In this engaging book, Julia Annas seeks
to get the Middle Platonists (a set of writers presumed to have been working
between the first century BC and the second century AD) back into our
discussions of Plato, and more generally of moral philosophy. Given the fact that most scholarship has a
pretty short temporal horizon, even in the timeless realms of first philosophy,
this is a pretty Herculean task. (Her
own book has 12 references out of 91 in its bibliography dating before 1970;
only one to the nineteenth century.)

Her reasons for directing our attention
to this set of writers include an admirable desire to avoid the parochialism
that attends an exclusive focus on contemporary debates. She argues that there are several ways in
which we can learn from the Middle Platonists the narrowness and possible
perverseness of our present assumptions:

• One
  arises out of her starting point, Arius Didymus’ remark: “Plato has many
  voices, not, as some think, many doctrines.” This is taken to mean that Plato exhibits a range and
  variety of linguistic expression (qualities Plato condemns in Homer)
  mainly for pedagogical reasons. 
  Annas argues persuasively that if we take Plato to be aiming at
  different audiences there is less need to assume the developmentalism that
  is now the orthodox way of resolving apparent inconsistencies between what
  appears to be espoused in different dialogues and of accounting for their
  other philosophical and stylistic features.
• Annas
  also argues that our tendency to give pride of place to the Republic,
  and to see it as primarily a political work, is really a legacy of
  nineteenth century education. Her
  ancient sources do not give it such prominence and they offer a different
  perspective on how we should take the extended excursus into utopian
  political theory that no one can deny plays some role in the argumentative
  structure of the work.
• Another
  contribution they can make is to require us to consider the notion of
  “becoming like god” that they ascribe to Plato as the goal of human
  life. As Annas says, this notion
  has hardly been apparent in most recent commentary on Plato, though it is
  one of his many contributions to the subsequent traditions of Christian,
  especially Orthodox, thought. 
  Annas here criticises her allies for not recognising an
  unresolvable tension within Plato between an anti-worldly ascetic strain
  and the more conventional position that we should cope with this world’s
  goods and evils as best we can. 
  (She notes elsewhere a similar tension in Plato’s thinking about
  “parts” of the psyche: elements that can live together as “friends”
  versus a despotic Reason curbing a many-headed monster.)
• Annas
  seeks the support of her ancient sources in arguing against the view,
  urged for instance by Terence Irwin, that there is a switch from an
  extreme position (that virtue is sufficient for happiness) that can be
  found in the supposed early Socratic dialogues to a less extreme position
  (that the virtuous person is happier than the non-virtuous but may yet
  fail to be happy) in the Republic. 
  She shows how the centuries of debate within Stoicism permitted her
  Middle Platonists to have a clearer grasp of the various positions than
  Plato and Aristotle, while correctly assimilating Plato to the later Stoic
  position.
• Annas
  devotes a final chapter and an appendix to problems with Plato’s
  discussions of pleasure, again arguing that her sources’ unitarian
  assumptions can help us look for alternatives to a facile developmental
  solution to the difficulties.

Whether or not the world is finally
persuaded of the correctness of Annas’ views on these particular interpretive
issues, it is incontestable that she has unearthed from the Middle Platonists
views that deserve a hearing, contributions to a possible understanding of that
most elusive of authors who towers over the beginnings of philosophy in the
West. Indeed Annas is insistent on how
little we know of Plato, of how little anyone has ever known of Plato — she
notes that ‘our oldest biographical “fact” about Plato, which goes back to his
nephew Speusippus, is that Plato’s real father was Apollo’ (p. 29)! For my taste Annas is in fact somewhat too
agnostic. She argues, for instance,
that, since the figure of Socrates served as a kind of patron saint for several
antagonistic schools of later philosophy, what is and was known of him totally
underdetermines any theory of his life and contributions to philosophy that may
be put forward. But one of her modern
sources (A.A. Long) for the emblematic history of Socrates pointed out that
Aristotle apparently did not hold Socrates in any kind of awe (while his
successors in the Peripatetic school indulged in a zealous smear-campaign
against him), so that we do not have that reason for discounting the scraps of
evidence for Socrates’ views and their difference from Plato that Aristotle
offers.

This is just one little example of the
rewarding engagement to which Annas provokes one in seeking a satisfying
construal of Plato’s texts (or perhaps one should say, of those texts currently
attributed to him). (I was pleased to
find that Taylor’s review of Annas in the Philosophical Quarterly, vol.
50 [2000] 109-112, also takes up a case of Annas’ excessive doubt of the
tradition, in particular with respect to Plato’s disillusionment with Athenian
politics.)

It would not be appropriate here to enter
into the various detailed arguments she offers with respect to Plato’s accounts
of “parts” of the soul, the related question of the role of the political
analogy in the argument of the Republic, the eudaimonistic framework
within which she thinks Plato’s advocacy of a profound moral transformation of
one’s life as the outcome of sustained ethical reflection is to be seen, the
dialectical interpretation of the Protagoras’ discussions of pleasure,
her contrasts between the concept of eudaimonia and our conceptions of
happiness, and the many other points that will no doubt give specialists in
ethics and ancient philosophy much to contend with. Suffice it to say that they are there.

The book derives from the Townsend
Lectures of 1997. It seems to follow
the lecture mode fairly closely so there are perhaps more repetitions across
chapters of the main line of argument than are strictly necessary.  But it is a pleasure to read and has its
footnotes where they belong.

© 2002 Ed Brandon

Ed Brandon is, by training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy
position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in
Barbados.

The paperback is available from Barnes & Noble.com:


Platonic Ethics, Old and New