13  “A Soul Superlatively Natural”: Psychic Excess in Laws 10

Sara Brill

Early on in the lengthy prelude that is to be delivered to the would-be atheist, the Athenian makes a statement about soul whose ambiguity and profundity beg comparison with that fateful description of the good from Republic 6 as image (509b). If, observes the Athenian, soul can be shown to be generated prior to things like fire and air, then “it would be most correct to say it to be image (892c).1 As the adverbial form of image, image means primarily “differently from;” when used in conjunction with a genitive it can indicate “above,” and this specification to its kind of “difference from” recommends the adverb’s use to indicate “especially,” “pre-eminently” or as Bury renders it, “superlatively.”2 To claim that image is image image is to suggest that image exists as both surpassingly and superlatively natural, which is to attribute to soul a deeply ambiguous relationship to nature.

This is a fruitful ambiguity, and one that is in keeping with the general tenor of the discussion of soul in Book 10. The Athenian’s characterization of the soul as exceedingly natural is contingent upon both a conception of image and a demonstration of soul’s generation, a showing of its priority with respect to genesis. This approach implies a relation between image and genesis made explicit in the Athenian’s summary of the atheist’s conception of image as image image [generation or coming-to-be of things primary] (892c). As the prelude continues, the Athenian does not expressly challenge this general formulation of image; instead, he attempts to reconfigure the atheist’s conception of the relationship between image and image by asserting that soul is the primary cause of all motion. In doing so, the Athenian attributes to soul generative capacities whose magnitude and scope blur the distinction between psychology and cosmology.

The shape the Athenian’s contention with impiety takes in Book 10, namely the development of an account of soul that will be delivered to the impious as an antidote to their impiety, attests to the political efficacy of “psychology.” At the same time, the particular account of soul the Athenian presents, with the excesses it attributes to image and their cosmic significance, offers a commentary on the cosmological status of the laws under which the polis itself operates, and by which its citizens are to be treated. Thus the account of soul in Book 10 has significant implications for the Laws’ overarching conception of the role of the polis in the lives of its citizens and the cosmos in which it stands. This essay explores the relationship between the psychology the Athenian promotes in the preludes against impiety and the legislative project undertaken in the Laws. More specifically, in drawing out the account of soul embedded in the preludes against impiety and the cosmology they promote, we will explore the source of the curative function that is claimed for legislation throughout the Laws. Section 1 sketches the theological and legislative context out of which the preludes against impiety arise. Section 2 analyzes who the impious are and identifies the therapeutic work the preludes are to do on their souls. Section 3 focuses on the relationship between soul and mind that is promoted by the preludes in order to explicate both the vision of health that grants the preludes their efficacy and the role the polis plays in this vision.

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The legislative project undertaken by the Athenian and his interlocutors in designing laws for Magnesia is predicated upon an intimate association between law and divine nous. Given the structure of the Laws, the means of contending with the impiety of the young cannot but have an impact on the legislative project undertaken in the dialogue. Indeed because this “second-best city” is imagined as having value only insofar as it imitates, to the extent possible, the mind of the divine and because its laws are a principle means of its doing so (713e–714a), impiety is a crime against the very foundation of the city itself. As Cleinias observes, the legislation against impiety which the three men have been discussing serves as a defense of law as such (890d) and of the particular laws they have been creating (887c). In contending with those flirting with impiety, the Athenian engages in a radical if understated revaluation of the divine, transforming archaic theogony (against which the atheist reacts in formulating his cosmology) into a noetic theology (which does not need to operate independently of a noetic cosmology).

There is not space here to investigate the full measure of the significance of impiety to the Laws (Eric Sanday’s chapter in this volume makes some compelling claims about this significance); I will limit myself to a sketch of what I take to be the essential features of the dialogue’s treatment of impiety. The Athenian Stranger’s concession in Book 5 that the eradication of private property is possible only amongst gods or children of gods (739c–e) signals a difference between the Laws’ city-in-speech and that of the Republic.3 The production of the greatest possible civic unity in Magnesia will proceed not by eradicating private property, but by refiguring the citizen’s relationship to property, that is to say, refiguring the way in which the citizen thinks of, behaves toward, and refers to his or her own.4

Because the ownership of property marks the city as distanced from the gods and their children, Magnesia in its very founding is already flirting with a kind of impiety, namely the impiety of calling one’s own that which ultimately belongs to the gods. And indeed this appropriating gesture is explicitly conceived as the source of many great evils by the Athenian.5 Shaping how Magnesia’s citizens conceive of and behave toward their own can thus be presented as combating this general, diffuse impiety. More specifically, while property will be permitted the citizen, the citizen in turn will be asked to consider his identity and life as belonging to the gods and to the city and to behave accordingly.6 That this project will involve a relatively elaborate psychology is signaled at the start of Book 5 with the Athenian’s observation that the most divine possession [image] a citizen has is his soul because it is most his own (726a). This description of image as a possession signals the dialogue’s reformulation of what constitutes property, as does the enigmatic elision between what is image and what is image, between what is divine and what is most one’s own.7 That one’s ownership by the gods extends to ownership by the city (to the extent that the city imitates divine nous) is strongly suggested in the conclusion to Book 6, wherein the beginning and end of life are determined by a civic gesture—the writing and erasing of names in one’s ancestral temple (785a–b).

The various pathologies outlined in the Laws can be treated as manifestations of the failure of this effort to refigure how citizens relate to property. Indeed the general and diffuse impiety that accompanies a failure to properly conceive of and relate to what is one’s own takes many more specific forms depending upon the extent to which this project fails. For instance, the excessive self-love identified in Book 5 as a cause of all image (731e), the condition of image called injustice (906c), the innate inability to avoid self-gain and do what is best for the community (875a–c), and the unexpiated hamartia of the past that the would-be temple robber is told is the cause of his desire (854a–b) can all be read as conditions in which the manner in which one relates to what is one’s own and to what is for others is flawed and in need of treatment. The specific impiety to which we shall turn presently, the impiety of the young, finds its source in three beliefs, and it is in the treatment of these beliefs that the Athenian feels compelled to present the psychology that will occupy much of the book. Before we look more closely at this treatment, I would like to outline the legislative context in which they occur.

Granted the position of this psychology within preludes addressing the impious—that is, within a legislative project that takes itself to be therapeutic in nature and that maintains the practice of appending preludes to laws as intimately related to its curative capacity—we will need to identify the alleviative function it is supposed to fulfill; that is, we will need to identify the conditions of soul these preludes are to treat. In light of the above comments, the therapeutic thrust of the preludes delivered to the impious in Book 10 is found in their attempt to correct how three types of the impious think about what belongs to them. The preludes do so by offering a cosmology in which what is most one’s own is presented as an offshoot of a much larger and potent cosmic force. In these preludes individual psychology is to be transformed by means of an account of cosmic psychology (or of the psychology of the cosmos). But in order to understand how such a prelude could be successful we must notice one crucial feature about the preludes in general.

