Chapter Four
The Statesman

1. Statesman As Shepherd (257a-267c)

After the fanfare and multiple demonstrations with which the stranger introduced the method of symmetrical division in the Sophist , it is surprising to find that that is the only dialogue in which Plato makes use of it in its pure form. The same Eleatic stranger conducts the inquiry of the Statesman , but halfway through the dialogue the divisions cease to be symmetrical and bisective, and the stranger increasingly resorts to myth, analogy, and metaphor—sespecially the metaphor of weaving—in a way that resembles Socratic inquiry much more than it resembles the diaeretic method employed in the Sophist .^[1] In fact that method is employed in a dubious way from the beginning of the dialogue. The first division may be schematized as in Figure 10.

The details of this diaeresis show a remarkable decline from the rigor and precision of the divisions in the Sophist . Three points in particular are worth commenting on.

1. In the shorter way the distinction between leathered and non-leathered is made twice: the differentia of step 7, "leathered" (or

[1] The shift is preceded by a discussion of the importance of paradigms (277d-279a). We may think of that discussion as a deliberate tempering of the Parmenides ' critique of analogical and metaphorical reasoning. The discussion acknowledges that paradigms are only an indirect way of presenting what we would prefer to present directly, but that they are sometimes indispensable.

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Figure 10

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"winged":

), is repeated in step 9 (, ).^[2] This is an obvious violation of the method. Once "leathered" is excluded by step 7, it can no longer be implicit in the species to be divided in step 9. Since this manifest anomaly involves the species of birds, it calls our attention to a more serious problem about that species, the fact that the stranger's divisions, both here and in the Sophist , destroy the species of birds. In both dialogues there is a distinction between land animals and water animals. The Sophist locates birds within the genus "water animal" (220b) while the Statesman locates them within the genus "land animal" (264e). Thus we can locate water birds within one genus and land birds within another, but there is no genus that divides into the species of birds per se . We can isolate classes that are too general (animals) or too specific (water birds, land birds) but not the precise species of birds itself. The problem could easily have been avoided by making "feathered" into a prior differentia, that is, by dividing animals into feathered and nonfeathered, and nonfeathered into swimmers and walkers (birds could then have been located by appropriate distinctions within "feathered"). In fact this very point is suggested by the summaries, both here and at 276a, which omit step 6 and thereby separate the species "feathered" prior to any distinction between water and land.

All this would be of little consequence if the method of division were presented merely as a convenient method of classification, but it is offered rather as a method of arriving at real essences, by discovering which species belong by nature within which genera. The stranger speaks of distinguishing one kind of thing from everything else in terms of its "single form" (

, 258c5), and later says,

When someone at first perceives the common character of many things, he should not turn away until he sees in it all the distinctions, as many as lie in the forms [

]. When on the other hand he at first perceives all sorts of differences in a great many things, he must not become discouraged and stop until he has put those that are akin into a single similarity, enclosed in the genus to which they really belong [

].
(285a-b)

The problems we have seen, however, (and will continue to see) should make us wonder whether the method of bisective division is being recommended as wholeheartedly as at first it seemed.

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2. The diaeresis begins with the same flagrant violation of methodology with which it ended. Just as step 9 of the shorter way used a differentia already excluded by step 7, step 2 uses one already excluded by step 1. Step I distinguishes practical from intellectual arts on the grounds that the former eventuate in products (

, 258e). But when the latter (which by definition now exclude the producing of products) are divided into critical and directive, the distinction is that the directive art is for the sake of producing (, 261a-b) and necessarily has products (, 261b). Here too a characteristic supposedly excluded by the previous division reappears and needs to be excluded again in the subsequent one (even though the stranger could have made his point without inconsistency, as we shall see). This is reinforced by an oddly enfeebled conclusion that the stranger draws: not that the art of the king is within the class of theoretical rather than practical arts, as the stranger has just claimed to show, but only that his art is "more akin to" the theoretical than the practical (259c-d)—a weak identification that is hardly adequate to the requirements of definition by division (although it will be echoed in the "weaver" division), but that faithfully reflects the lack of rigor in the first two steps. All this seems too confusing even for the stranger. Here he locates kingship within the directive sciences, which are distinguished from the critical; but later he will say that kingship was differentiated from other sciences as being both directive and critical (292b).^[3] More than methodological carelessness is involved here. After the stranger distinguished between practical and intellectual arts on the basis of whether or not they involve products, he remarked that "any king can, with his hands or his whole body, do little to hold his rule, compared with what he can do with his entire soul and its force" (259c). This distinction between what can be accomplished by the body and what by the soul, which was mentioned only in passing, could have been used to avoid the problem that we just noticed. Suppose that step 1 distinguished the intellectual sciences from the practical not by claiming that the latter have products and the former do not, but that the latter have corporeal products (resulting from the activities of the body) while the former have intelligible products (resulting from the activities of the soul). In that case, the intellectual sciences would not have been defined in such a way as to preclude them from making products, and there would be no contradiction when step 2 uses this as the differentia to

[3] Cf. Benardete 3.126.

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distinguish the directive intellectual sciences from the critical. Step 1 would have rejected only corporeal products while step 2 affirmed intellectual products. Thus the incoherence is egregious and the stranger himself has shown us how he could easily have made these divisions without tangling his distinctions. Why does he refer to the corporeal/ intellectual distinction but not use it—especially when it would have saved him from incoherence? This issue will reappear in an intensified way within the next passage discussed.

3. After step 5, where herds are distinguished from individuals, Socrates' namesake, young Socrates, proposes that the next division be between human herds and animal herds, and is rebuked by the stranger for impatiently cutting off a small part (herds of humans) from the whole (herds) rather than gradually narrowing the field by progressive symmetrical divisions (262a-b). However, the stranger has evidently not dosed the door on shortcuts altogether, for he soon offers young Socrates the choice of a longer or shorter route by which to track down the statesman. The longer is methodologically more correct, he repeats, but "it is possible to go by whichever of these ways we wish" (265a). Young Socrates understandably would like to see both, so they take first the longer, then the shorter way, and arrive at two apparently quite different conceptions of what the statesman is. Both conceptions start from the assumption that he is a herdsman of human beings, but the way a human being is conceived is very different. According to the more famous shorter way, the lowest genus to which humanity belongs is the genus of two-footed animals, which includes only the two species "humans" and "birds." The difference between the two is that humans have no feathers, so our essence is "featherless biped." According to the longer way, the lowest genus to which humans belong is the genus of tame, hornless, noninterbreeding herd animals, which includes only the two species "humans" and "pigs."^[4] The difference between the two is

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that humans have two legs and pigs have four, so our essence is "two-footed, tame, hornless, noninterbreeding herd animal."

There are at least two problems here. First, the concept "human" is radically different in each case, with "two-footed" acting as the genus in one and the differentia in the other. Second, neither definition is very impressive: according to one, humans are like birds with the feathers missing; according to the other we are like pigs with two legs missing. And yet this method is supposed to lead us to a thing's very essence (285a-b). How does young Socrates react to all this? "The argument was beautifully done," he replies (267a). Perhaps, then, the problems are meant to reflect on young Socrates' lack of conceptual discipline and rigor, rather than on the method itself, for he has also ignored the stranger's recommendation to take the long way rather than the short (262a-c, 265a).^[5]

On the other hand, perhaps he ignored that recommendation because of its conditional character: "It is finest to distinguish what is sought from everything rise immediately, if that correctly reflects how the things really are . . . [But] it is safer to make one's cuts by going down the middle, and one would more likely hit upon the boundaries between the forms" (262b). Conceptual rigor and safety are serious concerns in Plato, as he previously had shown in the Phaedo (101d-e, 105b-c). But if a different approach is called the finest or most beautiful one (

), this is certainly a still more impressive recommendation. Even the safer way is not entirely secure: it is only "more likely" to hit upon the boundaries. Accordingly, while the longer way would be safer, it would not be unreasonable for young Socrates to hope that the stranger has found a valid shortcut, which would, after all, be the "finest" solution. In fact the shorter way does, in effect, "distinguish what is sought from everything else immediately." Since leathered creatures were already ruled out by step 7, all the stranger needs to do is distinguish the resultant species of (featherless) walking animals into two-legged and four-legged (there was no need to exclude feathers again in

[5] Cf. Mitchell Miller, The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980) 21-29.

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step 9, as we saw). Strictly speaking, then, the definition that the shorter way leads to is not "featherless biped" but "two-footed walker." The subsequent reintroduction of the already discarded category of "feathers" can only be regarded as a kind of joke since both divisions begin from the same point, if the shorter way still needed to exclude feathers so would the longer way. The stranger's intention, in this calculated attempt to make the shorter way look less respectable than it really is, is perhaps to reinforce his effort to discourage Theaetetus from looking for shortcuts before he knows how to do so properly. Had Theaetetus been able to demonstrate at this point the ability to see through the stranger's subterfuge, it would have been a different story.

The shorter way turns out to be more convincing than the longer one not only in its one-step definition ("two-footed walker"), but also in its procedure. Since the genus from which the longer and shorter ways began was "walking," it is more natural to use "number of feet" as the differentia, rather than "presence of horns." Nor do the differentiae "horned/hornless" and "interbreeding/noninterbreeding" tell us anything significant about human nature. Even though they are technically more correct because they proceed by more symmetrical cuts, they are artificially devised and are more in the nature of distractions from, rather than concentrations upon, the subject to be defined. (As Socrates points out in the Philebus [17a], it is possible to go from the one to the many too slowly as well as too quickly.) It is perhaps an implied criticism of their artificiality that, when this division is later recalled, the order of these two unilluminating differentiae is reversed (276a)." It is far more natural to define human beings simply as two-footed animals than as two-footed noninterbreeding hornless ones.^[6] Consequently it is the definition of the shorter way that serves as the model for Aristotle, who commonly defines "human being" as the "two-footed animal" (and describes us as "by nature a political [cf. "herd"] animal": Politics 1.2.1253^a 2-3).

If we think of the shorter way in terms of the definition to which it really leads, rather than the redundancy that the stranger tacks onto the end in order to belittle it, then there is a very pointed difference between the results of the two methods. Both take "two-footed" to be the final

[6] Moreover, as Harvey Scodel points out, the longer way "is somewhat perverse in its implication, for it construes human nature . . . as a surd, while that of its four-footed counterparts is rational" (Diaeresis and Myth in Plato's Statesman [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1987] 65). The reference is to the stranger's description of human nature in terms of the square root of 2 at 266b.

