Essay: To what extent is it meaningful to interpret Plato as a fictionalist?

(This is a 4000 word exam paper I wrote a couple of weeks ago.)

Introduction

A common view is that we should take Plato’s ideas as very serious theoretical arguments, to be held up to scientific standards, and, when found wanting, excused on the ground of being ancient and charming. With this strategy of interpretation, most of Plato’s work has to be rejected. The only idea to withstand at least the bulk of such scrutiny, and which for that reason is framed as the great theoretical achievement entitling Plato to his traditionally very high position in the hall of philosophical fame, is his so-called Theory of Forms. This kind of interpretation was introduced as early as with Aristotle, who saw in elenchus something like a rudimentary scientific method, aiming narrowly at logical definitions. The modern heir is the tradition of linguistic philosophy, where prominent philosophers such as Frege and Russell self-identified as “platonists”, referring by that term to a philosophical realism of universals and abstract objects. But this tradition has long since outgrown the connection to its inspirational root, and is generally no longer invested in the issue of how we should interpret Plato.

In this essay, I’ll propose a “fictionalist” strategy of interpretation to challenge the one sketched above, which I’ll call “theoreticalist”. The term fictionalism is primarily meant to suggest that the best measure against which to judge Plato’s work is something else than truth (at least in the conventional sense). My ambition is to persuade the reader that this is a much more profound perspective than one might at first suspect.

I do not pretend to do theoreticalism justice. In fact, I am using it as a straw man position, to lever against in launching the fictionalist interpretation. The point of this essay is not to compare and evaluate the possible ways to interpret Plato, merely to propose and elaborate the fictionalist one.

The original intentions of the historical Plato is not the issue at stake here; for the purposes of this essay, the measure of an interpretation’s merit is simply how much it allows us to take out of Plato’s work – the width and depth opened to us by it. The interpretation is thus given a long leash: It shouldn’t stray too far off course, transforming Plato into something else entirely, but, on the other hand, there is no aspiration to actually capture the real Plato.

I will start out by reminding the reader of how Plato makes Socrates go about presenting his conception of the tripartite soul, as a representative example of Plato’s constructive thought. Then, I’ll point out the difficulties a theoreticalist interpretation of it faces, and go on to introduce the alternative, fictionalist approach, not just to the tripartite soul, but to Plato in general.

The tripartite soul and the theoreticalist attempt to make sense of it

Most of the Republic is directly or indirectly about the tripartite soul. It is introduced by Socrates as an essential part of an argument prompted by Glaucon asking him to substantiate his claim that the just life is better than the unjust life. At first, the idea can only be inferred to by analogy, as the imagined city – which, of course, is framed as the soul or individual “writ large” – gradually gets divided into three different classes.

The first explicit mention of parts of the soul is at the beginning of a long discussion about the education of the ruling class (which at this point included all those who would later be differentiated into guardians and auxiliaries). The talk is there about “the spirited part of one’s nature” on the one hand, and “the philosophic part” on the other (410d)¹, but there is no clear indication yet that this should be taken as anything but a figure of speech. Not until Book IV does Socrates arrive at a theoretical justification of the tripartition, with the abstract argument that “the same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same part of itself, in relation to the same thing, at the same time” (436b), together with the following demonstration that this can indeed be found to be happening in the soul. We “learn with one part, get angry with another, and with some third part desire the pleasures of food, drink, sex and the others that are closely akin to them” (436a).

Later, at 441c, Socrates finds it fit to conclude that “the individual is wise in the same way and in the same part of himself as the city”, and so on with “everything that has to do with virtue” (441d). The analogy is thus secured as a very strong one, and we should expect most of what is said about the one to be transferable to the other. He goes immediately on to introduce the “five forms of constitution and five forms of souls” (445d) – a discussion which is then interrupted and not brought up again until Book VIII. In short, it is an analysis of the one “good and correct” kind of city or man, and four “bad and mistaken” ones (449a). The right one, called kingship or aristocracy, is one where the spirited and appetitive parts recognize the rational part as their ruler, while the four deficient constitutions have one of the other two parts on the throne. Here, Socrates uses very poetic language, saying for instance about the oligarchic soul that he would “establish his appetitive and money-making part on the throne, setting it up as a great king within himself, adorning it with golden tiaras and collars and girding it with Persian swords”, while the rational and spirited parts would be made to “sit on the ground beneath appetite, one on either side”, reduced to slaves (553c).

