A Tale of Two Else Lectures
By Prof. Sara Rappe

In the calendar year of 2003, the Department hosted two Else lectures. The lectures were funded from the endowment that honors the late Professor Gerald Else. Our speakers, Professor Jonathan Lear, who lectured in January, and Professor Danielle Allen, who lectured in October, belong to the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Both speakers also teach at the University of Chicago: Professor Lear also holds a Chair in Department of Philosophy, while Professor Allen is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics. Both speakers are public intellectuals who have trained in a multitude of disciplines. And both speakers lectured on Plato. A coincidence? I think not: Professors Allen and Lear demonstrate in their lives and scholarship that Classical Studies is not just an antiquarian discipline. It is also the site of some very contemporary debates and disputes on the foundations of human culture.

Age before beauty, the adage goes, so we begin this report with Professor Lear's lecture, entitled, "The Efficacy of Myth in Plato's Republic." One helpful background note is that Lear is not only trained in ancient philosophy, but he is also a practicing psychoanalyst and has written several books in which the two disciplines merge admirably, including Love and its Place in Nature and Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life. For his Else lecture, Lear started with an account of the time-bomb-like phenomenon that, Plato cautions, can strike people in their later years. All of those stories one hears while growing up about the fate of the soul after death can take on a chilling new relevance toward the close of one's life. Plato uses this simple bit of folk psychology to illustrate how potent childhood stories can be in the development of one's life and unfolding of one's character. Of course, Plato's Republic is infamous for its particular brand of childhood education, which involves an extreme form of censorship built on the foundation of the so-called "Noble Lie" (Republic, 412).

According to the terms of this lie, all citizens above the age of ten will be exiled from the utopian society Plato intends to found. After this, each citizen will be told that, "up till now, all that you have experienced is a dream." Again, the lie will continue to maintain that all of these children were grown as metallic deposits, deep in the earth: some gold, some silver, some bronze. Unlike most Plato scholars, Lear does not concentrate on the myth of the metals. Instead, he emphasizes the first part of the lie, in which citizens are told not to believe in anything they have hitherto experienced: "up to now, all that you have experienced" is something that you have fundamentally not understood. But what is the effect of this lie on the minds of the adults who heard it, on those who have grown up under its influence? For one thing, the citizens will be suspicious of all of their experiences and of all that they learn. After all, it is part of a dream.

When will they wake up from this dream? What will their experience of wakefulness be like? For one thing, they have been taught to doubt their senses, to doubt their education, to doubt their whole life history. What would it be like to grow up in the midst of this persistent doubt, a doubt that everyone in society will be able to embrace? The collective mythology will become, "all of this unreal." And the correlate of this mythology will be the thought, "what is real"? "How do I wake up?" "What is wakefulness?"

All of the citizens will be prepared to encounter the questions that philosophy asks as a matter of course When they were told when young that they were fast asleep, they were primed for the philosophical pursuit, the quest for truth. And because they doubt their entire experience, this investigation will be the life journey for all the citizens of Kallipolis, who are told, in effect, don't believe anything you hear: you will find out the meaning of this strange event when you eventually wake up. Right now, it is enough to know that you are dreaming.

Professor Lear's highly provocative account of Plato's Noble Lie goes against mainstream interpreters who suggest that the politics of deceit amount to mere brainwashing. Instead, what is apparently propaganda serves as a seed for the future philosophical mind, the mind, as it turns out, of the everyday citizen in Plato's utopian vision.

Next we turn from utopian politics to something that more approximates Realpolitik, at least as far as Plato is concerned. Professor Danielle Allen graced the Department and its guests with her brilliant lecture, "Last Words: rhetoric, death and authority." Again it will be necessary to remind the reader that Allen's thought is best situated in a complex meditation on the meaning of democratic institutions, both ancient and modern. Allen is the author of The World of Prometheus: Politics of Punishing in Ancient Athens, and a forthcoming book, Talking to Strangers, which deals with the events surrounding the integration of the public school district in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Allen, like Lear, is a polymath, and earned a second Ph.D. at Harvard in Government while teaching Classics at the University of Chicago.

Allen's talk opened with an article from the New York Times, dated May 31, 1999 (her handout certainly threw Classicists for a loop!), that discussed the role of women's protests in forcing the Serbian government to return troops serving in Kosovo. Allen then went on to show that beneath the absurdly effulgent praise of Athens that Socrates practices in the Menexenus, lurk the entanglements of internal politics in the democratic state. Athens as a democratic society splits profoundly along two divisions, often radically under appreciated by ancient historians: there is a conflict between the young and the old, those who must go to war and those who once fought the wars. There is also a conflict between male and female, between those who must absorb the costs of war in terms of personal bereavement and financial destitution, and those who would bestow meaning on the very transience of human life by introducing the value of honor as a military prerogative.

Allen studies the rhetoric of social division in Ancient Athens, looking at the ideological construction of the funeral oration. Her quest is to pinpoint the locus of authority in this genre of literature, a task she pursues by hunting down the hidden messages encoded in the highly emotional public funeral celebration. The young come to realize that they can have access to sudden status enhancements, that heroization is within their immediate grasp. For this sudden empowerment, they merely have to seize control of the government and practice a restless form of imperial warfare. In Ancient Greece, it is the youth who clamor for war, and the older generation that fears the radical instability of a population old enough to vote, but young enough to vote with their feet.

Add to this tension the problem of how to instill obedience and traditional values in a constantly emerging new political generation that is restless for its own prizes. The funeral oration infuses the explosive possibilities of this dynamic with traditional language, to create an authoritative discourse based on what Allen calls, "paternalist mnemonics," For Allen, the image of the dying Socrates on his death bed (Menexenus is the name of Socrates' son), the words of the deceased ancestors, and the very staging of the funeral oration, all contribute to the emotional charge that attaches to memory and the language of memorialization.

And yet there is a twist to this game between fathers and sons, and that twist is Aspasia, Pericles' live-in girlfriend, whom Socrates actually makes out to be his own rhetoric teacher. The jest is that Aspasia is the real mastermind behind Pericles' paternalist mnemonics and tactics of control. And yet Aspasia has also given Socrates a pretty decent speech, one that he would be willing to recite should anyone ask him. It seems that Socrates got his material from the leftover bits that Pericles didn't use in making his famous speech that Thucydides quotes. This joke leaves us wondering how Pericles and Socrates can be quoting the same source, and what devious intentions Aspasia hid in mentoring two such radically different pupils.

To such a puzzle over the meaning of authorship and on the status of a paternal mnemonics that is after all, written by a woman, has Socrates' sly pilfering of public goods led the perplexed reader. One might suspect that Socrates was willing to read the part of the speech that told the youngsters to chill out and stay at home with their wives, that part that the women of Kosovo were so anxious to recite. One might suspect this, and yet the puzzles remain. Perhaps we are to expect nothing less from Socrates. Allen's lecture goes against the grain of mainstream reading by taking what is on the surface the least perplexing of Plato's dialogues, and showing that it is a profound meditation on the meaning and source of democratic ideology.

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