If it is the case, as it is suggested in Book 9, that the preludes supplement the laws’ blindness to particularity (875d) by speaking to the legislated herself and attempting to make her an ally of the law through both argument and threat (intimacy of address should not be taken for nonviolence),8 then our understanding of the preludes must be informed by a grasp of the person to whom the preludes are addressed. This is to say that the preludes, like the Platonic dialogues in general, are decisively shaped by the perspectives of a variety of characters. No matter how far these preludes may stray from the kinds of conversations Plato depicts Socrates as having, I agree with André Laks’s conclusion that, “the Socratic model of a dialectical conversation constitutes the horizon within which the theory of legislative preamble must be situated.”9 I do so even as I am persuaded by Catherine Zuckert’s argument in this volume that the Laws occurs at a far remove from Socratic philosophizing and even as I will highlight the manner in which the preludes, in mutating and pushing against this horizon, strain the limits of interlocution. This horizon requires us to identify the variety of perspectives presented in this dialogue, perspectives that are often adopted, given the interlocutionary limitations of Cleinias and Megillus, by the Athenian himself. The extent to which the Laws’ dramatic frame is also dialogic is certainly grounds for discussion, but that the Laws has a dramatic frame is important to keep in mind. Attention to the Laws’ curious dramatic structure forces us to recognize that, in asking ourselves, “What do the preludes say?” we must also ask, “To whom are the preludes addressed?”10

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Near the end of Book 10 the Athenian identifies six classes of impiety necessary for the legislator to distinguish because they require penalties that are “neither equal nor similar” (908b). In discerning who falls into these classes, we may take as a preliminary answer to this question those whom the Athenian identifies at the start of the book as prone to particularly grave offences, namely, the young. Further valuable information about these young people and those by whom they are influenced is given in the Athenian’s early admonition [image] of the impious, wherein he offers a general diagnosis of impiety: “No one who believes [image], as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the gods, has ever yet done an impious deed voluntarily, or uttered a lawless word: he that acts so is in one of these three conditions of mind—either he does not believe in what I have said; or, secondly, he believes that the gods exist, but have no care for men; or thirdly, he believes that they are easy to win over when bribed by offerings and prayers” (885b). The Athenian’s response to Cleinias’s question of how one is to contend with these beliefs is to define a certain posture one must adopt toward the people who possess them. Like the good doctor described in Book 4 (720c–e), one must listen to them (885c).11 But here we can note a discursive disruption, as this posture is made possible only by a kind of speaking, the speaking for the legislated. In order to listen to the legislated, the Athenian must address “himself”; that is, he must address the persona he has adopted as the legislator, by taking on the persona of the legislated, who are addressing the legislators. The Athenian must both give and receive the demand of the legislated. Thus it is by merit of a certain discursive gymnastics and ventriloquism that this scene of address is created.

The image that the Athenian assigns to the impious is hardly flattering. The tone which he attributes to them is mocking and demanding; he answers it by addressing them as children and telling them that their views are neither novel nor radical (888a–c). However, the impious are not without talents in rhetoric and public debate; the demand they make upon the Athenian both appeals to the model of legislation he has adopted and attempts to translate this model into the idiom of the court. The legislated charge the legislators with deceiving people by using groundless arguments for the sake of manipulating citizens (886e), and demand that they prove the existence of the gods (885e).12 When Cleinias suggests that proving the existence of the gods is as simple as pointing to the heavens, and attributes impiety to a simple inability to master one’s desire for pleasure (886a–b), the Athenian finds it necessary to complicate this diagnosis of impiety by calling attention to a broader cultural and political landscape in which impiety is allowed to flourish, a landscape beset, according to the Athenian, with “a very grievous unwisdom [image] which is reputed to be the height of wisdom” (886b). In elaborating upon this “unwisdom,” the Athenian outlines a political landscape in which the theologies produced by ancient poets have not only failed to provide a check to the pursuit of pleasure, they have also created a class of individuals who, in rebelling against them, propound a cosmology that fosters image by asserting there are no gods.13 Thus the stance of the atheists must be viewed in its reactive connection to a particular kind of theology.

This is a shrewd strategy on the part of the Athenian. By locating the position of the atheist within a particular cultural and intellectual framework, and specifically as a reaction to (and thus dependent upon) a particular theological context, the Athenian sets the stage for the putting-in-place of the atheist that will be continued in the prelude delivered directly to him. Moreover, he also signals to the reader that any attempt to contend with the beliefs that produce impiety must not only replace akratic cosmology with some other form of cosmology, it must also replace archaic theology with some other theology. This is to say that akratic cosmology will be replaced by noetic cosmology; noetic cosmology in turn will provide a theology that depicts the gods as bearers of mind.

The Athenian’s preliminary exchange with the impious tells us that the impious are the inheritors of this cultural landscape, of this constellation of beliefs in which a particular vision of the gods provokes a conception of nature that purports to refute any such vision and to resent its advocacy as a manipulative deception expressed in specious argumentation. This exchange leaves the reader with the sense that many of the impious are predisposed to argument (even if this manifests itself as a love for eristic) and thus that the preludes to these people can take the shape of something like dialectic.14 However, I want to focus less on the dialectical or argumentative character (or lack thereof) of these preludes and more on the manner in which their substance is fitted to the psychic condition of the person they are addressing. Given this general introduction to the impious, we can now inquire into the specific conditions of soul attributed to the atheist, the deist, and the traditional theist (to follow Robert Mayhew’s designations).15 Because the prelude delivered to the atheist is the longest and that upon which the other two preludes are based, my focus will be on this prelude, followed by a sketch of the other two characters and their preludes.

Prelude for the Atheist

What does the atheist believe? Or rather what portrait of the atheist does the Athenian deliver to the atheist? The belief that engenders the condition of soul of the atheist turns out to be a misconception of what constitutes the “first cause of becoming and perishing in all things” (891e). The atheist falls prey to a widespread misunderstanding about image that attributes to image a generation later than that of the body (892a). The cosmology to which the atheist is victim is one in which things come into being primarily by the interaction between image, whose most primary manifestations are soulless bodies of earth and fire, etc. (889b), image, which governs the mingling of these natural forces (889b–c), and image, which provides a secondary and lesser source of things, secondary because later and lesser because it receives what is good about it from nature (889a). Legislation, especially that which asserts the existence of gods, acts counter to the “natural” tendency to dominate: “as to things just, they do not exist at all by nature, but men are constantly in dispute about them and continually altering them, and whatever alteration they make is authoritative, though it owes its existence to art and the laws, and not in any way to nature” (889e–890a). Thus the atheist is persuaded by sophists who align law with image against nature, and who, on the basis of this antagonism, chart out a politics that valorizes injustice under the rubric of living a natural life.

Because the atheist’s beliefs lead to impiety, the “cure” or treatment for this psychic condition must involve a set of counter-beliefs, an alternative to the akratic cosmology. In his response to this cosmology and the politics it suggests, and thus in his antidote to the condition of soul fostered by such a cosmology, the Athenian tacitly accepts the atheist’s general vision of image, namely that image is the “production of things primary” (892c). The atheist’s error lies in what he considers such primary things to be: “That which is the first cause of becoming and perishing in all things, this is declared by the arguments which have produced the soul of the impious to be not first, but generated later, and that which is the later to be the earlier; and because of this they have fallen into error regarding the real nature of the divine existence” (891e). This is to say, the Athenian will assert that it is the soul (what the atheist had aligned with image and with later and secondary creation) that is responsible for the first productions and thus it is the soul that should be called by the atheists most natural (892c). The therapeutic move to be found in the logos that follows is expressed in its radically reconfiguring the relationship between image, image, and image such that the motions of soul—phenomena like joy, sorrow, hatred, love, reflections, memories, opinions true and false16—manifest in image and image alike, are the primary workings of the cosmos and are responsible for the generation and dissolution of all things. In this alternate cosmology, the operation of image, namely the combination of elements into things, is replaced by the presence and absence of mind; law, like soul itself, will indicate the inadequacy of the presentation of the relationship between image and image as antagonistic.

