Essays on Plato Quotes

“In later Platonists like Iamblichus, Proclus and Damascius, there is a set of prime units, called ‘henads’—a term that originates in the Philebus—who are unique, proper-named entities, namely the Gods themselves. These henads are ‘in’ the First Hypothesis of the Parmenides insofar as they are each a perfectly unique individual, while the classifications of them according to their properties yield the primary common terms for all of Being, which lies for its part in the Second Hypothesis.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“With respect to astronomy, we know that in his dialogue the Laws, the importance of astronomy is that celestial motion is akin to “the motion and revolution and calculations of reason” (Laws 897c). Thus the role of astronomy in Plato’s argument would have concerned the importance of a certain kind of motion in the cosmos, namely the kind that holds things together and fosters their orderly coexistence rather than their dispersion and disintegration, both individually and in harmonious conjunction. Plato would have sought to demonstrate thereby the way in which a single principle, the principle of unity, could govern all things in a just manner.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Giving something a proper name is how we express its uniqueness, something we emphasize further by the categorical distinction we draw between ‘what’ and ‘who’. If I ask what something is, I expect to be answered with a term that expresses its real or potential commonality with some number of other entities, whereas if I ask who someone or somebody is, I expect to be answered with something designating this entity alone.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In this discussion, Parmenides first posits that the One Itself exists, and what the consequences are for it itself. This is naturally the part of the inquiry which concerns us most insofar as it speaks directly to the nature of ‘the One’. Its result is that every property one tries to assert of the One Itself must be denied, because if the One is also that, then it is no longer One, no longer itself. The final result, in fact, is that the One Itself cannot even be, or be one (141e). This result provokes a certain incredulity, and so Parmenides makes a fresh start with his young interlocutor, and posits instead this time a One which is explicitly a being, with all that comes with that; and in this Second Hypothesis, as it is known, everything indeed comes in, because the One turns out to embrace every attribute that was previously denied it, and its negation. Neither in the First nor in the Second Hypothesis, then, is there room for the One Itself to be a singular item. In the First, the One Itself is nothing; in the Second, the One’s own unity disintegrates in contradiction.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“If we were to consider our friend, however, through the lens of the doctrine of reincarnation, then we would find that all of these restrictions have been lifted. My friend may have been a different kind of animal at some time, or a human with completely different traits. This, I would argue, is why Plato is so interested in reincarnation: because if we accept the thought experiment, it reveals a very important kind of unity: a unit the same while any of its particular attributes vary—an individuality, thus, beyond identity and difference.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Similarly, later in the Philebus (30d) we read that “in the nature of Zeus a royal soul and a royal intellect emerges through the power of the cause”—i.e., causality, agency—“and in other deities other noble qualities, according to which each is called what pleases them [philon … legesthai].” Here there is a chain formed by the Gods’ agency or action, their emergent qualities, and the names or epithets they receive, which are at once “their own” and those which “please them”. In the Cratylus (400d-e), similarly, Socrates states that it is evident that the names the Gods call themselves are true; while our own knowledge of them falls short of this absolute standard, nevertheless “there is a second kind of correctness, as is customary in prayers, that they be named whatever and from whencesoever pleases them [chairousin], and these we call them, since we know no other.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Near the end of a long career in which he had articulated his philosophical doctrines indirectly in the form of dialogues, and in private to a circle of students, Plato decided to make a direct, public statement in the form of a lecture that is known as On the Good. Unfortunately, it does not survive; we know its contents primarily from a memorable account deriving ultimately from Plato’s student Aristotle, who attended the lecture. Aristotle’s brief account dwells on the lecture’s reception, which was not positive. It was not that there was anything distasteful in Plato’s lecture; rather, it seems merely that it was very technical and confusing, and failed to speak directly to the issues his audience expected to hear about in a lecture on the Good. In particular, we are told that his extensive recourse to mathematics, and his final conclusion, that the Good is the One, or Unity, left his audience perplexed and, probably, bored.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“the ‘anti-essentialists’ are quite heterogeneous and in open conflict on certain issues. On the one hand, there are those constituting what Allan Silverman has labelled a new anti-essentialist “orthodoxy”, e.g. Fine, Annas, Moravcsik, McCabe et al.