Conclusion

The Letters is about Plato’s promotion and defense of philosophy, which was perennially endangered in his day. To defend philosophy in writing was always a problem, because, as Plato reminds us more than once in the Letters, it is difficult to write about philosophy. The “labor pains,” which the student must endure in wrestling with the most challenging cosmological and theological problems and all their moral implications, are, in Plato’s words, “responsible for all evils.” To cast writings about these subjects out into the world without sufficient thoughtfulness on this point would be to become responsible for many evils oneself. Plato, for his part, says that he therefore declined to write about the “highest and first things concerning nature” altogether. And even if we grant that this is something of an exaggerated claim insofar as Plato did write about these things for such readers as “are themselves capable of finding them out through a small indication,” we can at least recognize something of the extent of Plato’s self-restraint in writing about them by contrasting the Platonic with the Aristotelian corpus. Perhaps teacher and student differed fundamentally in this case on the question of the possibility of writing safely about natural philosophy, or perhaps Aristotle found that the success of Plato’s project of promoting philosophy opened up possibilities that had not existed for Plato himself. Whatever the case, Aristotle evidently thought it reasonable to go further than Plato did in writing about these subjects, and this remains among the most striking and significant differences between these two philosophic giants.

But Plato did develop his own brilliant and novel way of writing and speaking about philosophy. The possibility Plato discovered and made use of was a result of the Socratic emphasis on the examination of the “What is?” questions regarding the moral and political things. On one hand, the Socratic project of examining and refuting commonsense opinions regarding justice and virtue involved Socrates and his students in perhaps more danger than was typical for Greek philosophers even at this time. On the other hand, this same focus on moral and political questions allowed Plato to highlight the fact that these very questions—which anyone must admit are of the deepest and most urgent importance to human beings, especially once one has been shown by Socrates how deficient one’s supposed answers had been—are not likely to be susceptible of any resolution unless one will engage in a quest for wisdom regarding the human things. The shining ideal of philosophic rule in the Republic was a way of defending philosophy by saying that the happiness or fulfillment we seek in justice, virtue, piety, and generally in devotion to moral or political causes is in fact the subject of yet unanswered questions about the good—and insofar as the answers to those questions are actively sought nowhere but in philosophy, philosophy appears to offer the only possible path to the happiness and fulfillment we seek. The true philosopher, in Plato’s presentation, is the truly just man, the true statesman, the paragon of true piety. If it is the regime that is to arrange our affairs appropriately for the sake of our fulfillment, then it is the philosopher, who has examined and discovered the ideas of the good and the just, who is supremely qualified to establish and govern the regime.

To be sure, Plato also gave ample indication in his Republic that the possibility of philosophic rule is infinitesimal if it exists at all. Even aside from the many obstacles to the establishment of philosopher-rulers, which we have mentioned, there is the question of whether, according to Plato’s Socrates, the real, defective regime taken over by philosophers has any hope of becoming the perfectly good, perfectly virtuous city Socrates holds up as an ideal. It seems rather that this philosophically corrected regime will at best be made as closely akin to the genuinely ideal or best regime as possible, but we never learn in what ways or how greatly the approximation must differ from the model (471c2–473e5, 500d4–501c3, 540d1–541b1). But this does not alter the fact that Plato has allowed the Republic to give the impression that his philosophic utopia might be a real possibility, or at any rate that it would be a tremendous boon to humanity if philosophy and rule should ever, anywhere coincide. By portraying Socrates’s main interlocutors, Glaucon and Adeimantus, as having been persuaded that the appearance of philosopher-rulers is thus to be hoped for, Plato indicates his awareness that the Republic will leave many readers under the same impression and with the same hope.