But this antidote to atheism only functions by asserting some extremely provocative claims about the origin and nature of soul. The cosmic priority which this account grants to image is such that it is by merit of psychology, or, better, psychogony, that the existence of gods can and must be gleaned from the motion of the heavens. It is this psychogony that is to defeat the incredulity of the atheist by providing an alternate cosmology. Given its significance for the success of the prelude, it is necessary for us to gain a stronger grasp of just what conception of soul, what psychogony and psychology, the Athenian maintains as capable of combating the atheist’s cosmology. What is it necessary to believe about soul in order to excise atheism from one’s soul?

In this prelude, the fecundity of soul is a function of soul’s alignment with a kind of motion, an alignment accomplished by appeal to the phenomenon of living being itself. The Athenian presents the kinetics at the heart of this prelude by identifying ten kinds of motion and ordering them according to a hierarchy in which the motion capable of moving itself is granted the highest honor and conceded to be the motion that causes all others. The Athenian then connects this “self-movement” with image by attaining agreement from his interlocutors that the condition of things capable of moving themselves is that of being alive and that presence of soul as also associated with creating in things the condition of being alive (895c).17

Armed with the agreed definition of soul as “self-movement” the Athenian draws out several of its implications: soul is the cause of motion and change in all things (896b), soul is the oldest [image] of all things generated (896b),18 soul is prior to body (896b), the “things” of soul are also prior to body (896c–d), soul is the cause of all things, including opposites like good and bad (896d), and the soul controls heaven (896e). As the Athenian elaborates upon how soul causes motion, he and his interlocutors agree that there must be at least two kinds of soul, good soul (soul in conjunction with [image] mind) and bad soul (soul consorting with [image] image) (896e–897b). In attempting to determine which kind of soul governs heaven they investigate which motion is proper to mind, an investigation which requires the use of an image. On the grounds of its tendency toward self-sameness, revolution is recommended as the best image for the motion of mind (898a–b);19 as this motion is also most indicative of the motion of the heavens they conclude that it is good soul or several good souls that govern the heavens. This conclusion is further illustrated by a consideration of how “good soul” might move, in which the movement of the sun is taken as caused by soul (which implies that the sun and other heavenly bodies are not soulless) and is indicative of the movement of the cosmos as a whole. The Athenian and his interlocutors conclude their discussion of the sun’s motion with the agreement that the sun, like the cosmos itself, is moved by a good soul and further agree that this soul is a god (899a–b). They then end their prelude to the atheist by setting down “limiting conditions”: either the atheist must show that soul is not older than body or he must believe in and honor the gods (899c).

Prelude for the Deist

The preludes to the deist and the traditional theist explicitly build upon this picture of image and cosmos by drawing out the implications for human life of an ordered and mindful cosmos overseen by rational gods. However, the condition of soul of the one who believes the gods neglect human affairs is a bit different than that of the young atheist. This potentially impious person is driven not by a denial of the gods, but by a certain bind, a certain incapacity to square his belief in the gods with his perception of the apparent flourishing of unjust people. Here is the portrait the Athenian paints of this person: “My good sir [image],”20 let us say, “the fact that you believe in gods is due probably to a divine kinship drawing you to what is of like nature, to honor it and recognize its existence; but the fortunes of evil and unjust men, both privately and in public—which, though not really happy, are excessively and improperly lauded as happy by public opinion—drive you to impiety by the wrong way in which they are celebrated, not only in poetry, but in tales of every kind” (899d–e). While the atheist has fallen victim to a vision of the cosmos handed to him by certain sophists, the person who fears neglect from the gods is a victim of his own observations and the many stories told and songs sung that valorize an unjust life. There is a powerful resonance here between the Athenian’s description of the soul of this young person and Plato’s depiction of Glaucon and Adeimantus in Republic 2.21 Here as in the Republic, the truly enigmatic human phenomenon is the person who seems to have a natural love of justice, a passional predisposition toward measure and harmony.22 The existence, against all tendency toward image and excessive self-love, of such a human is the phenomenon that most begs philosophical attention and inquiry. And here, as in the Republic, attempting such an account will require the employment of a vast conceptual apparatus. For now, however, let us simply observe that the prelude must contend with the impression that injustice pays, and I take the necessity of the discursive supplement of the charm to the prelude to signal Plato’s acknowledgement of the power and traumatizing force of this experience. According to the Athenian, what the deist lacks, and what both the prelude and its supplementary charm are intended to provide, is a vision of the expiation of unjust deeds. They do so by means of an elaborate spatial metaphor in which theodicy is figured as the movement of souls to appropriate places and is governed by the cosmic law of “like to like.” Throughout this prelude and charm, the tropes of ownership and kinship play a decisive role: as both the property of the gods and as kin to the gods by merit of their possession of soul (902b),23 humans should be assured of the care and attention of the gods who, in their solicitude of what is their own, are exemplars of ownership.

Prelude for the Traditional Theist

The traditional theist is also one who has fallen prey to stories about the gods from both poets and prose writers. Like the deists, these impious people are misled by their own conception of divinity. However, the conception of the gods formulated by such people so far surpasses in depravity the claim that the gods neglect humans as to make Cleinias describe the people holding this opinion as the worst and most impious people (907b). The opinion about the gods that sparks in Cleinias this ardent, zealous condemnation is presented by the Athenian as likening gods to guardians and those who bribe them to wolves: “it is just as if wolves were to give small bits of their prey to watch-dogs, and they being mollified by the gifts were to allow them to go ravening among the flocks” (906d). Such a person takes the gods to be more corrupt than those human practitioners of image who manage to fulfill their duties without succumbing to corruption. Their discussion of the people who hold such views of the gods also has a maddening effect on the Athenian and his interlocutors themselves, driving them to a passionate and contentious denunciation of such people that violates their earlier agreement to tame their image (887c–888a) and argue against the impious dispassionately, a failure to which the Athenian calls their attention (907b–d). Beyond the preludes already delivered to the atheist and the deist, there does not seem to be much hope held out for convincing this person otherwise; however, the law prohibiting the possession of private shrines (909d–e) which concludes Book 10 seems designed with this particular form of impiety in mind, suggesting that with this type of person the limits of persuasive argument have been reached.

Frank and Ironic Impiety

There remains one more criterion relevant to the legislator’s discernment and treatment of impiety, the (infamous and fraught) distinction between the “frank” [image, 908c]24 and the ironic [image, 908e] impious person, a distinction perhaps most clearly illustrated in its demarcation of two kinds of atheist:

“For while those who, though they utterly disbelieve in the existence of the gods, possess by nature a just character, both hate the evil and, because of their dislike of injustice, are incapable of being induced to commit unjust actions, and flee from unjust men and love [image] the just; on the other hand, those who, besides holding that the world is empty of gods, are afflicted by incontinence in respect of pleasures and pains, and possess also powerful memories and sharp wits—though both these classes share alike in the disease of atheism, yet in respect of the amount of ruin they bring on other people, the latter class would work more and the former less of evil.” (908b–c)

It is from out of the class of the ironic impious that one finds diviners and jugglers, tyrants, demagogues, and generals, “those who plot by means of peculiar mystic rights of their own, and the devices of those who are called sophists” (908d). With respect to both the deist and the one who believes the gods can be bribed, the ironic or acute forms of their impiety turn their victims into “ravening beasts” who, “besides holding that the gods are negligent or open to bribes, despise men, charming the souls of many of the living, and claiming that they charm the souls of the dead, and promising to persuade the gods by bewitching them, as it were with sacrifices, prayers, and incantations, and who try this to wreck utterly not only individuals, but whole families and states for the sake of money” (909a–b). This passage draws together again both those who believe in the gods’ neglect and those who believe the gods can be bribed, a sobering reminder of the depths to which even those who possess some “natural” kinship with the gods (899d) can fall if their corruption is not checked.