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differentia of human beings, but the shorter way uses this to distinguish human beings from all walking animals, whereas the longer way uses it to distinguish us only from pigs. Which of these reflects more accurately the distinctive nature of humanity? It cannot be denied that by dividing walking animals immediately into two-footed and four-looted we produce a seemingly unbalanced division—humans on one side, all four-footed animals on the other—whereas by the longer way the divisions are more evenly balanced at each step. But on the other hand the longer way ignores the distinctive nature of human beings. A rigid insistence on balanced divisions may conform to the principle of relative measure, but violate that of the mean (to anticipate a distinction that the stranger will make later on). It may be that human beings are so distinctive that it makes more sense to speak of humans as one side and all "other animals" as the other, as young Socrates was inclined to do.^[7] The stranger did, it is true, rebuke young Socrates for doing something of the sort when he simply divided "animals" into "humans" and "beasts" (262a if.); however, the problem with young Socrates' immediate division of animals into human and nonhuman is not that it is asymmetrical, but that it gives no indication of what he takes to be the essential nature of humanity. Rather than identifying the determinative differentiation of the species "humanity," young Socrates simply makes the species its own differentia, and so the definition, in its impatience to arrive at the infima species , bypasses the all-important step of discovering what the real differentia of humanity is. Because it dispenses with an identification of the essence, the distinguishing feature of "human being," it fails to give us the very thing that the process of division is supposed to accomplish.

In a later remark the stranger shows that it does in fact make sense to set human beings apart from all other animals as long as we can discern the true differentia: "human beings, who are different and more divine [

] animals, govern the lower species of them" (271e). Later still we are told that the human soul comprises a divine part as well as an animal one (309c), which once again distinguishes us immediately from all other animals.^[8] Although these distinctions make no reference to the number of our legs, it is not unusual to regard our two-

[7] J. B. Skemp points out that "Aristotle argues very thoroughly against any attempt to reach any of the infimae species of the animal world by a process of division by dichotomy [De Partibus animalium , I, 2-4; 642b,5 644b,20]" (Plato's Statesman [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952] 70).

[8] Scodel 57, too, notes that "Plato himself continues to invoke the distinction between man and beast despite the Stranger's stricture (cf. Phil . 16a and Laws 653e)."

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legged posture, which sets our head heavenward, as the outward sign of our distinctive nature:

The name anthrôpos ["human being"] signifies this: that, on one hand, the other animals do not examine, reason about, or look up at what they see; but a human being, as soon as it has seen—and this means viewed—then it looks up and reasons about what it has viewed. Therefore alone of the animals the human being is rightly named anthrôpos , since it looks up [anathrôn ] at what it has viewed [opôpe ].
(Cratylus 399c)

For of all animals man alone stands erect, in accordance with his god-like nature and substance. For it is the function of the god-like to think and to be wise; and no easy task were this under the burden of a heavy body, pressing down from above and obstructing by its weight the motions of the intellect and of the general sense.
(Aristotle, Parts of Animals 4.10.686^a 27-32, rev. Oxford translation)

In challenging young Socrates' division of animals into human and not human, the stranger said that any other intelligent animal, as for example the crane is thought to be, might make an analogous division: for example, cranes and noncranes (263d). The stranger's primary reason for speaking of other intelligent animals here is that only an intelligent animal could make such a distinction; but there is a secondary consequence as well. If there are other intelligent animals, we are prevented from using intelligence or rationality as the obvious differentia by which to distinguish humans from other animals. The crane may be rational too. However, as we soon learn, only humanity is godlike. So there really is a natural differentia by which we might have been distinguished from all other animals immediately. The implication is that what distinguishes us from other animals is not a technical distinction but a difference of value, "divinity." The crucial difference between ourselves and other animals lies not merely in the number of legs, or even the presence of intelligence, but in the divinity of our nature, that is, in the nature of our soul . The longer way, in insisting on equal divisions, may often have to bypass the "fitting" division, as in this case. When it does so, it succeeds according to relative measure but fails according to the mean.

The key to the two preceding problems lies in the difficulty, for the method of division, of taking account of nonvisible marks such as the distinction between body and soul, or between one kind of soul and another. This difficulty stems from the method's inability to recognize

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differences among levels of being that imply differences of value. Such differences are alluded to even though they are never addressed. The stranger said that "the science of the king is never one that supervises soulless things, like architecture, but it is nobler [

] in that it always exercises its power among living beings and in relation to just these" (261c-d). Later, when he draws the distinction between "more divine" and "lower" souls (271e), it is clearer still that any adequate account would have to make distinctions of value. Since the first part of the dialogue defined statesmanship as the nourishing of human beings the way shepherds take care of their flock, we might have expected the concept of value to enter into the notion of "nourishing." However, the stranger never inquires into the meaning of "nourishing," but only into the meaning of "human being." Later he calls attention to this as a failure, saying that their investigation did not specify in sufficient detail how the statesman rules (275a). The myth will redress this reticence about nourishment—as will the final part of the dialogue (310a ff.)— explicitly discussing the nourishment of the human herd, both corporeal and otherwise (271e-272c).

In the Sophist the stranger had emphasized that the method abstracts from considerations of value (227a-b), and this turned out to be why the dialogue's eventual distinction between the sophist and the philosopher is ultimately unsatisfactory. Here, too, at the end of the longer way, the stranger defends the juxtaposition of pigs and people in the ultimate genus by repeating the prohibition against paying attention to differences of value (266d). But the present dialogue, unlike the Sophist , will violate that principle with increasing frequency throughout its course,^[9] as it replaces the longer way with the shorter. It even begins with an explicit recognition of the importance of value:

SOCRATES : I owe you a great debt of gratitude, Theodorus, for my acquaintance with Theaetetus and also for that with the stranger.

THEODORUS : Soon, Socrates, you will be three times as indebted, when they have worked out the statesman and philosopher for you.

SOCRATES : Indeed? Shall we say that this, my dear Theodorus, is what we heard from our great calculator and geometrician? . . . You are placing equal value on each of these three, who are farther apart in honor than your art of proportions can express.

[9] Cf. Michel Fattal: In the Statesman , "le dialecticien semble par là contrevenir à la règle qu'il s'est pourtant fixée dans le Sophiste en 227a-b et dans le Politique lui-même en 266d, celle qui proscrit l'usage des 'valeurs' comme critère de division" ("La diairesis dans le Politique de Platon" [paper presented at the Third Symposium Platonicum, "Plato's Politicus, " Bristol, August 25-30, 1992] 13).

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THEODORUS : By our god Ammon, Socrates, you have rebuked me well and justly and with presence of mind. (257a-b)

The second and third of the problems we noted regarding the opening division of this dialogue may be indirect confirmations of Socrates' warning: that an attempt to account for distinctively human activities without reference to value is doomed to confronting externals rather than essentials. And in view of Plato's association of the good with the image of the sun, there may be an oblique reference to value as well in Theodorus's oath by Ammon, who, in his characteristic of Ammon-Ra, was the Egyptian sun god.

As I have suggested above, the three dialogues of the trilogy may in this way be regarded as an extended application of the method of hypothesis. The Theaetetus , by hypothesizing that knowledge is a species of perception or doxa, foundered in a sea of unacceptable consequences. The Sophist proposed a "higher" hypothesis, that besides the individuals that comprise the world of perception and doxa, there are also universal kinds. This higher hypothesis resolved some of the aporiae of the Theaetetus (regarding the nature of knowledge and of epistemic logos), but led to unacceptable consequences of its own—an inability to find the true differentia between the sophist and the philosopher. Finally the Statesman will present us with a higher hypothesis still, that of the mean, which implies value and the good. On the basis of this hypothesis the residual problems of the Sophist (e.g., the essential difference between philosophy and sophistry) will be more convincingly resolved. The doctrine of the mean will not be introduced explicitly until 283d if., but it has been present (in different ways) by indirection in Socrates' opening remarks about correct proportion and in the stranger's problematic opening diaeresis.^[10]

2. Myth of Cosmic Reversal (267c-274d)

The division is not yet complete, for merchants, farmers, grain workers, physical trainers, and physicians would all claim that they, rather than the statesman, are the "shepherds" of humanity. Since shepherds perform all such duties and more, the claims of these rivals must be taken seriously. Instead of simply dividing further to distinguish these rivals from the shepherd, the stranger proposes to start entirely over, taking

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an altogether different road (268d). He relates a myth, according to which the universe's rotation alternates directions. When the god is directly in contact with it, the cosmos rotates together with him. At this time all life springs fully mature from the earth and ages in reverse, growing younger and younger until it disappears back into the earth, from which it is eventually reborn.^[11] Food is always available without effort, the weather is always gentle, and all animals live in harmony, each species under the governance of a subordinate deity. But nothing corporeal can continue indefinitely without change, so eventually, when each soul has fulfilled its allotted cycle of rebirths, the god lets go. This results in an earthquakelike shock that causes great destruction. The cosmos is a living and intelligent being, however, and does not remain at rest. Because of its blessed nature (269d) and its memory of governance by the god (273a-b), it seeks to emulate its former state, but its corporeality limits both the divinity of its nature (269d) and its ability to remember its former state (273b), so its emulation must be deficient. Consequently it rotates in the opposite direction, which is why birth, aging, and death are reversed in our experience. Moreover, when the god lets go, the subordinate gods let go of their own charges (272e), and the cosmos reverts to the harshness and injustice intrinsic to its corporeal nature (273b-c). Enmity arises among the animals, and hardship brought on by scarcity of food and inclemency of weather. It was as a compensation for this that Prometheus gave us fire, and Hephaestus and Athena gave us the arts (274b-c). Over time the cosmos continues to forget its divine legacy, and as it becomes more forgetful the proportion of disorder to goodness increases, until the cosmos and all within it are in danger of destruction. Then the ordering god, concerned that it might founder in confusion and break up in the sea of boundless dissimilarity,^[12] returns to his place, orders it, and, correcting it, makes it immortal and ageless again (273b-e). The cosmos is thus immortal only so long as the god periodically intervenes. Otherwise it will perish en-tropically in complete undifferentiation.

The myth is similar in many ways to that of the Timaeus .^[13] Here, as well as in the Timaeus , the irrationality of the cosmos is due to its cor-

[11] The souls must somehow age in the earth, for they each undergo a number of rebirths before the cycle reverses (272e).