More often than not, Plato makes Socrates deal with his ideas in a remarkably allegorical way. This is certainly the case with the tripartite soul, and any theoreticalist attempt to extract a precise psychological theory from passages like the ones I’ve pointed to, will either have to be very speculative or be forced to simply disregard a lot of the mythical and metaphorical language because of its inherent ambiguity. Imagery like the Phoenician story about citizens being made with different kinds of metals in the mix (415a) and the mythical creature Socrates makes in Book IX (588c) – these passages will have to be considered theoretically superfluous to the theory of tripartition, and handed over entirely to some other topic of inferior significance, like for instance their usefulness as tools for propaganda. The theoreticalist will thus try to purify Plato’s account of the tripartite soul from his more poetic expressions of it. The backbone of the skeletal remains after such purification is the above mentioned argument about the “same thing” not being willing to “do or undergo opposites” (436b). But it is just too sketchy, and has to meet several major challenges before being able to even stand on its feet. Challenges like the following:

1. Socrates himself says that appetite is multiform and pulls in many different directions. Why then does he not split the appetitive part of the soul in as many parts? And is an undecided state of mind (in the rational part of the soul) indicative of literally being “of two minds” or even more?
2. Where is the self located in this picture? Is it whoever “sits on the throne”? Or is it somehow a more complicated result of the internal power struggle? The self seems to be lost, or at least has become harder to distinguish through Plato’s language, because of his frequent use of personification and dramatization.
3. Are the metaphorical homunculi-citizens inhabiting one’s soul themselves in turn thought to be constituted like we are, in which case they would have to have parts themselves, and likewise with their parts’ parts in turn, and so on in eternal regress? – If they’re not constituted like we are, should we understand them as pure and simple “atoms of the soul”? If that is the case, Plato’s silence on the matter becomes conspicuous.

The theoreticalist narrows Plato’s wide spectrum of ways of dealing with his ideas. A tacit assumption is that his real idea is an unstated theory or the vague beginnings of one, something behind the facade of his antiquated presentations. And no doubt it is done out of respect, as an kind of apologeticism, because the only alternative seen is that he is wrong and must be dismissed as unrealistic. But it is not a given that Plato’s philosophy was intended to be realistic. This is where fictionalism comes in, starting out from the assumption that instead of dismissing the unrealistic aspects of Plato’s philosophy, it is the theoreticalist’s realism in interpretation that should be thrown out.

A fictionalist interpretation of Plato

As most philosophers, Plato distanced himself from association with the antecedent tradition of myth and poetry. These were too ambiguous, and, more importantly, too ethically disoriented. The theoreticalist strategy is essentially to echo and develop this differentiation of Plato’s work from mythos. But this, the fictionalist would say, boils down to a simple anachronistic fallacy. Having traveled through history to a much greater distance yet to mythos from where Plato was, we have to readjust our contrast settings and emphasize instead how similar Plato’s work in many ways was to myth and poetry as practiced in his time. Apart from elenchus, he hardly distinguishes himself at all in terms of the methods he used. Where he did differ significantly was in the aim of his endeavor. The poets aimed merely to create an emotional effect in the audience, and Plato objected to the vulgarity and corrupting effects he saw in this being the design principle of poetry. In his own words:

If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law or the thing that everyone has always believed to be best, namely, reason. (607a)

He doesn’t exclude all the Muses, only the pleasure-giving one. If his critique had been broader than this, one would expect to see a reprimandation of fictionality as such, but, as Ferrari (1989) notes:

Plato never in fact works with this concept, and still less does it have any verbal equivalent in his Greek. What dominates his thinking about poetry (and art in general) is not fictionality but ‘theatricality’; that capacity for imaginative identification which inspired poets and performers and satisfied audiences alike employ. [...] Plato makes poetry through and through an ethical, not an aesthetic affair. (p. 98)

Plato’s critique of poetry was an expression of his wanting to impose an ethical standard on it. Poetry should be submitted to reason, and serve it. What Plato wants to see is poetical means employed to the end of ethical instruction, to manipulate souls from a young age, so that people will learn to find justice sweet instead of indulging and pitying “our faults and frailties” (Ferrari, 1989, p. 112). Poetry’s independence is nothing less than a moral hazard. Plato didn’t censure it because it was inherently evil or inadequate, only because it wasn’t done right. This helps to explain why his own work is full of myths and literary devices, as well as why he chose such a literary genre for his work: He was setting an example.

