Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Plato does not make it easy for us to understand him. In the description of the good city above, the words are not Plato’s, but Socrates’s. As Simon Goldhill reminds us, Plato is full of “ironic hedging and careful withdrawal behind a mask (or two).””’ Plato never appears in “Plato,” as Goldhill says: “Plato names himself as absent from the scene of Socrates’s last conversation, and in his dialogues he offers a play of different masks, from the intimate impersonation of Socrates in the first-person to the studied anonymity of the Athenian stranger.’ (How is philosophy (to be) internalized?) Plato is veiled-absent and all-seeing-in Nonetheless few would disagree that when Socrates speaks, something, at least, of what Plato believes comes through. There is much that is ironic and humorous in the Republic’s description of the good city. At times Socrates admits that he is not at all sure what comes next, and at the critical moment in book 6, when he is discussing the idea of the good, which is the source of the wisdom that makes the good city possible, he eludes the definition of what exactly the idea of the good is, disconcerting his hearers by using the simile of the sun, but not explaining exactly how it works. With all its hesitations, false starts, and dead ends, it is hard to think that Plato is describing a totalitarian state, which in all historical instances has been presided over by a tyrant, Plato’s anathema, even though some of the Plato’s rules are indeed coercive.193 They coerce, however, the rulers far more than the ruled, and seem designed to avert rather than create tyranny. In any case, however playful the whole adventure of designing a good city is, allowing some to think his boldest proposals, such as the equality of women, are jokes, surely in the end Socrates wants his hearers to take his experiment seriously, and, if implementing it is not possible, “perhaps there is a pattern [paradigm] of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen.“194

  We should remember that the whole experiment of creating “a city in words” was designed in the first place to make clearer to his two interlocutors, Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, the nature of justice in the soul by showing it in larger scale in a city. The Republic operates at many levels and is attempting to do many things, but at one fairly obvious level it is Plato’s attempt at the conversion of Glaucon and Adeimantus to virtue in their own souls. Conversion is not too strong a word. The very heart of the dialogue, the parable of the cave in book 7, is about someone living in a cave and seeing only shadows cast on a wall until he is taken to the upper world, reality itself, and seeing the sun, even though he must be induced to descend to the cave again to help those condemned to live there. In the Republic the religious intention runs parallel to the political at every point, and we must always read it with an eye to several levels of meaning at once.

  But if Plato is no conservative when it comes to political structures or moral conventions, what is even more revolutionary about him is his rejection of the central Greek cultural heritage, exactly what conservatives are supposed most lovingly to hold to their breasts. Homer, the teacher of the Greeks, is ignominiously expelled from the good city, and with him Hesiod and the great tragic poets as well. Why is the defining literary tradition of Greece expelled from the good city? Because its form is poetry and its content is myth. Luc Brisson argues that Plato was the first to distinguish between muthos and logos, between myth and rational argument, that before him muthos and logos were virtual synonyms, both meaning a story or an account.195 Brisson describes the critical distinction that Plato made: “By contrasting mythos to logos as nonfalsifiable discourse to falsifiable discourse and as story to argumentative discourse, Plato reorganizes, in an original and decisive way, the vocabulary of `speech’ in ancient Greek, in accordance with his principal objective: that of making the philosopher’s discourse the measure by which all other discourses, including and especially that of the poet, can be

  Myths are inherently unreliable because they recount stories, not arguments, and because the stories they recount, handed down orally, occurred so far in the past than no one can possibly know if they are true or not. Plato was of (at least) two minds about the distinction between orality and literacy, sometimes arguing as in the Phaedrus, for example, that the truth can only be transmitted orally, but insisting in the Laws that all children be taught to read and write and that the laws themselves must be written.197 With respect to the very important myth of Atlantis in the Timaeus, Plato holds that, though it was for a long time handed down orally (it recounts events that occurred 9,000 years previously), its reliability rests on the fact that it was written down in Egypt long ago. In any case the myths that Plato would dismiss were handed down orally by Homer, from whom Hesiod and the tragic poets drew (there are those today who think the tragedies were first composed orally and only later written down), and this is part of their unreliability. Even more important, however, is the content of the myths, particularly their characterization of the gods as having all the moral defects of humans, often in an exaggerated degree. This cannot be true, according to Plato, and thus the good city must get rid of them.

  Because we have argued that the emergence of theory is critical to the axial transition, we can hardly be surprised that a great axial figure like Plato would rely above all on argumentative discourse and not on mythic narrative, and he often says that this is exactly what he is doing. Yet his blanket rejection of a poetic tradition that much of the world treasures to this day staggers the imagination. Plato himself says, in book 10 of the Republic, that since childhood he has loved Homer and still stands in awe of him. But this only emphasizes the radical and violent nature of his rejection. Hans-Georg Gadamer summarizes the charges: “[Homer] is said to be a sophist and magician who produces only deceptive appearances of things. And what is worse, he ruins the soul by stirring up in it the whole range of its passions.” After pointing out that Aeschylus had engaged in an effort to purify the myths by presenting the gods as exemplars of morality, not immorality, Gadamer says that Plato was going much further:

