My principal objection to Allan Bloom's interpretation of the character of Cephalus in Plato's Republic is that it presents dialectic as a calculated rhetorical strategy of exclusion, whereas the literary evidence suggests to the contrary that Socrates is really interested in hearing Cephalus speak about justice. (See my previous post for a more detailed explanation of this objection.) It may even be that conversation with Socrates would be morally superfluous for someone like Cephalus, but the point for us is not that Cephalus has or has not missed out on something, but that Socrates sees something to learn from him and has lost the opportunity.
Leo Strauss is of course at the source of this badly mistaken attitude towards Socratic dialectic. Whether he is guilty of it himself is another question (although according his own interpretive framework I suppose he should be held completely responsible for his legacy as well as his actual writings). A question easily answered by reference to The City and Man. He claims that Cephalus "stands for what seems to be the most natural authority. He posses the dignity peculiar to old age and thus presents the order which is based on reverence for the old, the old order as opposed to the present decay" (65).
Perhaps this kind of character analysis passed for careful reading in Strauss's day because it was so novel to pay so much attention to the characters at all. But surely Strauss's reasoning amounts to saying that if a character is old he stands for an old order, whereas Cephalus himself is characterized more by his differences from his ancestors than from any continuity. Strauss himself acknowledges that "assuredly, the metic Cephalus is not the proper representative of the old order, of the old Athenian order," without managing to draw the conclusion that Plato did not intend him to be such a representative at all.
This kind of allegorical reading (which would, one hopes, be unacceptable in the interpretation of, say, a modern novel) not only distorts Plato's attitude toward tradition and piety, it also obscures the real dramatic function of an elderly character, which is rather existential than representative: we, with Socrates, are interested in what it is like to be very old, not some presumption of what an old person supposedly thinks.
Julia Annas takes a position much closer to my own. Like me, she describes Cephalus as having a certain kind of "complacency." However, she too easily identifies morals as the dimension in which he demonstrates this defect. "Basically," she writes, "he does not care very much about morality" (Annas, 20). This judgment is no more warranted than Bloom's. Like his, it contradicts the obvious facts: Cephalus admires moderation and justice and thinks both of them more important than money (since money is actually subordinate to virtue); he thinks the most valuable thing his sons could gain from him would be refined moral judgment, together with the means to execute it. How does Annas come to the conclusion that such a man does not even care much about the very thing his life has been spent securing for his sons?
She soon makes it clear: "He has no intellectual interest in the matter at all. He enjoys a chat about it with Socrates, but as soon as the latter asks questions which force him to think, he loses interest and goes away with the polite fiction that he has to attend to the sacrifice (which is in fact over)." Leaving aside her contrived claim that Cephalus is lying about the sacrifices (as though he would, if he were so concerned with the external form of morality as Annas thinks he is!), she assumes that care and interest entail intellectual curiosity and fortitude. Cephalus should be a counterexample to this prejudice rather than just being summarily subsumed under it.
Next time, a few notes on Seth Benardete's unique interpretation.
Have you distinguished between the appearance of sophisitic refutation and actual Socratic refutation in this scene yet? Or drawn out Socrates' purpose in allowing himself to put words in Cephalus' mouth? I've been looking through your posts, and I can't seem to shake free of some version of Bloom's "calculated rhetorical strategy of exclusion" without understanding why Socrates could not exclude Cephalus (or reveal to Cephalus that he needs to exclude himself to maintain his own comfort) and still be a dialectician. I have some rather confused objections, or maybe just qualifications, here.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Annas, but I don't see why Cephalus can't be just as much the victim of double thoughts on the same issue as anyone else. It seems to me that his complacency extends both to his desire to participate in the making of speeches and to his desire to "hedge his bets" with both gods and men. He can be simultaneously interested and disinterested according to the depth of his involvement. There is a point at which his interest is "moderated" by a lack of intellectual curiosity and by the fact that he calls himself a money-making mean. Such a man is not the sort who would not, on principle, tell a fib about the sacrifices as a strategy of self-exclusion (though, of course, I've never heard that claim before and have no idea how Annas justifies it) to get out of a discussion--one he initially enjoys--that would disturb his conception of how to act out justice and therefore his easygoing way of life. This doesn't make him an evil or particularly immoral person--just an ordinary one.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Strauss' reading of Cephalus as "the most natural authority" is an indictment of the city itself--in response to "present decay," Cephalus can gesture comfortably at the symbols of an old order, all that remains of what would have been a genuinely authoritative order. That is a kind of traditionalism, though not one that anyone has any interest in defending. He participates in the sacrifices because they assuage a nagging fear and because it is simply what old men seem to do when they are not complaining about inconsiderate relatives. Either man's relation to the gods needs to be renewed or discussion of the gods must be put aside in order for philosophers to use "unaided reason" to discover the best regime.