Well, to continue my thought from the end of the Sophist post, with the Statesman, Plato seems to pull back from the moral confusion he opened up. This dialog does continue the theme of the intermixing of Forms that seems to characterize Plato's later philosophy. But it stops short of extending this logic to the most crucial distinction of all -- the good and the bad don't mix. So in a sense, you could see the Statesman as an attempt to circle the wagons. Despite the problems with knowledge opened up in Theaetetus, despite the confusion of supposed opposites that dominates the Sophist, Plato tries to come back and define the statesman (or king -- he uses these interchangeably) as straightforwardly as possible. The statesman is distinguished by his expert knowledge of how to: 1) identify and purify the various types of virtue and expertise necessary in a city, and 2) weave these parts together into a seamless fabric. While the statesman does mix together Forms, the materials he works with have already been purified and the bad elements discarded. The delicate lurking question of how we figure out which elements are good and which will fit into an overall pattern in what proportions is basically shoved under the rug; this is simply assumed to be the art of kingship, one which borders on the divine.
The thing that's probably most interesting about the Statesman is the way it illustrates Plato's increasingly elaborate concept of the dialectic in both its structure and contents. We've seen the idea of the dialectic appear in many places already, but the closest we've come to a definition was in Phaedrus (265d) and the Republic (533a). It is the art of gathering together and splitting apart in such a way that:
... when one perceives first the community between the members of a group of many things, one should not desist until one sees in it all those differences that are located in classes, and conversely, with the various unlikenesses, when they are seen in multitudes, one should be incapable of pulling a face and stopping before one has penned all the related things within one likeness and actually surrounded them in some real class. (Statesman 285b)
The search for the statesman falls exactly into these two parts, and they are both separated and joined by an interesting new Platonic myth. The first section of the dialog occupies itself with a long string of "cuts" that we saw constituted the "method of division" in the Sophist. Given that in this case, the first division of knowledge is between theoretical and practical, whereas is in searching for the sophist, the first distinction made was between production and acquisition, we immediately see (the Visitor even points it out) that the cuts we need to make are relative to the problem at hand, and not some absolute tree of classification. The rest of the cuts that define distinct classes of knowledge are also completely different this time. Here, the method results in a definition of the statesman as a "shepherd of featherless bipeds". So this appears to be where the famous definition of man as a featherless biped, the one so effectively mocked by Diogenes, came from. The statesman is an expert in rearing and herding, keeping and shepherding, humans. While the conclusion is reached by a process of dividing knowledge into classes (see the outline below for these) this actually turns out to be the gathering phase of the dialectic.
The splitting phase begins with a question the Visitor brings up in the wake of his definition: who is the true "shepherd of men"? It seems that many different people could contend with the statesman to fit this definition. Doctors, farmers, bakers, and merchants can all plausibly claim that they are the ones who keep and care for humans, or at least that they have an essential role in the knowledge needed to rear a "human flock". So it turns out that our class "shepherd" is too broad. We will have to refine it further to find the statesman. Now, you might expect that this would mean we should simply continue the method of division by classes. But with the second phase of the operation, Plato completely changes both the metaphor and the procedure. Instead of progressively slicing up a fixed space, we are now going to purify a mix of metals.
VISITOR: ... we seem to me to be in a situation similar to that of those who refine gold.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How so?
VISITOR: I imagine that these craftsmen also begin by separating out earth, and stones, and many different things; and after these, there remain commingled with the gold those things that are akin to it, precious things and only removable with the use of fire: copper, silver, and sometimes adamant, the removal of which through repeated smelting and testing leaves the 'unalloyed' gold that people talk about there for us to see, itself alone by itself. (303e)
And instead of proceeding by binary division into roughly equal parts, we'll fractionate off many contenders at once by using various procedures. The other obvious (though anachronistic) metaphor here would be the process of distillation. The splitting phase of the dialectic is the process of purification of an alloy.