Indeed this distinction between frank and ironic impious people would not be possible if the only cause of impiety was image, which is why the Athenian corrects Cleinias’s claim that it is only a weakness with respect to pleasure and pain that causes impiety; by pointing to the persuasive power of the sophistic position on the cosmos, the Athenian sets the stage for the corruption of those who, while they naturally love justice (and perhaps because they do), are traumatized by the apparent flourishing of unjust people and so are predisposed to be persuaded by the arguments of the sophists about what is natural and about the falsehood of justice. What Cleinias’s somewhat naive diagnosis fails to consider is the more dangerous possibility that even people predisposed to love justice and the gods can be turned away from justice and the gods; what Cleinias fails to discern is the array of impious people (the jarring connection between the sophist, the charlatan, and the people persuaded by each) and the work of a variety of cultural and political factors in producing this array.

Consequently, the preludes must be constructed with an eye to both individual psychology and social institution. Much of the work done by the preludes in addressing the impious consists in pointing out their psychic condition and locating them within a larger framework that requires of them certain metaphysical, theological, and cosmological commitments that they themselves can attest to. In locating the impious within a cosmic structure of which they are part, in presenting their psychic conditions and the inclinations that arise from them as part of a larger psychic structure that exceeds them, the prelude attempts to put the impious in their place, as it were, a gesture that grants, on the one hand, the security of theodicy the deist desires25 and, on the other hand, a kind of self-knowledge and humility that the atheist and those who believe the gods can be bribed are taken to lack.26

For the frank impious person, the antidote lies in pointing to the existence of people, like themselves, who do have a natural love for justice and order, and to play up the metaphysical and cosmological implications of such a love. The strategy the prelude employs is to show frank impious people that they are not at home in the very cosmology they espouse; their predisposition toward justice and order cannot be explained by the beliefs they have claimed as their own. This is especially true for the frank deist, whose attention is to be turned from the apparent flourishing of unjust people (the phenomenon that causes this person so much torment) to the remarkable occurrence of those naturally predisposed to love justice.27 The Athenian presents the prelude’s cosmology as able to account for both image and a natural predisposition toward justice; the atheist’s cosmology, on the other hand, can only account for image and cannot explain an innate love of justice and related phenomena like the eruptions of order exhibited by children in play and by all humans in dance. The only explanation offered is chance, and the Athenian is gambling that once the impious have been recognized as having a place in an orderly cosmos, for many of them this recourse will appear symptomatic of an impoverished perspective.

That not all impious people will be persuaded by these preludes is implied by the penalties the Athenian goes on to assign to impiety, penalties which are supposed to reflect the taxonomy of impiety the Athenian has produced. According to the Athenian, as there are three causes of impiety (the three beliefs just discussed) and two kinds of impiety that result from each (frank and ironic), there are six classes [image] “which require to be distinguished, as needing penalties that are neither equal nor similar [image]” (908b). Since imprisonment is imposed in all cases of conviction for impiety, the differences between these classes will be a function of the location and conditions of their imprisonment. This in turn is possible because there are three kinds of prisons in Magnesia: the public prison near the agora where most convicts are housed, the reformatory [image] located near the assembly room of the Nocturnal Council, and the third, called “retribution” [image], located in the wildest and most isolated part of the country (908a). The “frank” impious people, people who are suffering from “folly being devoid of evil disposition and character [image, 908e],” and who require “admonishment and imprisonment” [image image (908e)], are to receive a penalty of no less than five years in the reformatory where they will be visited only by members of the council charged with visiting them in order to “minister to their soul’s salvation by admonition” (909a).28 Those who, after the period of their incarceration, appear to be reformed are allowed back into Magnesian society; those who are convicted a second time are put to death (909a). The “ironic” impious people, those who are “like ravening beasts” (image, 909a) and for whom, according to the Athenian, even two deaths is not enough (908e), are to be imprisoned in the countryside and refused any visitors whatsoever, receiving only a food ration determined by the law wardens. That they are to be imprisoned until death is not explicitly stated in this passage, but is strongly suggested both by the absence of any specification as to a means for or result of their rehabilitation and by the legislative detail that should such a person have children, those children are to be received by the guardian of orphans from the day of their parent’s conviction (909d). Upon death, these impious are denied burial; their bodies are to be thrown outside the borders of Magnesia, with a penalty of impiety for anyone who dares to bury them, enforceable by anyone who chooses to prosecute (909c). Thus two deaths are indeed allotted to these people: the symbolic death of imprisonment in the most isolated place and under the most isolating of conditions, marked by the appropriation of the convict’s offspring and reiterated in the denial of burial, and physical death.

The Athenian’s delivery of the penalties to the impious, his “interpretation” of the law regarding impiety (907d) is incomplete, since it specifies not six but two main kinds of punishments, those for the frank and those for the ironic. Perhaps we are to infer that, for the classes of frank impious, distinctions will be drawn in terms of the length of time incarcerated; nevertheless, the Athenian fails to follow through with the demand to produce six separate penalties (908b). This apparent lapse, along with the admission that repeat offenses are possible and the suggested impossibility of rehabilitating three of these classes (not to mention the limitation placed on oath taking in Book 12 (948d–e), which bodes poorly for efforts to stem the tide of impiety) serve to remind the reader that all of this legislation occurs under the specter of its failure. As we return to discuss in more detail the psychology that is hoped to render these punishments superfluous, we should have in mind already the admission of the possibility (and even the likelihood) of its failure.

* * *

The clinical context of Book 10’s account of soul (its occurrence as a prelude and thus as a form of treatment) advises against assuming that it represents what Plato takes to be true about the soul. Rather, the safer assessment to make about the preludes, in my opinion, is that they tell us quite a bit about what Plato suspects it is necessary for citizens to believe about the soul, given the political and cultural landscape that has produced the particular condition of soul and set of beliefs the Athenian describes. This is not to say that Plato is “lying” or is not concerned with the truth;29 in fact, given the resemblance of some of these potentially impious people to some of the young men he depicts as particularly philosophically-leaning elsewhere in the dialogues, there is reason to believe Plato intentionally presented the Athenian as being particularly careful and thoughtful in his “answers” to the impious. Nevertheless, the curious clinical operation granted to the preludes ties their claims to a particular constellation of concerns in such a manner as to assert their immersion within a political environment, not their transcendence of it, and we should be mindful of this stance. Granted the strong political inflection of the preludes in general, it is necessary to ask where we might locate the role of the polis in the relationship between image and image that is asserted by the preludes against impiety. Investigating this question will give us a sharper sense of the vision of health that informs the very legislative structure that recommends the use of therapeutic preludes.

