Alan Saunders: A hymn to Gaia, from ancient Greece, and of course it’s a bit of a reconstruction, but how far can we go when it comes to reconstructing Greek thought? To what extent, for example, is Plato the sort of guy you might encounter in the philosophy department of a modern university, and to what extent is he really interested, not in dialogue, but in myth? That’s the question we’re going to try to answer this week on The Philosopher’s Zone.

Hi, I’m Alan Saunders, and to talk about Plato the myth-maker I’m joined now by Rick Benitez, professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Rick, welcome back to the show.

Rick Benitez: Hi, Alan.

Alan Saunders: There’s been a change in the interpretation of Plato, hasn’t there? For centuries he was admired for his inspiration and vision rather than for his theories and argumentation. Then the pendulum swung hard back in the other direction.

Rick Benitez: That’s right. I think the pendulum swung in the late 19th century and throughout most of the 20th century, and it swung towards Plato the philosopher as opposed to Plato the myth-maker or Plato the religious person, and it swung towards Plato’s arguments, Plato’s theories and Plato’s views about philosophical matters. It swung very hard in that direction and you found Plato being taught primarily in philosophy departments.

Alan Saunders: As opposed to where?

Rick Benitez: In literature, classics, yes.

Alan Saunders: In general, aside from Plato specifically, what do you think is the importance of myth in society?

Rick Benitez: That’s a huge question, but I’ll see what I can say. Myth is one of the ways that we encapsulate the things that are most meaningful to us, and we can’t easily express these things. They’re deep, they’re significant, but the meaning of them isn’t crystal clear, and we encapsulate them in stories, narratives, and those stories are in a way projections of the things that are so significant, and sometimes they’re pretty messy too, so they contain elements of add-ons and other things, right, but the heart, the kernel of the meaningful thing should be there in the myth, so that’s what I think of myth generally and its importance to a culture or a community.

Alan Saunders: And we can talk about myths regarding fairly historically recent events. I mean, there’s the Anzac myth, for example.

Rick Benitez: Exactly, that’s right. Each community, political or social, creates its own myths, and often at times you find that they’re taken for granted within the community when they turn out to be quite contrary or not very well grounded in historical fact. So I mean, I come originally from the US, and if we think about some of the political mythology about the founding of the United States, it’s very, very deep and rich, but it’s...a lot of it’s not so true.

Alan Saunders: What would be some examples of the myths that Plato uses?

Rick Benitez: What I’d like to do is to compare Plato to some of the ancient myths, so people would be familiar about myths about Orpheus and Eurydice, perhaps, or myths about Zeus and Cronos and Uranus, or myths about the underworld, Tartarus and Poseidon and myths from the Odyssey or the Iliad. Plato in the greatest myths that he writes, writes some pretty large-scale stories like that, and they have content which involves some supernatural element. They may involve, for example, there’s a long myth at the end of The Republic which is a narrative told by a soldier who had died and gone to the other world and come back, so it’s like an Orpheus myth, it’s an underworld myth with a return, and it tells what it looks like in the other world, and there are a few, not too many, myths in Plato’s dialogues that are really extended myths like this that have to do with life after death or supernatural things or cosmology or even probably a lot of listeners would be aware of the myth about Atlantis, which is Plato’s own myth, he’s the maker of the myth of Atlantis.

Alan Saunders: He’s the only source for Atlantis, isn’t he?

Rick Benitez: He’s the one, that’s right.

Alan Saunders: So, what do you think he thought he was doing when he was writing this sort of stuff? Should we see him as it were as a novelist, as somebody who’s engaged in creative fiction, or does he think he’s doing something else?

Rick Benitez: Look, I think that’s a really good question. Partly it does have to do with literature. Most people would know that Plato has a great antagonism to the poets of his day, the ones who went before him...

Alan Saunders: Yes, he wanted them garlanded and then dismissed from the city, didn’t he?

