Mythoi and logoi - myths and rational discourse
Certain myths will not be allowed in the kallipolis, the ideal state or polis of the Republic. But the Republic itself ends with the deep and complex Myth of Er; myths also figure prominently in Phaedo and Gorgias. (This is not a complete list.)
Julia Annas offers illuminating remarks on the myths and their functionality. A key point to note is that Plato does not make a pure division between **mythoi (myths) of the kinds he favours and logoi (rational discourse)** :
The myths in Plato's dialogues have been in general neglected by philosophers; when he moves from argument or exposition into the myth form
there is a sharp switching-off of philosophical interest. There have been
studies of the myths,1 some of them from a philosophical perspective, but it
is broadly true that philosophical analyses of the dialogues have made little
or no attempt to relate the content of each myth to the argument of the
dialogue in which it occurs. Whether they feel respect for the myths as
attempts to express profound truths beyond reason's grasp, or feel contempt for them as holidays from serious thinking, or (most commonly) feel
uncomfortable with them and endorse Crombie's, "To me these myths
tremble between the sublime and the tedious", philosophers have mostly
not thought to include the myths as part of "Plato's thought".
This is a pity, for some of the myths at least are worth non-literary study,
and this is especially true of the long and elaborate eschatological myths of
the Gorgias, Phaedo and Republic. All three myths come at the end of a
major dialogue full of controversial claims about the right way to live, and
impassioned rejections of conventional beliefs about good and evil, and
what is in one's interests. In this context an eschatological myth about the
ultimate fate of the good and the bad can hardly fail to be relevant to the
dialogue's main moral argument, and may well be revealing about the
form of that argument, and any appeal in it to the agent's interests. To treat
such a myth as an optional extra for those who like stories is to risk missing
something of significance about the form of Plato's arguments, as well as
interesting contrasts between dialogues; for differences between two myths
may point to differences in what the dialogues are arguing, or may illustrate a major shift of emphasis.
The philosophical myth mixes genres, and so is disliked by philosophers
who want philosophy to be "professional", with its own uniform and
distinct medium, preferably as transparent as possible so that philosophical argument cannot be confused with more literary modes of persuading. We can find this attitude in Aristotle, who faults the Phaedo myth
by reading it literally and then complaining that its geography and
hydraulics are impossible. The account of Tartarus, he says, makes non-
sense of the way rivers flow, and of the phenomenon of rain; and anyway it just is obvious that rivers flow into the sea and not down some great hole in
the earth to Tartarus (Meteorologica II, 335b33-336a33.) Aristotle was, I
suspect, as aware as we are that this could be thought an inappropriate
criticism; he is polemically refusing to take the Phaedo myth seriously in its
own terms by treating it as a failed geography lesson.
Aristotle's attitude here is only an extreme version of the attitude that
treats the myths as quarries for accounts of geography and technology,
religious beliefs, literary tropes - anything but an integral part of a philosophical dialogue. Yet this fails to answer adequately to what Plato is doing
in mixing his genres. A philosophical, as opposed to a popular myth, should
have some rational interpretation.
One reason why this has not been more attempted is that the contrast
between myth and argument has been understood too crudely. If myth is a
sharply demarcated alternative to rational procedures, then anything goes:
myth is then amenable solely to unanalytic appreciation, "aesthetic" in the
pejorative sense. Taking the myths to be Plato's lapses from rational
thinking encourages passively uncritical reading of them. Hence a tendency to assimilate myths that look superficially alike, as the eschatological
myths have been assimilated to one another and to the Christian Last
Judgement myth. Elements in different myths have likewise been conflated. There are "divine shepherds" in the myths of both the Critias and the
Statesman, but, as Christopher Gill has pointed out, it is wrong to use this
to assimilate the myths; when myths have (as these do) different political
messages, the elements in them are being put to distinct uses.
A crude dichotomy of myth and reason encourages us also to stay
content with unhelpful interpretations of the myths. Thus the frequent
appearance in the myths of reincarnation is explained by Plato's having
picked up the idea from some Pythagoreans. Whatever the value of this as
a historical explanation - relevant pre-Platonic evidence being hard to
come by - it leaves all the important questions still open: for why did Plato
choose to pick up this idea from the Pythagoreans? If myths have no
rational interpretation, we can only say that the idea had some personal
appeal. But surely we should be asking what Plato uses this notion to do:
what idea is of importance to him for which reincarnation would seem to
be the right symbolic expression?
