. . . knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting.
—Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
IN SEVERAL OF his later dialogues, Plato’s characters take up dialectical inquiries that oscillate between collecting particulars into their broader kinds and articulating those kinds into their subspecies according to a “natural line of cleavage [διαφυὴν]” (Statesman 259d).1 In both the Statesman and the earlier Phaedrus, this second aspect of the dialectical method, the division of kinds, is likened to the everyday practice of animal sacrifice and butchery. In what follows, I address two ways that this analogy can be used to interpret Plato’s later methodology. First, I argue that if we examine this analogy with respect to the details of its cultural practice, we discover evidence that Plato prioritizes the method of collection insofar as division is impossible without it. In addition, however, I also argue that since collection participates in constructing the subject of division as divisible, it, like division, fails to grasp the oneness central to the being of any class it produces. I conclude from this that both of these methods are inadequate and that the image of the sacrificable animal reveals the thoroughly mimetic nature of discursive reasoning.
In order to understand the significance of the appeal to animal sacrifice within Plato’s later methodology, we must begin with a study of the Phaedrus, where, in addition to its many allusions to animals, we find the first reference to the method of division as a kind of butchery. We also find there a more complete account of the method of collection, an important aspect of Platonic methodology, which remains, for the most part, only implicit within later dialogues.
The Phaedrus is full of allusions to animals and humans’ relationship to them. From the singing cicadas (230c, 259a–d) to the straining winged horses of the soul (246a, 253d–e), which is later likened to an oyster trapped in its shell, the body (250c), the Phaedrus is one of Plato’s most zoologically animated dialogues. Of the many creatures that populate Plato’s bestiary, Socrates paints himself as the first. Walking with Phaedrus in the path of the Ilissus river, Socrates is reminded of the myth told of Oreithyia’s abduction by Boreas, but he dismisses discussion of mythological happenings in favor of inquiring into himself, “to know whether I am a monster [θηρίον] more complicated and furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature [ζῷον], to whom a divine and quiet [ἀτύφου] lot is given by nature” (230a).2 Just a short time later, Socrates again underscores his “animal” nature: “For as people lead hungry animals by shaking in front of them a branch of leaves or some fruit, just so, I think, you [Phaedrus], by holding before me discourses [λόγους] in books, will lead me all over Attica and wherever you please” (230d–e).3 As in other dialogues, Socrates is portrayed as strange, and here he becomes an image of the half-breed nature of the human, at once divine and bestial.
Not only does Socrates himself appear as an animal in the Phaedrus, he goes on throughout the dialogue to offer a variety of depictions of logoi as animal-like, making this relationship one of the more powerful tropes of the Phaedrus. Having listened to Phaedrus’s recitation of Lysias’s speech and offered his own speeches on erotic madness, Socrates turns to reflect upon the art of speechmaking itself, using Lysias’s speech as an example for critique.4 As Socrates famously claims, a good speech “must be organized, like a living being [ζῷον], with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless or footless, but to have a middle and members, composed in fitting relation to each other and to the whole” (264c). Despite its display of many rhetorical techniques, Socrates faults Lysias’s speech for lacking a unifying principle. According to his critique, Lysias’s speech is a monster, having no head and far too many limbs, some of which appear not even to be attached. In contrast, the good speech, like an animal’s body, must have all the right parts in all the right places along with sound relations, or joints, between them. The good logos and the animal’s body share a similarly articulate nature. Moreover, the articulateness of the good speech is derived from the already articulate nature of the subject of the logos, which also reflects the symmetry of the animal body: “Just as the body, which is one, is naturally divisible into two, right and left, with parts called by the same names, so our two discourses conceived of madness as naturally one principle within us, and one discourse, cutting off the left-hand part, continued to divide this until it found among its parts a sort of left-handed love, which it very justly reviled, but the other discourse, leading us to the right-hand part of madness, found a love having the same name as the first, but divine” (265e–266b).5 Thus, the articulate nature characteristic of a good speech simply mirrors the already articulate nature of its subject.6
In addition to likening, in his discussion of rhetoric, the proper structure of speeches to that of an animate body, Socrates appeals to the liveliness of an animal in order to value spoken over written logoi. Lauding the vital responsiveness of spoken logoi in their ability to relate to an interlocutor, Socrates contrasts these with written logoi, characterized as lifeless and repetitive, rendered dumb by the static permanence of their inscription (275d–277a). Also within the portion of the dialogue devoted to rhetoric, Socrates introduces the zōion once more as he accounts for the relationship between the dialectician and logos in his discussion of the methods of collection and division.