Rick Benitez: That’s right, but he didn’t want all of poetry dismissed. He wanted a particular kind of poetry, his philosophic poetry, to replace that, or anyone else who could write poetry in a philosophic way. So in the Phaedo he famously has Socrates say that philosophy is the greatest music, right, so he does think of philosophy as a kind of art form and he’s pioneering a new genre. He’s not the first to begin to write dialogues, but he’s one of the ones who takes it to its highest form as a genre. So in part he is doing something aesthetic, something like a novelist would do. In part he’s doing that, but I also think embedded in his purposes is the use of pictures, images. The Greek word is icons, representations, to lead people from one kind of perspective, one way of thinking about things, to another, and his myths have that kind of function which I think of as at least pedagogical and maybe more philosophical of shifting perspective to a new kind of perspective, a different one.

Alan Saunders: What’s the relationship in Plato’s thought between myth and what we might call scientific knowledge?

Rick Benitez: That’s another really good question, and it’s in hot debate, I should say, right now. Okay, so there are a lot of papers going around in the journals about mythos, that’s the Greek word for myth, and logos, the word for argument or reason. I think the first best way to appreciate how Plato uses that distinction is to remind ourselves that the dialogues as a whole, all of the dialogues of Plato are narratives. They are framing myths within which both the arguments and the specialised myths occur. So at the very largest scale, what we’ve got is a dramatic work written by Plato in which there are characters, there’s a setting and those arguments that occur in them, they sometimes have an abstract form, but they’re not presented in an abstract way, they’re presented as embodied arguments, presented by a specific person in a specific circumstance. They are part of the mythos in the very large sense of plot, narrative structure of a dialogue. So, I don’t see reason and myth as one being subservient to the other in Plato’s purposes. There’s a contrast, though, within the dialogue, and the contrast is between a more pictorial kind of representation which you get in the myths and a more abstract and you might say geometrical kind of representation or geometrical or logical representation, but I think that the arguments, the scientific reasoning within Plato’s dialogues is also meant as a kind of modelling of the way things might be.

Alan Saunders: So, when he’s writing a dialogue and he’s saying this is what Socrates said to Euthyphro or whatever, is he doing something different to what he’s doing when he tells us about Atlantis, or are they the same thing essentially?

Rick Benitez: I don’t think they’re the same thing. Of course you can imagine Socrates asking what’s the point of the myth and why should we believe it, and getting an answer in terms of argument that’s more literal other than narrative, but at some stage in the process of that argument it’s always open and it sometimes happens in the Platonic dialogues for one of the interlocutors to say, ‘But wait a minute you didn’t understand me clearly,’ and then to present an analogy or a narrative which elaborates the logos being given. So I think there’s a dialectic between mythos and logos, and neither one of them is to be reckoned more fundamental than the other. You can move from one to the other and back again. The aim is to try to promote better understanding.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you’re with The Philosopher’s Zone and I’m talking to Rick Benitez from the University of Sydney about Plato as a myth-maker. Rick, how central do you think myth was to Plato’s thought?

Rick Benitez: I think it’s absolutely central. Let me give you an example. This may be slightly radical for people to think about, but we often talk about the theory of forms in Plato, but I think that the forms as Plato describes them are actually another myth.

Alan Saunders: We should say, the theory of forms, I mean, a simple way of saying that is to say that I’m sitting on a chair now, but that’s just one instance of the eternal form of the chair.

Rick Benitez: Instance, yes, the eternal form of the chair, or of a horse, or of red, or of beautiful or of any other thing. So sometimes people describe the forms as universals or concepts. Another word that Plato uses, a Greek word is idea, they’re the ideas, and he has a theory about those being the fundamentally real things, but I don’t think of it as theoretical, I think it is a model, and the connection between model and image and myth in Plato is very, very tight, it’s just that myths in the narrow sense are more accessible and familiar in their images and probably more confused in their images for ordinary people to understand. So they’re told in a story-like sort of way, but even the theory of forms is a depiction of Plato’s about the way reality might be, but he, in my view, recognises that as a depiction that we ultimately should try to get beyond. So I think the idea of myth is absolutely fundamental. The forms are a beautiful myth or beautiful lie for Plato, whereas some other myths are not so beautiful because they don’t tell things very much like they are, but they’re still a myth.

