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The Role of Play in the Philosophy of Plato
Gavin Ardley
Philosophy / Volume 42 / Issue 161 / July 1967, pp 226 – 244
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819100001303, Published online: 25 February 2009
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Gavin Ardley (1967). The Role of Play in the Philosophy of Plato. Philosophy,
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THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY
OF PLATO
GAVIN ARDLEY
'No human affairs are worth taking very seriously'—Rep. x, 604.
1. Philosophy as playful-seriousness
WE ARE little accustomed in modern times to think of philosophy
in terms of play. With few exceptions, philosophers in the last few
centuries are conspicuous for their gravity. If a lighter touch enters
their writings it is rather as a douceur with which to punctuateargument. To charge a philosopher with playing games is to con-
demn his activity as trivial and futile.
Yet, when we take up the Platonic Dialogues we cannot read for
long without noticing Plato's association of play (paidia) and serious
(spoude). This association is not one of disjunction, but of conjunc-
tion even to the point of assimilation. The propriety of the associationis a matter of explicit declaration in numerous passages; and thepropriety is everywhere taken for granted in the playful-seriousness
of Plato's characteristic modes of argument.
Just as some philosophers seek to divorce nature and convention,
where Plato seeks to unite them, so Plato opposes the even more
prevalent tendency to divorce the playful and the serious. In fact,it seems, Plato everywhere devotes himself to the healing of system-
atic dualisms, in whatever form they may appear. The healing ofthe play/serious dualism is the particular subject of this paper.
To claim that Plato seeks to redress all dualities may seem extra-
ordinary. Is not Plato the father of dualisms, notoriously of the body-
mind and appearance-reality dualisms
? We shall maintain the thesis
that such a reading of Plato is mistaken, and that the origin of themistake lies in a common failure to recognise Plato's playful-serious-
ness.
For Plato, philosophy is either a joyful game or it is less than
nothing. Play is not an incidental sop with which to beguile thereader; it is the very stuff of good argument. Fecundity, genuine
seriousness, real understanding, are to be found only in aerial flights
of play; without play, our intellectual exertions lead but to fatuoussolemnities. In Kierkegaard's phrase, humour is the incognito of
life;
it enables us to pass through the world without succumbing to theprevailing mood of alternating agitation and hopelessness. Through
irony, mimicry, gay satire, and sometimes bitter mockery, Platoshocks, puzzles, and gains rapport with the world in order to redeem
that world.
226

THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
It was said in former days: In Berlin the situation is serious but
not desperate; in Vienna it is desperate but not serious. Plato's mood
is Viennese. If we ignore Plato's Viennese temper, and read him as
a learned indefatigable German might read him, we shall reach
only a travesty of Plato's philosophy. We shall be led to see Plato
as a fantastical metaphysician in the worst sense of that word. We
shall miss what he really is: a unique personality bringing existential
'bite' and relevance to every human circumstance; a man whose
motto might well have been: 'above all no zeal'.
2. Few would-be philosophers have known how to play this game
The philosophers who have been touched with the spirit of playful
seriousness stand out from the multitude who were too serious to be
really serious. They are not many in number. Plato was the first.Aristotle comes co-equal, though he keeps his quality more in the
background. The patristic writers qualify; though some saw fit toconceal their real lightness of touch under a dour exterior. StThomas Aquinas: the prolonged agonistic of the Summa
Theologica
is the quintessence of play— a fact which the latter-day systematisers
have obscured in their solemn zeal. The Berkeley of the Principles,
the Three Dialogues, the Alciphron and the Siris: certainly. Kierke-
gaard: patently. The Thomas Garlyle of Sartor Resartus: manifestly.
The later Wittgenstein, in spite of, or perhaps because of, thechronic melancholy of his temperament, is not without stirrings.
And some of our contemporaries, for instance John Austin and
John Wisdom, come near at times to joining the select company.
Such a list cannot, of
course, be exhaustive. But it may give some
indication of the proper direction to look.
As for those who have endeavoured to recognise explicitly and to
trace out historically the play element in philosophy: they are very
few. Soren Kierkegaard, Johan Huizinga, Hugo Rahner, and Josef
Pieper, are prominent in this re-appraisal of the nature of philo-
sophic endeavour. Kierkegaard excepted, their names seem to belittle known in the English-speaking world. And yet, if they are
correct in their general contentions, we must re-write the history ofphilosophy.
3. Philosophy and Sophistry
How are we to understand this theme of play and anti-play?
Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens traces the simultaneous appari-
tion of the sophist and the philosopher from the company of theprophet, the medicine-man, the seer, the thaumaturge, and thepoet. The sophist's business is a kind of showmanship; he sets out
to exhibit his amazing knowledge, and to defeat his rival in public
227

PHILOSOPHY
contest. Sometimes, from this agonistic display, matters of more than
passing entertainment emerge as it were by accident: many a
witticism comes near to striking a profound note, a moment ofinsight or disclosure. Hence the beginnings of philosophy proper.
So, Huizinga writes:
We can sketch the successive stages of philosophy roughly as
follows: it starts in the remote past from the sacred riddle-game, which is at one and the same time ritual and festival
entertainment. On the religious side it gives rise to the profound
philosophy and theosophy of the Upanishads, to the intuitiveflashes of the pre-socratics; on the play side it produces thesophist. The two sides are not absolutely distinct. Plato raisesphilosophy, as the search for truth, to heights which he alonecould reach, but always in that aerial form which was and is
philosophy's proper element. Simultaneously it develops at a
lower level into sophistical quackery and intellectual smartness.