In the midst of his critique of Lysias’s speech, Socrates outlines the features of a good speech, saying that his own speeches on eros had demonstrated “two principles [δυοῖν εἰδοῖν], the essence of which it would be gratifying to learn, if art could teach it” (265d). As Socrates explains it, an initial collection produced a formal definition of love, affording his speech the “clearness and consistency” that was conspicuously lacking in Lysias’s speech (265d).7 In addition, Socrates identifies the second eidos of speech as that of “dividing things again by classes [κατ᾽ εἴδη], where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver [μαγείρου]” (265e). These “natural joints” appear to be echoed in the Statesman (quoted earlier) where division is said to cut along a “natural line of cleavage.” Let us consider each of these methods in turn.
Socrates describes collection as a “perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars, that one may make clear by definition the particular thing which he wishes to explain” (265d), and he characterizes the “divine” dialectician as one who can “see things that can naturally be collected into one” (266b). Nevertheless, collection is not simply reserved for the dialectician, as it is even invoked as the quintessential feature of the human soul in the elaborate myth describing the transmigration of souls: “For a human being must understand a general conception [εἴδος] formed by collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses” (249b). In sum, collection marks the defining nature of the human soul, distinguishing it from that of the nonhuman animal soul: the ability to move from multiplicity toward unity and from sensible particularity to formal abstraction.
Humans are again distinguished as superior to nonhuman animals with Socrates’s description of the second eidos of speech. Likening the method of division to the butcher’s ability to dismember an animal by its joints invokes humans’ domination over animals as food. That is, certain nonhuman animals are subordinated to humans as vehicles for maintaining our own animate existence. In addition, note the similar claim of the Statesman that the dialectician must divide classes “like an animal that is sacrificed, by joints” (287b–c). This reference to sacrifice also serves to elevate the human, since the nonhuman animal functions to preserve our relationship with the divine.
Throughout the Phaedrus, the trope of the animal appears ambiguous. On the one hand, the human is likened to the animal: Socrates is an animal hungry for logoi, and logoi are themselves articulate and animate. On the other hand, the human transcends the animal: collection produces abstractions purified of sensible nature, and division carves up a feast of logoi. This ambiguity appears to be grounded in human nature itself as simultaneously ruled by divine and animal natures. Because the methods of collection and division together negotiate the relation between similarity and difference, they serve as a key site for investigating the puzzling ambiguity of human nature. By looking more closely at these methods in light of the details of ancient Greek sacrificial practices, we will be able to investigate more deeply the way the nonhuman animal serves to highlight the human’s peculiar relationship to logos.
Most modern commentators agree that although the method of division is prominent in the Sophist and Statesman, this does not suggest that Plato was praising its use.8 Even the Great Divider himself, the Eleatic Stranger, critiques the overzealous use of division: “the attempt to separate everything from everything else is not only not in good taste but also shows that a man is utterly uncultivated and unphilosophical” (Sophist 259d–e).9 To divide simply for the sake of dividing is a mark of eristic disputation. In addition to this textual admonition against the excessive use of division, Mitchell Miller and Kenneth Dorter both assert that the performative failures of the bifurcatory divisions of the first half of the Statesman indicate Plato’s reserve with respect to the exclusive use of division.10
Nevertheless, these same authors also argue that the shift to the sacrificial model serves as an attempt at rehabilitating the method of division, from its rigidly quantitative application in the early bisectional divisions toward divisions based on qualitative assessments in the latter half of the dialogue.11 Thus, although division as strict quantitative bifurcation does seem to be under scrutiny in the dialogue, the invocation of sacrifice comes at precisely the point at which division is recast as founded on qualitative, eidetic judgments. In addition, the fact that sacrifice is a sacred ritual practice central to the daily life of the Greeks suggests not only that Plato is not critiquing “sacrificial” division but that he may even be embracing it.