[12] One way of looking at the method of division is that it aims to provide boundaries within the sea of dissimilarity.

[13] Also see Luc Brisson, "Interprétation du mythe du Politique " 5-6, and T. M. Robinson, "Forms, Demiurge and World-Soul in the Politicus " (both papers presented at the Third Symposium Platonicurn, "Plato's Politicus ," Bristol, August 25-30, 1992).

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poreal nature, which "partook in great disorder before entering into the present cosmos" (273b); and here too it is partly overcome by a memory of the divine, a memory that is obscured by the corporeal nature. Moreover, just as the demiurge of the Timaeus is distinguished from the Olympian gods, here too the divine "helmsman of the universe" (272e) is not one of the Olympians, although this is not at first apparent. At one point young Socrates asks, "But the life that you say existed during Kronos's reign, was it in those revolutions or these? For it is dear that the reversal of the stars and sun comes about in both periods" (271c). The stranger replies, "You have followed the story well. But the life you asked about, when everything came about by itself for people, does not belong to the presently established period, but this too was of the previous one" (271c-d). Is the stranger merely ironic when he praises young Socrates' grasp of the story? Is young Socrates really asking something as foolish as whether the self-generation of all things from the earth is happening now? In fact the question was a legitimate one (and the praise probably sincere), but it is answered elliptically. At the beginning of the myth the stranger mentioned the story of Zeus's reversing the direction of rotation of the sun and the heavens. Young Socrates has heard of it, he says. The stranger establishes that Socrates has also heard the story of the reign of Kronos, and the story of those who were born from the earth (269a-b). It appears that young Socrates now wonders whether the reign of Kronos and the time of the earthborn coincide, for it evidently occurs to him that if Zeus was the god who reversed the rotation (as in the traditional account of the Atreus story), then both directions of rotation would occur in Zeus's reign, and the same would probably have been true of Kronos's reign. As he puts it, "it is dear that the reversal of the stars and sun comes about in both periods" (271c). So there should be a period of the earthborn in both Zeus's and Kronos's reign, and it is perceptive of young Socrates to wonder which of these two is the fabled one. But the stranger, after his initial praise, answers as if the whole of Kronos's reign is the golden age, and the whole of Zeus's reign the present age. The reversed age, he says, "was that of the people of Kronos's time, but the present one is said to be at the time of Zeus" (272b). In that case it could not have been Zeus who reversed the course of the heavens, but rather some more fundamental god who is in charge during both periods (although in control only in one of them). This is supported by the fact that the ruling god never leaves the scene, and therefore could not have been replaced by a different god. Rather than debarking from

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the ship of the universe, he only leaves the helm and moves to a place of lookout (272e), from which he later returns to the helm (273e).^[14]

The peculiar form of the question and answer at 271c-272b thus points to a tacit emendation in the story. The god who is celebrated in the myth is beyond Kronos and Zeus, who are by implication relegated to the position of subordinate gods. The reign of Kronos corresponds to the period when the divine helmsman takes charge of the tiller, and the reign of Zeus corresponds to the period when the helmsman has let go. These distinctions are never explicit; with Socrates' trial in the offing, perhaps the stranger is cautious about introducing "other, new gods" in Athens.

Despite the similarities between the myth here and in the Timaeus , in the latter dialogue the divine and corporeal seem to be united in a perpetual polarity, whereas here they are united sequentially. In view of the political character of the dialogue, perhaps the sequential nature of the myth is meant to assimilate the myth to the nature of political history, for it is clear from the Republic that Plato sees political states as displaying a quasi-cyclical sequence: a rise from the agrarian to the warrior state and thence to an intelligent "civilization," which will progressively decline into appetitiveness (

): from "aristocracy" to oligarchy to democracy, anarchy, and tyranny. Here, too, when the god lets go of the cosmos it reverts to "its innate appetitiveness []" (272e). The myth combines the cosmic point of view of the Timaeus with the political point of view of the Republic . Another function of the sequential relationship of the poles may be, as G. R. F. Ferrari has suggested, that the distinction between ruled-by-god and ruled-after-god prefigures the dialogue's later distinction between rule by the statesman and rule by law.^[15] This suggestion is strengthened by the fact that the statesman (297e-299c), like the god, is compared to the captain of a ship.

Conspicuous throughout is the theme of value. At the beginning, when the stranger refers to the sign of the gods' favor that was bestowed upon Atreus (in his rivalry with his brother, Thyestes, over the succession to the rule of Mycenae), young Socrates thinks he means the golden lamb, whereas he means instead the subsequent reversal of the heavenly directions (268e-269a). Young Socrates' expectation is understandable since they had just been talking about shepherds and flocks, but more

[14] Cf. Brisson 7-8.

[15] "Myth and Conservatism in Plato's Politicus, " paper presented at the Third Symposium Platonicurn, "Plato's Politicus, " Bristol, August 25-30, 1992.

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than dramatic naturalism is involved. The golden lamb was a token that the gods considered Atreus more fit to rule than Thyestes. The golden attribute signifies, therefore, the difference between better and worse. Finding the statesman, we are later told (303d-e), is like refining gold to separate it from less precious metals (as here it is said that the statesman must be made to stand apart and pure: 268b). It will turn out not to be possible to do this without appealing to differences of value.

Similarly, one of the most important questions raised in the myth is in which of the two periods people are happier. The answer is that if those in the previous period used their special advantages for the pursuit of philosophy and wisdom, then they must have been ten thousand times happier than we; but if they used them only for idle pleasures— eating, drinking, and storytelling—then the reverse is the case (272b-d). Not only is it taken as beyond dispute that the value of wisdom is immeasurably greater than that of pleasure, but it is also dear that the stranger no longer treats differences of value as irrelevant to philosophical inquiry. The complete superiority—the incomparably greater value—of the cosmos's divine component over its corporeal one is as strongly emphasized in the Statesman myth as it is anywhere in Plato. "The corporeal element in the cosmos's composition . . . partook of great disorder before its entry into the present cosmos," the stranger says. "For from its composer it acquired all beautiful things, but from its previous state comes everything that is harsh and unjust in the heavens" (273b-c). From this passage in particular, and the myth in general, it is quite clear that Plato has not abandoned his "two-world" view.^[16] The distinction between the divine and the corporeal—and the polarity between them as the matrix of our world—is as unambiguous here as it ever was in the earlier dialogues. The passage may be a "myth," but it is a myth that represents a two-world conception of reality. It would be unaccountable if in this very trilogy he were abandoning that conception.

3. Paradigm of Weaving (274e-283b)

The stranger remarks that the myth has shown an error in their original diaeresis. "In one way the error was relatively small, but in another way it was of very noble [

] proportions and much larger and

[16] For detailed discussions of this question, see Richard Mohr, "Statesman 284c-d," Phronesis 22 (1977) 232-34; idem , "Disorderly Motion in Plato's Statesman," Phoenix 35 (1981) 199-215.

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greater than the other" (274e). It treated the present human statesman as if he were the shepherd-god of the divine cycle (this was the more serious aspect of the error), and did not specify in sufficient detail how he rules (the less serious aspect). The difference between the divine shepherd and human king is that the latter shares approximately the same nurture and education as his charges, whereas the former (like shepherds generally) does not. The former is in fact greater (

) than the latter (275b-c). The difference between the divine and the human, like that between the divine and corporeal (and between the two aspects of the error), is primarily a difference in value.

To remedy their mistake it is necessary, first, to think of the statesman not as a herdsman, since he is not different in kind from his charges, but yet as someone who has something in common with herdsmen. The stranger collects these activities together into the form of "caring for" (

, 275e). In the preceding diaeresis the production of living things (4b) was called nourishing or feeding (: e.g., 261d), and so the stranger proposes that they replace "nourishing" with "care" () and continue the division as before (276a-d). We may notice that the method of hypothesis is at work here again, in the rejection of the original conception of the statesman as a kind of shepherd, in favor of a more adequate or "higher" conception. In fact the concept of nourishing will later be distinguished from, rather than subsumed within, statesmanship (288e-289a), and the statesman will be explicated on the hypothesis that he is like a weaver rather than like a shepherd.

They made another great error in addition to this, he continues, by not making further divisions in their final definition. They ought to have divided the shepherd of human beings into a divine and a human shepherd, so that the statesman could be distinguished from the god. And they ought to have distinguished the statesman's rule into rule by force and rule by consent, so that the king could be distinguished from the tyrant (276c-e).^[17] But if the essential difference between kings and tyrants is said to be that the former are obeyed voluntarily and the latter involuntarily, here again the method of division has led us not to the true distinguishing essence of the thing, but only to a superficial characteristic. The writer of the Republic , for whom the tyrant was the paradigmatic unjust man, can hardly have believed that the distinguishing feature of the tyrant is simply the reluctance of his subjects, or that

[17] It is odd that this is called an additional error. The two elements seem to correspond to the major and minor aspects of the original error.

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hoi polloi will necessarily obey even just laws voluntarily. In fact the stranger will later repudiate this definition explicitly (296b).

Even apart from this the stranger is not satisfied, for the account is not only too long, but still unfinished. "It is difficult, you divine man, to show without paradigms any of the greater things. For each of us knows everything almost as if in a dream, and then is ignorant as if he has awakened" (277d). As with the doctrine of recollection (which Socrates, too, compares to a dreamlike state: Meno 85c-d), we have an implicit knowledge of all things, which we cannot discern when we try to bring it into explicit focus. How can we find the statesman unless we already know what he is, and why do we need to find him if we do know what he is? Again as with the doctrine of recollection, paradigms make possible the transition from merely implicit knowledge to explicit knowledge.

"I need to give a paradigm, my blessed one, of paradigm," the stranger says. Children who can correctly read short and easy syllables become confused when the same letters are used to make longer ones. So we can use the short syllables as paradigms of how the letters sound, from which the child will be able to read the longer ones. Thus "a paradigm comes about whenever something that is rightly believed to be the same in some second distinct thing is compared with the first, so that the two together result in one true opinion" (277d-278c). The application of the epithets "divine" (

) and "blessed" () to young Socrates may also remind us that the mundane can serve as a reminder or paradigm of the divine. Implicit as well in terms like "blessed" and "divine" is the connotation of value. After all, the method of paradigms is said to be especially important in dealing with the greatest and most valuable () things (285e).