1
In brief, we might say, there is a great gulf between the art of the
prima ballerina in Swan Lake and the art of a dancer in a sordidnightclub—a gulf as wide as that between the philosopher and thesophist.
Huizinga goes on to observe how the whole functioning of the
medieval university was profoundly agonistic and ludic. And like-
wise, it would seem, in every productive epoch, in different forms
according to the specific genius of that epoch.2 All knowledge is
polemical and agonistic by nature. What emerges from the agon
depends on the spirit in which it is conducted.
4. Eutrapelia
More specifically: in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle sketches out
his scheme of the moral excellences: these excellences which aredistinguished from the intellectual excellences principally by thefact that they cannot be taught, and that they rise up like hillsbetween valleys where dwell the vices.
In his scheme, he includes the virtue of eutrapelia (literally,
'happy turning'. Eth. Nic. II, vii, 13; IV, viii, 3-4, etc.). The
"Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (English translation, London 1949), p. 151.
2I have contended elsewhere that the birth of the modern exact sciences in the
seventeenth century came about not so much by any intellectual tour deforce, as by
virtue of a few people learning to play a new kind of game. They had little
conscious notion of what they were about. And the philosophers from Descartes
onwards, with few exceptions, because of over-seriousness failed to grasp the
situation; instead of gaining insight into the exact sciences, as they purported to
do, the philosophers produced nonsensical pseudo-metaphysics. An infusion of
paidia would seem to be requisite for any genuine philosophic discourse on theexact sciences.
228

THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
eutrapelos is the man of autarkeia, of inner serenity and self-sufficiency
of disposition, who can strike the right note of mingled seriousness
and gaiety, who brings a lightness and gracefulness of touch to every
situation.
Flanking the eutrapelos is, on one side, the agroikos, the rustic,
the boor, who is too stiff and serious to be a philosopher. On the
other side is the bomolochos, the buffoon, who is too frivolous,fawning and random to be a philosopher. The eutrapelos is on the
high mean between the two flanking vices: Thus:
^ eutrapelos v
agroikos-<—•bomolochos
Most of us succeed only in oscillating between agroikia and bomo-
lochia, and miss the verticality which leads up to the disposition of
eutrapelia.
Eutrapelia is one of the virtues displayed by the man who has
attained theoria, the inner activity of contemplation, as Aristotleexpounds in the Ethics; or schole, the leisured mind, as he prefers to
put the matter in the
Politics. Everything done by the man of schole
or theoria is informed by the grace of eutrapelia.
Plato did not express the matter in quite the same terms as Aris-
totle. But Plato's principles in this matter are so closely akin to
Aristotle's, that it is not improper to transpose Aristotle's convenient
terms to the Platonic idea of philosophy, where appropriate. By so
doing we shall gain much in conciseness at the expense of what wemay hope is only a slight dampening of Plato's freedom of move-ment. Thus, where Plato speaks of the vision of the good, we shallspeak of schole or theoria.
5. The Sophist
As Plato views the sophist, he is the archetypal demon among
human kind. Rhetoricians, tyrants, sensualists, even poets and
musicians, may be grievously mischievous, but their dark plumes areborrowed. It is the sophist who is the primordial evil genius.
And what is a sophist
? He is a spoiled philosopher. Like a certain
proud spirit mentioned in Scripture, the sophist lacks a sense of whatis and what is not becoming to a creature, in his case a man. He is
the intellectual Pharisee, proud that he is not as other men. He is
incapable of tempering the intellectual heights with the saving dash
of humility. By aspiring to rise above the human station, he succeedsonly in falling below that station: like the pig in the fable who was agood pig until he took to walking upright; when he became, not a
better pig, but a ridiculous pig. And the sophist in his fall is deter-mined to pull other men down with him. He is, Plato believes, theenemy of the human race.
229

PHILOSOPHY
In Aristotle's terms, the sophist is one who has slid down from the
pinnacle of playful seriousness, eutrapelia, either into the inflexi-
bility of the agroikos, or into the chameleon state of the bomolochos.
In fact, both vices, when carried to extremes, converge towards one
another. The earnest doctrinaire, the a priorist defending his thesisat all costs, the fawning chameleon, is an intellectual boor or anintellectual buffoon according to the way we choose to look at him.
Plato is scathing about these less than men who know no real
play and no real seriousness. Stanley Baldwin was more polite but
scarcely less cutting when he remarked: The intelligent man is to
the intelligentsia as a gentleman is to a gent'.
6. An interlude: On common sense
In the eighteenth century reaction against the metaphysical
extravagances of the previous century, a number of philosophersappealed to common sense, the common sense of the plain man, to
combat the doctrinal absurdities of the bifurcation of nature. Con-
spicuous in this recall to common sense were Buffier, Reid, Berkeley,
and, in one mood, David Hume.
When we examine the manifestos of these philosophers it appears
that they understood different things by the term 'common sense'.
Buffier and Reid thought in terms of incontrovertible axioms,
primordial truths, to be found in common sense. But when they
sought to specify these axioms they did not get far before the groundgrew treacherous.