In spite of these indications, I would like to argue that Plato is in fact offering a deeper critique of division than is recognized by those interpretations that offer a view of division as rehabilitated within the Statesman. In particular, I find that especially when division is compared to the practice of animal sacrifice, it is seen as insufficient on its own, as it must be accompanied both by a primary and by ongoing acts of collection.
To a modern reader, the Phaedrus’s appeal to butchery and the Statesman’s appeal to sacrifice might appear entirely unrelated, but in the context of ancient Greek language, the practice of sacrifice is not in fact separable from the butchery of animals for food. Whereas most contemporary industrialized cultures have a distinct term for butchery (profane dismemberment) as opposed to sacrifice (sacred dismemberment), by the fifth century BCE the Greek mageiros meant simultaneously butcher, sacrificer, and cook.12 Jean-Pierre Vernant summarizes the term’s ambiguous significance in this way: “For us, sacrifice and butchering belong to different semantic zones, [but] . . . among the Greeks matters were completely different. The same vocabulary encompasses two domains, from Homer to the end of the classical age. Ancient Greek has no other terms to convey the idea of slaughtering an animal to butcher it than those referring to sacrifice or killing for the gods.”13 Thus, even though division is at times related to the butcher’s craft and at others to the sacrificer’s, given the semantic overlap between mageiros as butcher and as sacrificer, we can safely assert that all these references invoke the ritual of animal sacrifice. We will find in what follows that insofar as sacrificial practice is constituted by an extensive series of cuts, it was for Plato an appropriate analogue for the method of division.
In his treatment of ancient Greek sacrifice, Homo Necans, Walter Burkert notes that, in addition to sources in ancient literature, the central acts of sacrificial ritual are attested to in many classical-era vase paintings.14 According to these sources, upon arriving at the sacrificial site, the space of the ritual must first be sanctified: “the sacrificial basket [containing the sacrificial knife] and water jug are carried around the assembly, thus marking off the sacred realm from the profane.”15 The first (symbolic) sacrifice is that of the animal’s hair. After this comes the killing blow, a deep cut at the neck, from which the animal’s blood is carefully captured, so that it too may be offered at the altar. Drained of blood, the animal’s body is stretched and cut lengthwise, dividing the left- and right-hand sides of the abdomen in order to expose both the upper and lower organs. We may note that these organs are double in two ways. First, the upper, “noble” organs, or splankhna, are opposed to the lower organs, which are undesirable for eating. That is, the organs are divided into the good and the bad, a sacrificial practice that corresponds directly to Socrates’s account in the Phaedrus. Second, the upper organs each demonstrate a kind of double nature in themselves: the kidneys are paired, the lungs and liver each have discernable lobes, and even the heart has distinct chambers.16
In addition to this division between upper and lower viscera, the viscera as a whole are extracted first and are divided from the flesh and bone of the animal. After this is complete, yet another separation is made, this time between the upper and lower halves of the animal’s body. Indeed, in many scenes of the “Ricci Vase,” we see half a goat’s carcass hanging like a festoon in the background.17 All that is left is to separate the bones from the flesh and the flesh from the fat, each division corresponding to the distinction between the Promethean offering to the gods and the meat left for the ritual’s participants to enjoy in common.
In all, since the ritual of sacrifice entails an elaborate series of cuts, it makes for a fitting analogue for the manifold divisions necessary in the search for some class, whether the divine madness of eros, the wily craft of the sophist, or the prudent wisdom of the statesman. But since it has been suggested that the analogy to sacrificial practice acts to elevate not only the human but also the method of division itself, let us consider in more detail the significance of this analogy for determining the relative value of this method.
