Plato's Stranger by Rodolphe Gasch;

Author:Rodolphe Gasch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

The Statesman

According to the history of its reception, the Statesman has not enjoyed considerable attention; in other words, its historical influence has not been particularly extensive.1 As A. E. Taylor remarks, “since the days of the Neoplatonists the dialogue seems to have been little read […] Perhaps no Platonic work of the same largeness of conception has been so completely neglected by most students of Platonism.”2 For instance, Gilbert Ryle contends that, unlike the Sophist, this “weary dialogue” “does not also tackle interesting philosophical issues, with one diminutive exception.”3 Is this because it is a dialogue that deals with a “practical” subject matter? Those interested in Plato’s conception of statehood generally limit themselves to the views expressed in the Republic and/or the Laws. Written in the interval between those two works, the Statesman undoubtedly makes for difficult reading. Presumably composed after Plato’s return from his second visit to Syracuse, the dialogue has been characterized as bizarre, rambling, and methodologically flawed; some scholars have even believed that Plato did not write it. When it is read at all, commentators have largely tended to focus on this late Platonic work’s refinement of the method of dialectic, rather than on the problematic of the statesman and his peculiar art. This is all the more bizarre as there is an unmistakable parallelism between the philosopher’s knowledge and that of the statesman, both of whose arts consist in interconnecting either ideas or contrary virtues.4 In recent years, however, this situation has changed. The number of excellent studies devoted to this previously neglected dialogue has increased, as has the interest in the complexity of the figure of the statesman and his art.

After having inquired, in the Theaetetus, into the nature of knowledge without achieving a definite answer, the Sophist, the Statesman, and the announced (but never written) dialogue on the philosopher represent attempts to determine three forms of human activity through the specific forms of knowledge that characterize them, thus acknowledging a certain plurality of knowledge. These are sophistike, politike, and philosophical episteme. In the Sophist, as well as in the Statesman, this inquiry into three types of human activity and the three corresponding and distinct forms of knowledge is conducted by a stranger, the xenos eleates. As Cornelius Castoriadis reminds us, xenos in Greek means not only a stranger or foreigner “but also and especially he who receives the treatment reserved to foreigners, that is to say hospitality. There is a Zeus Xenios, protector of foreigners; and xenia is hospitality. Xenos eleates is therefore both the stranger as well as the guest, the invited visitor from Elea.”5 But why, in order to elaborate on the specific nature of the knowledge that characterizes the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher, does Plato need a stranger to perform this inquiry? I have tried to respond to this question in the context of the Sophist, and I expect to address this unique feature of the dialogues—which has drawn very little attention in Plato scholarship—in the case of the Statesman as well.

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