Plato's myths are often ignored or downgraded because it is thought that
he takes all myths, including his own, to be mere mythoi or stories, which
are all to be despised by contrast with logoi or rational discourse and
argument. This is, however, too simple. Mythos and cognate words
originally mean no more than "speech",5 and the usage survives in Plato
whereby mythoi and logoi are put together and both are opposed to action
(e.g. Republic 376d9-10). By Plato's time mythos has come to mean something like "story"; to favour mythoi over logoi is to favour storytelling over
argument. Given his stress on the importance of reason in our lives, it is not
surprising that we can often find Plato displaying a general hostility to
stories, and it is not hard to find passages where he abuses or despises
(mere) stories as trivial, suitable only for children or lightweight entertainment. He is especially hostile to the stories that we think of as
traditional "Greek myths"; Republic books 2 and 3 attack them as immoral
and misleading, and he insists that they should not be allegorized or
explained in terms of physical theory; he refuses to find rational depth in
them.
But this hostility or indifference concerns the content of particular
stories. Plato nowhere says or implies that there is a single all-purpose
distinction between storytelling and reasoning such that all stories are
necessarily stupid or immoral. He in fact clearly believes that some mythoi,
stories, do have rational depth. The fact that popular stories are mostly
trivial does not prevent the philosopher from using or inventing a story
which is not. Thus we sometimes find Plato indifferent as to whether his
account is called a mythos or a logos; the Timaeus' cosmology is called a
"likely mythos"; and the Republic's account of the growth of the state is
called a mythos, though it clearly displays the rational basis for political
association. In the case of his own "mythical" stories Plato, so far from
contrasting myth and reason, emphasizes both the obvious fact that we
have a story, not an argument, and the less obvious fact that it is a seriously
meant story: it is foolish to treat it as an old wives' tale. In fact he goes so
far as to claim that the "myth of Atlantis" is true; and the Gorgias myth is
introduced by, and interspersed with, claims that it is true, and a logos.
We have, then, no good grounds for assuming that Plato thought his own
philosophical myths trivial, or a dispensable part of the dialogues.15
Plato has, or course, a well-known epistemological problem over his
myths. He uses the myth form to express truths that are profound and
important; yet for him myth or any form of storytelling has low epistemological status, the preferred philosophical method being argument. (There
is a similar problem in his use of imagery, as in the Republic's Sun, Line and
Cave sequence.) It is, clearly, a mistake to make Plato's myths or imagery
central to interpreting his thought, at the expense of the arguments; to
make this use of the more accessible passages would be unplatonically lazy
and unphilosophical. But it is also a mistake to ignore the myths (or
images) as being clearly dispensable. For Plato, his use of philosophically
low-grade forms to present important philosophical content produces a
problem, a problem which he never explicitly solves, but which is inescapably obvious to an author who has chosen to do philosophy in a literary
medium. The mixed genre of the philosophical myth is of its nature problematic (and its interpretation exposed to much uncertainty). But the easy
modem assumption that myths can be ignored on the grounds that they
"do not lend themselves to logical analysis" may be congenial to our own
view of the relation of myth to reason, but it fails Plato; it solves his
problem by trivializing it. For him, as for Aristotle, "the lover of myth is a
lover of wisdom, in a way" (Metaphysics 982b 18-19).
(Julia Annas, 'Plato's Myths of Judgement', Phronesis, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1982), pp. 119-143: 119-122.)
References
Julia Annas, 'Plato's Myths of Judgement', Phronesis, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1982), pp. 119-143.
I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato's Doctrines vol I (London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 154.
L. Edelstein, 'The Function of the Myth in Plato's Philosophy, Journal of the History of Ideas X (1949) pp.463-481.
C. Gill, 'The Origin of the Atlantis myth', Trivium 11, pp.1-11.
Addendum
Sand1 has usefully referenced new work:
More recently Luc Brisson has published remarkable work on the topic; also there is his polemics with Marcel Detienne (and his Invention de la mythologie).
I think my answer above adds to the material posted previously - that was the basis on which it was offered - but I am glad to supplement it with Sand1's suggestions.