Recall that when the method of division is first discussed in the Phaedrus Socrates warns against chopping up classes “in the manner of a bad carver.” Whereas a “hack job” would likely leave behind splintered bones, a clean cut would preserve the integrity of each member that has been divided. As the master carver of the Zhuang-zi puts it:
A good cook changes his blade once a year: he slices. An ordinary cook changes his blade once a month: he hacks. I have been using this same blade for nineteen years, cutting up thousands of oxen, and yet it is still as sharp as the day it came off the whetstone. For the joints have spaces within them, and the very edge of the blade has no thickness at all. When what has no thickness enters into an empty space, it is vast and open, with more than enough room for the play of the blade. (3:4)18
That is, the failure of the bad butcher consists in the fact that he does cut what is separated, harming the integrity of the parts that are separated. The excellent butcher, on the other hand, merely renders visible those perforations that are present but invisible within the animal’s body.19 In addition, proper butchery makes good on the original wholeness of the animal by preserving and revealing the unity of each part that is separated. Thus a successful division must reconstitute unity in the production of two wholes from an original one. From this perspective, division might appear to be quite productive. Just as butchery produces useful food, division produces useful concepts, which may in turn be divided in order to produce even more.
In spite of its productive quality, we are unable to overlook the fact that the virtuous mageiros cannot cut meat well without having first killed an animal. Similarly, though the virtuous dialectician may divide adeptly, merely following the “natural joints,” the practice of division requires that the unity of what is divided be somehow violated in the process. This would seem to suggest that the method of division, like animal sacrifice, may be productive only by means of a violation of the vital integrity of the original subject.20
But what, exactly, is violated by the method of division? Scrutinizing this original unity, we encounter an apparent divergence between the practice of sacrifice and that of division. It seems inaccurate to consider the sacrificial animal analogous with what is articulated through the method of division, for the class that is divided in each case is always something other than the target of division’s inquiry. In order to pursue a definition by means of division, the Stranger in each case must assume the first class to be divided, and this class is not itself the subject of the inquiry. For example, the divisions of both the Sophist and the Statesman begin from the assertion of a class that is not itself produced on the basis of a prior division: the Sophist’s divisions begin from the assumption that sophistry is a form of technē (221d), and the Stranger begins his divisions with the agreement that the statesman will be found among those who have epistēmē (258b). Every time the method of division is employed to sketch the path toward a definition, some class must first be posited, a class that cannot itself be accounted for by means of the method of division.21
This apparent divergence is resolved, however, if we reconsider the transformation of the animal within the sacrificial rite. The animal that is sacrificed is, in at least one sense, decidedly different from that which is dismembered. That is, the life of the living animal, its zōē, must be sacrificed before the dead animal can be eviscerated and dismembered in a second sacrifice, which is made as an offering to the god(s). This living unity, then, is the sine qua non of ritual sacrifice, but it is different from the nonliving unity of the carcass that is dismembered.
In division, the correlate to the living animal of sacrifice is the class originally posited for analysis, as it must be different from the sought-after class at the same time as it also somehow harbors it. Notice, however, that division cannot provide this original class on its own. Before division may begin, there must be something for it to divide. The single class that begins the search by division is not something achieved by division but instead something posited by collection, which identifies a unified set of features shared by all members of the larger genus that is proposed as containing the division’s target class.22 In all, the fact that division should require the fundamental assumption of a class to be divided strongly suggests that division is viewed in the later dialogues as a method dependent upon a prior use of collection.
Not only is collection necessary in advance of any division, it also appears to be responsible for identifying the distinctions among subsequently divided classes. That is, since collection isolates traits common to a class, it thereby also illuminates their distinction from others. Thus, just as Zhuang-zi’s butcher suggested that the space between the joints is more significant than the width of the blade, it would seem that collection’s identification of classes paves the way for division’s subsequent articulation. According to this model, then, every division is sketched in advance by the method of collection. As a result, the majority of what appears to be accomplished through division is in fact the work of multiple, ongoing collections, taking place, as it were, behind the scenes, unnoticeably tracing the line along which each cut is to be made.