Between the two phases, Plato inserts an interesting new myth about the reverse rotation of the universe. While we're familiar with the importance of a circular movement from the various versions of the myth of metempsychosis (in Phaedrus, Gorgias, and Phaedo, and the Republic) this time the circle appears in a completely different light. The myth tells us that, just like the dialectic, the history of the universe is divided into two phases. In the first phase, everything rotated in the opposite direction we are accustomed to -- backwards in time. Old men lost their wrinkles till they became young, then lost their beards till they became babies and eventually vanished. Meanwhile, new men sprung alive again from the bones in the earth. In this phase the "earth-born race" was watched over by a shepherd god that saw to all their needs. Since it was a garden of Eden type situation, everything was ordered and unified and people lived in harmony with one another under direction of the nameless shepherd-god. They didn't even need to have a political constitution. At the end of this era of reverse time, there's an earth shattering tremor and apocalypse in the garden. The gods, including the shepherd-of-men-god, who have been steering the world let go, and it changes direction and begins to rotate on its own in our conventional forward direction. In a pretty good presentiment of the second law of thermodynamics, as this forward rotation progresses, the world gradually loses its order through a sort of entropic mixing. Left to their own devices, humans had to fend for themselves by hunting, farming, and forming political collectives. Finally, the whole joint gets to the point where it's such a mess that, with another tremor apocalypse, the gods take over again and the universe begins its reverse journey towards perfection.
Situated right between the two sides of our dialectical quest for the statesman, the myth clearly reflects in miniature the structure of the dialog as a whole. It has a forward, splitting phase where everything tends towards diversity and difference, and a reverse, gathering phase where unity is reconstructed. But at the same time, the myth also points to a curious intertwining or embedding of each side in the other. The splitting phase moves towards diversity, but at the same time is a process of purifying the metals that make up the disordered alloy. And the gathering phase proceeds towards unity, but is accomplished through dividing a single unity of knowledge into classes. So there seems to be a sort of interweaving of the two poles of the dialectic, as if they were arranged in some sort of fractal yin-yang pattern. The shepherd-god takes a diverse mixture, splits it into its pure components, and reconstitutes a lost unity that embraces this diversity.
It will turn out that this is exactly what the true statesman does. The shepherd-god of the myth provides us with an ideal image of the king who knows how to provide for every aspect of his flock at once. In other words, the ideal king would know medicine, farming, baking and banking himself. He would be a completely self-sufficient herdsman, and embody at once both the unity of the class we found by the method of division, and the diversity of possible contenders to this throne. The one true king or statesman is the divine shepherd.
It was just for these reasons that we introduced our story, in b order that it might demonstrate, in relation to herd-rearing, not only that as things now stand everyone disputes this function with the person we are looking for, but also in order that we might see more plainly that other person himself whom alone, in accordance with the example of shepherds and cowherds, because he has charge of human rearing, it is appropriate to think worthy of this name, and this name alone (275b)
It seems that the closest a human king can come to this perfection is to follow the movement of the dialectic, of the cosmos, as it shuttles back and forth between splitting and gathering. This interweaving forms the main theme of the second half of the dialog. In fact, quite soon after the myth, the Visitor launches into a long, seemingly tangential, definition of, wait for it ... weaving. Just like the myth, this section again recapitulates both parts of the dialectic, and actually functions as a kind of analytic, rational counterpart to the central story's synthetic and mythic part. So it seems the Statesman is woven together at every level, constantly shuttling back and forth between opposites like splitting and gathering, top-down and bottom-up. The definition of weaving proceeds by the method of class division until it reaches "the art of clothes making", and then begins to purify away parts like wool and needle manufacture till all that remains is just the knowledge of how to intertwine warp and weft.
Finally, the knowledge of the statesman will be purified from the lump we called "the knowledge of shepherding men" (which is nevertheless a sort of divine lump) by an analogous method. The Visitor slowly removes all the specialized knowledges needed in a city as contributing to the knowledge of the statesman, but not constituting that knowledge itself. Eventually, having smelted away even the most similar metals like the general and the judge, he discovers the exact knowledge that characterizes the true (human) statesman -- the knowledge of how to weave together all the other knowledge to best effect. In other words, like we saw in the Republic, the statesman has meta-knowledge of the good of other knowledge. Now, however, it's not clear whether we should consider this One-Good that the statesman knows as a Form itself, or more a process of combination of many other Forms. One can't help but imagine that Parmenides suggests the latter, though perhaps the ideal of the divine shepherd argues for the former.
In any event, as I observed at the outset, the Statesman seems content to gloss over these complicated metaphysical questions. It concludes in an entirely satisfying way, with no hint of the undermining in the Sophist. The statesman weaves together diverse knowledges to approximate the complete knowledge of the divine shepherd. And he weaves together the seemingly opposed components of virtue like courage and moderation to form a balanced social fabric. The question of how he identifies those pure components in the messy mix of human society isn't asked, but merely assumed.