  Plato’s criticism is no longer poetic criticism of myth, for unlike the poets he does not preserve ancient poetry in a form purified by criticism. He destroys it. To that extent his criticism becomes an attack on the foundations of Greek culture and on the inheritance bequeathed to us by Greek history. We might perhaps expect something of this sort from an unmusical rationalist but not from a man whose work itself is nourished from poetic sources and who cast a poetic spell which has enthralled mankind for thousands of

  Charles Kahn confirms Gadamer’s point: “Plato is the only major philosopher who is also a supreme literary artist … Plato is the only Socratic writer to turn this popular genre [the dialogue] into a major art form, in rivalry with the great works of fifth-century Attic drama.””’ Kahn gives us the clue to how Plato, the great poet, can reject the entire poetic tradition. Plato, as I would expect in terms of my argument about the axial transition, by no means rejects the mimetic and the mythic-indeed, he sees that without them he can never make his theoretic insights effective. What he rejects is not the mimetic and the mythic as such, only the entire tradition of them! Plato would abandon Homer and Hesiod, Aeschylus and Sophocles-and replace them with what? The Symposium ends with most of the participants in the previous night’s discussion awaking with hangovers, only to find Socrates and Aristophanes engaged in argument, as though they had never slept at all. And what was the argument about? Whether the same man could write tragedy and comedy, with Aristophanes saying it would be impossible and Socrates arguing that it should be possible. And who was the man who wrote comic tragedies or tragic comedies?

  So Plato, the man who rejected tradition (and so can in no way be called conservative), knew that humans cannot live without tradition. What he created was a new tradition (oxymoron though that is), one in which Socrates replaced Achilles, and his own dialogues replaced the epic and tragic poets (we might add, in size as well as contents). Did he pull it off? Not completely, to be sure, and thank God for that, but he
did indeed establish his new tradition, one that continues to our day. For any lesser man (and who could we name as greater than Plato), the very project would be that of a madman. Yet Plato was not mad. In the scope and depth of his thought he can be compared, perhaps, to only one man, his pupil, Aristotle.

  But we need to say more, though not much more, about how Plato kept the mimetic and mythic aspects of tradition along with the theoretic. (And we should not forget that Plato did not reject all of his Greek inheritance: Heraclitus and Parmenides escape, not his occasional criticism, but his censure, and he owed a great deal to Parmenides, who, after all, wrote in dactylic hexameters, but neither did he reject the great lawgivers, Solon in particular, but Lycurgus and others. With Solon he even recognized a form of poetry that need not be banned.) Plato knew that education (paideia) was key to his reform effort: a new kind of person had to be educated to make possible a new kind of city. He took the traditional elements of Greek education, gymnastike (not too far from our “athletics”) and musike (including our music, singing, and dancing, but the arts generally) and gave them a new form. With gymnastike his reform was primarily negative: one was not to overemphasize athletic competitions (so dear to the Greeks), because that could lead to the exclusion of what is really important, and even to a kind of sloth. Care of the body remained important so long as it contributed to health, vitality, and good looks, but beyond that it was only a distraction.

  With musike, too, he began with tradition, but then replaced the substance. In both the Republic and the Laws Plato emphasizes that the right kind of music, singing, and dancing (and for children, games) begin the ordering of the soul that makes rational reflection possible at a later age. Book 2 of the Laws is the place where Plato most fully spells out his views on musical education. For example:

  Athenian: So, by an `uneducated’ man we shall mean a man who has not been trained to take part in a chorus and we must say that if a man has been sufficiently trained, he is `educated.’

  Clinias: Naturally.

  Athenian: And of course a performance by a chorus is a combination of dancing and singing?

  Clinias: Of course.

  Athenian: And this means that the well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well?

  Clinias: So it

  Of course the Athenian stranger, who speaks (we think) for Plato, goes on to describe in more detail what moral elements are involved in singing and dancing well. But the experience of participating in a chorus is not just for educating the young; it essential for everyone:

  Education, then, is a matter of correctly disciplined feelings of pleasure and pain. But in the course of a man’s life the effect wears off, and in many respects it is lost altogether. the gods, however, took pity on the human race, born to suffer as it was, and gave it relief in the form of religious festivals to serve as periods of rest from its labors. They gave us the Muses, with Apollo their leader, and Dionysus, by having these gods to share their holidays, men were to be made whole again, and thanks to them, we find refreshment in the celebration of these

  Plato knows that only a few can devote their lives to rational argument, however important that is to the good life for everyone, and that narrativemyth-remains the primary mode of expressing truth.202 Here things get tricky indeed, and I cannot solve arguments that have perplexed many, but Plato, though holding that his “new” myths are on the whole true, or “something like the truth,” or “likely,” and thus provide an important supplement to rational discourse even for the most advanced students, can also admit that he is on occasion lying-for a beneficial purpose to be sure, but still lying. The most famous and most vilified instance is the “noble lie” in the Republic, intended to convince the various classes in the city that their position is “natural.” It is beyond my purpose to get into this argument, except to say that this untrue myth (as opposed to the “true myths,” such as the one about Atlantis in the Timeaus) is, it seems to me, more intended to convince the guardians that their “golden” nature is sufficiently wonderful that they don’t need the metal, gold, or the properties and households that go with wealth, rather than to convince the lower classes, who can have all these things, that they are “naturally” subservient.