As a paradigm of something that has "the same activity as statecraft" (279a), the stranger gives a diaeresis of the art of weaving (see Figure 11).^[18] For a division that is meant to be "paradigmatic," it is, like the previous one, remarkably lax. The first two subdivisions are both nonnormal, in opposite ways. The Sophists divisions began by distinguishing production from acquisition, but this one, on the contrary, begins by conflating them: "All things whatever that we make or acquire are for the sake either of doing something or of protecting ourselves against suffering something" (279c). Whereas step 1 thus fails to divide the starting point

[18] Charles Griswold suggests an interesting connection between the choice, of the weaving of woolen garments as a paradigm of statesmanship, and the inclement conditions of the age of Zeus: "Politikê Epistêmê in Plato's Statesman, " in Anton and Preus, eds., 141-67, esp. 152, 165 n. 22.

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Figure 11

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as it should have done, step 2, on the contrary, performs a double division instead of a single one for no apparent reason: not only 2b (barriers) but also 2a (protective drugs) is divided in half. More remarkable than either of these lapses is the summary, which is by far the most inaccurate of all, misrepresenting the original order at almost every step. The original step 4 is missing altogether (or else it is assimilated into step 5 in a very diffuse way: cf. 280d), and only in one case is the sequence between two steps—5 and 6—accurately repeated. Not even the first and last steps are correctly recalled. The most serious deficiency is the conclusion. After having defined clothesmaking, the stranger says, "weaving, to the extent that the greatest part of it deals with the making of clothing, does not differ except in name from this art of clothes-making" (280a). But if only part of weaving (even if the greatest part) is concerned with the making of clothing, then the definition is too narrow, and avowedly so. The false note was struck with step 6 (which, perhaps significantly, is treated as the ultimate step by the summary), when the stranger divided carpets from wrappings and seeks the weaver in the latter class, even though carpets too can be woven. Without this step the stranger would not have had to weaken his conclusion with the unscientific qualification "for the most part."^[19]

Not only is the definition too narrow, it also turns out to be too broad: not only are not all weavers clothesmakers, but not all clothes-makers are weavers, the stranger reminds us. They are so only for the most part:

STRGER : The one who works at the first stage of clothesmaking appears to do the opposite of weaving.

YOUNG SOCRATES : How so?

STRANGER : The work of weaving is a kind of combining.

YOUNG SOCRATES : Yes.

STRANGER : But the other is the separating of what is joined or matted together.

YOUNG SOCRATES : Which one?

STRANGER : The work of the carder's art. (280e-291a)

Not only carders but also fullers and menders consider themselves involved in the making of clothing, although they will admit that weaving is "the greatest part" of clothesmaking (251b).

[19] Recall the stranger's equally unscientific conclusion after the second step of the opening diaeresis, that the art of the king is only "more akin to" the theoretical than the practical (259c-d).

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Even those who make the instruments for these arts are part of the art of clothesmaking, but these might be classified as contributory causes rather than true causes (281d-e). The distinction between contributory and true causes is reminiscent of the Phaedo's distinction between the true cause and "that without which the cause could not be a cause" (98b-99c ff.). The true cause is teleological, while the contributing causes are the material conditions that allow the purpose to be fulfilled. That is the case here as well. It may seem surprising that the stranger begins by dividing "doing" from "protecting against," and looking for weaving under the latter. We can find it just as easily under the former, so it is odd that the distinction is made at all. It is evidently made in order to illustrate that an activity is best defined by its purpose, we might even say its "value." The reason that the sophist was never convincingly differentiated from the philosopher in the Sophist was that their most important difference, the difference in their goals, was never taken into account. They were treated as makers of products, and the purpose for which the products were made was ignored. Here, on the contrary, the purpose is insisted on right from the beginning of the division, and distinguished from mere making. Similarly, it is only because their ultimate purposes coincide that instrument makers and carders can be considered part of the art of clothesmaking. In a technical sense, the maker of the loom is not a clothing maker, nor is the person who cards fleece into woolen strands. But the stranger is now no longer concerned with technical definitions as in the Sophist , but with teleological, purposive, value-laden ones. In fact we might even distinguish the weaver from these others by calling weaving the most beautiful and greatest (

) of them, he says. Although there would be some truth () in this—a possibility that he might not have entertained earlier—it would not yet be a clear and complete distinction (281c-d). Accordingly, he expands the previous division, as shown in Figure 12.

Here again we find remarkable failures in the rigor and even usefulness of the division, signaled once again by the stranger's own words. There is a comparatively minor oddity in that the left-hand side of the division has to be taken a step farther than the right-hand side before the latter becomes fully intelligible, but the serious problem emerges in step 13. There the stranger says: "Of woolworking there are two divisions, and each of them is by nature a part of two arts" (252b). We would have expected him to say that each has two arts as its parts. To say that a species is part of two genera means that it is not unified, not

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Figure 12

wholly subsumed within either genus (as was prefigured earlier by the split species of "birds," part of which was subsumed under "water animals" and part under "land animals")—in other words, that the division is incorrect, not made at the natural joints between genera. The stranger shows this in his otherwise unnecessary division of the left-hand species, "dividing." For both combing and carding turn out to be partly in one and partly in the other genus. This is explicit in the case of combing, about which the stranger says, "half of combing . . . belongs to the art of dividing" (252b; the other half belongs to the art of composing). We would expect this to be true of carding as well, since he had said that both divisions are parts of two arts, and that is in fact the case. Carding includes not only raking the fleece into a web to straighten it and remove the impurities^[20] ("dividing") by rubbing it be-

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tween fiat surfaces set with teeth, but also the subsequent condensing ("composing") of the web into a sliver, which can then be twisted and spun. So carding too, as the stranger remarked, is part of both arts. The reason that combing as well as carding is in both genera is that the weaver uses the comb partly to separate the strands and partly to combine the warp and woof. But since it is in the act of weaving that the comb is used, the ambiguity in combing attaches to weaving itself and undermines the definition. Carding for the most part separates, and weaving for the most part combines, but that is hardly an adequate way to distinguish them, and it certainly is not in keeping with the precision demanded by the method of division.

At this point the method of division by bisection, the "longer way," which has been used in an increasingly ineffectual way throughout the dialogue, becomes completely abandoned. The stranger will continue to make divisions, but rather than dividing by halves, he will divide immediately into the ultimate species—the very thing that he had warned young Socrates against at 262b. The reason he will give for this is that here division by bisection simply is not possible, but we shall see that that is no more true here than it was previously. A more convincing reason emerges from the ensuing discussion of the two different kinds of measure.

4. Relative Measure, the Mean, and Diaeresis (283b-287b)

"Why ever didn't we straightaway answer that weaving is the combining of the warp and woof, instead of going around in a circle and distinguishing very many things pointlessly?" the stranger asks (283b). On the basis of the foregoing discussion we can reply that one reason for the roundabout approach is that it locates weaving within a framework of purpose and value: weaving is for the sake of production. To define it merely in terms of its mechanical activity is to ignore what it is good for, and therefore its "true" cause or reason for being. Later the stranger will claim that "it might plausibly be said that whatever exists, among all that is, is an instrument or contributing cause of at least one thing" (287d). Everything, therefore, points toward something as its purpose. Looms are for the sake of woven cloth, woven cloth for the sake of warmth, warmth for the sake of health, health for the sake of life, and life (as the myth suggests) for the sake of embodying the divine. Only what is beyond being, the good itself, does not point beyond itself. The ultimate meaning of each thing is its value.

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Although young Socrates does not feel that all this Was Unnecessarily lengthy or a waste of time, the stranger worries that he may come to think so in the future, and seeks to preclude this by explaining two different ways of measuring length.

STRANGER : One is with respect to the shared bigness or smallness of things toward one another. The other is with respect to the necessary essence of coming into being [

].

YOUNG SOCRATES : What do you mean?

STRANGER : Doesn't it seem to you that, in the nature of it, we must say that the greater is greater than nothing other than the less, and, again, the less is less than the greater and nothing else?

YOUNG SOCRATES : It certainly does.

STRANGER : But what about this? With regard to what exceeds or what is exceeded by the nature of the mean, whether in words or actions, must we not also say that it really exists? And that in this lies the chief difference between those of us who are bad and those who are good?

YOUNG SOCRATES : Evidently. (283d-e)

The "mean" (

) does not refer here to a mathematical mean (average), any more than it does in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics .^[21] It refers to the correct degree between two indeterminate extremes such as too long and too short. If we wonder, then, whether a discussion, like the previous one, is too lengthy, we may answer either by comparing its length with that of other discussions, or by comparing it with an independent standard of moderation. Similarly, if we wonder whether individual people are good or bad, we may compare their qualities with those of some other person, or we may compare them with an independent standard of the mean. For Plato, as later for Aristotle, we can speak of good and bad, excess and deficiency, only in relation to such a mean. The concept of value has now been introduced in a fully explicit way.

None of the arts—including that of statesmanship—would be possible without such a measure, for any art necessarily presupposes a standard of goodness at which to aim (284a-b). This is in part what the stranger meant by calling the mean "the necessary essence of coming

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into being." Not only human creation but, as the myth showed, all coming to be is ultimately dependent on an absolute or "divine" standard. The stranger goes on, however, to make the dependence between the mean and the arts reciprocal. "If this exists, they exist, and if they exist, this too exists. But if one of them does not exist, the other never will either" (284d). The mean cannot therefore be equated with the Republic's Idea of the good, whose existence has absolute priority and is unhypothetical. The mean is not goodness absolutely, but the measure of goodness in words and actions, hence inseparable from them. The confusion that we witnessed at the beginning of the dialogue, as to whether statesmanship is a practical or theoretical science, now seems to be a deliberate adumbration of the nature of the science of the mean, in which praxis and theôria are inextricably linked. In the earlier passage we saw that in step 1 statesmanship was intellectual rather than practical because it does not result in products (258d-e), while in step 2 it was directive rather than critical because it does result in products (260b). Now we see that it is indeed both, because they cannot be separated. The greatest science, the science of the mean, is double-sided: what we know and what we do are ultimately inseparable. The Socratic equation between knowledge and virtue reappears here in a more subtle form. We may assume that this is also the reason that acquisition and production, which were fundamentally distinguished in the Sophist , were recombined at the beginning of the weaver division (279c): knowing may be regarded as a kind of acquisition, and doing as a kind of production. The rule-free flexibility of the science of the mean corresponds to Aristotle's concept of practical wisdom (pbronêsis ),^[22] that is, the capacity for discerning in practical situations the mean that embodies what is right or good. Plato is here treating of the individual application of the principles that were discussed only in a general way in the Republic .^[23]

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The distinction between relative measure and the mean has an important consequence for the method of division as it has been used here. In principle the method ought to be concerned with the mean, rather than with relative measure:

When one first sees what is common among many things, one should not retire until one sees within it all the differences, however many lie in forms. And again, on the other hand, when all kinds of dissimilarities are seen in a plethora of things, one should not be liable to get discouraged or stop until one has compassed all the related things within a single similarity and enclosed them in the essence of some genus.
(285b)

In other words, the mean between the extremes of seeing everything either as an identical unity or as completely unrelated consists of discovering the same and the different as it really is. Nothing is said about dividing into halves. When the stranger had earlier recommended the longer way of bisection into equal halves, over the shorter way of immediately separating off the species as they really are, he in effect recommended relative measure over the mean.