On this interpretation, rather than demonstrating Plato’s rehabilitation and innovation of the method of division, the analogy made between division and animal sacrifice shows division’s utter dependence upon collection as logically primary. In so doing, Plato implicitly posits collection as the philosophical method more closely bound to the original unity of what is articulated through division, giving it the duty of identifying the natural joints, such that division may separate them appropriately. But insofar as collection acts as the preparation for division, it is also thereby implicated in the logic of sacrifice. In my final section, I will investigate the role of collection as a kind of “domestication” of forms from natural, “wild” wholes to constructed, and thus “tamed,” unities.
I have argued above that, in the later dialogues, the method of division is shown as subordinate to the method of collection because of its dependence upon prior (and subsequent) unities that must be posited in order for it to conduct its characteristic articulation and analysis. I would now like to return to the method of collection in order to probe its role within the logic of sacrifice already uncovered in our analysis of the method of division. Let us look again to the practice of sacrifice in order to discuss a specific aspect of its “logic,” as I have called it.
We have posited that the method of collection is presupposed by the method of division for the same reason that a living, whole animal must already be available for sacrifice before it can be butchered. Focusing on this living, whole animal, we can quickly see that much must already have been accomplished to have an animal “available” and “ready” for sacrifice. Most importantly, animals must be docile enough to be handled by human participants during a sacrifice. Indeed, the willing victim was the highest ideal in ancient Greek sacrifice—to such an extent, in fact, that evidence of this quality became embedded within the ritual itself. By pouring water over the animal’s head, the participants encouraged the animal to extend its neck, lifting its head as if in noble assent to its coming death.23 In addition to this ritual evidence, the geographer and anthropologist Erich Isaac has argued that this need for a stock of docile animals for sacrifice acted as the catalyst for extensive domestic breeding of herd animals, beginning in ancient Babylon and Egypt.24
Given these relationships between domestication and sacrifice, it is clear that the prior unity of the animal that is established before the sacrifice is not simply the animal given in nature but one already inscribed with social forms via domestication. In order to make a sacrifice, a sacrificial animal must be available, but insofar as the properties befitting a sacrificial animal are not immediately abundant without human imposition, specific domesticated animals must be bred as sacrificable.25 Although the idea of an animal as sacrificable implies both the relationship between animal and human and that between human and divine, the notion of “animal-as-sacrificable” is exclusively indexed to human aims. If this is the case, then the living unity that precedes the sacrificial rite is necessarily a human construction. That is, the introduction of “sacrificable” into the very meaning of “animal” is something that does not occur simply by nature, although the natural vulnerability and tractability of certain animals is compatible with this meaning. I will now argue for an interpretation of the method of collection as performing a similar kind of constructive mediation of the classes it renders up for division.
On the face of it, depicting collection as a kind of “domestication” of concepts is problematic, for it seems to deny the claims throughout the dialogues that division occurs diaphuēn, according to “natural joints,” which, as I have already argued, are marked out by prior collections. Furthermore, domestication suggests a technicity normally absent from discussions of dialectical inquiry and present, instead, in discussions of sophistry. Surely the dialogues suggest that the breaks between classes are ontologically grounded, with collection gesturing directly at this nature. But a gesture is not the same as that to which it points. The method of collection generates a class, a definition, perhaps even simply a single term, and each of these serves as a sign of the distinctiveness of that kind in nature, while not being that nature itself. This gap is sufficient to introduce what I see to be the similarity between the collection of divisible classes and the domestication of sacrificable animals: the production of a novel kind whose nature is inherently double because of its relation to the human.
We may begin by noting that domestication and collection both produce a “tame” version of their subject. Domestication begins with the animal “in nature” and then renders it behaviorally docile by conditioning and selective breeding, ultimately making the animal a being relative to the human, a being whose nature is not simply its own but is also for the human. Thus domestication introduces a duplicity into the nature of the animal, a nature that is self-same and yet oriented toward another, the human. This ontological and semantic doubling of the animal is necessary so that its material multiplicity may be exploited in the act of sacred dismemberment. This is not to say that the animal in nature is not sacrificed, only that this sacrifice occurs within the domestication that necessarily precedes the sacrificial ritual.
