THE DIVINE BOND
- Prescott Johnson
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“it binds . . . with a divine bond … and after the divine it binds . . . with human bonds” — Statesman 309c.
“but the spiritual is the means of all society” — Symposium 203.
“the True City will be called after God, who verily ruleth over men of understanding” — Laws iv. 712e.
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As a young man, Plato witnessed the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404-03 B.C.). Among the oligarchical usurpers governing Athens were relatives of Plato, who urged him to enter public life under their auspices. However, when he saw the corruption of the oligarchy, he declined the overture. The restored democracy was not an improvement in government, for it too was incompetent and corrupt. And it condemned “our comrade Socrates” to death on the absurd charge of impiety, an event that caused Plato to abandon any political aspiration.
For a young man whose family was distinguished in the Athens of the Periclean age, the decision to forego a political career was a fateful one. The ambition of every such young man, of Alcibiades in the dialogue of the same name, was “to become a leading man in the city.” The fate of Socrates, which symbolized for Plato the disintegration of Athens, caused him to realize that the old institutions could not be patched up, that what was needed was a radical remaking of man. Without making man “virtuous,” it was impossible to conceive of “virtue,” or Arete, in the city, or the Polis.
In the beginning, the Greek state was based on a divine foundation. According to Homer, Zeus confers authority on the rulers: “Zeus has given into your [Agamemnon] hand the sceptre and rights of judgment, to be king over the people” (Iliad ix. 98f). In Hesiod the Horai–Eunomia (Order), Dike (Justice), and Eirene (Peace)‑-“mind the works of mortal men” (Theogony 902ff), i.e., represent the basic principles underlying the political community. Heraclitus secures the state in the order of the cosmos: “For all human laws are nourished by one, which is divine. For it governs as far as it will, and is sufficient for all, and more than enough” (Frag. 114).
Within the span of a few generations, this religious foundation of the City was lost. As the Greeks became acquainted with other peoples and different customs, the faith in their own norms as the true and right ones dissolved. The fate of the great personages of the tragic age showed the concept of justice in a problematic light. The “Twofold Speech” of the Sophists made justice and injustice one and the same: what is just at one time may be unjust at another time.
Into this time and world that had lost religious anchorage, Socrates was thrust, an intense flash of light searching for the Dike that had all but disappeared from human sight. His mission, thrust upon him by the god, the daimon, was to search for “what is,” the true meaning of “justice,” of the “virtues,” and, finally, of the supreme “virtue.” His consuming passion was to find again the Dike that had once ruled the city of man. He was assured that it was still written in the nature of things, however hidden. So sure was he that he died for it at the command of the city that, in its disintegration, yet bore for him a witness to the supremacy of Dike.
This was the Socrates whom Plato met. He witnessed, even participated in, the Socratic inquiry into the personal and social meaning of justice and the other virtues. This inquiry gave impetus to his own inclination, as yet vague, “to strive after the commonweal.” Plato must have spoken to Socrates, as does Alcibiades in the Symposium (218d): “To me nothing is more important than the attainment of the highest possible excellence, and in this aim I believe I can find no abler ally than you.” “So I was compelled,,” Plato wrote in his mid-seventies, “praising true philosophy, to declare that she alone enables men to discern what is justice in the state and in the lives of the individuals” (Epistle vii). And he may have heard the words that he ascribes to Socrates speaking to Alcibiades: “Without me it is impossible for all those designs of yours to be crowned with achievement; so great is the power I conceive myself to have over your affairs and over you” (Alcibiades I 105d). In these words, Plato came to acknowledge the life and death of his “aged friend Socrates” as his own destiny.
Before Plato’s time, poets and poet-philosophers used the metaphor, “the eye of the soul.” Aeschylus spoke of an “understanding endowed with eyes.” Poet-philosophers, as Parmenides, Empedocles, and Epicharmos said that we must “see with our minds.” But it was Plato who gave the metaphor its distinctive philosophic import. In Alcibiades I (133b), he develops a beautiful allegory that likens knowledge to vision: “And if the soul . . . is to know herself, she must surely look at that region of it in which occurs the virtue of a soul‑-wisdom.” Plato’s discussion in the Republic (533d) contains the metaphor “the eye of the soul.” In the analogy of the cave (Republic vii), he carries the metaphor to its ultimate stage, when he speaks of “the vision of the soul,” the faculty that discloses “the things that are real and true.” Knowledge, then, is the “vision of the higher things.” The Phaedrus myth changes the analogy and speaks of “the wings of the soul” (246e). Nevertheless, the language of the myth is fraught with visual imagery. The immortal souls and the best of human souls see the “eternal verities,” the “truly existing essences,” which are “visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul.”