Let us reconsider the episode of the longer and shorter ways, where the stranger, for the only other time in the dialogue, gives us alternative procedures. In a previously quoted passage he had said, "It is finest to distinguish what is sought from everything else immediately, if that cor-

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rectly reflects how the things really are . . . [But] it is safer to make one's cuts by going down the middle, and one would more likely hit upon the boundaries between the forms" (262b). The dichotomy is precisely parallel with that between relative measure and the mean. "Going down the middle" means comparing the two species to make sure that they are of approximately equal size, that is, dividing according to relative measure. The true mean, however, would be the precise boundary that one is seeking. Since the mean is connected with values such as beauty (

), it is finest () to find the proper measure (mean) of a thing immediately, the one that "correctly reflects how the things really are."

But in this earlier passage the stranger recommends relative measure over the mean, because of its greater "safety." The tension between the earlier endorsement of the longer way, which corresponds to relative measure, and the later endorsement of the nonrelative mean illuminates both the particular peculiarity of the episode of the two ways, and the general peculiarity of the fate of the method of bisective division, which is first employed with increasing ineffectuality, and then entirely abandoned for no obvious reason. The episode of the two ways now seems to have been an intimation of the fact that the safe, bisective approach to division involves only relative measure and can never be fully adequate. And the progressive but unacknowledged failure of the divisions that follow shows how a mechanical application of the formal rules of division can lead to unsatisfactory results. As a confirmation of this, in the remainder of the dialogue the stranger will always use the shorter rather than the longer way. He will distinguish forms immediately into their infimae species instead of proceeding indirectly by the relative measure of making artificial distinctions designed to produce symmetrical halves. We shall see that this is not because such artificial longer ways cannot be devised. It must be, then, that the shift is meant to recommend the shorter way as ultimately preferable. The rigid but safe relative measure of the longer way turns out to be a pedagogical steppingstone to a subtler method of division. And the stranger's distinction between the two measures turns out to be the principle of division that bifurcates the dialogue itself into its two halves—in more ways than one. Not only does it occur directly in the middle of the dialogue, and function as the boundary that separates the stranger's use of the longer way in the first half from the shorter way in the second, but more important, it provides the differentia by which the difference between the longer and shorter ways can be identified.

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That the longer way, the method of symmetrical bisection, should eventually be superseded should not entirely surprise us, for in the same passage where the stranger distinguished the longer and shorter ways, he said, with regard to his explanation of the method of division, "I must try to speak even more dearly, in cognizance of your nature, Socrates. In the present circumstances it is not possible to make it clearly evident" (262c). What is it that the stranger cannot yet explain to young Socrates because of his nature? The method of division, as the stranger has so far employed it, is evidently some kind of simplification. We will consider in the next chapter what it may be that the stranger is holding back here, but perhaps a due to the way that he accommodates the method to young Socrates' nature is to be found in the stranger's previously mentioned reference to mathematics at the beginning of the dialogue: "Shall we say that this, my dear Theodorus, is what we heard from our great calculator and geometrician? . . . You are placing equal value on each of these three, who are farther apart in honor than your art of proportions can express" (257a-b). Consider the reference to mathematics when the stranger divides the mean from relative measure:

It is dear that we should divide the art of measurement by cutting it into two, in accordance with what has been said. One section includes all those arts that measure number, length, depth, breadth, or thickness in relation to their opposites. The other includes all those that measure in accordance with what is due, fitting, timely, required, and everything rise that dwells at the mean and away from the extremes.
(254e)

Thus, mathematics, like the longer way, is a species of relative measure. To consider the significance of this, let us recall the elder Socrates' first meeting with Theaetetus, young Socrates' classmate. Socrates asks whether Theaetetus has been learning geometry, astronomy, harmonics, and arithmetic from Theodorus, and Theaetetus replies that he has (145c-d). These were, as we saw, the first five of the six disciplines that, in the Republic , Socrates had said would turn our soul around from its imprisonment in the Cave and lead it to an apprehension of the good. But those five were to be no more than a preparation for the sixth, dialectic (Republic 531d). This, however, has not been part of their training. Not only is there no mention of it in Socrates' initial conversation with Theaetetus, but less than a page later Theodorus turns down Socrates' invitation to discuss the nature of knowledge with him, because "I am not accustomed to dialectic" (146b).

Theaetetus and young Socrates are to be thought of as talented mathe-

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maticians who lack any acquaintance with dialectical thought. They are, in the language of the Republic , well versed in dianoia but not yet at the level of noesis.^[24] Accordingly, it is appropriate for the stranger to address them at the level of dianoia, by means of a method that, like mathematics, follows postulates to their consequences but not to their origins. This is how mathematics and dianoia in general were described in the Republic (510c), and it applies as well to the longer method of division. The starting point of the division is never called into question as part of the method: one simply postulates it and proceeds to make symmetrical derivations from it. It seems that the stranger is providing Theaetetus and young Socrates (and that Plato is providing us ) with a multistage training in dialectic. As he says, "Why did we set ourselves the search for the statesman? Was it for the sake of this subject itself, or rather for the sake of becoming better dialecticians about all subjects?" "It is for the sake of all of them," young Socrates replies (285d).

The first stage of their training in dianoia picks up where mathematics leaves off. There is still the procedure of reasoning downward from a given starting point, but that reasoning now shifts from reasoning about quantity to reasoning about quality. It is perhaps meant to alert us to this that when Socrates uses the term "quality" (

) in the Theaetetus , he does not expect Theaetetus to know what he means.^[25] And perhaps it is to enhance this shift from quantity to quality that Plato has both Socrates and the stranger use letters and syllables as examples of rational thought, whereas in previous dialogues he used mathematical examples. At this stage one learns to think in terms of "same" and "different," by making use of the relative measure of "equal halves" to arrive at contradictory categories. But the conclusions at which one arrives do not always turn out to be consistent or convincing. A standard of correctness needs to be added, then, to the simple concept of relative differentiation. This is the mean. But if we are indeed capable of discerning the mean, then the elaborate artificiality of the relativistic divisions of the longer way are unnecessary and even detrimental—as all the divisions of this dialogue have demonstrated. The longer way functions as a stepping-stone to the shorter, a step for which young

[24] Miller observes: "by presenting young Socrates as immersed in mathematics and not yet introduced to philosophy, [Plato] seems to address his students at just the point in their education where they must first turn from the one to the other" (PPS 9).

[25] 182a (it may also be that this term is first coined here, and that Socrates needs to explain it on that account). The contrast between quantity and quality would perhaps not look quite so simple to the Greeks, since for them the paradigm of mathematics was geometry, in which quantity is to a certain extent assimilated to quality (shape).

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Socrates was not ready earlier. At this stage value enters into the picture once again, for correctness and truth are valued above error and falsity. Thus the method of division, which at the earlier stage had abstracted from value, is now itself justified precisely on the basis of its value: "By far the greatest and primary consideration is to honor [

] the method itself of being able to divide according to forms" (286d).

After this point, where Plato distinguishes the mean from relative measure, he will never again make use of the longer way, the relative measure of bisective division. Nor will any of his characters, including the Eleatic stranger, reiterate the stranger's ban on making distinctions based on value. On the contrary, just as the nature of the mean (unlike that of relative measure) is inseparable from that of value, the primacy of value will permeate the dialogue from now on. The stranger, as we have seen, defines the mean in terms of value : "good and beautiful" (284b), "due, fitting, timely, required" (284e).

To put the matter somewhat differently, there are two conceptions lacking in mathematical dianoia that need to be supplied if a transition to noesis is to be possible. One is the ability to reduce the indefinite multiplicity of the world to a synoptic order, by perceiving the world in terms of connected forms or kinds or essences rather than individuals (cf. Sophist 253d).^[26] The other is the ability to discern the inner necessity of the existence of such essences, the fact that, as Socrates puts it in the Republic , they all spring from the nature of the good. Thus what is required is that the mathematicians learn to think qualitatively rather than only quantitatively, and eventually learn the teleological mode of thought implied by the myth and presupposed by the concept of the mean.

5. Division Without Bisection (287b-293e)

When the stranger moves from the "safe," longer way of the first half of the dialogue to the "finest" (262b), shorter way of the second half, he makes it seem that he is forced to do so by the nature of the subject rather than by his choice of methodology, but this claim is disingenuous. It is a stratagem complementary to the one he employed in the first half in regard to the superiority of the shorter way. Then he tacked a redundant step onto the end of the shorter way's definition to make the ap-

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proach seem absurd ("featherless biped" instead of "two-looted animal"); now he claims that he is proceeding immediately to the final species only because these genera do not admit bisection. Both stratagems are attempts to minimize the temptations, to impatient natures, of the shorter way; but both pretexts fall away under scrutiny.

The stranger says: "The king, then, has been separated from most of his companions, or rather from all who have to do with herds. There remain, we say, the arts that have to do with the city itself, arts of both contributory causes and causes, which we must first separate from one another" (287b). So the following division picks up where the original one left off. We are now looking at the class of contributory causes and causes, of the episteme, intellectual, directive, and originary, of the production or nurture of two-footed, herd animals.