Berkeley took up common sense in a different way. He did not
search for axiomatic statements, but treated common sense rather
as a spring of mental vigour. Looking at Berkeley now after the
Wittgensteinian 'break through' (Wittgenstein, attempting a funda-
mentally similar task to Berkeley, found an audience, whereas
Berkeley could get no one to take him seriously), we can see what
Berkeley was trying to do, though Berkeley himself found it difficult
to express himself articulately on the point: Berkeley was reachingtowards the play element in philosophy, and found it in the abilityof the plain man to be seriously playful. The man of common senseis the natural grave-merry man, the eutrapelos. The seventeenth-
century metaphysicians had destroyed play; they had lost their wits
through their learned education, as Berkeley puts it satirically.
Buffier and Reid saw vaguely that common sense was the missing
element in philosophy, but never grasped what was the relevantattribute of common sense. They remained too serious, and failed intheir reform. Berkeley alone of the eighteenth-century philosophers
caught something of the real nature of our mother wit, and thereby
succeeded in putting philosophy back on to its perennial basis.
230

THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
7. Work and play
Jest and earnest, playful and serious, are sisters, Plato insists
again and again. It was the sophists, the ambitious worldly men, and
their victims, the unfortunate depressed multitudes for whom techne
had sunk into dull routine (tribe), who had divorced play and
earnest. They persisted on keeping them in separate compartments,
thereby frustrating both.
The man of schole, of eutrapelia, recognises no such divorce.
From his inner citadel of masterly leisure he takes his work as a
kind of play. His holiday interludes are places of pause, anapaulai,
in which he refreshes himself by play in a different tempo. His lifeis integral, invigorated by variety, like a musical composition in
different movements.
The man who has no schole: for him, work is a serious thing, done
for the sake of interludes of play, which interludes are not serious.
But here, play and serious have lost their savour. This man's workis a meaningless round; his periods of so-called leisure are merelyvacuous interludes of diversion in preparation for a further period
of furious work.
The state of ascholia, at least as manifested in the work/play
dichotomy, is a disease peculiar to certain human societies, notably
the European. So-called 'primitive' men do not seem to be infected
by it. For them, work is play, ritual movements, worship. Hence thebewilderment occasioned to 'primitive' man by European intrusion.The bifurcation of life in the so-called 'advanced' cultures is as
irrational to the Australian aborigine as it was to Plato.
8.
Inversion of perspective
How and when this play/serious bifurcation arose, Plato does not
profess to know. But that it was rampant among the Greeks of his
day is quite apparent. Plato waged a life-long war against the
dichotomy, and traced it to its lurking-place in an artificial intro-version and reversal of perspective, of which the Cave figure provides
an allegory.
The bifurcation is by no means confined to the rude mechanicals.
The men of cultivation are perhaps even more prone to slip into the
disastrous inversion and dichotomy.
Thus Callicles, a man of quick intelligence, but tragically directed
to a selfish public ambition, to dominance over a multitude which
he despises—and thus, as Socrates predicts, destined to follow the
path of flattery and so of eventual slavery to that multitude—
Callicles is ensnared in the bifurcation, to the atrophy within him of
both the serious and the playful, and to his ultimate total ruin.
So Callicles rallies Socrates in the
Gorgias (484):
231

PHILOSOPHY
'Philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the
proper age, is an elegant accomplishment. But too much philo-
sophy is the ruin of human life.'1
Callicles recognises philosophy as play, but does not recognise its
seriousness. He recognises a public career as serious, but does not see
the propriety of leavening such a career with a light touch, heedless
that misplaced seriousnses leads to vacuity.
That Callicles should be held captive by this dualistic and indigent
reading of human nature is evidence that he had things in the wrongperspective: As witness his remark to Socrates,
Gorg. 481:
'By the gods, tell me Socrates are you in earnest, or only in jest?
For if you are in earnest, and what you say is true, is not thewhole of human life turned upside down; and are we not doing,
as would appear, in everything the opposite of what we ought to
be doing ?'
To which, Socrates' answer in brief
is: 'You're right; one of us has
got the world upside down, and it's not me, my friend'.
9. Dichotomies
We referred above to the connection of the dichotomy of play and
serious with a reversal of scale and a foreshortening of perspective.
Just how these are connected is a matter concerning which it is diffi-
cult to reach any clearness; and it seems to have been an enigma for
Plato. He observes the fact, expresses it in innumerable figures and
allegories, and regards the whole concatenation as one of the ultimatemysteries, the real tragedy of human existence. Since Plato's day
one aspect of the matter has often been discussed in a slightly dif-ferent form: the origin of moral evil. But it has always remained atroot profoundly mysterious.
What concerns us here is the fact that dualisms appear when
perspective is foreshortened and reversed. The dualism of play andserious, the dualism of matter and mind, the cosmic dualism of good
and evil principles, the seventeenth-century divorce of appearanceand reality, and indeed all systematic bifurcations, seem to be the
products of contraction and inversion. Conversion, turning around,
in the Cave figure, involves the dispelling of pride, the shock of
recognition, the dissolution of all dualisms, and entry into theproper human state.
Where the sophist pronounces a dichotomy, a permanent apart-
ness, the philosopher sees something more like a male and female
principle, from the union of which, in love, is born a healthy child,
wisdom. Hence the sexual symbolism which runs through the
"Citations from Plato are taken, sometimes with emendation, from the standard
English versions: Jowett, Lindsay, Taylor, etc.