A natural objection at this point is that associating Plato’s work with fiction in effect diminishes him and trivializes his contribution to the history of philosophy. The assumption is, of course, that fiction is inferior to fact, an assumption that is so ingrained as to have an air of self-evidence. To this, the fictionalist would reply that it is an unwarranted, speculative claim that the guiding line of the philosophical field Plato was involved in even can be, as implied, a selection of expressible facts or theories – the subject matter of ethical or “spiritual” philosophy is far more elusive than that of natural philosophy; the scientific standard is just not applicable to the internal reality of the soul.

But of course, Plato’s philosophy is not without a guiding line of its own, only this is much more vague. If I may dare to speculate: it is an inexpressible “something” that is only hinted at by the word “wisdom”; something which strictly speaking is beyond our capability, and impossible for us to fully reach, but toward which we nevertheless can and should aspire. As Ferrari (1989) puts a closely related point:

[T]here is a sense in which the Philosopher-Painter must remain an imitator, in that he aspires to and attempts to identify with something that he must nevertheless recognize is not entirely him, and from which he must measure his distance – the ‘godlike’ element within him. (We recall that painting is to be contrasted with poetry as an art in which the image and what is imitated are most evidently distinct from – distant from – each other.) It is akin to the thought that Plato conveys in the Laws by calling the social arrangements in the just city, in so far as they are an imitation of the best life, the finest and most genuine ‘drama’. (p. 122)

Does this mean that Plato was suspicious of truth as such, or just within his field of inquiry? It seems very plausible that he did at least acknowledge the possibility of attaining truth in pure, non-empirical fields such as mathematics. But when he comes to use this term in relation to the soul, it seems that he has something else in mind entirely. Ferrari suggests that one might just as well think of Plato as dealing with an ethical definition of truth in these instances (1989, p. 112), or perhaps, I’ll add, a definition with mixed criteria, possibly even a confused mix. In any case, he has a concept of truth far more lenient than truth in the conventional modern sense (which I take to be that of correspondence between statements and reality). To avoid confusion on this point, I’ll avoid talk of truth except where this term itself is the issue. As I see it, it is preferable to replace the term with references to whatever criteria the case might imply, like the classically fictionalist criteria usefulness.

This, then, is Plato according to the fictionalist interpretation: His ideas weren’t intended as theories to be able to withstand the close scrutiny of a theoreticalist, but rather as advice from a wise and wisdom-loving man of great experience, a set of heuristics to promote the good and just life. What Socrates says about the noble falsehoods he encourages the rulers of the ideal city to instruct their citizenry with, namely that these are “a form of drug” that “only doctors” should be allowed to use – this appears to fit very well on most of the ideas Plato himself presents, especially if seen in connection with the above conclusion on the issue of his censure of poetry. Plato is a “spiritual doctor” that shudders at the corrupting misuse of the spiritual equivalent of pharmakon he sees all around him. He makes Socrates voice the same advice to the rulers of the ideal city in the Republic that he simultaneously attempts to demonstrate by example in writing the Republic.

Granted that the ideas Plato deals with is best understood as a special kind of philosophical fiction, how is the line to be drawn between literary fiction and philosophical fiction? How is the latter elevated above the former, if indeed it is at all? In the excellent words of G.R.F. Ferrari (1989):

Witnessing Antigone’s tragedy, hearing of the struggles of Odysseus, we are privy to actions which, however exemplary or revealing they may be, in some sense stand on their own. These things are happening, we tell ourselves, and what, now, shall we make of them? But as the audience of Platonic dialogue we hear talk which, just to the extent that we imagine ourselves present as it is spoken and identify with the ideals it expresses, directs us out again to the world beyond such fictions, telling us that the only reaction to its message which has value in itself is to recreate its ideal in our own lives. The written dialogue itself, then, has, strictly speaking, only instrumental value toward that end. (p. 145)

