Topography and Deep Structure in Plato by Corcoran Clinton DeBevoise;

Author:Corcoran, Clinton DeBevoise;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

War, Conflict, and the Good

In conclusion, Socrates often models the proper spirit, rules, and actions of authentic dialectic using the frame of theomachia, war, martial contests, and wrestling matches. There is a consistent Platonic hierarchy of wrestling allusions throughout the corpus; the hierarchy from best to worst forms of wrestling is upright, ground, and pankration. The ranking parallels the hierarchy of best and worst kinds of argument. One can always ask the Platonic question: does an activity result in increased order or increased disorder? Good conflict results in a kind of sorting, while bad creates chaos. On a deep level, Calliope’s setting limits is exactly the function the Good exercises on being. Her knockout blow to Aphrodite symbolizes victory over a consciousness that is literally unable to discriminate. It is a consciousness that is unable to restrain the unlimited desire for pleasure. The undifferentiated One must be divided in such a way that it preserves order; that is, the Forms must reflect an internal harmony, symmetry, balance, and ratio in their structure, hierarchy, and mixing. This order may be compound and complex, combining many different forms. The conflict inherent in agonistic settings represents in Becoming, through time and space, the compounding and resolution of the Forms of sameness and difference through combative activity.125 Even the Realm of Being, as the level of mathematical incommensurables reveals, inevitably contains incompatible relations of Forms, unless the conflicts can be resolved in a higher synthesis of relations between Forms, and ultimately by the One itself.

Leon Harold Craig’s study of Plato’s Republic, The War Lover, mistakes the purpose of Plato’s obsession with war.126 While it is undeniable that the theme of war is central to the project of the Republic, it is by no means clear that Plato is happy about, or reconciled to, the role of war in history. The number, constancy, and violence of wars have by Plato’s day brought the Athenian state to the edge of the cataract. Conflict is an inevitable result of Becoming, but the kind, degree, and manner of conflict are not. Isn’t the opening of the Republic a model of how wars should be resolved through the use of philosophic discourse? Jill Frank, contra Craig, takes just such a line: “By modeling interactions among political actors who do not resort to violence against the historical backdrop of an extremely violent war, the Republic depicts a different possible future while also arguing for the conditions necessary for such change.”127 As we have seen, the physical compulsion of the first scene is turned, by the last scene, to persuasion through philosophic reasoning and argumentation. At the end, Socrates turns Glaucon back toward the Good, and they are released—a war of reason overcomes brute physical force. Plato acknowledges the value of war, conflict, and wrestling insofar as the activities are metaphors for discrimination (cf. the battle of Ur-Athens and Atlantis), not as metaphors for blind brute force (cf. Thrasymachus’s character in Book I). For Plato, the embodiment of war and wisdom

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