232

THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
Platonic Dialogues: the discourses on love of the Symposium, Socrates'
midwifery in the Theaetetus, the marriage arrangements of Republic
Book v—all would seem to bear on the theme of fruitful unions in
contrast to the sophists' homosexual barrenness. The unions of
nature and convention, of persuasion and force, of virtue and
knowledge, of knowing and not-knowing, of play and serious, are
potentially fecund unions actualised through dialectic. The under-standing ascends thereby, as if a dolphin had come and taken us
up. {Rep. v, 453.)x
10. Games
Let us now see what there is about a game, at its best, which allies
it with philosophy.
A game at its best is something played for love, for its own sake. A
game is disinterested, an end in itself. As with love, there can be no
compulsion or necessity in play: its essence is spontaneity and out-
givingness. There must be no professionalism (in the sense in which
the professional has gained superior competence at the expense ofthe amateur virtues), no undue competitiveness, no over-eagerness
to win, nor under-eagerness either, or the game degenerates into a
sham. A real game is a case of simple timeless enjoyment. Subsequentbenefits in health and spirits will properly flow from a game (asworldly benefits will properly associate themselves with the truly
just man: Rep. x, 612); but they must not be the immediate purpose,
or the game will sink to a dreary round.
Here we begin to see the connection of amateur play with the
disinterested love of truth, with Plato's vision of the Good, with
Aristotle's schole/theoria.
Schole/theoria, declares Aristotle, are attributes of the highest
attainment of the human being; they are man's supreme activity;man's most effortless and joyful game, as we might say. It is schole/
theoria which make all our subordinate activities intelligible, beingthe culmination and fulfilment of all properly human activities of
lower rank. The divine life, declares Aristotle in Met. A, is the life of
theoria at its highest, a timeless activity of thinking on thinking, at
once supreme activity and supreme rest. Man is most alive, and mostlike unto God, when he possesses and deploys this overflowingactivity. He is then the grave-merry man. He moves in the world,
simultaneously as a man who loves the world as his home, and as aman of no illusions about the finality of worldly things.
11. Learning through play
The possession of inner leisure, especially as manifested in eutra-
This passage from the Republic was chosen by Seren Kierkegaard as the motto
for his Concept of Irony.
233

PHILOSOPHY
pelia, transforms human life. It rescues us from the fallen state, at
once frantic and dreary, where we mistake properly subordinate
ends for final ends; where we are never satisfied, but are like leaking
vessels which cannot be filled; where we are driven to the abject
dichotomy of earnest and play, of work and amusement.
Furthermore, it is only those who are capable of playful wonder,
those who have the inner citadel of schole, who can learn anything
beyond the acquisition of mere knacks. For only in schole can there
be community of minds. Schole is the pre-requisite for dialectic,
which itself is a kind of play. To attempt dialectic without scholeis to produce only futile eristic. In eristic we learn nothing, for our
game has ceased to be a game and has degenerated into a sordid
competition.
We learn through playing, and only through playing: this is one
of Plato's leading themes. We find it in his recommendations forbringing up children by what he calls law-abiding play
{Rep. iv,
424e; vii, 536d-537a; Laws vii, 797, etc.). We find it in Socrates'
encounters with the sophists, where, by the play of irony, he en-deavours to lighten the pomposities of these ludicrously serious
doctrinaires (or alternatively, to put to shame these players ofgames that are not games), and engage them in real play. We find
it again in the ever-ascending play of dialectic between those whohave been turned around in the Cave, and are ready to engage in
the disinterested play of the mind as it carries them upwards tothe authentic human state, to a recognition of the puniness andunseriousness of all human affairs before the towering standard ofthe ultimate eidos.
12. A theology of play
Play has no temporal end beyond itself, but it reaches upwards
atemporally; it is fecund, it partakes ofcreatio ex nihilo. Indeed, there
is a school of theologians with a long lineage, which endeavours to
interpret the creation of the world in terms of play. (On the simple
analogy of boys playing cricket in the back-yard on a summer
evening.) God has no need of anything outside himself. He creates
and sustains the world freely and without necessity in the outgiving
spirit of loving play. The world is, as it were, God's playmate;
worship is a kind of play, the playful response to an offer to play.1
One of the characteristics of play is repetition: we do the same
thing over and over again for the sheer love of doing it, whether it becricket, or playing Bach, or re-telling old stories. Hence the world-
order: it is one of endless repetition of joyful movements, it has
'Hugo Rahner in his Man at Play (English translation, London 1964) provides
an admirable sketch of the theology of play.
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THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
the regularity of the dance. Hence, too, the possibility of natural
science.
It is to this school of theology that Plato belongs, and Aristotle
after him. At least, Plato belongs to this school in a measure as full as
his Greek limitations would allow. For his notion of creation is
timid compared with that of the Hebrews. He has no conception of
creatio ex nihilo as regards the being of the world, but enters into the
notion with zest as regards the world order. His idea of cosmologyis that of the rhythmic dance of joy. And his idea of philosophy is
analogous: by graceful movements of the understanding, by an
ascending game, we rise up from the clay to the Olympian heights;
only to find ourselves mysteriously back where we started, but now
released from the chains which before held us bound in pseudo-
seriousness, now able to play the tragi-comic game of
life.
13. Man as playmate of God
In the Laws i, 644d, Plato enters on a moral fable of the human
puppets:
'Let us suppose, says the Athenian Stranger, that each of us
living creatures is a thauma [toy, marionette] made by the gods:whether for their plaything, or for more serious purpose, we do notknow.'