[99] Also classifiable as ‘anti-essentialist’ is a growing body of scholarship that displaces forms as such from a central place in Plato’s ‘ontology’ in favor of unities such as souls and minds (see, e.g., Lloyd Gerson, Knowing Persons; Gerd van Riel, Plato’s Gods). And where in this picture ought one to place the so-called Tübingen school, which displaces the theory of forms in the interest of a doctrine of principles (archai) drawn from the testimonia and careful reading of the dialogues?”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“According to Curd, Parmenides’ doctrine is not numerical monism, which “asserts that there exists only one thing,” so that “a complete list of entities in the universe would have only one entry,” but rather predicational monism, which is “the claim that each thing that is can be only one thing … a being of a single kind … with a single account of what it is; but it need not be the case that there exists only one such thing.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“As Halper remarks, a “primary one”, such as he thinks Plato affirms, “does not make something that belongs to it one; it makes the complex of itself and the other thing a plurality or, to the extent the other has no existence apart from a primary one, it makes the other less than one.”[95] This is, however, a perfectly Platonic argument for why the One neither is, nor is one (Parm. 141e), for it is not a unit but any unit—cf. Halper’s own argument that for Aristotle, “the one”, “the primary one”, “being qua being” and “one qua one” all refer to the nature of any being.[96] The identity of ‘the One’ in the ultimate sense is like the structural “zero symbolic value” of Lévi-Strauss, which if it expresses anything for itself, expresses the purely diacritical determination of the elements of the system.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Shifting from the ‘what’ question to the ‘who’ question pivots the inquiry within henology from structured unity to the structuring (or measuring) agent unity.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“the transition from the reign of Kronos to [25] that of Zeus as recounted in Hesiod does lead to the establishment of a more just order among the Gods, one chiefly operating through persuasion and the balancing of honors (timai) rather than force of will (Ouranos) or calculation (Kronos).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“A God like Apollo has a role internal to his pantheon and also a role mediating between that tradition and certain universal – i.e., emptily formal – epistemic practices; and we can expect that Gods with similar patterns of activity in other pantheons will play similar roles empowering the ‘translational’ practices of philosophy or equivalent discourses.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In the Republic passage, Apollo’s role as exegete is “hereditary” for Hellenes, but Socrates also says that Apollo is “for all humanity the interpreter of [their] hereditary [religion]” (427c). Plato is hardly ignorant that other nations have their own theologies and exegetical practices internal to them. Rather, he seems to assert a special role for Apollo here as a patron of philosophy, though not in the same sense as Zeus, the patron of the philosopher in the Phaedrus (252e–253a). Among the abundant references to Apollo in Plato’s works, most telling perhaps is the etymology offered for his name in the Cratylus (404e–406a), where Apollo is at once the one causing a manifold to “move together” (homopolôn) in harmony, and the one who is “simple” (haplous), that is, rather than complex or heterogeneous. The relationship between harmony in a manifold and the integrity of a unit, whether the city-state or the individual soul, is the very theme of the Republic.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“The Gods, on the other hand, recover their wholeness or autarchy from within the problematic justice of the narrative “state” through the art of esoteric exegesis. In the city of guardians as framed by Socrates, the place of exegete is held by Delphic Apollo, “who, seated at the centre and upon the navel of the earth, delivers his interpretation”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Mortal souls recover their integrity, such as it is, on the festal meadow upon which they must choose their paradeigmata, their life-patterns. Only by briefly recovering in the meadow their individual wholeness can souls, in a moment as free as they can experience, express what they truly find beautiful, what they truly want.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Olympos is not a place, but a regime. Zeus’s problem is to establish a division of labour, of “honors”, timai, a term used persistently in Hesiod’s Theogony and echoed by Plato when speaking of the articulated [99] functions within the state”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“The democratic state, therefore, for all its shortcomings, expresses most transparently the “meadow” in which the souls of all animals choose their life-patterns and form a lifetime bond, a marriage of sorts, with the [98] daimôn who shall be “the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice” (620e).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In Plato’s account, it becomes clear that souls and cities mutually condition one another to the point that statecraft is as much the art of forming souls, and of forming a soul, as of forming a state, these activities being inseparable. Beyond this, the soul is a citizen in the cosmos – even the souls of other animals, which are also, like us, part of the cosmic animal discussed in the Timaeus, the dialogue following on the Republic’s heels. For what is an animal composed of animals (Timaeus 30c–d) but a polity?”