The more mythical accounts Plato gives of the tripartite soul are thus of vital importance, not merely mnemotechnical instruments submitted to and in the service of the true account, because Plato gives no true account, except in th weak and ethically focused sense mentioned. What Socrates says about the myth he presents near the end of the Phaedo is highly relevant here (content-wise, this myth is unrelated to the tripartite soul):

No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief – for the risk is a noble one – that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation [or spell] (Phaedo, 114d)

This suggests that what he’s prescribing is something like engaging in a religious practice oriented by reason in the direction of the Good. This certainly fits in well with what he says in the Republic about how to manage the people, as when he introduces the Phoenician story:

How, then, could we devise one of those useful falsehoods we were talking about a while ago, one noble falsehood that would, in the best case, persuade even the rulers, but if that’s not possible, then the others in the city? (414b-c)

That Socrates unhesitatingly includes even the rulers among those he would like to see persuaded of this noble falsehood, indicates that the only reason the rulers are above this kind of religious indoctrination, is their ability to see through and inclination to disbelieve such simple stories. One interpretation of this would be that they would remain in a disillusioned state, but, as it were, only by accident, as it is not “the best case” scenario. The fictionalist alternative to this is that they simply have to find a story at their own level of sophistication. And there’s no reason this kind of story has to be similar to the traditional myths, which are shaped to conform with the theatrical tastes of the common people. If formulas or geometrical shapes appeals more to the taste of reason, then such conceptions is what the rational elite should invest their faith in. In fact, it makes perfect sense to understand the Republic as Plato’s attempt to offer just this; a set of ideas suited for the most educated to risk belief in, complete with suggestions for how to translate them to the uneducated – for instance, the mythical creature developed in Book IX: seemingly a translation of the teaching of the tripartite soul into the language of myth, as a didactic device as well as an interesting shorthand for those already familiar with Plato’s thought.

Ethical uprightness is Plato’s main concern. When needed, he is even willing to sacrifice truth (which in this context seems to be used in a sense close to the standard modern sense):

[T]elling the greatest falsehood about the most important things doesn’t make a fine story – I mean Hesiod telling us about how Uranus behaved, how Cronus punished him for it, and how he was in turn punished by his son. Bun even if it were true, it should have passed over in silence, not told to foolish young people. And if, for some reason, it has to be told, only a very few people – pledged to secrecy and after sacrificing not just a pig but something great and scarce – should hear it, so that their number is kept as small as possible. (378a)

At other times, Socrates is less concerned with distinguishing truth from falsehood, like when he argues that we must suppose it to be “true” that the gods register all the justice and injustice of all, and deals out rewards and punishments accordingly, if not within a lifetime, then beyond it (612e-613b). Glaucon’s agrees that we “definitely” should suppose it to be true, although his first response is more moderate: It “makes sense”, he says, and this does indeed seem to be good enough to declare it to be true. These cases, the present one together with the ones mentioned earlier, are no accidents. Plato does indeed give primacy to ethics, and makes this as clear as possible, by claiming that the highest form of knowledge is the Form of the Good, not the Form of the True.

In this way, the theory of Forms is certainly a roof on the edifice of Plato’s fictionalist thought. But of course, this is contested by the theoreticalist, who sees the theory of Forms as the crown of his case. Against this, the fictionalist can point to two further peculiarities with this theory, 1) that Plato resorts to allegory and even myth to explain it, and 2) the mathematical metaphor which is frequently evoked in support of the theoreticalist/platonist version of the theory of Forms, is suspect, as Plato shows no reluctance in using mathematics as just another mythmaking tool, much like the later alchemical tradition made a habit of. There are a couple of examples in the Republic to demonstrate this last point, the most elaborate of which is the following:

