Plato's Laws by Author

Author:Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

What can the Athenian mean by his characterization of his as “spoken like a work of poetry”? He is of course not referring to their diction, for he immediately contrasts them with “spoken in verse.” If we look instead to content, we will be struck by the Athenian’s claim a bit later that “the [Magnesian] constitution is constructed as an imitation ( ) of the noblest and best life, and this, we declare, is really the truest tragedy” (817b). But this, even while we will later see that the notion of the best life may indeed be relevant, is the wrong place to focus. In the passage itself the Athenian draws attention to the way, first, the discourses “are spoken” as, second, this presents itself in retrospect to him as, now, a reflective auditor; what’s more, he stresses that they now seem to have been “inspired by gods.” Shouldn’t this encourage us to think that Plato intends the written text to present itself with the force of good poetry, that is, as having the power to waken and inspire in its reader a certain vision that alters and reorients his sense of the way things are? But, to be stressed here, this force emerges not in the particulars—the syntax, for instance, or turns of phrase 16—of the Stranger’s speeches but rather in the way, seen in retrospect, they fit together as a whole; it is only when the Stranger steps back and lets the full set of the day’s discourses come to view together, “gathered, as it were, in close array,” that he is moved to appreciate their poetic force. 17

B. 768d6–8: the interplay of structure and the process of understanding

If we are to share this appreciation, we too must try to step back and see the whole. But how? To see a text whole requires recognizing the distinction and fit of its parts, and at least initially, the immense reach of the conversation resists such structural judgments, making them seem capricious. This difficulty makes the second of our two passages crucial: at 768d6–8, midway through Book 6, Plato appears to give us guiding language for the way in which the conversation, at least from the moment the Athenian takes up the project of founding Magnesia, should be seen in its compositional totality. As we shall see, this language has a dynamism about it that makes it puzzling at first; but this dynamism, I will suggest, proves to reflect the phases of the process by which the text brings the reader to just that sort of visionary experience and retrospective understanding of the whole that the Athenian speaks of at 811c–d.

We should begin by locating 768d6–8 in its surrounding context: the Athenian has twice stressed that a constitution has two fundamental “aspects” ( ), related as part and counterpart: the “offices” ( ) of the state and the “laws” ( ) by which the officers regulate the various practices that fall within their spheres. (See 735a and 751a.) The primary

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.