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In the Platonic interpretation of the Iliad, the city of Ilios is the material (hylikos) site where the struggle over the status of embodied beauty is staged, and in this respect Homer’s epic already suggests a symbolic identification of the City with the work of art.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Specifically, animal forms in Er’s vision serve to transmute passions into virtues. Ajax, nursing his grievance over the arms of Achilles, chooses the life of a lion, spurning the human form (620b). Plato obviously comments here upon the fit of insane rage in which, in Sophocles’ tragedy, Ajax slaughters sheep and cattle, thinking them the Greek leaders who have disgraced him. A hero become ignoble in the throes of passion becomes here a creature who kills dispassionately to survive. Ajax can more easily manifest virtue as a lion than as a human who would begin from the place where the son of Telamon ended; he can be a just lion who could no longer be a just human.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“The ultimate role accorded to philosophy in the Republic, as supplied by the vision of Er, is to aid the individual in the utterly private and idiosyncratic act of personal demiurgy.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Thus Socrates anticipates the unique paradigm of the individual when he speaks of a παράδειγμα of the city “of one’s own” that may well not be “the city of one’s birth”, but which is “laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen. But it makes no difference whether it exists now or ever will come into being. The politics of this city only will be his and of none other” (Rep. 592ab, trans. Shorey).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In Proclus’ reading, virtues, even traits apparently divine (δοκοῦντα δαιμόνια), and not merely flaws, generate animal bodies in the presence of passion and without philosophy (316.6-25). Agamemnon, an embodiment of kingly virtue, admirable for his patience and perseverance (Crat. 395a), and whom Socrates looks forward to meeting in the afterlife (Apol. 41b), chooses a life as an eagle (Rep. 620b); Orpheus, a transmitter of divine inspiration (Ion 536b), chooses a life as a swan, even as a swan chooses the life of a human (Rep. 620a).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Φύσις is used, e.g., at Rep. 620c, as a synonym for that which elsewhere in Er’s account is more often termed βίος, a life or way of life, namely that structure which, through the choice of a paradigm, the individual brings forth. This structure expresses the different result that follows from one individual choosing a particular paradigm rather than another individual choosing the same one: same paradigm, different life.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“We are reminded of the formulations from the vision of Er when the Philebus states that “in the nature [φύσις] of Zeus … a kingly soul and a kingly mind appeared through the power of the cause, and in other deities other noble qualities from which they derive their favourite epithets” (30d, trans. Fowler, slightly modified).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In the vision of Er (Rep. 614b-621d), souls preparing for rebirth are presented with an array of possible paradigms for lives they might live. The possible lives include those of all kinds of animals as well as all sorts of human lives, and the choosers include those who have just completed human lives as well as those who have been animals. Humans may choose lives as humans again or as other sorts of animals, animals may choose lives as other sorts of animals, and animals may even choose human lives as well. We need not assume that Plato intends us to [312] take this account literally in every respect, but certain things follow if we take it seriously at all—and it is clear enough from the references to metempsychosis in other dialogues,[20] differing in some particulars but not very much, that Plato means us to make something of it, and something more than what would answer solely to the thematic needs of the Republic.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“for Aristotle (Politics 1323b23-26) the God is blessed “not because of any exoteric good but through himself, on account of being a nature of a certain kind,”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In this triangle, the idea is a measure deriving its value from its position in an economy of human and divine in which the human is not opposed to the divine as mortal to immortal, because all soul is immortal, but as forgetful to mindful or unstable to stable.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“The accounts in the Symposium and the Phaedrus thus complement each other: the ascent up the ladder to the pure idea was for the purpose of ensuring that the virtue propagated in the polis was genuine and not counterfeit, because it is the cultivation in the polis of the virtues embodied by one’s patron deity that wins the love of that deity. Instead of the erotic cultivation of virtue in the polis being for the sake of the ascent up the ladder, according to this view it is for the sake of becoming beloved by the God, to which end the ascent up the [84] ladder is also subordinated.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato