Tae-Yeoun Keum

What role do canonical figureheads play in the process by which philosophical ideas gain political substance? This paper explores an interpretive shift in the reception of Plato in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), a three-act play dramatizing the trial and death of Socrates. I advance a reading of the play as an effort to offer a new political extension of a recent epistemological realignment in interpretations of Plato’s philosophy. Plato’s eighteenth-century readers developed an understanding of his epistemology that negotiated a compromise between Neoplatonism and Academic Skepticism. Working out the political ramifications of this compromise, I argue, was central to Voltaire’s reimagination of Socrates’s trial. In turn, Voltaire’s play calls attention to a neglected dimension in which the contingencies of historically situated, idiosyncratic interpretations can bear out in the dynamics of disciplinary canons: how authors’ philosophical receptions interact with their receptions in political thought. At the same time, the play also offers a case study of an intervention in the symbolic meanings of Plato, one in which the deep-rooted associations he accrued in two ancient traditions that claimed him as a figurehead were reshuffled in a distinctly modern, political key.

In this article, I respond to critics of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. First, I defend my choice to carve up the concept of myth into deep myths and literary myths. I address concerns that the effective focus of my book on literary myths risks jettisoning the political stakes of myth, and that it may not solve the definitional problems the move seeks to mitigate. Second, I answer my critics’ invitation to elaborate on the relationship between myth and critical reason. In particular, I attempt to resolve the tension they perceive between my definition of myth, as a medium that is distinctively opaque to criticism, and my argument that it can complement critical thought.

Myths—symbolically dense narratives in wide cultural circulation that resist critical scrutiny—are often thought to be counterproductive to political discourse, but they are also ubiquitous in contemporary culture and society. Just two years apart, Jürgen Habermas and Hans Blumenberg developed contrasting visions of how we ought to respond to the myths in our society. By reconstructing their disagreement, this paper uncovers the distinctive challenge of balancing a commitment to political emancipation with the opacity of myths to critical reason. I argue for an alternative approach to myths than those in the theoretical mainstream, taking Blumenberg’s relatively neglected position as a starting point. Blumenberg invites us to pay closer attention to the cognitive needs that necessitate the generation of myths while simultaneously reminding us of our own creative agency to reinvent them.

This introduction presents an overview of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought and its central arguments. I situate the contributions of the book within theoretical work on political myth, both traditional and more recent, and also within scholarship on the philosophical function of Plato’s myths. Whereas political theorists have long conceived of myth in pathological terms, Plato and the Mythic Tradition joins a growing body of work envisioning a more constructive role for myth in politics and philosophy. This was a task that preoccupied Plato and some of his most significant modern readers. Recovering their common project, moreover, helps us tell a different story about Plato’s philosophical myths and their reception in modern political thought.

Plato's antipathy to crowds is a commonplace that reinforces a prevailing portrait of the Socratic method as a practice that centers on individuals, to the exclusion of crowds and the many. This canonical view, however, comes into tension with the tendency of Plato's Socrates to conduct his dialogues in the presence of collective audiences. I argue that Plato's position on crowds is at once more complex and more ambivalent than has been commonly accepted. I distinguish between two distinct lines of critique that Plato develops against crowds: the argument that the incentive structures that move crowds are unconducive to philosophy; and a more ambiguous argument that crowds tend not to be as amenable to control as their portrayal in the Athenian democratic imaginary seems to promise. Plato's depiction of Socratic practice can be understood as an effort to explore an alternative vision of crowd control.

Plato is often regarded as a founding figure for Western philosophy, and specifically as the inventor of a way of doing philosophy grounded in critical, argumentative reason. This article asks whether Plato's practice of writing myths in his dialogues comes into tension with his canonical reputation. I suggest that resolving this tension may require us to revise our standing ideas about the nature of philosophy and its relationship to myth. Against interpretations that minimize the significance of Plato's myths to his philosophy, I argue that he may have constructed them deliberately as a form of philosophical discourse in their own right.

The Socratic method is conventionally understood to be a one-on-one interaction between Socrates and an individual interlocutor. Why, then, does Socrates conduct so many of his dialogues in public places, where they are prone to being witnessed or even interrupted? Through a careful reading of the Gorgias, a dialogue traditionally appealed to in studies of both the Socratic method and the philosophy of rhetoric, I argue that Socrates deliberately involves his audience in his conversations with individuals. The Socratic method seeks to harness the group's constructive potential in the formation of a temporary community around a joint philosophical inquiry.

Why did Plato conclude the Republic, arguably his most celebrated work of political theory, with the Myth of Er, an obscure story of indeterminate political-theoretical significance? This paper advances a novel reading of the Myth of Er that attends to the common plot that it shares with two earlier narrative interludes in the Republic. It suggests that Plato constructed the myth as an account of a search, akin to the sorting of potential philosopher-kings that underwrites the kallipolis’ educational curriculum, for natures that have successfully absorbed the cumulative effects of their philosophical upbringing. The model of nature presented in the myth, in turn, helps us approach the category of nature as a working concept: we can recognize contexts in which it is useful to assume in otherwise complex and fluid individuals a fixed, indelible nature, while granting that our sense of what that consists in is subject to revision.