"Let us then divide them, like sacrificial animals, by their limbs, since we cannot cut them into two. For it is always necessary to cut into the closest number possible" (287c). He thus suggests that he is dividing them by the limbs only because division by bisection does not happen to be possible in these cases. But in the Phaedrus Socrates had introduced the method of division as "the ability to divide according to forms, at the natural joints; and not to attempt to hack off a part, in the manner of a bad butcher" (265e). The object of the method of division is not, then, to divide down the middle, but to divide correctly into the forms. So the reason that the stranger wants to divide at the natural joints is because this is what the method of division aims to do—and not, as he makes it seem, because symmetrical bisection, although inherently superior, happens not to be possible in this case. He never explains why bisection will not work here, but says only: "The reason, I think, will be no less evident as we proceed." We shall test this claim, and try to discover the reason that the stranger refers to, by attempting as far as possible to do what he says cannot be done, that is, to derive all the remaining specifications in the dialogue by means of bisective division. A reason why this cannot be done with complete success will, in fact, become evident, but it will be a reason that applies to all subjects, not only to this one in particular. As long as we are content with the previous standards of definition, we will be able to arrive at the remaining species by progressive bisection as easily as in all the previous cases.

In fact the genus itself is already bifurcated—"contributory causes and causes"—and the stranger tacitly divides it along those lines before he distinguishes the first species, instruments: "Whatever arts make any

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instrument whether large or small for the city, all these must be classed as contributory causes" (287d). Is the genus, then, from which the further divisions are made "both contributory and primary causes," as the stranger said at 287b, or only "contributory causes," as he now says? Actually, it appears to be neither, for the stranger proceeds to the second species with the words, "All the same, let's say this about another kind of possession in the city" (287d-e), and from then on all these species will be classed as kinds of possession. So the stranger appears to have made a further silent bisection, this time of the class of contributory causes into those that produce possessions and those that contribute in some other way. It will later appear that this other class is that of servants.

The stranger lists a total of seven kinds of possessions that are contributory causes of statesmanship and need to be distinguished from the art of the statesman. These are instruments, receptacles, supports, defenses, playthings, raw materials, and nourishment. Compared with the divisions of the Sophist , an extensive list like this hardly seems like a division at all. But given the stranger's distinction between the longer way and the shorter way, we can see that he is now employing the shorter way, the immediate articulation of the genus into its ultimate species, without intermediate bisections. Had the stranger wished, however, he could easily have derived them by a bisective division like the one shown in Figure 13. In the summary (289a-b), the stranger mentions that raw materials (called there the "firstborn form,"

) should have been put first, which confirms something like the sequence in the diagram.

This supplied series of bisections is as rigorous as those of the Sophist , and more so than those of the Statesman ; so why did Plato not devise one similar or better? The reason cannot be that this subject in particular lends itself more naturally to division into seven, for even without the constraint of bifurcation the stranger mentions that certain classes have been left out and can only be included by force:

Whatever we have left out, if we have forgotten anything not very important, can be fit into one of these. Thus with the class [

] of coins, seals, and every other kind of engraved dies. These do not constitute among themselves a large genus with a common name, but some can be made m fit under "playthings," and others under "instruments," although the amalgamation is very forced. With regard to the possession of tame animals, except slaves, the previously partitioned art of herd nurturing will show itself to include them all.
(289b-c)

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Figure 13

The admission that some things have been left out and should be forced, not very naturally, into the classes mentioned is quite surprising: since he proceeded immediately to the ultimate species without intermediate divisions, all the stranger needed to do was add more species.

Since the present diaeresis was introduced as a continuation of the one with which the dialogue began, it is no problem to assign the species of tame animals to one of the earlier classifications as the stranger recommends (presumably they would be placed under step 6b, "land animals," as they were in the Sophist's division A, 222b-d), but it is surprising that he mentions them at all, since they are not produced by an art, a "contributing cause." It may be that, like slaves, they are mentioned even though they are excluded from this classification, because they too are possessions, even if not products of contributory arts. But in that case it sounds as though "possessions" is the genus, and "contributory arts" the differentia, rather than the other way around. The lines of derivation are becoming tangled. However, this does not mean that the subject itself does not admit of progressive bisection, but only that (as with the weaver diaeresis) the method has not been employed as rigorously as it was in the Sophist .

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The stranger's next remark is ambiguous as well: "The class of slaves and servants in general remains, among whom somewhere, I prophesy, will become evident those who dispute with the king about this very weaving [i.e., the art of statesmanship]" (289c). Does this class "remain" because all other species of possessions have now been separated and it is the remaining species of possessions, or because it remains outside the class of possessions altogether? One would expect the former, because it would seem pointless for the stranger to have taken the trouble to divide possessions into seven species if he were going to look for his quarry elsewhere; but, on the other hand, slaves are no more "produced by contributory arts" than are tame animals, and the other members of the class of servants are not possessions at all. Rather, they belong in the class that I earlier suggested is the counterpart to that of "contributory arts of production" within the genus of contributory arts generally, that is, the class of servants. Presumably that is why the stranger, although he had in the previous speech mentioned slaves in the context of possessions, now speaks of them in the context of "servants in general."

Again without bisection, the stranger immediately proceeds to list (i.e., divide according to the shorter way) five kinds of servant: slaves, distributors, public servants, diviners, and priests. This time, not only is the list capable of being derived by progressive bisection, but the very order in which it is given is what would most naturally follow from such bisection (see Figure 14, which also includes the implicit preliminary bisections that we have already noted).

Another ambiguity attaches to this representation, however. Are we right to put the class of servants under contributory as distinct from primary causes (B), or does it proceed from the wider class, that of causes generally (A)? If it belongs under A, then why did the stranger bother to distinguish the two kinds of cause and classify possessions as a species of contributory cause rather than of cause generally? But if it belongs under B, then all the subsequent distinctions are going to be within the class- of contributory rather than primary causes, in which case we may never be able to find the statesman at all; for the stranger seems to suggest that the statesman is the primary cause of the city, as the weaver is the primary cause of weaving (287c-d). In that case the stranger might as well say now that the true differentia of the statesman is that he is the primary cause of the city whereas the others are contributory causes. It will turn out, however, that the class of servants includes rulers, such as kings, and so apparently contains primary causes

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Figure 14

as well as contributory ones. It seems that the class of servants belongs under A after all.

As with the weaver division, and to a lesser extent the shepherd division, the lines of division are badly tangled. However, that is not because the subject itself resists bifurcation more than any other subject. Plato could have made these distinctions as cleanly as any of the previous ones, but there was always an artificiality about that cleanliness, a pretense of definitive rigor, which is now dropped. The tangled lines of derivation illustrate an important problem in the longer way. All things are related to one another in a multitude of ways—there can be no definitive conceptual map of reality—and yet the longer way arbitrarily insists on a single, thoroughly determined path of derivation. The present tangles arise because the stranger abandons the artificial tidiness of the Sophist's divisions and exhibits the multifariousness of relationships

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by introducing more than one line of derivation at a time: tame animals can be classified under animals or under possessions; slaves are species both of possessions and of servants; and the statesman will turn out to be in one way a master but in another way a servant, in one way a primary cause but in another way a contributing cause (cf. 287d: "it might plausibly be said that whatever exists, among all that is, is an instrument or contributing cause of at least one other thing"). The difficulty in finding the statesman through just one line of derivation was prefigured in the shepherd division, where birds are found under two-looted animals, land animals, or (in the Sophist ) water animals; and in the weaver division, where not only were both combing and carding parts of two (contradictory) arts, but weaving itself turned out to be a species of clothesmaking that was only partly concerned with making clothing.

Now that they have separated these off, however, another very large crowd becomes visible:

Many of the men resemble lions and centaurs and other such creatures. Whereas very many others resemble satyrs and other weak and cunning beasts. And they quickly exchange their form [

] and power into one another.
     (291a-b)

These turn out to be "the greatest impostors of all the sophists," and in order to distinguish them from the statesman, the stranger distinguishes different types of government (291c-292a), for it will turn out that the impostors are the monarch, aristocrat, democrat, oligarch, and tyrant. The types are distinguished initially by whether the ruler is one, few, or many. The stranger then bisects the first two of these, monarchy and oligarchy, although he does so not on his own initiative. He merely reports that "people today" employ distinctions such as enforced/voluntary, poor/rich, and lawful/unlawful. The result is five types of government: monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, and democracy (which is called by the same name in both cases).^[27] It is unclear why the stranger confuses the issue by including the distinctions enforced/voluntary and rich/poor, since the only important differentia

[27] Benardete 3.138 notes an interesting parallel: "The number of common names for the kinds of regimes . . . is equal to the number of disguises in which the sophist showed up in the stranger's divisions in the Sophist . The parallel extends even farther. Not only is the one name of a regime (kingship) the only possible name for the correct regime, just as Socrates' cathartics is the one sophistry noble in descent, but the double form of democracy, which hides under a single name, is exactly parallel to Theaetetus' mistaking the double form of the stranger's third division for the third and fourth." The conclusion that Benardete draws from all this seems somewhat anticlimactic, however: "Young Socrates learns that the city is the natural locus of all sophistry."

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turns out to be lawful/unlawful, and the other two pairs are not coextensive either with lawful/unlawful or with each other. King and tyrant, aristocrat and oligarch, all are likely to be rich, and their subjects may be ruled equally involuntarily. The stranger's only stated reason for adding the other differentiae appears to be that at the time people made distinctions on the basis of such criteria (291e), and bringing the criteria into the discussion enables him to dismiss them. In fact he will go on to dismiss all three "fashionable" criteria as irrelevant to the definition of the statesman (298a-299b), but the lawful/unlawful distinction turns out at least to be relevant to distinguishing other kinds of rulers (301a-c). It is worth noting, however, that the other two criteria, force and wealth, correspond to the lower levels of the tripartite soul. They therefore represent ways that the dictates of reason can be subverted.

Since statesmanship was agreed to be a kind of science, "the boundary between the statesman and his rivals is not 'few' or 'many,' nor 'voluntary' or 'involuntary,' nor 'poor' or 'rich,' but some science" (292c). And indeed to the extent that we attain to this science the symmetrical technical divisions according to the longer way (few/many, voluntary/involuntary, poor/rich) become inadequate and irrelevant. The only criterion that really matters is that of goodness:

As long as they employ science and justice and preserve it [the city], changing it from worse to better as far as possible, this must, at that time and by those measures, be for us the only right regime. All the others, we say, must be said to be not genuine nor really existent [in their own right], but imitating this one. Those that we speak of as having good laws imitate it more nobly, and the others more basely.
     (293d-e)

So instead of the five forms of government that "people today" distinguish by relative measure, there is really only one, determined by the mean (301a). As far as its imitations are concerned, distinctions of value are now anything but irrelevant to the stranger's method of definition. That was already implicit in earlier passages, but now that he has replaced the value-free method of division by relative measure (equal halves) with the value-grounding mean, in the above passage it becomes in a sense the only relevant distinction.