Plato is not here depreciating the human estate. On the contrary,
he is enhancing that estate. We are fit to be the companions of God
(although we do not as yet know how fully). In the gracefulness of
play we associate by mimesis with the deity. Through the Museswe recover something of our lost fellowship with the divine.
In Laws vii, 803, the Athenian Stranger explains:
cWhat I wish to say is: that a man ought to apply himself
seriously to what is serious, not to what is not serious. That bynature God merits all our blessed zeal [makariou spoudes].
While man, as we said before, has been constructed as a toy for
God; and this is the finest thing about him. Thus I say that everyman and woman ought to pass through life in this role: playingat the finest and noblest of plays—to the complete inversion ofcurrent understanding.'
His next remarks are subtle and compressed. But the gist seems to
be: It is the current fancy that work, notably war, is alone serious;
that we work in order to play; that play is not serious; that education
is properly directed to work. But to look at the matter in this way is to
make nonsense of human life. The truth is rather the other way about.
It is play which is supremely serious for us, and to it education
should be directed. *We should pass our lives in the playing of games
—certain games, that is sacrifice song and dance, and so be able to
235

PHILOSOPHY
gain heaven's grace.' Then we shall take our work in our stride.
What Plato means is that when man looks upward to God his
introverted shell is broken, his perspective is reversed, his horizon
is unbounded. He can no longer be satisfied with the illusion of an
autonomous world economy, as if the whole meaning of the world
were contained within itself. Henceforth he sees life as a tragi-
comedy not worth taking with deadly gravity, nor yet to be despised
as a mere sport, but something to be taken as the eutrapelos takes it,
with playful serenity and lightness of heart.
So the Athenian Stranger goes on:
'Our nurslings . . . should live out their lives as what they really
are, inasmuch as they are puppets [thaumata], for the most part,
yet share some little part in truth.'
Megillus the Spartan: 'I must say, sir, you have but a poor estimate
of our race'.
The Stranger: 'Bear with me, Megillus. I had God before my
mind's eye, and felt myself to be what I have just said. Let us
grant, however, if you wish, that the human race is not a mean
thing, but merits more serious attention.'
Plato introduces these touches of unmeasure here and there:
Socrates for a moment is carried away and becomes too zealous,
he offends the etiquette of the game, he breaks the higher logic.
Thus in Rep. vii, 536, in speaking of the education of the guardians,
and with warmth of the ruin to be apprehended if unworthy men,the sophoi, should slip into the royal company, he suddenly pullshimself up:
'I made myself ridiculous just now. … I forgot that we were
playing, and I spoke with too much intensity. For as I spoke I
glanced at philosophy, and seeing her so undeservedly spurned and
contemned, I think I got angry, and said what I said too severely,
as though I had lost my temper with those who are responsible for
it.'Measure, the mean, is the proper rule for conducting the game of
life. But our devotion to God breaks through the rules of human
play; in devotion to God alone there is no mean.
14. Play in the Platonic Dialogues
'I forgot we were playing', says Socrates in Rep. vii, 536. The
construction of the ideal polis is play. Indeed, the whole of the
Republic is play, from the opening scene where Socrates is about to
return from the Peiraeus to Athens but is pounced upon by Pole-
marchus and his friends, right through to the closing myth of Er.
The Republic is play in the Mozartian manner, in a variety of keys
and moods, hovering between grave and gay, sometimes allegro,
236

THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO
sometimes andante; sometimes, as in the latter part of Book i, in
partnership with a boorish player, Thrasymachus, the music
becomes a wild and abandoned romp, leaving that ferocious man
quite exhausted.
The Laws likewise is play: play not now in the scintillating
spirit of Mozart, but in graver Handelian measures. The three oldmen as they walk from Knossos up to the cave of Zeus on that
memorable mid-summer day beguile their time with discourse;they indulge in the sober old man's game of jurisprudence, as theAthenian Stranger describes it, modelling laws in imagination,
making up parables, like elderly men playing a boy's game in a
day-dream.
The abstract dialectic of the dialogue
Parmenides is play: where shall
we begin? asks Parmenides (137). What supposition shall we start
with? Would you like me, since we are committed to play out thislaborious game of the One and the Many, to begin with myself and
my own original supposition about the One
? This is an echo of a
surviving fragment of Parmenides himself: 'It is all one to me where
I begin, for I shall come back again there' (Diels. fr. 5)—an in-
souciance appropriate to all dialectical play: play which makes therounds many times over, constantly lifting the discourse (including
the starting point) to successively higher planes of understanding,changing the rules as it goes along.
Plato's myth-making is likewise play; a special kind of imaginative
play in the antique mode; a special kind of play which breaks the
monotony of more formal measures.
'Let us make a new beginning', says the Eleatic Stranger in
the
Statesman (268d), 'and travel by a different road. Let us have a
little amusement [paidia] with a famous mythos…. Then we may
go back on our old path, resuming our series of divisions, until
we reach the desired summit.'
When Phaedrus, in the opening scene of the dialogue of that name,
asks Socrates whether he believes in the old story of Boreas seizing the
maiden Oreithuia from the Ilissus, Socrates replies ironically that he
is too much of an atopos [eccentric, paradoxical, a 'natural'] to be an
unbeliever like the sophoi. The latter are clever laborious pedants,
agroikoi, who waste their time in futile pursuits. They have no ear forthe music of the myth.