On the basis of the tyrant being “three times three removed from true pleasure” in his ranked list of constitutions of the soul, Socrates concludes that “the image of tyrannical pleasure is a plane figure”, which, by being squared and cubed, will reveal “how far a tyrant’s pleasure is from that of a king”. The result, Socrates claims, is that “a king lives seven hundred and twenty-nine times more pleasantly than a tyrant” (587d-e). This hardly makes any sense at all. The basis of the calculation is completely arbitrary, and the execution seems very confused². As before, Socrates confidently declares this suspect reasoning to be “a true one”, adding that it’s “appropriate to human lives, if indeed days, nights, months, and years are appropriate to them”. Glaucon does of course concede that these are appropriate, and appears to be tricked this way into accepting the argument (588a). This is unmistakably a mystical use of mathematics. It has nothing to do with pure logical forms. The numbers and operations are chosen arbitrarily, as if only because they are pleasant to the mind or have the appearance of profundity. What this shows is, again, how mixed Plato concept of truth was – how little he shared the theoreticalists’ concern with theoretical precision. It doesn’t make sense to apply realism to his philosophy in interpreting it, nor even theoretical consistency. These are clearly not the concerns first in Plato’s mind.

Conclusion

Against skeptical scrutiny, would Plato really stand ground as a dogmatist? There are more than enough skeptical traits to his own philosophy to make this seem unlikely. If he had wanted to, he would surely have had no difficulty undermining his own claims – but this would have been inappropriate to do, as it would cause harm to society and to his own soul rather than be of help. In this way, he wasn’t a skeptic, at least not in the purely negative sense. On the other hand, the constructive part of his philosophy was intended as serious and substantial contributions to philosophy, but neither in the systematic/scientific sense or the more plainly dogmatic sense. His is a position that falls between the usual categories. What the fictionalist perspective offers, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, is a name and an explicit framework to capture this middle position. It attempts to be a consistent and comprehensive interpretation to reconcile the negative side of Plato’s work and philosophy with the positive side.

In the fictionalist’s view, Plato is trying to equip us with both the cognitive and conative resources we need to live good lives, as well as teaching us how to wield these responsibly. The ideas involved aren’t guaranteed by reference to eternal truths, except as a useful fiction. The only guarantee is the wisdom of Plato himself.

Philosophy, in Plato’s view, is in the business of edification, of shaping souls to the better (first of all one’s own) by means of wise fictions, employing both logical and mythical form to this end. This appears peculiarly religious, and from our contemporary point of view it may indeed be helpful to see him in continuity with the earlier, religious tradition rather than the later, theoreticalist strand of philosophy founded by Aristotle.

Even if Plato would disagree with the fictionalist interpretation of him as here described, it would still be useful for us in dealing with his philosophy, most of all because it doesn’t require that one accepts his arguments in any strong sense, but can look beyond them as superficialities, and reap the benefits of the undeniably wise works of an extraordinary thinker without having to buy into every word he’s saying. The theoreticalist’s vision of Plato as a crude but original precursor to systematic philosophy is not as attractive on its own, but the questions it raises, like the ones brought up in this essay, are certainly interesting, and answers might develop the particular fictions to higher degrees of consistency, accuracy or palatability. Therefore, it is natural to incorporate the theoreticalist approach to Plato into the fictionalist interpretation, as a special branch of investigation. This way, its questions can be addressed without having the whole of Plato on the line. And even the benefits of its competition can be gained with a fictionalist strategy.

Notes

1. If nothing else is indicated, all references are to the Republic.
2. 729 is the cube of nine, which suggests that the magnitude of the tyrant’s pleasure is nine simple. But if that were the case, the king would only be 81 times happier than the tyrant. The tyrant’s pleasure would either a) have to be one (1), something which does not evoke the image of a “plane figure”, or b) the squaring and cubing of 9 has to be interpreted as cumulative in an unusual way, resulting in the calculation 9^4. In other words, four-dimensional geometry. Or five, if one takes into account the fact that the simple number 9 is called a plane figure. It is hard to believe that Plato had any of these options in mind!

Literature

• Ferrari, G.R.F. 1989, “Plato and Poetry”, in Kennedy, G.A. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1: Classical Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Plato, “Republic” (transl. Grube G.M.A., rev. Reeve, C.D.C.), in Cooper, J.M. (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis. 971-1223.
• Plato, “Phaedo” (transl. Grube G.M.A.), in Cooper, J.M. (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis. 49-100.