Similarly, collection also begins from a natural class, for instance “animal,” which is itself whole “in nature,” that is, with respect to being. As an ontological kind, “animal” is one, whole, unmediated, and uncomplicated. Though there are many different kinds of animals, they are all one in being animals. Collection “domesticates” the class for human understanding by identifying the common features within a variety of instances and stitching that sensible many into a coherent unity. But where there are stitches a seam remains, and collection’s fabricated unity can never be other than the image of that whole. That is, thought’s synthetic movement toward abstraction is discursively related to being, and, however faithful it may be, it remains an image of being rather than being itself. Though collection is responsive to the immediate oneness of the being of a class, it nonetheless mediates that singular nature, rendering each class composite and, thus, implicitly divisible. The “natural” class with which collection begins is tamed by logos, which produces a discursively intelligible kind. Thus, just as domestication is not directly responsible for sacrifice, though it produces the animal as sacrificable, so collection does not actively divide classes, though it constructs them as divisible.
As “taming” disciplines, collection and domestication actively produce natural subjects as relative to the human. In the case of domestication, an animal’s disposition as either wild or tame is legible only within the context of human fear and need, and only by reflecting this relation does it become coherent as sacrificable. Similarly, ontological kinds have no inherent relationship to human knowledge, but when that relation is performed through logos, the kind produced includes a multiplicity reflective of that relation. Thus, in each case, what is sacrificed/articulated is not a natural being tout court; it is nature as relative to the human, nature as a reflection of itself.
If we take these considerations back to the context of the Phaedrus, a few things become clear. First, Socrates’s early introspective turn to consider his own nature becomes more suggestive: is he a beast wilder than Typhon or a tamer, gentler animal? Though Socrates may be alluding to the fact that he is often confused with a sophist (and here we must be reminded of the Stranger’s admonition about the wolf and the dog in the Sophist26), we must also notice that to ask the question of whether one is a wild or a tame animal is to have already decided in favor of the latter. For “tame” and “wild” both imply the animal’s relationship to humans. In addition, the relation of collection to discursive knowledge clarifies the significance of the Phaedrus’s sharply drawn distinction between written and spoken logos. Spoken logos, like the natural class, is wholly oriented by proximity to its source, whereas written logos is an image abandoned by its origin, rigidly repetitive of its script, unable to be responsive to new inquiry. Perhaps the anxiety immediately following the discussion of dialectic arises in response to the fact that the sacrificial metaphor accurately depicts the dialectician’s craft as endemically mimetic and thus divorced from direct contact with its origin in being.
The foregoing discussion has established at least one clear problem: there is a hidden insufficiency not only in division but in the method of collection as well. On account of its implication in a logic of sacrifice, we determined that the unity identified by collection has a constructed rather than a natural coherence, revealing its distance from the singularity of the forms. Thus, although the priority of the method of collection ahead of division remains, the ontological integrity of the classes it produces has been undermined. By presenting a class as prepared for division, collection has to have already marked the joints so that they may be severed, and to have marked those joints is to have also already intimated a multiplicity of forms within a given class rather than its natural wholeness. Though it is constructive rather than destructive, and thus occupies the first position in the order of dialectic, the method of collection is nonetheless a sort of midwife of being rather than its direct heir. Since both collection and division are central to dialectical inquiry and both are represented in the analogy to sacrificial practices, we must now consider the possible implications of our analysis for our understanding of the “free man’s science,” that is, dialectic (Sophist 234b, 253c–d).
