The Argument and the Action of Plato's "'Laws" (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 81 I doubt that a better defense of revisionism for Philebus could be accomplished in Shiner's format. And I would not expect a conclusive defense to appear in any format. We would need a clearer definition of TTF than the middle dialogues allow. They are, as Cherniss urges, rich enough to suggest virtually all the moves that are supposed to be revisionary. A conclusive defense, however, is not necessary. Leaving the later dialogues "to their own devices" (as Owen puts it) has been fruitful in recent years. That should be enough. PAUL WooDRUFF Leo Strauss. The Argument and the Action of Plato's "'Laws." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. vii + 186. $10.75. This book is an apparently simple, but actually labyrinthian, interpretation. The many years of careful reading required to solve its mysteries would be well spent. For it is an incredibly thoughtful work. Strauss claims that the Laws is Plato's most political and most pious work. He interprets Book 10 as its most philosophic part, since it contains a direct confrontation with the gods sanctifying family and civic life. This confrontation cannot culminate in philosophy's victory, for it lacks the knowledge of the good required to supplant those gods as the ultimate moral authorities (pp. 113, 129-30, 148-50, 182-84). Although knowledge is the philosopher's goal, he lives in the realm of opinion, unlike the pious or morally committed who are unable to experience their deepest ties as mere opinions (pp. 45-45, 106, 133,137, 145). Nor can philosophy provide adequate grounds for so experiencing them. Thus a philosopher desiring to guide human life would first need to numb his awareness of his ignorance through intoxication (pp. 33, 95). Informing the political man's piety is fear of the terrifying chaos of possibilities that threatens people unguided by divine law. Philosophic reduction of divine law to something seriously questionable, to mere opinion, exposes men to that "initial and final terror" (pp. 38-41, 104, 171).' Strauss compares the Stranger's education of the two pious Dorians to Cyrus's corruption of his Persians in The Education of Cyrus. In both cases, education encourages tyrannic cravings, passions forbidden by the divine law that commands subordination of one's pursuit of happiness to the sacred duties of fatherhood and citizenship (pp. 15-20, 49, 142--46).z The old Dorians are repelled by the Stranger's willingness to use tyrants to further his aims (pp. 56-7, 72, 155; Laws 711a-b, 712c). For tyranny is rule not sanctified by the ancestral piety of one's city, however "enlightened" such rule may appear. Thus only tyrants need philosophic rhetoric to legitimate themselves; nontyrannic rulers are legitimated by their ancestral piety's unquestioning faith (pp. 3-5).' Since philosophy appears tyrannic on Dorian horizons, the Stranger cannot suggest its open hegemony as Socrates can in his conversation with the immature Glaucon (pp. 35, 38, 75, 83, 181). At best, philosophy might have some influence in a clandestine nocturnal council composed primarily of pious old Dorians (pp. 177-86). Modern scholarship usually deplores such concessions to Dorian piety as unphilosophic or "racist" (pp. vii, 5, 4zl, 47, 76-77, 118, 140--41). Strauss's last three books revolved around the conflict between Socrates and Athenian piety. He interprets the Athenian Stranger as a Socrates who chose exile to execution (pp. 2, 83). Socrates preferred Crete to Athens for the same reason that he, unlike Glaucon, preferred to return to the older, more pious Athens rather than to remain in Piraeus, the impious, cosmopolitan seaport into which foreign gods may be imported with impunity (p. 55; cf. Resp. ' See also Strauss, Thoughtson Machiavelli(Glencoe: Free Press, 1958), p. 167. Cf. Strauss, On Tyranny (Glencoe: Free Press, 1963), p. 194. Cf. ibid., p. 129, n. 50. 82 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 327a-c). Since Crete is more pious it also is more anti-Socratic than the Athens that tolerated Socrates for seventy years. It is stronger in the ancestral piety that philosophy must discredit but that its ignorance prevents it from discrediting. Philosophy is inseparable from the courage to acknowledge its possible inferiority to...