is one merely of degree and not of kind. The Republic treated mythos as if it could be entirely subordinated to logos (as rational account) in the fashioning of a politeia. The Timaeus treats mythos as if it were a mere aberration dependent upon an accidental circumstance of a people, i.e. as if mythos were dispensable in principle and, under good circumstances, in deed as

well. When we study the surface of Critias’ speech about Atlantis, we find an

apparently straightforward historical account of the Athenian rescue of Egypt several millennia ago from the attacking Atlantans. Significantly, Critias presents his account as ‘a logos which is not new’ (21a8-9) rather than as a mythos (this textual significance will be explained shortly). Further, this account was told to the Critias of the dialog when the latter was ten years old by the elder Critias (ninety years old at the time of the telling). The elder Critias, in turn, heard the account from Solon, who (also in turn) heard it from Egyptian priests. The account, in brief: out of hubris, the Atlantans planned to attack the whole of Europe and Asia, but a noble Greek people repelled them, and their island was swallowed up by the earth soon thereafter. And most remarkably of all, thepolis which Socrates thought he had founded merely in speech on the previous day (in the Republic) actually existed as such in deed those many millennia ago, and was peopled by the very race of Greeks to which Solon, the listener, unwittingly

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belonged, and which performed the heroic rescue in a manner entirely in keeping with Socrates’ account.

Now this report of what happened millennia ago is offered with serene confidence by Critias, and presumably as well by the elder Critias, by Dropides, by Solon, and by the Egyptian priest who speaks to Solon with beneficent condescension. Although Critias admits that the lapse of time made him unsure, on the previous day, of the degree of clarity of his account and so he was silent (i.e. at the Republic), one night’s effort gave him complete recollection. And so Socrates’ city in speech offered in a mythological context in the Republic(i.e. ‘like men mythologizing in a myth and at their leisure, let’s educate [the city’s guardians] in speech’ (376d) is effortlessly elevated to ‘actuality’ in the Timaeus. Critias, who calls this account of his a logos, says to Socrates in the Timaeus:

And the city with its citizens which you described to us yesterday as in a mythos we will now transport mto truth, and posit that the city is that ancient city ofours, and that the citizens you conceived are the true progenitors of ours, of whom the priest told (26c-d).

This ‘transportation’ (metenegkontes, from metapherein) is empowered by two sources, one ‘natural’ and one ‘conventional’. Both sources are available to the Egyptians; neither, the priest explained, are available to the Greeks. The natural source is the geography of the area and the floods and fires which periodically wreak great destruction upon the region, the cause of which is not the myth of Phaethon but the shifting of the heavenly bodies (according to the priest). The rising of the Nile saves the Egyptians from fire on the one hand and keeps them safe from floods on the other, whereas in Greece the learned people of the low- lying cities are wiped out by floods, leaving behind only the illiterate mountain dwellers. The conventional source of ‘transportation’ is the art of writing, by virtue of which the Egyptians are able to preserve their history accurately. The Greeks, by contrast, must always begin anew after each scourge, since all the writers, who are city dwellers, have been wiped out by the floods. This is why the priest says ‘0 Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children, there is not such a thing as an old Greek’ (22b); the Greeks are always ‘young in soul’ because they

must, out of an illiterate and unmusical state, fashion accounts and poems-myths-anew each time. The older and wiser Egyptians, however, have no need of recourse to myths. They can provide the truth underlying both the myths and the myth-making impulse, since they have ‘the actual writing’ (24a).

However, certain features of Critias’ tale undermine what he purported to say. First of all, in his anti-mythical speech about Solon which has traversed several generations, Critias has clearly mythologized Sofon, who (he proudly notes) was a friend of his great-grandfather. Solon was both the wisest man in all things and the noblest poet, so noble that if his wisdom and courage did not call him to other tasks he would surely have dwarfed Homer and Hesiod in fame. This is the stuff of the celebration of heroes in poetry, not of sober historiography. So too is old Athens mythologized, given form not by actual events but first of all by the goddess who gives it its name, ‘herself both a lover of war and a lover of wisdom’ (24c-d). In Critias’ account, the city develops and performs in accord with the

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mythical source of its origin. No real detail is given. And finally the Atlantis tale: it is presented as a true account, but has all the signs of poetic tragedy. There is a hostile race governed by ‘kings of great and wondrous power’(25a) on a far away island. The Atlantans commit hubris and the city guided by Athena defeats them. Then both Athenians and Atlantans are swallowed up by the earth. The purported anti-mythical speech is riddled throughout by mythos in stock form.

This culminating and inadvertent declaration of the mythical origin of the Athens of which (according to Critias) Socrates (who named no city) spoke in the Republic affirms the presence of mythos in human logos generally and especially in the founding of politeiai. The darkness which gave rise to the tale of Critias-the passage of time, the unreliability of oral reports both in general and as told by old men, the need for a great and mysterious origin, and the blindness to all of these expose this abiding presence at the heart of logos in terms both of the tale and of the teller.

Both dialogs playfully treat mythos as if it could be somehow set at a distance-either mastered or dispensed with. In the Republic, this setting-at-a- distance of mythos results in the building of a city in speech which is a peculiar kind of ideal, existing either in the future, or merely ‘in logos, since I don’t suppose it exists anywhere on earth’ (Republic, 592b). In the Timaeus, the setting- at-a-distance results in a tale of a similarly ideal city as existing in the far-distant past, so long ago that there is no possibility of verification beyond the word of an old speaker whose credentials consist entirely of his having heard the tale from other old speakers. Concerning the actual city of thepresent, neither dialogue has much to say that is clear.

But this silence, or lack of clear insight, into the interplay of mythos and logos in the city of the present is no careless omission, nor does it bear witness to some serious defect in the present city. Rather, it testifies to the confusing intertwining of elements which occur in the fashioning of any city; their co-presence testifies to the co-presence of the twin needs mentioned earlier, namely for a just and orderly city and for the nourishment of a whole human soul. Perhaps if mythos were not at the heart of both, these two needs might be harmonized-but this, of course, is another myth, issuing out of another region of our blindness. Whatever shape such a city-of the very distant past, or in the very distant future-might have, the politeiai of the present must cope with the troublesome mixture.

New large events, we are told, are occurring and changing the face of the world. New configurations in the political arena and elsewhere call for new ways of thinking. But there is also a need to remember what is old and what abides, and what holds both human beings and their politeiai within their limits.

Slippery Rock University, PA Bernard D. Freydberg

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NOTES

All references are to Volume IV of the Oxford Universtty Press edmon of Plato, Plaron~s Opera, ed. Burnet (Oxford: Oxford Universrty Press, 1962).

I made use of the Bloom translation of the Republic (The Repubk of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom [New York: Basic Books 1968]), and also of the Bury translatron of the Timaeus (Plaro, Vol. VII, trans. R.G. Bury, [Cambridge: Harvard IJniversrty Press, 19521); I have made occasional emendattons.