I have argued here that the invocation of sacrifice to describe the method of division serves to unsettle division’s position within dialectic, thereby placing the method of collection as a requisite first step. However, by extending the metaphor of the sacrificial rite to consider the role collection plays, I have shown that, similar to the domestication that makes an animal sacrificable, collection also “tames” being, producing classes that are divisible because they are already complicated through their mediated relationship to being. But if collection is implicated in the logic of sacrifice in the way I have argued, then dialectic would be thoroughly mediated in its approach to being and the forms, something many of the dialogues would seem to dispute outright. We are forced to wonder: did Plato believe dialectic to be ultimately insufficient?
Perhaps it is simply too difficult to convince ourselves that Plato could be deeply skeptical regarding the philosopher’s ability to achieve direct knowledge of the forms, so let us propose one possibility. In the Statesman, the Stranger presents not only the statesman’s activity but also implicitly the philosopher’s in terms of two kinds of weaving. This would mean that while dialectic is composed of collection and division, it is conducted by means of a third, and this, not collection or division or their combination, is the beating heart of dialectic. The Statesman reveals that this knowledge lies in the recognition and implementation of the principle of the mean. That is, the phronēsis of both the philosopher and the statesman rests with the adequate negotiation of the propriety of their application of the available methods.
According to this approach, we might have an explanation for why, in the later dialogues, Plato seems to ignore the question of the way direct knowledge of the forms is achieved, focusing instead on the dialectician’s grounds for judging the use of images of the forms. In fact, rather than offering an account of how we might have direct access to the forms, Plato appears to presuppose that this is the case. Skepticism about the intellect’s capacity to know the forms is as incoherent to Plato as skepticism regarding the existence of substances is to Aristotle.27 Following from this, we might, then, claim that the goal of philosophy is not simply to achieve direct intuition of the forms, which is perhaps always already possible and present even within the experiences of perception. Instead, philosophy’s aim must be to acquire the ability to adequately and effectively judge the relationship between the forms and our representations of them within thought. That philosophy is far more concerned with its relationship to what it thinks than with its content is a theme not limited to the critical dialogues of Plato’s later period but is deeply embedded within both the aporetic early dialogues and the middle dialogues, which focus on the practice of philosophy as a way of life.
The careful reader of Plato’s later dialogues would be justified in concluding that they reflect a sober position with regard to our ultimate access to the ideas. The ambiguity and inconclusiveness of some of the later dialogues’ searches alone might point in this direction. But we are also rightly drawn to the triumphant claims the Stranger makes regarding the “free man’s science,” and the description of the statesman as a weaver suggests a fruitful analogy that offers the possibility of reclaiming even deeply imagistic and mediated thinking. Given this, we are justified in asserting that the later dialogues show Plato coming to terms in a deeper sense with his own need as a philosopher to think through images and with the fact that these images infiltrate the philosophical concepts they would illuminate. It is perhaps mediated knowledge itself that Plato aims to honor in these dialogues, even as that honor is bestowed by means of the sacrifice of images on the altar of dialectical thought. For these reasons, then, the sacrificial animal remains the ultimate analogue for the relationship between images and dialectic.
1. Plato, Statesman, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925).
2. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914).
3. The intoxicating effects of logos as a pharmakon reappear throughout the Phaedrus. These moments are traced in detail in Jacques Derrida’s landmark essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171.
4. In the introduction to their translation of the Phaedrus, Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995) make a compelling case for considering the Phaedrus itself to be unified by the theme of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophical dialectic. They argue that “the three speeches that form its first part turn out to be examples Plato puts forward in order to support the conclusion he reaches in the second” (xxviii).
5. This claim follows the Pythagorean table of opposites by aligning “good” with “right-handed” and “bad” with “left-handed.”
6. This conforms to the principle described in the Timaeus that a “likely speech [εἰκὼς λόγος]” must formally reflect its subject matter (48d).
7. On collection as a method of definition, see Marguerite Deslauriers, “Plato and Aristotle on Division and Definition,” Ancient Philosophy 10 (1990): 203–219. See also Deborah De Chiara-Quenzer’s refutation of this claim in “The Purpose of the Philosophical Method in Plato’s Statesman,” Apeiron 31 (1998): 98–99.