  Yet, for all Plato’s distinction between the poetic myths (Homer, and so on) that must be abolished and the poetic myths (his own) that are basic to the good city, there is an element of myth, maybe several elements, that never come to the surface of discussion. It would be unwise to imagine that Plato, in every way so sensitive and intelligent, was unaware of them, but had his own reasons for not pointing them out. For one thing, in the sense of myth as a story or account, never lost in Plato, there is a basic myth in the whole corpus of his dialogues: the myth of the life and death of Socrates. It is this above all that Plato is holding up; it is surely in his eyes a true myth, even when he attributes thoughts to Socrates that he might logically have had though he didn’t actually have them. And Socrates is not an argument; he is a person with a story, a narrative. What does that do to the idea that theory triumphs in Plato? And regardless of whether one thinks it a good or a bad thing if it did?

  There is then the fact that though Homer and Hesiod are thrown out at the front door, they keep sneaking in at the back door. In an interesting essay on poetry in the Republic, David O’Connor points out the poetic allusions that underlie so much of the action. He points in particular to Plato’s use of Odysseus’s “Visit to the Dead” (Odyssey, book 11) as an implicit model for much of the Republic, but for the parable of the cave in particular. After having excoriated Homer’s account of the visit to the dead in book 3 (386a-d), he actually uses it positively in relating the parable of the cave where he cites the Odyssey (516d-e) in support of the idea that one who had once reached the surface of the earth would never want to return to the cave, where all one sees are “shadows,” Homer’s word for the dead in Hades. Homer as banished; Homer as authority (Plato in many dialogues, in passing, cites a line of Homer, often to clinch a point); Homer as subtext for the whole structure of a dialogue. O’Connor also develops Plato’s elaborate use of Hesiod’s “Races of Metal” from the Works and Days as providing the substructure of his account of the various regimes, the kind of human being appropriate to each, and their successive decline in books 8 and 9 of the Republic, an argument well worth pursuing if we had space, but only reinforcing the idea that what Plato threw out so unceremoniously in book 2 remains fundamental to the whole structure of the dialogue, at least subterraneously, or, for Greeks who often knew much of Homer and Hesiod by heart, not so hard to see at all.201 What is that telling us about the relationship of theory and narrative?

  Finally, as Gadamer, Kahn, and others have pointed out, it is the dialogues as the rivals of Homer and Sophocles, the Apology, the Symposium, the Phaedrus, the Republic, even the Laws if read rightly, that pull us into the philosophical life; whereas the arguments are often disconcerting, ending in mid-air, as when Socrates in the Republic just won’t tell us what the idea of the good really is, or the arguments need recasting, often in the same dialogue, sometimes in a later one.204 In his outline of the highest level of education in the Republic, I know that Plato puts mathematics, and particularly geometry, very high, because there the truth is evident to the mind alone and needs no confirmation from the senses, and then he puts dialectic, logical argument, even higher, and here one thinks of Plato’s revisions of Parmenides’s arguments for Being. None of that do I deny. But if that were all, would Plato be Plato?205 Would he not be just another interesting early logician? My point is that the power of Plato is his reform of the whole of what Donald called the cultural “hybrid system,” the system that includes mimetic, mythic, and theoretic in a new synthesis, but not the replacement of mimetic and mythic by the theoretic alone.206 Such a replacement is an experiment that no one central to the axial transition in any of the four cases undertook; that awaited the emergence of Western modernity in the seventeenth century.

  I ha
ve referred to Aristotle as perhaps the second greatest mind of all time, so it would seem churlish not to give him equal or almost equal space with Plato, but we don’t have such space. Aristotle is an effective writer-at times, such as in the Nicomachean Ethics, an almost great one-but he is not the artist that Plato was. What he did, however, with enormous enthusiasm and energy, was to sketch out most of the fields of inquiry that would preoccupy later thinkers, and do it so well that the Middle Ages came close to treating him as a final authority, something neither Aristotle himself nor the ancient Greeks and Romans ever did. Along the way, he rehabilitated poetry (especially admiring tragedy in his Poetics), and he rehabilitated rhetoric, when he saw, if used properly, that it could indeed serve ethical ends.207 He had no need to throw out received myths-in his Metaphysics he saw the early poets’ interest in the origins of things as foreshadowing philosophy-or to replace them with true or untrue myths of his own. Nor did he have Plato’s need to start everything from scratch, relying only on deductive argument-not that Plato really carried out such a project. Aristotle often allowed himself to start from opinion, from common experience, and refine it with critical reflection and argument, but never move too far from the world as given. It would be condescending to say of so great a thinker that he was a man of eminent common sense. Yet the Plato who sometimes seems to be a man of smoke and mirrors, more concerned to startle us than to help us, was not imitated in these respects by Aristotle. There is a long tradition of choosing one or the other of them, as if that involved the choice of two different kinds of life, but I think we need make no such choice: we still need both of them.