6. Distinguishing the Statesman (293e-305e)

The stranger had said that if someone possesses the science of the mean, the distinctions between few and many, voluntary and involuntary, rich

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and poor are irrelevant (292c). A more controversial claim, that it is also irrelevant whether such a ruler rules with or without law, is with caution introduced more gradually. It is not mentioned at all in the passage referred to above, and at 293b it is only hinted at with the words, "in accordance with writings or without writings." Not until 293c does the stranger specifically mention the irrelevance of law, at which point young Socrates responds by saying only, "Fine" (

). The implications do not sink in until the stranger's next speech, in which he says that, as long as it is for the good () and in accordance with science and justice, the statesman may undertake such actions as killing or exiling citizens (293d-e). Only at this point does young Socrates reply, "The rest of what you said, stranger, seems moderate []. But the statement that it is necessary to rule even without laws sounds rather difficult" (293e). Even at this late point the stranger feels that young Socrates is rushing him: "You anticipate me a little," he says.

However outrageous the claim may seem, it follows necessarily from the doctrine of the mean, for the mean is not something that can be formulated into writings. Just as the flexibility and responsiveness of oral teaching makes it in principle superior to written teaching (Phaedrus 275d-277a), and the greater pliancy of the shorter way makes it ultimately preferable to the rule-bound longer way, so too is the science of ruling (like Aristotle's phronêsis ) superior to any set of laws:

A law would never be able, by comprehending accurately what is best and most just for everyone at once, to enjoin what is best. For the dissimilarities among human beings and actions, and the fact that nothing is ever, so to speak, at rest in human affairs, do not allow any art to declare a simple rule in any case regarding all people and for all time.
     (294b)

In this respect the statesman is like a physician or ship's captain, and the stranger shows at length the absurdities that would result from having these two professions supervised by the rich or the many, or from subordinating them to strict written laws of practice. Young Socrates is persuaded: "It is clear that all the arts would be completely destroyed" (299e).

The stranger does, however, address young Socrates' concerns about rule without law, by distinguishing between two kinds of lawlessness. Although rule by law is inferior to rule by science, it is superior to the abrogation of law for the sake of profit or individual favor. One who overrides the laws without doing so on the basis of science does so

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on the basis of ignorance and desire (

, 301c). As in Republic Book 9, this embodiment of desire is the tyrant. On the basis of the above distinction, the stranger divides all the unscientific forms of government first into three—rule of one, few, or many—and then each of these into two: with law or without law. It seems at first that he is reverting to the technical, value-free kind of distinctions characteristic of the Sophist , but then he proceeds to rank them in the order of their relative goodness (302b-303b): "Monarchy, then, when harnessed within good writings [], which we call laws, is the best of all six. But without law it is difficult and the most oppressive to live with" (302e). Nothing is said about monarchy with bad laws. The reason for this appears to be that only "good writings" are called laws. As attempts to imitate science, laws are good to the extent that they succeed in imitating it; and to the extent that they fail to imitate it, they cannot be called laws at all.

When a government is lawful, the stronger and more effective it is, the better; and when it is lawless, the reverse is true. The strongest government is monarchy, followed by oligarchy and democracy. Accordingly, when governments are lawful, monarchy will be best, oligarchy next, and democracy third; but when they are lawless, democracy will be best, oligarchy next, and monarchy (tyranny) last. This is the order of goodness of the six normal constitutions, but the statesman himself is a god as compared with all of them. Since the other six merely "preside over the greatest images, they themselves are such. And, being the greatest imitators and impostors, they turn out to be the sophists of sophists" (303b-c). In this way, the stranger concludes, we can distinguish the statesman from the centaurs and satyrs that were confused with him earlier (at 291a-b). Since satyrs were there called weak and cunning, and since they were traditionally associated with the appetites, they may perhaps be meant to indicate the lawless species, which follow desires . Centaurs, grouped in the earlier passage with animals like lions, are what the Republic classes as spirited , and function there as upholders of the law. So perhaps we may take these terms to refer to the lawless and law-abiding species, respectively.

More important, the stranger has now succeeded in doing what he failed to do adequately in the Sophist : he has provided a convincing criterion for distinguishing between the genuine knower and the sophist. It is no longer a question of what kind of images (

) they produce in their words—whether accurate (likenesses) or inaccurate (semblances). We saw that in the Sophist many of the problems initially ascribed to

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the concept of "semblance" ended up being spoken of in terms of "likeness" and "image" generally, although the stranger never called attention to this in a thematic way. Any image is always at a remove from reality itself. Accordingly, here in the Statesman the stranger no longer castigates the sophists because they produce inaccurate images, but because they produce images at all , whether accurate or inaccurate: "Because they preside over the greatest images [

], they themselves are such. And, being the greatest imitators and impostors, they turn out to be the sophists of sophists" (303b-c). They do not fall short because their images are inferior. On the contrary, they preside over the "greatest images" and are the "greatest imitators"; even the monarch who rules "with good writings" is not exempted from the stranger's attack. The problem is that they provide only an image, an imitation, of the principle of goodness; and images, because of their inflexibility, necessarily petrify and distort the unformulaic nature of goodness.^[28] The statesman, by contrast, who possesses the science of the mean, embodies goodness within himself and does not need to distort it in inflexible formulations. As we saw in section 10 of the chapter on the Theaetetus , wisdom is not only a matter of intellectual knowledge (i.e., images of reality), but a way of being: at the highest level, what we know and what we are coincide, in precisely the same sense that Aristotle would later argue that the good in particular cases can be known only by a good person. Moral forms can be grasped only as far as we can experience moral truth within ourselves, and this means freeing ourselves from attachment to the pleasures of appetite and ambition. Precisely this is impossible for the sophist, whose enterprise is inseparable from these passions (as the preliminary divisions of the Sophist reminded us). The mark of the science of statesmanship, then, which distinguishes the statesman from impostors, is the same as the mark of any true science or techne: it is the ability to discern the mean, the best course.

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It is no accident that the weaver division lumps together the acquisitive/productive distinction (279c) that was so central to the Sophist , for sophists are no longer to be understood only in terms of acquisitiveness, as in the Republic and earlier dialogues, nor in terms of their products, as in the Sophist itself. They are rather those who imitate the one who knows, but without the science of the mean, by which the latter knows what is good. It is not that the imitations (images) produced by sophists happen to be merely semblances rather than likenesses, but that, lacking the science of the mean, it is impossible that their products be otherwise. Just as the Sophist completed the project of the Theaetetus by introducing the conception of universal kinds, the Statesman completes that of the Sophist by introducing that of goodness.

Once again the stranger sees a group from which the statesman still needs to be separated. The task is compared to the refining of gold (303d-e), the separation of more precious from less precious metals, what is of greater value from what is of lesser value. The baser impurities have already been removed, so that everything that remains (types of political episteme) is valuable (

). These are the arts of the general and the judge, and the royal rhetoric that is in the service of justice (303e-304a). "By means of music we must attempt to make [the statesman] clear," the stranger says (304a). When it is a matter of learning music, or the handicrafts in general, there is always another science by which we can decide whether we ought to learn these or not, and that therefore governs and rules over them.^[29] Thus the science that decides whether to use rhetoric or force takes precedence over the science of rhetoric, and the one that decides whether to make war or peace supervenes over the science of making war. These evaluational roles belong to statesmanship, which, in a different way, supervenes over jurisprudence as well, for the judge is bound by the statesman's laws (304b-305d). The highest science is thus distinguished from the technical sciences by its status as a science of valuation.

In the Republic (332e-333d) Socrates argues that justice does not in itself do anything; at best it governs something else that is an activity. It we insist on specifying a function for justice, it will turn out to be something absurd, like the guarding of money when the money itself is not in use. Here, too, the stranger has separated the statesman's science of justice from any specific kind of action. It is the art that decides when

[29] Why did the stranger single out music in particular? Is it a reference to music's role as a sensuous symbol of the divine?

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and how the others are to be used: "The art that is really kingly should not itself act, but should rule over those that are able to act, recognizing the right time and wrong time to begin and urge on the greatest things in the cities. And the others should do what it orders" (306c-d). Statesmanship thus weaves together the other arts (306e). Just as the weaver oversees all the arts that are contributory to weaving and exist for its sake, the statesman oversees all these contributory arts of service (except the "imitators"), for they all exist ultimately for the sake of the polis. The polis is their purpose, their reason for being, and therefore the ultimate referent of their value.

At this point the statesman has been fully distinguished from his rivals. Here, as earlier, we can see that although the stranger pretended that bisective division was no longer possible, it could well have been applied if he had chosen to do so. Figure 15 (which incorporates the earlier bisective classification of "servants") both illustrates how this might have been done and gives an overview of the statesman in relation to his various rivals.

The statesman, it seems, is ultimately found within the form of "servant," although this is never stated precisely. The stranger says only: "But I don't think I was seeing a dream when I said that somewhere in this realm would appear those who most of all dispute about the claim to statesmanship. However it would seem to be extremely strange to seek them in some subservient [

] part" (290b-c). It is not dear whether "those who most of all dispute about the claim to statesmanship" includes the statesman himself or only his rivals; but since the statesman is distinguished from his rivals only within the last genera, he must be present in the same class to begin with. A little later the stranger says that the priest's and diviner's arts "both are somehow parts of the art of service [] . . . . So finally we seem to me to have caught on to a trail that leads where we are going" (290d). The traditional king will be found in this region as well (290e-291a ff.); and if he is a servant, then so must be the statesman. That is not surprising, since the ruler is in the service of the state (the only true masters, as the myth showed, are divine: cf. 274e-275a). The Republic makes it clear that any practitioner of an art or science serves what the science is about (1.342c-d).

Whether the class of servants is, in turn, to be found within the class of causes in general ("contributory causes and causes") or only contributory causes was, as we have seen, ambiguous. The ambiguity is appropriate, for although on one hand it is clear that the statesman and

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Figure 15.

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those whom he supervises are related as primary cause to contributing causes, on the other hand everything was said to be a contributing cause in some sense (287d). According to the Phaedo the only true cause is the purpose, the good, to which every other kind of cause is merely instrumental (98b-99c). In the same way the statesman, although in one sense the author of his instructions, is in another sense an acolyte of the mean, and his activity is the transmission of the good into the city.