Plato ascribes to mind and the objects of mental vision a divine quality. In Alcibiades I, the “seat of knowledge and thought” is divine. It “resembles God,” and by its power one “comes to know all that is divine” (133c). The Phaedrus says that the mind, the pilot of the soul, is divine and that the objects of mental vision are likewise divine. “But the divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and all such qualities” (246e). Finally, Plato says that “the excellence of thought . . . is certainly of a more divine quality” (vii. 519), the organ that beholds “what is best among realities” (532d). Assuredly, the best among realities is divine.
Now these “higher things,” the “things that are real and true,” the “best among realities,” are, according to Plato, the Ideas. The eternal realities, those things that forever are, are the Ideas. But just what are these Ideas, and how are they to be described? Certainly, the virtue of Dike, justice, is one of these realities. But what is this virtue, and the other virtues, that are requisite to “justice in the state and the lives of the individuals”? In his passionate striving “after the commonweal,” Plato must, and does, answer this question. For he brings to view that for which his old master searched, the hidden Dike that once ruled the city of man.
Plato uses the terms Eidos and Idea to denote the truly real. Both terms are derived from Idein, which means “to see.” Their original meaning, then, is an intuitive one, that of “visible form.” The terms then came to signify visible nature, and then nature in general, and finally the determinate character that marks a class off from other classes.
Probably Plato’s first use of the terms is found in the Euthyphro. In that Dialogue, Socrates asks for the definition of piety, or holiness. He explains that he is seeking for the connotation, rather than the denotation, of the term, that he is seeking the essential nature of holiness. Thus he asks in Euthyphro 5d: “Is not holiness always the same with itself in every action . . .?” Again, in Euthyphro 6d-e:
Now call to mind that this is not what I asked you, to tell me one or two of the many holy acts, but to tell the essential aspect, by which all holy acts are holy. . . . Tell me then what this aspect is, that I may keep my eye fixed upon it and employ it as a model.
It must be emphasized that Plato never departed from the primary, intuitive sense of the terms Eidos and Idea. Nowhere does he offer a conceptual definition of the truly real, the Idea. Rather, he retains his primary experience of beholding the Idea. This primary experience, and the intuitive complexion that it confers upon the Idea, are the essential marks of Plato. Thus the important thing about justice is that it is an Eidos that is to be beheld in mental vision, and that when it is so beheld it empowers justice in the beholder.
“Or do you think it possible not to imitate the things to which anyone attaches himself with admiration? Then the lover of wisdom associating with the divine order will himself become orderly and divine in the measure permitted to man” (Republic vi. 500c).
It is, then, in his quest for the true city that Plato designates his meaning in the use of the terms Eidos and Idea. Both the redemption of the individual and the city are at stake. Not only a new man but a new city must be founded around the Idea of justice, around the Idea in general, and finally around the supreme Idea, the Idea of the Good. For this Idea, the Idea of the Good, is the central principle of order and stability in the city. The connection between Idea and Polis is not merely one of conceptual construction, but one of experiential necessity. This and only this is what Plato means in his saying that only as lovers of wisdom become rulers and rulers become genuine seekers after the truth will mankind find release from its besetting evils.
Now the discovery of the truly real, the Idea, has profound implications with respect to the nature of man. The discovery of the Idea is at the same time the discovery of man as soul. The soul is what characterizes man intrinsically. It is his “existence,” or what constitutes his essence. The discovery of the Idea as the “beyond” of eternal being discloses to oneself, at the same time, that man is part of two worlds and yet belongs to neither world. Rather, man is between both worlds: the world of true and eternal being and the world of becoming and passing away. The soul, then, is no simple thing. Instead it is life and activity of multiple dimensions. There is, indeed, the “pilot of the soul,” the power of intellection, the reason, but there are also the “lower parts of soul,” the impulsions of the natural life in the world of becoming.
This complex and ambiguous life of the soul of man is, according to Plato, a complicating factor in the way to the Idea. Just as the Idea cannot be entirely defined in conceptual terms, so the vision of the Idea is not an entirely intellectualist one, in the sense of logical or dialectical process.
In the first place, dialectic, as a process of surveying the Ideas in their logical interrelationships, is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the final goal of knowledge, the knowledge of the supreme Idea of the Good. Plato thus describes the dialectical process:
“In like manner, when anyone by dialectics attempts through discourse of reason and apart from all perceptions of sense, to find his way to the essence of each thing and does not desist till he apprehends by thought itself the nature of the good in itself, he arrives at the limit of the intelligible” (Republic vii. 532b).
The Line analogy, appearing in an earlier passage (510-11), clearly indicates that, as a mode of cognition, dialectics is dianoia, and that it grasps as its objects the hypotheses, which are the various departmental Ideas. Dialectics, or dianoia, serves as “underpinnings, footings, and springboards, so to speak,” to occasion the final knowledge, noesis, which is a beholding of the supreme Idea, the Idea of the Good. But this knowledge is itself not a formal, logical process. Indeed, no “explanation” as to its character can be given in the strictly scientific terms of dialectics. Instead, it is something sui generis, positioned at “the limit of the intelligible,” an emotional beholding of supreme value‑-supreme Arete. In this respect, then, the primary, intuitive meaning of the terms Idea and Eidos is retained.
Plato once recounted a dream-vision:
. . . my dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of the good, and when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, . . . itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this. (Republic vii. 517c)
Why does Plato call this vision of the Good, such an all-important vision of such an all-important reality, but a dream-vision? The answer has already been given. The vision of the Good is a dream-vision because the Good is neither a factual referent nor a definable concept. And yet, it is the most important of all things, and the vision of it is inescapably essential to the well-being of a people.
Yet the Idea of the Good is not, as we have just remarked, a self-fulfilling idea. It cannot be reached by conceptual, logical understanding. This is the import of Plato’s statement:
This, then, which gives to the objects of knowledge their truth and to him who knows them his power of knowing, is the Form or essential nature of Goodness. It is the cause of knowledge and truth; and so, while you may think of it as an object of knowledge, you will do well to regard it as something beyond truth and knowledge and, precious as these both are, of still higher worth. . . . and Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power (Republic vi. 508e-509b).
We may “think of it as an object of knowledge,” yet the Good is not knowledge, if by knowledge is meant conceptual understanding. Since the Good is “the cause of knowledge,” i.e., of conceptual, logical knowledge, it must, shrouded in mystery, transcend that form of knowing. The Good is, further, the source of all reality. It thus must transcend every particular real thing. Its reality is transcendent and ideal.
There is a second, important, respect in which the way to the Idea is not strictly an intellectualist, logical route. This consideration has to do with the ambiguous manner in which man is situated in existence. Besides the “pilot of the soul,” the “wings of the soul,” there is the soul of the natural life, fraught with propensities and impulsions that, unless unchecked, cut off the way to the Idea.
Therefore, something more than intellectual clarity is involved in the journey of mind to the beyond. This “something more” is the drive of mania. Mania is the demonic and the erotic. While, indeed, the redemption of the individual and the city consists in the great vision of the Good, it also consists in that “irrational” creative and empowering force underlying that vision, a divine madness driving the soul in the passionate love of wisdom. This is the meaning of the passage, again in the analogy of the cave, where Plato says:
Even so this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the world of becoming together with the entire soul, like the scene-shifting periact in the theatre, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being (Republic vii. 518d).
What Plato calls “the excellence of thought,” then, must be given a potency “according to the direction of its conversion.” It is mania, erotic love, which provides this potency. How this occurs is something that evades any scientific understanding; for it is something that lies beyond the limits of dialectics. Plato intimates this when in the analogy of the cave he says, regarding the conversion of the soul:
“Consider, then, what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature something of this sort should happen to them” (Republic vii. 515c).
The expression, “something of this sort,” indicates that, while Plato is confident that the soul can be turned in the direction of the Idea, he cannot account for that conversion in conceptual terms. Rather conversion is a dynamics lying below, underneath, the deliverance of the logical intellect.
All of this echoes the historical Socrates and Plato’s experience with the master. In Socrates’s history, there is, according to his own words, an irrational, impelling force that drives him in his quest for wisdom and virtue. At his trial, he confesses that he is driven to the search for wisdom, truth, and the perfection of soul by divine command. That command is the mania that opens the way to the Idea and the beyond:
“the god gave me a station, as I believed and understood, with orders to spend my life in philosophy and in examining myself and others” (Apology 29).
The question now becomes, how may this irrational condition of knowledge, this mania that opens up the way to the Idea and the beyond, be made accessible to some form of understanding? How are we to understand the process of the demonic and erotic as the avenue to knowledge of the supreme Good? How are we to view this irrational empowerment of the soul in its quest for the Idea, the virtue, justice in man and his city? Plato’s answer to these questions is unequivocal, although all this is all-too-often ignored and overlooked. To these questions there can be no answer by the purely logical intellect. Does this mean, then, that there is no semblance of understanding about this all-important dimension of man and his experience in his search for deliverance from darkness to light, from evil to good? Were this the case, Plato’s thought would be reduced to a pittance of insignificance, as much of modern thought suggests. What is worse, the really important issues of human existence and life would be shrouded in an impenetrable darkness. But this is not Plato’s view. For there is the myth, and the myth speaks, not only eloquently but informatively, of these issues of human destiny.
Thus the role of mania, the demonic and erotic that lift the soul to “the plain of truth,” is couched in terms of myth. While, for Plato, the myth is not literally true, it is also not merely an irresponsible play of fantasy. Within the myth lies an immanent, intrinsic meaning that, as it were, floats upon the surface of the story, a meaning, then, that cannot be taken out of the story and captured in any conceptual rendering. Attending intransitively to its immanent meaning, the myth gives an expanded and opened awareness of the real‑-the real that otherwise is closed off from any contemplative awareness.
The significance of Daimon and Eros is found, and found only, in the mythic story. If, then, we will confine our attention to that significance as it is inextricably imbedded in the form of the myth, we may catch glimpse, albeit fleeting, of “the final secret” that reveals to the soul the glad promise of its true individual and corporate destiny.
The daimon of the myths is divine. The two are connected in the language of Socrates’ defense (Apology 31d, 40b), where he speaks of “something divine and spiritual,” and of “the sign of the god.” Further, the daimon is the soul’s guide in the journey across the border of the beyond. This function of the daimon is set forth in many of the great myths of Plato. According to the myth of the soul in the Phaedo, the daimon guides the soul in its “journey thither,” “to a place where the dead are gathered together; then they are judged and depart to the other world with the guide” (107d). In the Myth of Er (Republic x. 614), the judges sit at a “demonic” place “between” (metaxu) heaven and earth. In Timaeus (90a), the daimon “raises us . . . up from earth to our kindred in the heaven.”
But it is in the Symposium that the great mediating and elevating work of the daimon is told in unparalleled significance and beauty. The daimon is now identified as Eros, or love. Diotima says that Eros is “something between” (metaxu), “a great spirit [daimon], . . . for the whole of the spiritual [daimonion] is between [metaxu] divine and mortal.” Through the various stages, this demonic Eros brings the soul in its journey upward to the vision of the Idea, to “the main ocean of the beautiful,” the inner nature of the beautiful itself, and to the Idea of the Good. Eros is the “demonic” guide, bringing the soul in its passion for truth ever upwards across the borders of the beyond, “almost able to lay hold of the final secret” and having “begotten a true virtue . . . destined to win the friendship of heaven” (Symposium 212). In fine, this daimon, Eros, is the metaxu, the bond uniting mortality with immortality. Eros is a union, a begetting, bringing to birth the Idea, the children of the soul, so internally united with and interwoven with the soul as to issue in righteousness. Love wins the Idea, the virtues and the supreme virtue, and in winning these becomes the bond of healing for man and his city.
Now, the Statesman, to which our main attention will be devoted throughout the remainder of this essay, carries out the thought of demonic bonding, the intermediate metaxu, as the power of justice, not only in the individual, but in the state. That is, there is a divine bonding by which Dike may once again find a measure of rule in the city of man.
The passage in the Statesman, from which the quote in the front piece is taken, suggests that there are certain souls that are themselves a “demonic species” that receive a divine knowledge of the Idea, and, as now bonded “in metaxu” yield the promise of justice in the state. The passage (309c) reads:
Str. First, it binds the eternal part of their souls with a divine bond, to which that part is akin, and after the divine it binds the animal part of them with human bonds.
- Soc. Again I ask What do you mean?
Str. I mean that really true and assured opinion about honour, justice, goodness and their opposites is divine, and when it arises in men’s souls, it arises in a godlike [daimoni_] race.
Now the task before us is to come to an understanding of what is meant by the term, “divine bond,” and to ascertain its place in the institution of justice in the state. As the passage indicates, the divine bond is contrasted with “human bonds.” Thus an ancillary question concerns what is meant by human bonds and what their role is in regard to social justice.
Plato wrote three great political dialogues: the Republic, the Statesman, and the Laws. The Republic presents the true statesman, the lover of wisdom, who governs without laws. In the ideal situation, wisdom is the basis of justice. The Laws, Plato’s last work, shows that in the actual state laws are necessary, since the ideal situation does not in fact exist. But the state that requires laws is the “second best” state. The dialogue, the Statesman, searches for an essential definition of the true statesman by the method of division. To anticipate the outcome of the search: the true statesman is conceived after the analogy of the art of weaving. True statesmanship is the art of weaving together opposites in the community.
The earlier portion of the dialogue consists in an elaborate process of logical analysis, making a series of divisions in order to set the statesman off from others and thus come to a definition of him. There comes a point, however, at which the logical process fails to identify the true statesman. To remedy this deficiency, Plato turns to the myth, in this instance the myth of the cosmic periods.
The myth tells of alternating cosmic periods. The period in which the god stands at the helm of the world is one of perfect order, the Idea of justice suffused in the human world as much as this is possible. The period in which the god has withdrawn from the world is one of injustice and evils.
Now the myth of the alternating cosmic periods is a temporal, sequential interpretation of the Timaeus myth of the structural opposites in the constitution of the world (48). According to the latter myth, the origin of the world is due to the Ideas entering and informing the physical material. The world is a mixture of mind, Nous, and necessity, Ananke. This world is one in which Ananke is mastered by Nous. But there is a price that is paid, for the perfect form that organizes the physical material of the world is itself tarnished. The being of the world is, then, an ambiguous duality.
In several respects, Plato explains why he has introduced the myth of the cosmic periods. Its immediate function is to disclose the nature of the statesman, to “help us make clear the nature of the king,” “that we may more clearly see him who alone ought to have the care of human beings” (Statesman 269c, 275b). But it has a far more reaching function. That function, Plato says, is to correct a serious error, or flaw, in the discussion thus far:
Str. When we were asked about the king and the statesman of the present movement of the world and mode of generation, we told of the shepherd of the human flock in the time of the reverse movement, and he was a god, not a man, besides. That was a very great error (275b).
The meaning of this passage is that, in the attempt to identify the statesman, he has been confused with the shepherd of the human flock as it existed in the golden age of divine rule. No such divine statesman exists in the present world. Thus the true statesman of this present world has not as yet been found and identified.
Beyond this negative outcome of the mythic reference, however, there is a positive indication‑-an indication that is supremely significant. The point is this: when we see, in mythic language, the golden age of Cronus, we catch glimpse of a perfection that not only makes us see the confusion in the present world but also helps us to see the distant goal toward which dialectics points but cannot find by itself. We now see a standard of perfection, against which the confusion in the affairs of mortals is seen and understood. We see that this confusion is inevitable and unavoidable, since the human world is a mixture of Nous and Ananke. But we see more‑-and this is the important point. We see that whatever order and justice exist in the human world of confusion is an outgrowth of perfection, and that human life is possible only as it lovingly takes over the divine gifts into its own life. We see that our human world is transformed only by the power of the divine bond.
In like manner God, they say, of his loving-kindness toward men, set over us the race of Daemons, which is more excellent than ours; and they, to their own great content and to ours, caring for us, and providing for our peace, and modesty, and good government, and justice without stint, made the nations of mankind peaceable and happy.
This Tale, then, hath in it truth, inasmuch as it signifieth that whichsoever city hath not God, but a mortal man, for ruler, hath no way of escape from evils and troubles: wherefore, according to the admonition of the Tale, must we by all means make our life unto the life which was when Cronus was King: and in so far as that which is Immortal dwelleth in us, must we be obedient unto the voice thereof in all our doings private and public, and govern our households and cities according to Law, which, being interpreted, is the Award of Reason (Laws iv. 713e-714).
