Abstract

I trace the pervasive, but mostly tacit, valorization of unity, and the concomitant denigration of plurality, through the various political, psychological, and ontological settings of Plato's early and middle dialogues. I argue that a three-fold set of presumptions structures Platonic inquiry at virtually every step between the Apology and the Republic. There is the political presumption, first in view in the Apology and the Crito, that the many, as a many, are incapable of rational action for the good of the whole polis. It follows that the wise city is a unity . ;Similarly, the virtuous person is the one who has made a unity of the natural manifold of her psyche, by forming it in the image of the real moral unities, but especially the good itself. This doctrine, I argue, is present before the Republic only in prolepsis. But it is so present, as I attempt to demonstrate by detailed readings of key passages in the Gorgias, Meno, Euthydemus, and Lysis. These passages have often been read as evidence for a pre-Republic doctrine that denies the possibility of incontinence by insisting that each and every desire is for a perceived good. I argue against this view by following the development in the pre-Republic dialogues of a conception of moral knowledge as nothing else than the condition of a unified soul. Moral knowledge then is a settled disposition of desire, not a psychically isolated cognitive state. So, moral knowledge, for Plato, is virtue, and any aberration from virtue is just another symptom of a soul under the influences of dissolution . ;Finally, there is the central tenet of Plato's Eleatic heritage, that to be is to be one, as to be a many is not to be fully. This presumption begins to emerge in the Euthyphro and Meno, and is well-entrenched in the middle dialogues, where it serves as the anchor for the systematically isomorphic accounts of virtue, political harmony, and reality that are woven through their pages