One particularly striking element of the psychology developed in these preludes is its emphasis on the excesses that attend to image and their cosmic effects. The pervasive ignorance about the soul and its origin (892a–b), the Athenian’s characterization of their discourse about the soul as alien and unfamiliar (see 891d image and 891e: a logos that is image) as well as violent (892e–893a),30 and the “definition” of soul as self-movement (896a) all attest to a certain limitlessness of soul. Indeed to describe soul as self-motion is to attribute to soul an ecstatic character that, for Aristotle,31 renders such an account nearly nonsensical, but that I hope to show is in fact in keeping with the general portrait of the soul the Athenian has been drawing. A psychology predicated upon self-motion is a psychology of ekstasis. This ecstatic quality of soul, in turn, gives us some indispensable information about the relationship between soul and mind in the Laws.

The ensuing discussion of soul’s motion also contains numerous illustrations of its character. Soul’s motion, for instance, is described as infinitely malleable (894c), infinitely excellent (894d), exceedingly effective (894d),32 and as graspable by mind alone (898e). What the mind can grasp is that there are three ways in which soul might move the body of the sun: psychic infusion, psychic occupation, or some other wondrous capacity: “either it exists everywhere inside of this apparent globular body and directs it, such as it is, just as the soul in us moves us about in all ways; or, having procured itself a body of fire or air (as some argue), it in the form of the body pushes forcibly on the body from outside; or, thirdly, being itself void of body, but endowed with other surpassingly marvelous potencies [image], it conducts the body” (898e–899a). Both the plurality of possibilities and the assertion of surpassingly wondrous capacities emphasize the limitless character of the soul. The very mind by means of which the speakers have recourse to describe these possibilities is itself a source of excess, as is illustrated in the impossibility of describing the movement of reason without an image: “In making our answer let us not bring on night, as it were, at midday, by looking right in the eye of the sun, as though with mortal eyes we could ever behold reason and know it fully; the safer way to behold the object with which our question is concerned is by looking at an image of it” (897d).33

Perhaps the most telling illustration of psychic excess, however, is found in the Athenian’s account of the kind of motion for which soul is responsible—namely, all motion.34 Indeed the prodigious operation of soul is such as to shatter it: in order to describe the kind of motion that the heavenly bodies conduct the Athenian finds it necessary to split soul into at least two kinds, good soul and bad soul (896d–897b). This is to say that the motions the soul can cause threaten its unity to the point where, in this dialogue, Plato ceases to contemplate this unity and instead, for the sake of the preludes, splits soul into two. Thus the soul’s excesses comprise also a deficiency, insofar as they require the supplement of mind in order to produce the motion that is observable in the heavens (897b).

However, what I find most remarkable about this need for supplement is that soul receives mind as something that is fitting to it, that discloses something about it, that brings to light its capacities, and that augments those capacities. I take soul’s reception of mind to shed some light on the characterization of soul as image image, and to suggest that the ambiguity of the phrase is fully intended. To say that soul exceeds as well as exemplifies nature is to say that soul exceeds certain boundaries and horizons,35 which is also to suggest that in order to operate within those boundaries and horizons some kind of limit needs to be imposed on soul. At the same time, such a limit would do nothing but enable soul to take on the variety of forms of motions to which it subjects itself, and thus this limit is somehow both “external” to it and intimately related to it, intimately its own.36 Such an enhancing and augmenting limit would act not merely as an addition to soul, but as a prosthetic to soul. Because of its ambiguous suggestion of replacement, augmentation, and generation, of filling in, enhancing, and innovating, and because it is reducible neither to the natural nor to the artificial but answerable to the living, prosthesis is an idiom uniquely suited to describe the relationship between soul and mind as it is presented in the Laws. Soul, endlessly malleable, endlessly plastic, endlessly transforming, tends toward prosthesis. Or, to speak more precisely, we could say that soul tends toward prosthetic limits. Mind and its closely related phenomenon, law,37 provide precisely such enhancing, augmenting, and enabling limits.

To contextualize this claim a bit, recall that the Athenian has described a cosmos for which an assertion of antagonism between image and image, an assertion made by the atheist, is ill-suited because it denies the generative force of soul and its effects. He has also given an account of soul as having been separated into at least two by the excessive and prodigious generation of which it is the cause. Mind emerges as that entity both separable from soul (soul can receive mind or operate without mind, consorting with mindlessness)38 and capable of providing soul with those limits that allow soul to render its motions in an orderly fashion. I have suggested prosthesis as a conceptual apparatus capable of capturing the nature and effects of soul’s reception of mind. Further illustration of this prosthetic function can be seen if we turn our attention from the life of the cosmos to the character of human life itself.

The ecstatic character of cosmic soul belongs to living beings as well, insofar as their living is aligned with self-motion, and has bearing on the very nature of legislation as well as the structure of discourse of the dialogue itself. Indeed it is image that helps to indicate the insufficiency of the rigid and antagonistic distinction between image and image, and that operates with the limiting function granted to mind.39 The clinical function that is reserved for both law and prelude, and that is emphasized whenever the curative capacity of voicing the law and prelude is observed, attests to the law’s prosthetic character.40 What is it that grounds the therapeutic operation of the prelude, what vision of health, if it is a health of the soul and thus a health of that which cannot be circumscribed by image alone? From what the Athenian has said thus far, what grounds such a conception of psychic health is a vision of human flourishing that must somehow be imposed upon soul in the form of prosthetic limits like mind and law.41 After all, there is at least one important difference among the disease, plague, and injustice which the Athenian presents as all instances of image (906b–c):42 diseases and plagues operate within the limits imposed upon them by their “bodily” nature, even if those limits are conceived simply as a function of mortality itself. Injustice does not operate within the same limits, as is evinced by the fact that people who “catch” injustice do not necessarily die from it, and may even appear to flourish from it, to return to the experience that so traumatizes the one who believes the gods neglect human affairs. If injustice, unlike disease, is a corruption that does not carry its own limitation, then the human soul is in need of prosthetic limits in order to assure some end to human corruption. Laws are such prosthetic limits. At the same time, the Athenian’s cosmology presents such a vision of human flourishing as not simply imposed on soul but invited by soul, just as mind is both external to but also somehow intimately related to soul. The Laws’ construction of soul’s relation to mind, then, bears a striking resemblance to its construction of the citizen’s relation to the city. Both the cosmic and individual soul must actively take mind as an ally; for human beings, doing so requires or at least is greatly facilitated by a good city.

Further traces of soul’s tendency toward prosthesis and of the varieties of psychic prostheses that exist, are found in the Athenian’s discussion of divine law in the prelude to the deist. So powerful and traumatizing is the experience of the flourishing of unjust people that a logos about the nature of the Whole and the All, about the gods’ care for the All and thus their care for its parts (an argument made by the comparison between the gods and practitioners of image; see 902d–e, for instance), proves insufficient, and a discursive supplement becomes necessary. Or, as the Athenian puts it, such a person still needs “some words of counsel to act as a charm upon him” (903a–b). It is in the course of delivering this charm that the Athenian characterizes theodicy as the creation of places that are appropriate to the conditions of souls and the allocation of souls to those places, and presents this theodicy as automatic, as a veritable physics that operates by means of a psychic attraction whereby souls exert a gravitational pull upon one another, settling into communities in places that are somehow appropriate to them. Granted the curious presentation of this gravitational pull—curious because the condition of one’s soul is presented as a function of one’s will and yet also as subject to transformations “according to the law and order of destiny” (904c)—all that remains for the god to do in this system “is to shift the character that grows better to a superior place, and the worse to a worse, according to what best suits each of them, so that each may be allotted its appropriate destiny” (903d). What the god imposes then is this gravitational pull of souls upon one another and toward regions appropriate to them. Indeed the Athenian concludes this charm, this supplement, by speaking in the voice of the Olympian gods themselves, stating: “O thou child and stripling who thinkest thou art neglected by the gods—the decree that as thou becomest worse, thou goest to the company of the worse souls, and as thou becomest better to better souls; and that, alike in life and every shape of death, thou both doest and sufferest what it is befitting that like should do toward like” (905a). Thus this discursive supplement includes a legislative prosthesis, that is, a certain order of movement is imposed upon the soul in the form of the law “like to like,” but imposed by those entities who are themselves one manifestation of soul’s reception of mind.43