There is some sense in saying that Dion represents the danger, which Plato invites by publishing the Republic, of creating devoted Glaucons. Dion and Glaucon are of course different. Dion seems to be more fully the “timocratic” man than Glaucon (see Republic 548d6–549a7), less at home in a democracy; Dion is more active and less thoughtful, perhaps less erotic, or in any case less musical. But it is the way in which Dion gets carried away by Plato’s rhetoric concerning the ideal of philosophic rule that is the point here. Plato eventually had to reckon with the danger that the reputation of philosophy in general, and of Platonic philosophy in particular, might be badly tarnished by someone like Dion, who hopes too ardently for the profound fulfillment Plato has described under philosopher-kings, and who has the will and the resources to make a serious—and sure to be disastrous—attempt at bringing it about.

Dion was likely a great ally and supporter of Plato for twenty years following their initial meeting. When Dionysius the Elder died, and Dion saw at last, as he thought, the possibility of philosophic rule present itself in Syracuse, Plato came to be in a difficult bind. The problem with declining Dion’s invitation was not only that the reputation of Platonic philosophy would thus be yoked to whatever catastrophe Dion might orchestrate on his own. There was also the problem that Plato would have publicly turned his back on this man, to whom he owed some considerable debt, when Dion’s hope had only been to accomplish what Plato himself had always famously said would be best for all humanity. If Plato should accept the invitation, he would of course be involving himself and his reputation much more directly in the dangerously imprudent venture. But at least in this case he might be seen as having nobly failed, which is better than to be seen as having coldly rebuffed his friend and repudiated his own doctrine. And after all, what if Dionysius should turn out to have some genuine interest in philosophy? Would it not be a boon to those seeking to live the philosophic life, to Plato and his friends, for Plato to have made such a powerful man his student and admirer?

It seems clear enough from the Letters that Plato made an earnest attempt to make Syracuse a comfortable place for philosophers. The fact that he was at work on “preludes to the laws” during the earliest, most hopeful phase of his visit—that he was attempting something apparently more closely akin to the regime of the Laws than to that of the Republic—helps us to recognize that the Laws itself, like the Letters, was intended in part to serve as a kind of antidote to the Republic. The Laws is an attempt to provide a more realistic, more concrete and practical proposal than the dangerously utopian ideal of the Republic. That Plato was willing to devote such enormous effort to the production of a writing concerning things that must not be “the most serious things” to a “serious man” shows how greatly this antidote was needed.

And let us not understate the extent to which Dion was after all on to something in recommending Dionysius as a prospective student for Plato. Plato lets it be known in the Letters that the young tyrant was neither without aptitude nor without some genuine interest in philosophy. But Dion had failed to appreciate just how rare it is for a human being to become a philosopher—something Plato’s Socrates stresses in the Republic (503b3–10). Dionysius had the advantage of a tremendous love of honor spurring him on toward intellectual achievement. But he seems not to have had enough of an independent, philosophic drive to articulate and to resolve the philosopher’s deepest, most intractable problems. And, perhaps worse, Dionysius was too averse to the cultivation of a virtuous character and sound daily habits. Such character and habits are, of course, always a prerequisite of serious, dedicated study. Still more important, Plato insists that a student’s natural kinship with the elements of a “good nature,” a commitment to attaining the highest fulfillment promised by moral virtue, is necessary for anyone who is to follow the path of Platonic philosophy through to the end.

Plato’s establishment of diplomatic relations between Dionysius and Archytas may have been his most important political achievement in the whole Syracusan affair. These friendly relations were doubtless good for Plato’s and Archytas’s students and friends, at least for a time. Other than that, it is rather an understatement to say that nothing much went well for Plato in this endeavor. But surely, Plato must have approached the entire attempt with the understanding that such would be the likely outcome. The true silver lining here, if it is appropriate to speak of it in that way, is Plato’s writing and publication of the Letters itself. On one level, the Letters is Plato’s attempt to “set the record straight” on his involvement in Syracuse, to give his own account of what happened, to salvage the reputation of Platonic philosophy from the wreckage of this dark period in Syracusan history. This was indeed a difficult task, given the problem of rumor or slander that besets Plato throughout this text. But on a deeper level, the Letters is Plato’s attempt to clarify the meaning of his lifelong project of promoting and defending the reputation of philosophy, of seeking to make philosophy “honored even among the multitude.”