This final diaeresis is problematic in another and more fundamental way as well. By distinguishing statesmanship as a science that supervises rather than acts directly, the dialogue has in fact come full circle back to the opening steps of the first diaeresis, where the science of statesmanship was differentiated from other sciences as being intellectual rather than practical (258d-e), directive rather than critical (260b), and originary rather than transmissive (258d-261a). Some of the same language is even used. Statesmanship was distinguished from the productive or practical arts (

, 258d-e) in step I of the shepherd diaeresis, and is now distinguished from arts like those of the general, rhetorician, and judge in the same terms (, , 305d)—even though such arts should not be able to appear within the region that remained after step 1. In step 2, where the statesman was classified as directive, the word used (, 260b) is a form of the term for "to order" (); here another form of the same word is used when the stranger says that the practical arts must follow the orders (, 305d) of the statesman.

How is it possible that a division that begins as an explicit continuation of the shepherd division (287b), ends up by subsuming within itself the opening steps of its predecessor and thus giving birth to its parent? This phenomenon, of earlier differentia reappearing within later species that ought to exclude them, was the besetting sin of the beginning and end of the shepherd division (step 2, and step 9 of the shorter way), and its multiple appearance there now seems to have been a foreshadowing of its grander manifestation in the whole sweep of the dialogue: not merely as a redundant step (as in the shepherd division) but as a great circle. Earlier the stranger had spoken of "going around in a circle" (

, 283b) with reference to the weaver division. The weaver division was not in fact circular, and the stranger's phrase was nothing more than a hyperbolic metaphor for taking a roundabout route. But it can be taken quite literally as a foreshadowing of the fate of the statesman diaeresis, of which the weaver diaeresis was said to be a paradigm.

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This circle is the most extensive manifestation of the tangles that we have witnessed throughout the dialogue, and that bear witness to Plato's belief that no definitive mapping of reality is possible. The multiplicity of ways that things are related to one another means that any such map will be characterized by arbitrariness or inconsistency, or both.^[30] The longer way of diaeresis attempts to produce just such a map, but that technique can never be final, however much it can be useful. Even in the Sophist we saw that the sophist can be defined in many ways—ways that lead to very different conceptions of his nature—depending on our starting point and how we divide up the territory. We should not forget that the Phaedrus , where the method of the longer way is first introduced (265e-266b), is also the dialogue that most strongly warns of the impossibility of adequately capturing reality in writings (275c, 276d). Rather than there being a single hierarchy of precedence and subordination, of presupposition and entailment, the overarching circle of the Statesman illustrates that any place that we begin can lead us to any other place, once we know what we are doing.

Plato was never one-sided: he always recognized the importance of methodological rigor, but he also always recognized its limitations. Methodical rigor is important for leading us out of the Cave, up from eikasia , the lowest level of the Divided Line, through pistis , and to mastery of deductive thinking, dianoia. But when it is time to pass from dianoia to noesis we must pass from the rigidity of deductive rigor to something more flexible and fluid. Just as the rule of the statesman supersedes the rule of law because laws are too rigid to apply in a nonarbitrary way to the realities of life, so too the fluidity of the shorter way of thinking, guided by the mean, supersedes the rigidity of the longer way, guided by the artificial rigor of relative measure. The relationships within reality are too intricate to be captured in a formal way. In one way or another the limitations of formal and systematic theorizing, such as were exposed in the first part of the Parmenides , will always reemerge.

7. The Nature of Virtue (305e-311c)

"That a part [

] of virtue is opposed to a form [] of virtue is very easily attacked by those who dispute about words, according to the

[30] Cf. Joseph Novak, "Plato and the Irrationals" (Apeiron Vol. XVI [1982] pp. 71-85 and Vol. XVII [1983] pp. 14-27): "Plato is using the operations with irrationals as a model for establishing divisions which are to terminate in definitions . . . [J]ust as the exact numerical value of an irrational quantity and the nonterminating algorithm, so a Form can never be definitively articulated on account of enormously complex relationships revealed by a division . . . [A]t 266A the Stranger asks Theaetetus and young Socrates to make a division . . . 'by the diagonal and again by the diagonal of the diagonal' . . . This reference to division by irrationals, beyond the obvious pun, probably makes reference to the way irrationals function as a model in division" (21-2).

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opinion of the many," the stranger says.^[31] Nevertheless, he continues, it is dear that courage and moderation are often, in a certain way (

), fiercely opposed to each other (306a-b). The qualifying phrase "in a certain way" is important; but it tends to be overlooked by those who see in this passage a divergence from the doctrine of the unity (or at least compatibility) of the virtues, found in the Phaedo and Republic . In fact there is no divergence except nominally (i.e., for "those who dispute about words"). The doctrine continues to be maintained in the Laws (963c-965d). In the Phaedo Socrates distinguished between the nature of courage and moderation when they exist in their ordinary sense and when they follow from philosophical purification (68c-e). Only in the latter sense are they truly virtuous and unified. And in Book 4 of the Republic they are compatible only when they are defined in a very sophisticated way. Someone is courageous

when his spirited part preserves, through both pains and pleasures, the instructions of reason about both what is to be feared and what is not . . . . And is he not moderate by the friendship and consonance of these same parts [the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive] when the ruler and its two subjects agree that the rational part should rule and they do not rebel against it?
     (442b-d)

This conception of virtue, like the more specialized one in the Phaedo , is meant to reflect a philosophically purified condition, one in which reason rules. It is not intended to deny that in normal parlance what we mean by courage is fearlessness and what we mean by moderation is restraint, nor that these two are normally in opposition. On the contrary, the Republic too affirms that "a gentle nature is opposed to a spirited one" (375c).^[32] It is with these normal senses that the discussion in the Statesman begins, and the discussion will, like its predecessors, point to a refined form of these virtues in which they are compatible

[32] Cf. Guthrie 5.191.

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with each other. That they are not meant to be ultimately incompatible was already dear at the beginning of the trilogy, when Theodorus recounted his surprise at finding them united in Theaetetus—something that he had not expected to be possible (Theaetetus 144a-b).

Even in their normal senses courage and moderation are virtues, although not unqualifiedly so. Courage is not the same as recklessness, nor is moderation the same as apathy. They are virtues because they are good, even in their unpurified state. Statesmanship, like any other art, can create good products only by using good materials. Just as the other arts discard bad materials and use only the good ones, statesmanship discards "those characters that lack the power to share in courage and moderation, and whatever other qualities tend toward virtue" (308e). The others, which "tend toward godlessness, violence, and injustice, carried away by the force of a bad nature, it removes by punishment with death, exile, and the greatest dishonors [

] . . . . And again those who wallow in ignorance and extreme abasement it yokes to the genus of slavery" (309a). However things may stand with the art of diaeresis, it certainly could not be said of the art of statesmanship that "it honors [] all equally" (Sophist 227b; cf. Statesman 266d).

Even though courage and moderation in their normal sense are good, and therefore virtues, they are not completely so. In the strict sense they can be said only to "tend toward virtue." The moderate type "lacks drive and a certain sharp and active quickness," and may even be simpleminded; while the courageous type "is lacking in justice and caution" and "inclines towards brutality" (309e, 311a-b). The statesman's job will be to weave these two natures together as the literal weaver does the warp and woof (and in a way analogous to the philosopher-king's weaving together of the appetitive and spirited natures), and thus remove their initial incompatibility.^[33] Since the human soul comprises both a divine and an animal part, there will be both a divine bond and a human one (309c). By the divine bond the stranger means "that when the really existent true opinion, together with constancy, about the beautiful, the just, the good, and their opposites comes to be in souls, it comes to be as divine [

] in a godly [] race" (309c). When

[33] Benardete 3.112 suggests that "since the warp, or vertical threads, which is kept distinct on the loom, stands to the woof, or horizontal threads, which must be packed tightly together, as courage to moderation, the stranger seems to imply that moderation must be adapted to courage and not vice versa."

Paul Friedländer writes: "Is not the art of weaving as practiced by the true statesman a copy of the world 'bound together' by the law of proportion (Timaeus 31b et seq .), the 'living garment of the deity'?" (3.290-91). Cf. his n. 24 (3.528) on the theme of the "'world fabric' . . . in the beliefs of different peoples."

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this is present, virtue is consummated, and the courageous type "is made genre and is most willing to share in the just things," and "the orderly nature . . . is made really moderate [

], and wise" (309d-e). It is dear then that the kind of moderation that is opposed to courage is not "really moderate," and the present analysis does not contradict in spirit those of earlier dialogues. As in the Republic , virtue in the fullest sense is possible only in conjunction with truth about the good and beautiful.

The human bond will be intermarriage—an ironic conclusion to a dialogue that began by defining humanity as noninterbreeding. Instead of marriages being arranged as they now are for the sake of wealth or power (310b)—that is, the lower levels of the tripartite soul—they will be arranged for the sake of virtue. By interbreeding the courageous and moderate types, the statesman will hope to produce fully virtuous offspring in which both qualities are combined. The trilogy ends as it began, with the extraordinary nature exemplified by Theaetetus. It is not impossible that the Theaetetus's dramatic emphasis on parents and offspring is a foreshadowing of this—but only in part, since that function would be unintelligible before the trilogy was complete.

The two types would not normally marry—are naturally noninterbreeding—since like is attracted to like; but their mutual repulsion can be overcome by means of the divine bond. If both have the same opinion about the beautiful and the good, then they will no longer be incompatible. Thus the statesman weaves them together by "co-opinions, that is [

], honors, dishonors, opinions, and the giving in marriage of pledges to one another" (310e). This bonding of the opposite tempers within the higher yoke of the state is a political version of the epistemic method of hypothesis. Each type, by itself, relies on a thesis whose consequences are in some sense disharmonious. The view that raw courage is good cannot be reconciled with the fact that it leads to brutality, injustice, and even madness (310d). And the view that simple moderation is good cannot be reconciled with its tendency to lead to passivity, simple-mindedness, and even to sloth and mutilation (310e). The one-sidedness of each hypothesis is overcome by a higher—truer—hypothesis or opinion about the good, according to which each of these appears only as a partial consequence. Here, as in the Phaedo and Republic , the journey can come to an end only with a vision of true goodness. The method of division and the method of hypothesis converge in the form of the good: the latter by the overcoming of incompleteness, the former by the shorter way of dividing by the mean rather than the average.

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