So again it is the daimon, the divine Eros dwelling in the middle (metaxu) between the mortals and the immortal, that is the guide to the Idea, the supreme virtue that brings justice and order among mortals and binds them in concord.
While we now neither have the divine shepherd nor enjoy the order of goodness of the golden age of Cronus, we nevertheless have before us the ideal of perfection, which serves as the norm and lure in our effort to secure justice in the city of mortals. The true statesman, then, will keep before him the Idea that has been disclosed in dialectics, and even more in the myth, as the pattern of his own statesmanship. His art, Plato says, consists in watching “over the laws and all things in the state, weaving them all most perfectly together” (Statesman 305e). He performs this, weaving a “divine bond.”
To identify more precisely the meaning of the “divine bond,” that bond, so the text says, concerns the “eternal part of their souls” (309c). This observation is crucial, for it provides the key to the nature and function of divine bonding. What this bond does is to effect concord at the level of what is definitively distinctive of mankind, namely, the mind (Nous). It is, the Statesman says, to establish a “community of opinion” (310e). Thus the divine bond is a cognitive bond, a cognitive concord. It is, the text says, “true and assured opinion about honour, justice, goodness” (309c). There is possible, then, even in present life, a concord of understanding about the virtues that promises order and justice in the affairs of humanity. And it is the task of the true statesman to bring this understanding to the people whom he serves. Without this understanding, no merely human contrivances can bring harmony in the affairs of the state. But given this understanding among peoples, other relationships, the bonds of natural life, can be further established. That is the meaning of the reference to the human bonds. The establishment of human bonds is important and necessary, but those bonds take second place to that upon which they ultimately depend, namely, the divine bond.
It is very likely the case‑-and Plato suggests this in various places throughout the dialogues‑-that all we can expect, with respect to statesmanship and the establishment of virtue in the state, is probability and approximation rather than certainty and absoluteness. For the understanding that the statesman possesses and disseminates among his people is, after all, but “opinion” (doxa), albeit an “assured” opinion. It further follows from this, accordingly, that it is, in the final analysis, problematic whether the “divine bond” really does bring the proper measure of justice to the city. All this is to say again that we live in the middle, the metaxu, between the immortality of the Idea and the mortality of nature. Although having caught sight of the age of Cronus, our age is the age of Zeus.
Some further attention needs to be given this consideration. The Statesman propounds the view that there is conflict among the virtues (306b):
Str. Now I must venture to utter a strange doctrine about them.
- Soc. What is that?
Str. That, in a way, they are in a condition of great hostility and opposition to each other in many beings.
As the discussion continues, the Statesman argues that the virtues of manliness and moderation are in opposition to each other and, in human beings, can develop into the one-sided extremes of violence and cowardice. The function of the statesman is to reconcile these two virtues and tendencies in an Heraclitean “bond of opposites.” This reconciliation, however, does not bring the full measure of harmony, or justice, in the state.
The divine bond of the Statesman, then, is fraught with promise, but yet is seriously lacking. The reason is that the statesman, howsoever important in the affairs of state, is not the philosopher, the lover of wisdom. He strives to be philosophical, but he still is not the philosopher. The great dialogue, the Statesman, then is, it must be confessed, but an approximation to what is finally required in bringing the virtue of Dike to the city of man.
The participants in the dialogue are Socrates, Theodorus, the Stranger (from Athens), and the younger Socrates. Other than introducing the discussion, Socrates stands aside in silence. It is only the Athenian Stranger who tells about the statesman. At the close of the dialogue, Socrates says that the discourse that the Stranger has given is well-said and impressive. But beyond this, Socrates remains silent.
Socrates’s presence as a mere listener, his remaining silent, has significant import. He concurs in the Statesman’s thesis that the divine bond is all-important as the indispensable basis of human bonds. But he is silent, for he knows that the statesman has not found the divine bond. The bond that is truly divine cannot consist in opinion. Whatever the divine bond is, however it is to be delineated, it must, in its essence, consist in knowledge. Opinion, even right and assured opinion, is not knowledge.[1]
The point is, now, that the statesman must give way to the philosopher, the lover of wisdom. Assured opinion must give way to true knowledge. But is true knowledge possible? Not at the level of the statesman. In the Republic, Plato teaches that our grasp of the Ideas, as justice and goodness, is that form of understanding that he calls dianoia. The Ideas, therefore, appear as but tentative and provisional; they are the hypotheses. This level of understanding cannot be called true knowledge. The understanding that the statesman achieves, the community of opinion that pervades the city, are at this level of human experience. While the bonding that is procured is pragmatically effectual, it is but provisional and ought to be viewed as tentative and not imposed as an absolute and final norm. All this is indicated by the silence of Socrates.