Alan Saunders: We usually draw a distinction between mythos and logos in Plato’s thought. That’s to say, between myth and rational dialogue. How does the identification of the myth voice in Plato affect our understanding of this distinction?

Rick Benitez: I think you might be talking about the results of some computer studies that we’ve done to identify a myth voice in Plato, is that right?

Alan Saunders: Yes, that’s fine, yes.

Rick Benitez: So, some colleagues of mine and I have worked on counting elements of style in Plato, and one of the things we noticed and have pretty well verified now is that there is a very distinct pattern of words that you can’t control very well or very consciously, that shows a difference between those passages in Plato where a myth is told or a story that is meant to be authoritative is reported, and those passages in which there’s argumentation going on. So we haven’t noticed that there’s a distinction. That means that there’s a different kind of language, and probably those different kinds of language have different function, but like I said earlier, I don’t want to say that that separation means that there’s one form of discourse that Plato thinks of as always and everywhere preferred over another form of discourse, that the logical form of discourse should always be preferred over the mythical discourse. I don’t see any evidence to indicate that that’s the way we should read Plato.

Alan Saunders: We know that the Oracle of Delphi told Socrates that he should know himself, and...

Rick Benitez: The way I understand the story, sorry Alan, is that Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle if there was anyone wiser than Socrates, and the Oracle responded, ‘No one.’ So that’s the way...

Alan Saunders: Okay, that’s... that’s even better, but I just wondered how Plato’s myth voice is connected with the cultural role in ancient Greece, played by seers and oracles, particularly with the Delphic Oracle.

Rick Benitez: I see, yes. Let’s put in a Platonic context, so let’s recall what happens when Socrates hears the report that the Oracle said there’s no one wiser than he is. His first reaction is to disbelieve it, because he thinks, ‘I don’t know anything, at least not anything of importance, and there’s all these other people around who do know stuff, at least they claim to know a lot of stuff, so the Oracle can’t be right, but it has to be right, so I’ll go around and start talking with the people and find out what they know.’ And lo and behold the more he has conversations with people the more the Oracle is confirmed. There’s a lot of people who say they know things that don’t really know anything of very much importance at all, they’re very confused, there’s other people who know some things, but because of that they think they know everything, and there are some people who just can’t answer Socrates’s questions at all. And so Socrates comes to believe that, ‘Well, the Oracle might have been right, but not in the way I first thought it was, because I didn’t have wisdom but I’m wiser in this respect, that I don’t think I have wisdom when I don’t.’ And so he has a special kind of wisdom, a human wisdom. So his view of the rightness, the correctness of the Oracle is transformed by his investigation, and I think that’s a kind of example, exemplar, for how to understand the myths in Plato too. I don’t think that Plato intends people reading the dialogues to read the myths and say, ‘Oh, now that’s Plato’s religious account of how things really are.’ We’re actually meant to question the myths, to think about them, to wonder about them, but hopefully we arrive at a point where we see a way in which the myth was telling us something, and maybe that wasn’t the way we thought it was telling us something in the first place.

Alan Saunders: Do authors other than Plato employ a similar myth voice suggesting religious authority?

Rick Benitez: Well, we’re looking at that. The answer’s not completely clear about that yet, so we want to look at oracles generally. For example, we’ve looked at the speeches of Tiresias the seer in Euripides’s tragedies, and we have noticed that there are also computational differences between those speeches of Tiresias and other speeches in the tragedies. We need to check that against the baseline for Euripides, it’s still ongoing work, right, to see if that’s the case, but we suspect that it is the case at this point, and if it is the case, then that means that probably culturally most ancient Greeks had an ability to hear when someone was speaking to them in a register that represented, ah, now you’re speaking in a myth kind of voice, or a voice that represents a certain kind of authority like an oracular authority. And then people would have picked up on that naturally the same way that I can pick up with you when we speak informally or whether I speak formally with my dean or provost or someone at the university.

Alan Saunders: How did Plato regard the power of myth to control lives?