This law of “like to like” and the ambiguity attendant upon it—that it is presented as both a function of the gods’ activity and of the character of soul itself—illustrates the manner in which image fluctuates between image and image and thus exhibits soul’s excessive character and its need for/invitation of prosthesis. Several other formulations of the “like-to-like” law in the dialogue help to measure the full significance of this prosthetic. For instance, what is described in Book 10 as the action of a god needs to be measured with the characterization of the same state of affairs as automatic earlier in the dialogue. In Book 5 the Athenian observes that few people notice the greatest judgment against wrongdoing [image]: “to grow like unto men that are wicked, and, in so growing, to shun good men and good counsel and cut oneself off from them, but to cleave to the company of the wicked and follow after them; and he that is joined to such men inevitably [image] acts and is acted upon in the way that such men bid one another to act” (728b). Here the law of “like to like” ensures the inevitability of these souls’ entropy, such that corrupt souls gravitate toward other corrupt souls, eschew the better, cleave to the worse, and act according to the community with which they have surrounded themselves. This gravitational pull of like to like, the propensity of character or soul to flock to those like itself, is treated in this passage as automatic, as a fact of the behavior of soul.

In the prelude delivered to the one contemplating the murder of a parent in Book 9, the Athenian employs an ancient “account” in which expiation for the murder of a parent is only attained when “the soul which committed the act pays back murder for murder, like for like” (873a). Here, as with Book 10, the law of “like to like” is presented as a formulation of divine justice. Another version of this law occurs in Book 8, wherein the Athenian asserts that like is “friends” with like (837a–b). However, the addition of the notion of friendship (image) in this passage, as distinct from the simple association asserted in Books 9 and 10, creates a crucial difference between these two versions of the ancient rule, a difference to which the Athenian attests when he notes in Book 4 that like is attracted to like only amongst those who are measured [image]; for those who lack measure no amity, no friendship, is possible (716c). This statement should be weighed against the Athenian’s assertion in Book 5 that the greatest penalty to wrongdoing is that it makes the wrongdoer more like bad men and puts him in their company (728b–c). If such a movement belongs to soul as such, then why must the gods impose it upon human souls?44 My contention is that this ambiguity points to what the Laws presents as the specific domain of the polis. While the association between those who are similar is treated as inevitable, and will in Book 10 function as an effect that attends upon the commission of deeds and acts as an automatic penalty for wrongdoers (they must suffer one another’s company), that the company so forged would be one of friendship is possible only in the absence of wrongdoing (or the presence of measure); thus the community of souls may be amicable or acrimonious, but necessary nevertheless.

This point is extremely helpful in navigating the description of theodicy in Book 10 in which a discussion of physical space mutates into an emphasis on psychic conglomerates. Insofar as the charm conflates the places appropriate to souls with the community of like souls, “Hades” emerges as particularly close to the city itself, and the city emerges as the scene of the soul’s reception of its prosthetic limitation/augmentation. And indeed the ultimate result of the legislation against impiety is the formation of “places,” prisons, and the allocation of different kinds of impious people to them. In this sense, the penalty performs in deed what the charm asserts in speech, and creates a this-worldly Hades, a Hades on earth, which would be in keeping with the chilling call in Book 9 to create laws on earth that fall in no way short of those in Hades (881b) and with Seth Benardete’s provocative claim that Hades, “is nothing but another name for the city.”45

It is, however, important to keep in mind that, given the conception of soul promoted here, a Hades on earth is deemed necessary because of the particular conception of soul that is at work in the dialogue, a conception in which soul’s excesses are not necessarily limited by any mandate to promote human flourishing. The locus for such a mandate is the city itself, and thus the city is the place in which soul receives prosthetic limits. In this sense there is no grounding for psychic prosthesis, for psychic health, outside of the particular political and cultural constellations of particular cities. Human dwelling and flourishing are radically contingent. At the same time, however, that such a mandate can be more or less amenable to the soul, there are better and worse prostheses, and the limitless malleability of soul seems also to be precisely that which invites prosthesis. What seems to be emerging here is an outline of politics not as the effort to approximate an ideal, but as the effort to devise ever more subtle psychic prostheses, an effort that would involve critical engagement with particular laws and with the practice of legislating itself.46 This is to say that the scene of psychic phenomena is not simply cosmic put also deeply political. Both a cosmology and a politics are outlined in the psychology the Athenian produces in order to make the point that there are gods who care for humans and cannot be bribed.

Such a cosmology and politics involves a particular vision of the relationship between image and polis. The psychology at work here provides an image of the city as that arena of human striving wherein human action and psychic condition reciprocally affect one another and coalesce into the character not only of the individual but of the city itself. It provides a panoptic view of the city as the living medium of action. This psychology is thus an instrument of the Laws’ legislative effort to make citizens identify with the city itself, to see themselves as the sum of the community their actions help to foster. What such a vision of the city offers the impious in particular is the “assurance” (which the Athenians suggests will seem assuring or threatening depending on the kind of impious person one is, but is therapeutic in either instance) of a this-worldly automaticity of punishment by providing the place wherein collectives of human souls form communities of better and worse, thereby providing the environment in which the soul gravitates toward that which it most resembles. Thus the “like-to-like” law, treated at once as a function of the gods’ mindful intercession in the world of human affairs and as an attestation to the tendency toward mind within the human soul, is taken to be an impulse toward that revolving, self-same motion of the heavens that is itself the best likeness of the movement of mind.

Notes

Portions of this essay have appeared in my “Psychology and Legislation in Plato’s Laws,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, v. 26 (2010), 211–242.

1. My translation. Bury 1967: “it would most truly be described as a superlatively natural existence”; Saunders 1975: “it will be quite correct to say that soul is pre-eminently natural”; Pangle 1980: “it would be most correct, almost, to say that it is especially by nature.” Unless otherwise noted, citations will be from Bury’s translation.

2. LSJ sv.

3. The Athenian’s formulation of civic unity also includes an interesting shift from the Republic with respect to the status of the body—in the Republic it is the only private “property” permitted; in the Laws even the body is to be communized to the extent possible (see 739c-d.)

4. Indeed, as Glenn Morrow notes, “Plato asserts that the establishment of a right attitude toward property is the foundation (krēpis) of all legislation, the security of the state” (Morrow 1993, 101). Morrow cites 736a, but we also find this proper attitude encapsulated in the justification for prohibiting the taking of lost, abandoned, or buried property in Book 11: “For never should I gain so much pecuniary profit by its removal, as I should win increase in virtue of soul and in justice by not removing it; and by preferring to gain justice in my soul rather than money in my purse, I should be winning a greater in place of a lesser gain, and that too in a better part of me” (913a).