8. Against Julius Stenzel, J. B. Skemp is an early proponent of the position that the Statesman is “a gentle satire on the over-enthusiastic use of the method of Division by some of the members of the Academy itself.” Introductory essay, in Plato, Statesman, trans. J. B. Skemp (London: Routledge, 1952), 67.
9. Plato, Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961).
10. Mitchell Miller, The Philosopher in Plato’s “Statesman” (Las Vegas, Nev.: Parmenides Publishing, 2004), 27; Kenneth Dorter, “The Clash of Methodologies in Plato’s Statesman,” in Plato and Platonism, ed. M. Van Ophuijsen (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1999), 200.
11. In “Clash of Methodologies,” Dorter specifically links this concern with qualitative judgment to the discussion of the mean in the latter part of the Statesman. See also Dorter’s “Justice and Method in the Statesman,” in Justice, Law and Method in Plato and Aristotle, ed. Spiro Panagiotou (Edmonton, Canada: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1987), 105–122, esp. sect. II.
12. See Guy Berthiaume’s treatment of these three related roles in Les roles du mágeiros: Étude sur la boucherie, la cuisine et le sacrifice dans la Grèce ancienne (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1982).
13. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “At Man’s Table,” in The Cuisine of Sacrifice, ed. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 25. Vernant is here summarizing Jean Casabona’s view presented in Recherches sur le vocabulaire du sacrifice en grec, des origines à la fin de l’époque classique (Aix-en-Provence: Annales de la Faculté des Lettres, Éditions Ophrys, no. 56, 1966).
14. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 3, figs. 1–2. The following description closely follows Burkert’s account in Homo Necans as well as in his Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
15. Burkert, Homo Necans, 4.
16. Aristotle remarks on this in On the Parts of Animals 669b13–21.
17. The “Ricci Vase” is the name given to a fifth-century Ionic hydria from Caere by Jean-Louis Durand in his “Greek Animals: Toward a Topology of Edible Bodies,” in The Cuisine of Sacrifice, 87–117; see figs. 1, 3–4, 11–12.
18. Zhuang-zi: The Essential Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009), 3:4.
19. On Zhuang-zi’s invention of the term tianli, that is, “divine/natural perforations,” see Ziporyn’s discussion in Zhuang-zi: The Essential Writings, 22n6.
20. This reasoning is similar to that of Georges Bataille in L’Érotisme (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957).
21. In the Phaedrus, Socrates simply adopts one of the implicit claims of Lysias’s speech, namely, that love is a kind of madness, as a guiding definition for his own speeches.
22. In his Metaphysics and Method in Plato’s “Statesman” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Kenneth Sayre argues that recollection is similar to the method of collection, both presupposing “prior knowledge” (39). Sayre references Charles Griswold’s helpful account of the relation between collection and recollection in Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 116, 173–186.
23. Burkert, Homo Necans, 3–4, and Greek Religion, 56.
24. Erich Isaac, “Myths, Cults, and Livestock Breeding,” Diogenes 41 (1963): 70–93. That the Athenians had a similar “need” for the prodigious sacrifices of the Babylonian kings is hinted at in Book 8 of The Laws, where the Athenian Stranger states his aspiration that, according to their proposed constitution, “there shall be not less than 365 feasts” (828b). Taking this along with W. S. Ferguson’s calculation of the sacrificial animals slaughtered for two festivals in 324/3 BCE as 240 for the Dionysia and 75 for the Asklepieia, it would appear that the Athenians had a significant appetite for sacrificial victims (Hesperia 17, no. 2 [1948]: 134n7).
25. This is not to say, of course, that all domestication is for the purpose of sacrifice, nor that all domestic animals would be considered appropriate for sacrifice. In Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), Robert Parker, referring to the structuralist ethnographers Halveson and Leach, writes: “in some societies, it has been argued, there is a correlation between an animal’s edibility and its ‘social distance’ in relation to man” (363–364).
26. At 231a, the Stranger hesitates to grant the sophist any honor, saying that “a wolf is very like a dog, the wildest like the tamest.”
27. Metaphysics VII, ch. 17.