15. Learning insensibly
In play, and in particular in the diversity of play modes, we learn,
without at the time knowing that we learn. Thus, in the Philebus
(30e), Socrates remarks: 'We now have an answer to my enquiry—
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that mind is the parent cause of all. . . .' To which his companion
replies: CI have, indeed, and yet I did not observe that you had
answered'. And Socrates observes: 'A jest is sometimes refreshing,
Protarchus, when it interrupts earnest'.
The game ascends, we learn insensibly, through the stimulation
of successive perplexities (aporiai). The aporia is initially a foreign
body, a stranger not yet domesticated. The aporia presents us with
something not merely to be solved in the flat like a geometrical
problem, but rather with a challenge which, when met, invigorates
and elevates the whole. By examining credentials and making
distinctions, the aporia is surmounted and incorporated; we grow
wiser in the process; and the world for us is one stage further towards
being a cosmos.
Mounting up step by step from one aporia to another is the mark of
genuinely dialectical philosophy. It matters little where we start or
what road we take. If we have the love of truth we shall reach the
summit all the same.
A doctrinaire, a sophist, a metaphysician in the bad sense, does not
mount because he cannot play. He is a professional, not an amateur.
Whether he professes to solve problems, or is anguished to find that
problems are intractable, it matters little; for he stays always at thesame level and grows no wiser. His perplexity is morbid. He knowsnothing of lively aporiai. The sophist seeks to possess the world for
himself; the philosopher takes it as a gift and returns thanks to the
giver.
Plato and Aristotle are the pioneers of aporetic discussion. At each
aporia the whole subject is lifted up to the next plane. The discussion
does not reach any grand conclusion. But having gone through the
cycles, the participants, the players, find themselves unawares, and
to their astonishment as it were, on the summit.
Accordingly Socrates in the Theaetetus (150-151), reverting to the
sexual figure, can say about his whimsical midwifery: CI bring nothing
to birth myself; there is no wisdom in me'. Those who seek my
company are full of perplexity (aporia), like women in the pains oflabour. To provoke aporiai in others, and together to surmount
them; figuratively, creating truly viable brain-children out ofnothing; is Socrates' art.
Because dialectic is a game, it requires a number of willing
players. Although some men can perform the feat of playing withthemselves, like playing patience, it is normally a matter of throwing
the ball round a circle. Each member must be a genuine player,
or the game is spoilt. The sophoi were the spoil-sports who would
not play.
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16. The Cave: unredeemed and redeemed
We are not all the time engaged in ascending out of the Cave. We
must return to the Cave {Rep. 519-20). What is dull and cloddish in
the unredeemed Cave is leavened and transposed in the redeemed
Cave. What would be disastrously unmusical in the hands of the
casual, the unfit, the introverted (the prisoners in the Cave), may be
proper and indispensable and even musical in the hands of educatedmen, those who know the natures of what they are dealing with.
Let us take an example to illustrate this recurrent theme: Towards
the close of the
Phaedrus, Socrates takes up the subject of the written
word. Writing is a disastrous invention, he considers, in the hands of
the unwary. With its fixed stare, like a statue, writing is a poor
substitute for the real play of the spoken word in dialectic. Only
the spoken word, like the royal man, can be eutrapelos. Writing
corresponds to the tyrant.
Writing makes a seductive appeal to the temporal memory, but in
so doing it blots out the a-temporal memory (what in the earlier
Dialogues is called anamnesis), the capacity to understand aerial
truth, to grasp perennial standards. Writing depresses the human
condition and induces a disguised form of idolatry. Writing gives
the appearance of conveying truth, but it is more like cosmetics
on an aged face. Or, to change the figure, writing is like the Gardensof Adonis: the boxes of forced flowers put out on the window-sills for
the Athenian festival, flowers which bloom for a few days and then are
no more. No farmer of serious intent would plant his crops on this
ephemeral principle.
Yet, while writing is a hazard for the unprepared, leading them to
think they have what they have not, it can be proper and useful and
even indispensable for the prepared. The condition for its proper
employment is that we don't take it too seriously: The philosopherwill write by way of pastime (paidia) making a temporal record for
the delight of his old age, and for all such as come after him—like
the farmer who by way of pastime plants a garden of Adonis forthe temporal delectation of himself and his friends.
It is evident that Plato, when he wrote his Dialogues, had this well
in mind, and composed them in as sylph-like a manner as he could,in order to discourage the unmusical from fastening on to them and
making a dull travesty of his grace.
17. Plato's severities
Anything is permissible if it can be treated as genuine play, if it
is capable of partaking in rhythm and harmony. What is intrinsically
unmusical should be shunned by all as evil. But even those thingscapable of being musical should be taken up only by those who can
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render them musical. Others should leave them alone lest they be a
stone of stumbling. Hence the apparent severity of many of Plato'shalf-serious half-whimsical strictures, particularly in the
Republic.
The serious and the playful are sisters. Through their association in
contrariety, through the aporiai engendered thereby, the intelligenceis set in motion. The proper handling of this ascending counterpointis the key to education. The maintenance of the fugue is no easy
matter: we so readily run after one contrary to the exclusion of the
other.
The comic side of life, if we become absorbed in it, is stultifying,
because we have begun to treat it seriously in a closed order; we
forget that the discords which provoke laughter get their point from
something which is not discord.