5. See the opening of Laws 10 (884a) as well as the general discussion of the evils of image toward its end (906c).

6. See, for instance, 902b; see also 906a–b: the gods and daemons are our allies [image] while we are their possessions [image]; and of course the very early and famous presentation of human beings as playthings of the gods (644d–e); and the later characterization of human things as lacking in seriousness (even though they must be treated as such; see 803b–c and David Roochnik’s essay in this volume). We can also see in this general project some further motive for the dialogue’s privileging of old age. The divinity of soul grounds the dialogue’s sanctification of age; the elderly are to be honored because their sheer endurance through time is treated as a testament to the excellence of the gods’ property.

7. The suggestion that what is most one’s own really belongs to the divine is borne out throughout the rest of the dialogue. It can be seen, for instance, in the claim in Laws 11 that one’s parents are to be honored because the elderly are living statues to the gods (931d–e), and in the description, as part of the funerary law outlined in Laws 12, of the soul as that which makes a person who they are and of corpses as soulless altars to the gods (959 b–d), and in the law concerning the burial of suicides in Laws 9 (875b–d).

8. Throughout this essay I will take for granted the violence of the law, the Athenian’s frequent assertion of the inadequacy of law, and his various critiques of law, as well as the more subtle and in some ways more troubling violence that attends even to the “persuasive” preludes such that while gentleness emerges as desirable, its legislative instantiation is enigmatic and perpetually incomplete. On the violence of the law, see especially André Laks’s masterful account in Laks 2000, 277–278, 286–290.

9. Laks 2000, 289.

10. I take this question to be a bit different than the question of who is speaking, even as I recognize that it may be neither possible nor desirable to systematically distinguish between these two questions. At least three possible answers to this question present themselves. First, the Athenian is speaking with and to Cleinias and Megillus, who, amongst other things, are identified as Cretan and Spartan respectively, are middle-aged, are not particularly well-versed in dialectic, and who have adopted, for the sake of conversation as well as for Cleinias’s Cretan colony, the personae of legislators. Thus the Athenian is speaking as a nascent legislator and also with nascent legislators. Moreover, he and his interlocutors do so by adopting the voices of both the legislator and the legislated. In fact, given Cleinias’s and Megillus’s lack of experience with conversations of this sort (an inexperience to which our attention is called explicitly in this book) and the Athenian’s strategy for dealing with this inexperience, namely, to speak for them (892d–893a), a second answer to the question “who is speaking?” must be: the Athenian is speaking to himself. Thirdly, of course, we cannot ignore the perspective that no one is speaking here, not even the Athenian. Plato is the writer (and therefore can be viewed as the speaker), and his Cleinias emphasizes and celebrates the written character of the law in a passage (890e–891a) whose relationship to a position espoused by Socrates in the Phaedrus merits much further consideration than I can give it now.

11. Before we get swept up in the possibilities afforded by this call to listen, we must remind ourselves that the voice to which the Athenian claims they must listen is his own. The stance he will adopt throughout the legislating of impiety, the stance that enables this entire discussion to resemble a dialogue, given the limitations of Cleinias and Megillus (892e–893a), is that of giving voice to the impious, answering and asking as the impious as well as the legislator. In order to have a substantive dialogue, the Athenian must bifurcate. And what his assertion that they listen to the words of the impious signals to us is that he is now going to adopt the posture of the one who knows the impious better than they know themselves, or, in the words of the Athenian, he and his interlocutors should consider “what it is that people in their camp really intend” (888e–889a).

12. This is to say, the legislated accuse the legislators of corruption. The Athenian and his interlocutors initially accept this context. The Athenian asks: “Are we to make our defense as it were before a court of impious men, where someone had accused us of doing something dreadful by assuming in our legislation the existence of gods” (889e–887a) and receives a reply in the affirmative. Eventually, the Athenian counters this move on the part of the legislated by inverting the charge. He will present the position of the legislated in such a manner as to make them answerable to the charge of corrupting the youth, a reversal made most explicit by Cleinias’s response to it: “What a horrible statement you have described, Stranger! And what widespread corruption of the young in private families as well as publicly in the states!” (890b). This exchange, and the courtroom scene it presents, evokes Socrates’ trial and then inverts it.

13. In doing so, the Athenian draws together two figures, those ancient poets who have produced stories about the gods, and contemporary investigators of nature, sophists. While the Athenian will exercise some restraint in critiquing the ancient stories of the gods, and will state that it is rather the views of the sophist that must be held responsible for the beliefs that lead to impiety, the significance of his mention of the ancient composers of theogonies in this context should not be lost. The theologies of the ancient poets, suggests the Athenian, actually leads to sophistic, akratic cosmology.

14. The Athenian’s description at 891c–d of the atheist’s views as not only harmful but erroneous suggests that the prelude is intended to be, to the atheist, both therapeutic (correcting with respect to health) and also the case (correct with respect to the truth); that these two need not always accompany one another is implied in the Republic by the therapeutic function attributed to the lie in speech (382c–d). For a recent treatment of the argumentative status of these preludes, see, Bobonich 2002, along with the critical discussions of this work by Kahn 2004, Brisson 2005, and Gerson 2003.

15. Mayhew 2008.

16. 892b, 896d, 897a.

17. As though to acknowledge that the conclusion the Athenian is to draw from this correlation—namely, that soul is self-motion—is in need of further argumentation, the Athenian then briefly segues into a discussion of the three things that can be attributed to any thing: substance, definition, and name. That being alive entails a certain divine solicitude is repeated in the preludes to both the deist (902b) and the one who maintains the gods can be bribed (906b).

18. I take the claim that soul is image to be strongly honorific; image is oldest and first in the sense of best and greatest (ordinal, nor cardinal numbering). At the same time, given the “definition” of soul as self-moving motion, and thus as generated but undying (904a), we must conceive of something like psychic time. As the actions of soul are the workings of love and hatred, sorrow and joy, wish, memory, opinion, etc. this would be a time of psychic deeds and effects, a time of perpetual psychic generation. Psychic time is pathic and ergonic time; it is the working through of passion and action. As such it has intimations for the working through of deeds and suggests a temporality to ethics. While there is not space to develop this line of thought here, I submit that doing so would shed further light on Plato’s use of afterlife myths in general, in which the working through or expiation of unjust deeds is a frequent topic, and in the Laws in particular. The fate of individual souls outlined in the charm to the deist, the time it takes a soul to migrate to the community of souls appropriate to it, offers an image of the time and space of violence and its expiation.

19. See E. N. Lee’s provocative discussion of rotation and nous (Lee 1976).

20. Note the difference between the address to this atheist “O, child” and the address to this person: “my good man.”

21. At 365d–e Adeimantus identifies precisely the three beliefs that the Athenian considers the source of impiety, as Stephen Menn also observes (Menn 2005). Note Socrates’ expression of surprise and admiration that Glaucon and Adeimantus have not been simply swept up by the cultural forces valorizing tyranny that surround them (368a–b).

22. Laks’s discussion of the “human prodigy” and the significance of dance in the Laws (Laks 2000, 277–278) is quite helpful on this point; see also John Russon’s essay in this volume.

23. See also 906b: human beings are to be saved by the justice, temperance, and wisdom “which dwell in the animate [image] powers of the gods, and of which some small trace may be clearly seen here also residing in us.” I take the manifestations of order in play and dance and the love of justice to be evidence of this “trace” of divinity.

24. The Athenian context of the cultural milieu the Stranger has been outlining is made apparent in this distinction. For a recent study of the significance of image in Athens, see Monoson 2000 and Glenn Morrow’s concluding comments on Plato and Athens in his commentary on the Laws (Morrow 1993, 591–593).