Rick Benitez: It’s a double-edged sword, it has incredible power to control lives, and I think you want to say not just the lives of people who are the irrational lot. It has the power to control the lives of even the most rational of people, and one of the things you find described in The Republic is that even the guardians of the republic, those most rational of all people in the society, are people for whom the power of the image is so great that it slips in under the radar of rationality and has its effect on them. This is one reason why he’s so scared of some kinds of poetry and its ability to persuade. He’s scared of propaganda. Many people may think, well, he’s got his own propaganda to replace it, but he doesn’t like the power that image has to persuade even the most rational of people. So, the most important thing for him is if you’re going to have the use of myths and images in society, he wants them to be ones that reflect in more accurate ways the truth of the matter about things, and this is where his belief that there is a truth of the matter about even the most ordinary practical sorts of things, right and wrong in everyday life, may differ from more recent views about that, more relativistic views about that.

Alan Saunders: Was there in Plato’s time a new, a different philosophical approach to myth?

Rick Benitez: Well, I think that’s one of the things you start to see in the early days of philosophy, at least as early as the Sophists who precede Plato by a generation or so. Probably even earlier, pushing back into the natural scientists, people that we often call the pre-Socratics, the people like Anaxagoras, partly defence for them, a cover if you want, in order to present their views which were ultimately more secular and more naturalistic, is in the context of myths, poems, allegories. So there’s a very interesting document now known as the Derveni Papyrus; a papyrus discovered not so long ago in which the author is interpreting an Orphic poem.

Alan Saunders: So this is a poem about Orpheus?

Rick Benitez: It’s a poem about Orpheus, and it’s pretty bizarre by my likes. It’s the kind that would belong to Orphic religion, and it has all kinds of symbolism about the underworld and the gods and genealogies and the like, but this author interprets it according to principles of probably Anaxagorean natural science. He interprets it as an allegory, the Orphic poem, as an allegory of a natural scientific point of view, and I think what’s really interesting about that is you’re starting to find that some of the early philosophers are trying to find ways in which they can assimilate their views to things that went before so that it’s a little bit less dangerous to express them, and to put them in the context of poetry or mythology or allegory, and if that’s the case, then it’s not at all surprising to find Plato using myths in the way that he does.

Alan Saunders: I always have difficulties, I mean, and this is not my difficulty specifically with Greek beliefs, it’s I also have this problem with Hindu beliefs, but I always wonder, did the Greeks actually think that if you went to the top of Mt Olympus you’d meet Zeus and the guys? I mean, how literal were they in their beliefs about their deities?

Rick Benitez: I have the same difficulty that you have. I find it incredible, and yet even very recently I saw a documentary program in which a Cambridge ancient historian talking about the statues of the gods said that the Greeks actually believed that these statues weren’t just representations of the gods but that they were the gods and they might at any time move or cause things to happen and so on, and as wonderful as Greek sculpture became, I find it impossible to believe that someone looking at bronze or marble could believe that that was the real thing, so I have the same difficulty that you have. It’s still a large part of the scholarship to say yes; no, the beliefs are quite literal, and you could believe that you could go up to the top of Mt Olympus. But we have that problem today too, don’t we, still? People with literal beliefs about the existence of the pearly gates and the roads paved in gold, right?

Alan Saunders: Yes. Well, I had a dream a few weeks ago in which I was making a sacrifice to Apollo.

Rick Benitez: It’s not always a bad thing to do if you want to hedge your bets.

Alan Saunders: Just finally, there’s a poem by the 20th century Irish poet Louis MacNeice, I can’t quite remember the words, but he was a great classicist, and he talks about ancient Greece and he said something like, it was all so unimaginably different, and so long ago. You’re making Plato look a bit further away from us than we thought he was, aren’t you?

Rick Benitez: I think that’s right, yes. I tend to accept that. In some ways I suspect that we might have more to gain from Plato if he actually is farther away from us, because we can find out some things we didn’t expect to find.

Alan Saunders: Well Rick Benitez, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Rick Benitez: Thanks, Alan.

Alan Saunders: Rick Benitez is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. The sound engineer on The Philosopher’s Zone this week was John Diamond. I’m Alan Saunders, I’ll be back next week, and that’s not a myth.