Conversely, the tragic side of
life, if we become so absorbed in it, is
stultifying, because we are beginning to take the world with too
much gravity, as if human affairs were worth taking seriously as
ends in themselves in a closed order; we forget that the tragic
impasse is not an ultimate impasse.
A man must get to know the comic, says the Athenian Stranger in
Laws 816, so that he might never be betrayed by ignorance into
doing or saying a ludicrous thing when it is out of place. But he mustnot go to the other extreme and let himself be a mere comic.
Similarly we must not take the tragic too seriously. Thus, Socrates
in
Rep. x, 608, at the end of the talk on the ancient quarrel between
philosophy and poetry:
'Let us repeat to ourselves as a charm this argument of ours and
this incantation, for fear of falling again into that childish love
[of tragic performances] which is still shared by the many. We shall
chant, therefore, that this poetry is not to be taken seriously as
though it were a solemn performance which had to do withtruth, but that he who hears it is to keep watch on it, fearful forthe city in his soul, and that we must lay down these laws con-cerning poetry which we have described.'
The notion of contrapuntal education is Plato's contribution to a
problem which Aristotle attacked in a blunter way through the
ancient doctrine of the mean. The two expressions are consonant.
Playful seriousness is the way in which we attain the mean. Plato
is
looking to the way, Aristotle to the end. But Aristotle's mean islimited to human affairs. Towards God there is no mean; the fuguefinally resolves itself in completion. So, Plato's unmeasured vehem-ence when, as he says, he is looking directly to the last end. Hence,
'hymns to the Gods and praises of good men'
(Rep. 607) are the only
specimens of poetry which occasion Plato no anxiety lest they be
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misused: for they of their nature transcend the mean, they alone
may properly go beyond the conventions of the game.
18. Plato and the dramatists
We may now be in a position better to understand Plato's attitude
to Greek tragic drama—a matter which has, it would seem, been
much misunderstood by reading over-rigid categories into the
Republic and losing sight of the nuances in which the truth lies.
The Greek drama is constructed around law, around dike, hubris,
and nemesis; its Gods are anthropomorphic. The world of the drama
is artificial and introverted. It has little sense of the wayward, the
incalculable, the mysterious, the infinite. It is unrelievedly serious
about things whose natures are distorted by taking them so seriously.It creates emotional tension higher than is meet for things of human
stature; ugly emotions stemming from ugly theology. It lacks the
astringent counterpoint of irony, the sense of the ridiculous, which
could render it genuinely human. It does not see through the masks
of
life, but is engrossed in its own narrowly regulated world.
The Greek drama is mimetic in a foreshortened sense. It does not
ascend. The rules, as a festival agon, are fixed. It does not, like
dialectic, encounter a genuine aporia and surmount it, i.e. changeits rules as it goes along. It has instead a fixed stare, like the fixed
doctrines of the sophists; it is heavily didactic and metaphysical in anoppressive sense. It keeps the audience childish.
When we see or read Greek tragedy today we do not find it as
oppressive as Plato apparently felt it. This, it would seem, is becauseof the growth of a moral infra-structure over the last two and a half
thousand years; an infra-structure which we take for granted, of
which we are scarcely conscious. This infra-structure makes a
great difference. We can take the Greek drama lightly because wehave an inner reserve. Plato
himself, it would appear, possessed by
anticipation something of this reserve; few of his compatriots did;hence his scorn and anxiety.
Tragedy becoming dominant before the establishment of strong
standards in self and polis inhibits the attainment of those standards.When these standards are firmly implanted we may entertain thepoets with more safety—as a serious amusement, as Plato himselfforeshadows.
When we compare the Greek tragedians with Shakespeare we find
ourselves in different worlds. Shakespeare's kaleidoscopic world isopen vertically, the Greek tragedians' world is confined to a hori-zontal plane. Shakespeare is the kind of poet whom Plato hoped for;but it required some two millenia of preparation before reaching thekairos, the appointed time, when the advent of a Shakespeare was
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possible. Shakespeare had a spirit like Plato's: he too was one who
saw the sisterhood of the playful and serious and the aerial ascent
resulting therefrom. Shakespeare's tragedies go beyond tragedy as
the Greek dramatists understood it. Shakespeare sensed that tragedy
is not the final reading of life; the conflict is resoluble, if not always
explicitly resolved, by a vertical movement.
The novels of Sir Walter Scott are illuminating vis-a-vis Plato.
The Heart of Midlothian is a splendid story until a point about two
thirds of the way through. Then suddenly Scott's spirit flagged, andexcept for occasional passages thereafter, the novel is dull andmechanical. At his worst, Scott is mimetic in the sense which Platoabhorred, in the closed wooden sense of the Greek drama, lacking
even the Greek ability to conceal this poverty by great emotionaltension (or, more justly, scorning such an artifice). At his best,
however, Scott is mimetic in the full playful aporetic sense in which
Plato delighted; rejoicing in the rich diversity of things, each thing
with its own unique business in the world.
To take a hackneyed but relevant illustration from another
field, we sense a similar transition in architecture. The Greek temple
at its best, in the Parthenon, is perfect of its kind—the kind where the
measured is all, and the measureless is forbidden. There is no play
in Greek temple architecture. It is perfect on its own terms, which
are those of resolute agroikia.