25. The deist simply needs a vision, a scale by means of which to locate the expiation of unjust deeds; what this prelude and its charm offers him is the equivalent of a wide-angle lens.

26. Insofar as this lack can be seen to stem from, or be a manifestation of, excessive self-love [image], whose warping effect on judgment the Athenian has previously emphasized (731e), the Athenian’s comment that such preludes will make the impious more disposed to hate themselves [image, 907c] is particularly revelatory of the intended therapeutic thrust of these preludes and the specific psychological and cultural context in which they are operating.

27. As with Socrates in the Republic, it is the enigmatic character of the good to which the Athenian would call attention.

28. This period of incarceration, in which those who naturally love justice are instructed by members of the Nocturnal Council, may be the closest thing Magnesia sees to the practice of philosophy, a Magnesian version of Socratic dialogue, an idea pointed out to me by David Roochnik.

29. Recall the function allocated to the lie in speech in the Republic—as a treatment for the mad, as a cure available to the politician and as a means of approximating the truth about matters that remain deeply obscure (382c–d).

30. “The argument now in front of us is too violent [image], and probably impassable, for such strength as you possess; so, lest it make you faint and dizzy as it rushes past and poses you with questions you are unused [image] to answering, and thus causes an unpleasing lack of shapeliness and seemliness, I think that I ought now to act in the way described—question myself first, while you remain listening in safety, and then return answer to myself, and in this way proceed through the whole argument until it has discussed in full the subject of soul and demonstrated that soul is prior to body.”

31. “But surely even if the soul itself moves itself, then at any rate it would be moved, so that, if every motion is a stepping outside itself of the thing moved insofar as it is moved, the soul would step outside its own thinghood, if it moves itself not incidentally, but motion belongs to its thinghood in its own right” (De Anima, 406b13ff.). Joseph Sachs offers a sobering cautionary warning about two possible effects of attributing to soul such a character: “To avoid this consequence, one would have to say that the soul is that which, by its very nature, moves or alters itself in ways that do not belong to its nature. Finding the nature of the soul in self-motion may sound impressive, but it seems to be either contradictory or empty” (Sachs 2002, 60). I am hoping to put a lot of weight on Sachs’s “seems” here.

32. In both references from 894c a form of image is used.

33. This passage and the image proposed, the motion of the sun, has powerful resonances with Republic 6.

34. The attribution of all motion (good and bad) to soul does suggest a difference between the Laws and Timaeus; however, the weight of this difference may not be as substantial as it appears, see Parry 2002, 289–302.

35. Again, Aristotle is helpful here: “But though [fire] is in some way jointly [of nutrition and growth] it is surely not simply the cause, but rather the soul is, for the growth of fire goes on without limit, so long as there is something burnable, but all things put together by nature have a limit and a proportion of size and growth, and this belongs to soul, not to fire, and to the articulation of the meaning more than the material” (416a14ff.). Insofar as nature is the site of limit, were soul to exceed nature it would also exceed limit. Of course for Aristotle it is the manifestation of limit as a manifestation of soul that, in part, recommends the inquiry of soul as contributing to the inquiry into nature, while it is the character of fire to go on without limit, and I am claiming that Plato’s account of viciousness suggests that body operates under certain limits which soul does not.

36. With limit understood in this sense, the presentation of soul’s reception of mind in the Laws resonates with the Philebus’s presentation of the fecund and generative work accomplished by number, law, and order in bringing limit to the unlimited (Philebus 23d, 25d, 26b, 27b).

37. On the relationship between image and nous see 713e–714a and 957c; the qualification in this latter passage, namely that the learning pertaining to the laws is sovereign with respect to human betterment if they are set up correctly is important, but maintains the relationship between image and nous by shifting the burden from the laws themselves to their instantiation by the legislators. See also the correlation between logismos and nous at 967b. That enslavement to the laws is enslavement to the gods, see 762e. At 741b the lot distributing property is itself called divine. At 902b it is agreed that all mortal things are possessions of the gods.

38. The controversy surrounding the question of whether Plato conceives of nous as separable from image is longstanding; I am persuaded by Menn’s (1995) argument for separability, and would only add that in the Laws Plato is as concerned to indicate their intimacy as their separability. Mind has a unique relationship to soul, and I have tried to capture the nature of this relationship with the notion of the prosthetic function (as enabling limit) mind supplies to soul. Menn takes the separability of image and nous as evidence that Plato has a theology distinct from his metaphysics and physics; I view this separability as Plato also intimating that psychology cannot be reduced to theology, metaphysics, or even physics. In this, I diverge from Pangle’s claim that “psychology and theology are in the end the same” (Pangle 1976, 1059–1077). At the very least, it is necessary to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, observations about the theological effects of psychology and the psychological effects of theology, and, on the other hand, observations about the nature of philosophic investigations of the soul and the gods. The final chapter of Friedrich Solmsen’s Plato’s Theology illustrates well the importance of maintaining such a distinction (Solmsen 1942, 177–193).

39. It should also be noted that image is not the only limiting or correcting entity in the dialogue. For instance, amongst the arsenal of techniques and instruments needed by the legislator in order to counteract the desires for food, drink, and sex that can lead to hamartia, law is listed as only one of three greatest [image] forces (783a); the other two, fear and true account, mingle with some frequency in the preludes themselves, as well as in the Platonic corpus as a whole, and we can note throughout the Laws Plato’s concerns about the efficacy of human legislators to properly instantiate the laws. For this reason I remain, with others, unconvinced by Chris Bobonich’s claims about the rationality of the procedures for legislating in the Laws. See Bobonich 2002 and the critical comments by Kahn 2004, 337–362, Brisson 2005, 93–121, and Gerson 2003, 149–154.

40. This character is also consistent with figurations of legislation in other dialogues. I have in mind here in particular the Protagoras myth, in which image is presented as a gift from Zeus meant to correct Epimethean shortsightedness in denying humans any means to defend themselves (322c–d).

41. It would be hasty to assume that Plato is necessarily concerned with human flourishing as such. However, the Athenian’s comments in Laws 1 about war and peace do imply a preoccupation with human happiness in this dialogue. See also 718a.

42. “But there are certain souls that dwell on the earth and have acquired unjust gain which, being plainly bestial, beseech the souls of the guardians—whether they be watch-dogs or herdsmen or the most exalted masters—trying to convince them by fawning words and prayerful incantations that (as the tales of evil men relate) they can profiteer among men on earth without any severe penalty: but we assert that the sin now mentioned, of profiteering or ‘overgaining,’ is what is called in the case of fleshly bodies ‘disease,’ in that of seasons and years ‘pestilence,’ and in that of states and politics, by a verbal change, this same sin is called ‘injustice’” (906b–c).

43. See 897b–c, 899b: the soul with mind is wise and good, the soul or souls that rule heaven are souls with mind (and thus wise and good), and these souls are gods.

44. I find Gabriela Carone’s distinction between the account of image as such and the account of human image in particular a compelling response to this question, and would add only that the question itself becomes less important if the mindful intercession of the gods in the form of the law is seen as an enhancement or augmentation (a prosthesis) that is invited by human soul (Carone 1994).

45. Benardete 2000b, 35, cited in Burger 2004, 58.

46. This assertion requires far more development than I can give it here, and would have to contend with the image of legislating as painting at 769a–e, a brief discussion of which appears in my “Psychology and Legislation in Plato’s Laws.” See also R. F. Stalley’s brief address of the checks and balances in the Laws as a rebuttal to Popper (Stalley 1983, 184–185).