VISITOR: Whether, I suppose, any of the sorts of expert knowledge that involve putting things together voluntarily puts together any at all of the things it produces, even of the lowliest kind, out of bad and good things, or whether every sort of expert knowledge everywhere throws away the bad so far as it can, and takes what is suitable and good, bringing all of this—both like and unlike—together into one, and so producing some single kind of thing with a single capacity. (308c)
This passage indicates what I meant when I said that the Statesman tries to avoid letting the metaphysical questions of the Sophist escape into the moral domain. A grand dialectical theory of the interweaving of opposites is all well and good so long as we're not talking about weaving together good and bad. Likewise, the presumption that the king simply knows which fabric to create with these elements goes unexplored. What elements should you weave together? What should you weave them together into? Just follow the lead of the divine shepherd who knows both the beginning and ending of the universe and you should be fine!
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Here's the detailed outlined.
262b-263c -- Digression on the classes used in the method of division. They must be real classes, not just X and not-X.
269-274e -- The myth of the reverse rotation of the universe. In the reverse direction, a shepherd god or divine statesman is in charge of every aspect of the human flock (ie. there are no other contenders), which springs spontaneously from the earth. This direction moves toward order and purity. In the forward direction, the world runs under its own power and humans have to care for themselves. They do this using the gifts of fire, crafts, seeds and plants. Context: The human statesman is the one who organizes the use of all these separate crafts. In the forward direction everything runs from order to disorder, and all the pure and unified things (like the single herder god) are broken down into parts and mixed together.
275-277d -- Revising the definition in light of the story. Herd "rearing" is too narrow to encompass both the human and divine shepherds, but herd "keeping" or "caring" would work. Then we should divide by divine/human; enforced/voluntary. This would exclude the tyrant as a statesman.
277d- 279a -- We need a model to identify the statesman. The model for how a model works is the alphabet. The letters are models of sounds, and these can be combined to sound out complicated words. The divine shepherd doesn't seem to be a model for the king, because models are simple and synthetic.
279b-283a -- Weaving will be our model for the statesman. Using the method of division, we define weaving as "the art of clothes-making". But there are still many rivals to this title who produce the wool, the tools to weave, etc ... The weaver needs to be separated from them as the person who intertwines their products (warp and woof) to create a fabric.
283b-287b -- Meta-discussion about the structure and purpose of discussions. How long should a discussion be; how big should a class be? In addition to the question of relative length, there is an absolute length that fits a given topic. Similarly for the size of the classes used in the method of division. These are the real classes that split off all unlike things and join together all like things (285b). But the ultimate point of having discussions is not to answer the immediate question of "who is the statesman". The point is to improve our dialectical skills. The length of a discussion should be judged first from that perspective (286e).
287b-END How do we distinguish the statesman from the list of other contenders who claim to be a "shepherd of men"?
287d-289b -- There are 7 types of expertise which contribute to the knowledge need to have a city. Production of commodities, tools, vessels, vehicles, defenses, playthings, and nourishment.
289c-291c -- There are 3 classes of people in the city: slaves, merchants, and subordinates concerned with affairs of state (like heralds and orators). The class of subordinates divides further into religious subordinates (diviners and priests) and political subordinates or sophists.
291d-303d -- How can we separate the expertise of the sophist from the king? Usually we divide constitutions by how many rule and whether people are free of not (276e). But the real division is between a city run by an expert with true knowledge of how to rule and one run by non-experts. We assume that the king has some expert knowledge that is difficult to obtain (hence there are few kings). If the king truly has knowledge of how to run a state, then there's no need for laws and they would only get in the way. Laws aren't flexible enough to be adapted to individual circumstances that keep changing. So the best state has no laws, which are just an imitation of governance. The next best kind of state is one where there are laws for everything, but they are written by a committee of non-experts. And the worst kind of state is one where no one even follows the non-expert laws at all. So the tyrant is distinguished from the true king not by whether the subjects are free, but by whether he has knowledge of ruling. We can divide constitutions by whether they are lawful abiding or not and by how many people rule. The one true constitution is any number of rulers who have true knowledge. After that comes rulers without knowledge but with laws: 1) king 2) aristocracy 3) democracy -- and then rulers without knowledge and without laws: 4) democracy 5) oligarchy 6) tyrant.
303e-306 -- How can we purify the knowledge of the statesmen from other related knowledge like the general, the judge, etc ... as we would purify gold in an alloy? The statesman has meta-knowledge of how to weave together all the other knowledges.
306a-END -- The weaving of the statesman combines different Forms into the fabric of a virtuous city. The Forms of virtue like courage and moderation do not always mix. Some things need to be done quickly and aggressively while others are better done slowly and delicately. The Statesman first has to direct the purification of each of these opposed virtues, then weave together the good ones into a good polis. He creates alloys of previously purified metals. His real expertise is knowing the right mix needed to produce the One-Good.
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