Contrast the Greek temple with the Gothic cathedral: the latter is
play in stone, yet not play run wild, but play in counterpoint with
serious. From the Greek architects to the medieval architects there
has been an infusion of that which transcends the mean, an infusion
which made eutrapelia possible.
Once more, we can admire the Greek temple without feeling
oppressed because we do not let it dominate us; we have the requisite
resources to master its spell. It has become for us what Plato wouldcall an amusement. But when Plato looked from the AcademyGardens up to the Parthenon he must have felt that structure
weighing down on the citizens of Athens and keeping them earth-
bound. The Parthenon is perfect in its way, but that way is tragic:a noble fly in a noble fly-bottle.
19. Plato, the master of mimes
When we go through the Platonic dialogues, particularly the
Republic, prepared in this way, the conventional commentaries look
like a cake that has collapsed when some well-meaning but clumsy
person has opened the oven door; or like Garlyle's German Baron
who took to leaping on tables and answered that he was learning to
be lively.
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Plato's forte, particularly in Republic, Gorgias and Phaedrus, is
miming, making up revealing caricatures, often homoeopathic—a
little absurdity to humble a greater absurdity. Irony and humour
release us from our solemn obsessions by inviting us to play; some-
what like the rescue of the unhappy man in Wittgenstein's room:
hammering on the walls, can't get out, when the door is openbehind him all the time if only he could be induced to turn around.
The mimes of the latter part of
Rep. i are put in rapid succession
before the truculent Thrasymachus. Taken literally, and out of
context, they are wildly sophistical; but they are calculated to
bring shame, and cure by homoeopathy—like Socrates' comic first
speech on love in the Phaedrus, which makes game of Lysias by
pretending to take him seriously.
The mimes of the Gorgias on cookery and medicine, which bring
out Plato's moral insights, should prepare us for the mimes of Rep.
iii. The 3rd Book of the Republic is not highly regarded by commenta-
tors: they see in it for the most part only extravagant and highly
dubious observations about music, poetry and acting. But, unlessour argument is seriously astray, Rep. iii contains some of Plato'srichest mimes.
As soldiers lead to our first ideas about guardians; as dogs lead
to the first ideas about educating guardians; so the foibles of diction
and music are the first intimations of the sophistical perils surrounding
us.
In 392 begins a discussion of poetry in simple narration or
imitative narration, with much shaking of the head over the evilsof the imitative art. Taken at face value, this seems to be straining
at gnats, and has given rise to much mystification about the expulsion
of the imitative poets from the city; and even to the elaboration of
theories to the effect that Plato would countenance only abstract
art: which is as sensible as an earnest man who writes a treatise on
the state of speleology in ancient Athens from the evidence of theCave figure in Book vii.
In truth, it would seem, Plato in
Rep. iii is in a thoroughly naughty
Carlylian mood. As Carlyle in Sartor Resartus advances his convic-
tions about the world through a preposterous philosophy of clothes—a discourse which might at times have a faint bearing in serious veinabout literal clothes—so Plato in Rep. iii plays his way upwards
through a more or less wry game with the poets. What he seems to beaiming at eventually is to identify the arch enemy, the kolakikos,
the flatterer and fawner, who keeps men mean and low; the figure
of the sophist, the anti-body in the human scene.
This interpretation seems to be confirmed when, a little later (399),
he takes up the subject of music and announces that many-stringed
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and many-keyed instruments should be forbidden the city in favour
of Apollo's simple instrument. Only the hardiest of pedants would
seriously delve here into Athenian musicology.
What could the many-stringed instrument be, but a mime of the
sophist, who can speak in a hundred voices, and bemuse and reduce
all and sundry by his flattery? And Apollo's lyre: who but the philo-
sopher?
'If there comes to our city a man so wise that he can turn into
everything under the sun and imitate every conceivable object…
we shall do obeisance to him as to a sacred, wonderful, and
agreeable person; but we shall say that we have no such man in
our city, and the law forbids there being one, and we shall anointhim with myrrh, and crown him with a wreath of sacred wool, and
send him off to another city.' (398.)
Even the most reprobate of
poets, or the most seductive of music-
ians, could scarcely bear the weight of this indictment. It is aimed at
the archetypal kolakikos.
Sometimes Plato casts his playful mimes into the stricter measures
of analogy of proportion, the most explicit being the divided line of
Rep. vi. We cannot pursue them here. Pierre-Maxime Schuhl has
explored a number of them in his La Tabulation Platonicienne; but not,
surprisingly, those of Rep. iii.
Instead of speaking of Plato's mimicry, we could use the term
'model'. The latter is a term which has been brought into prominence
in recent years by those seeking to understand the evolution of the
exact sciences since their eruption in the seventeenth century. This
appears to be on the right path; it is certainly a great advance on theefforts of those arch-agroikoi, from Descartes onwards, who havecast our understanding of the exact sciences into well-nigh impene-
trable darkness through total neglect of the play element in the
sciences.
We may suspect, nevertheless, that the notion of 'model' is in
danger of languishing through being taken too seriously by thephilosophers. The serious needs to be joined with the playful beforeit can kindle. Those who practise the exact sciences perform this
marriage with consummate skill, at an infra-conscious level. New-
ton's secret was his proficiency at a new mode of serious play. The
right company for Newton is Shakespeare. But this, as Aristotlewould say, is another question, and we cannot go further into it here.
University of Auckland, New Zealand
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