But does the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, possess true knowledge that goes beyond the problematic opinion of the statesman? Does the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, possess, indeed, the wisdom that brings the true Dike to the city of man?
To answer this most important question, we must return to the Republic, where Plato speaks of a high knowledge that goes beyond the purely logical, discursive intellect that views the provisional virtues of the Statesman. There is, Plato says, the true knowledge, noesis, which intuitively beholds the supreme Idea, or virtue, that is unquestionably real. This ultimate reality‑-perfection that is self-sufficing and creatively fecund‑-is the supreme virtue, the supreme Arete, the Idea of the Good. The supreme Idea, the Good, is the final harmony, and, as subsisting in that harmony and suffused with radiance from perfection, justice now unites the virtues. Thus it is that the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, under the aegis of the vision of the Good, may so educate his people as to bring an even greater measure of harmony, and therefore of justice, to the fabric of humanity and society.
This vision of harmony that brings the mind across the borders of the beyond in touch with the Idea is empowered, however, by the divine daimon, Eros. At its very foundation, wisdom is love. Love, finally, opens the way to the Idea, to the Good. True knowledge is, as Diotima tells Socrates in the Symposium, “a wondrous vision” that beholds “divine beauty itself.” The vision of divine beauty, of divine harmony, is a begetting of true virtue in the soul. In this vision the friendship of heaven is finally won, and the final secret glimpsed in its wondrous mystery. As it was in those days of Cronus when the Daemons brought order and justice to the city of mortals, so now, even in the days of Zeus, the daimon of Eros leads the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, to the harmony of an heavenly music. It is the music that assuages all opposition and strife, and blends the forces of the soul and the city in a hymn of concord. This music, this harmony of the supreme Idea‑-the Good‑-then, is truly the “divine bond.” The vision of loveliness, which is the vision of the Good, and which only he who loves wisdom may enjoy, is the vision that, finally, restores the lost Dike to the city of man.
In conclusion, we must not attempt to delineate this vision, this true knowledge, in conceptual terms. As we have attempted to make clear, the goal that the pilot of the soul seeks is the Idea, but the Idea is not self-fulfilling. “The last thing to be seen,” Plato has said in the Republic, “and hardly seen is the idea of the good.” Diotima has said that Eros enables the mind “almost . . . to lay hold of the final secret.” Now, if the vision of the Good were conceptual, we would know in conceptual terms the “final secret.” But such a knowledge is not ours to possess. Yet the vision is indeed a cognition, and reaches the Good, though but “hardly,” and is “almost able to lay hold of the final secret.” In this “hardly” and “almost” lie both the disclosure and the mystery of the Good. The wisdom, therefore, that the philosopher, the true statesman, brings to the city of man is not one that imposes conceptual stereotypes upon the commonwealth of people. Indeed, it is the approximate statesman, he whose knowledge is but “assured opinion,” he whose vision is restricted to the probabilities of dianoia and who therefore, caught in the conflict of the virtues, turns his hypotheses into false absolutes, that brings coercion into the fabric of the state. The divine bonding consists, not in fixed absolutes, but rather in the purification of the affective consciousness of individuals. Here lies the empowerment through which concord and harmony are established. The wisdom that governs and in which Dike is established is the wisdom born of Eros, born of love.
Thus the way to the Idea is opened up only by the daimon, the Eros that, dwelling in metaxu, leads man and his city to fulfillment. To him who is fastened to the purely conceptual and who cannot know the meaning of vision, no answer can be given, save that he must needs seek the mythic god, the Eros, who, and who alone, can lead one to the vision of loveliness. And when seen, loveliness shall be loved forever, and then, in the bonds of harmony, man and his city shall “rest from troubles” (Republic v. 473d) and, as of old, Dike shall reign supremely. “What else, asked Euripides (Bacchae 877-881),
What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavor
Or God’s high grace so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over hate;
And shall not Loveliness be loved forever?
[1]See the Theaetetus.