The Choreographic Writing of the Law in Plato's Nomoi

The Laws, Plato's longest dialogue and also one of his last, has often been read as either a "popularization" of his more esoteric philosophy, if not a "degenerate" turn away from the rigors of philosophical discourse, or as the attempt to articulate a "second-best republic," acceding to the limitations of reality. It is only recently, with the work of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Seth Benardete, that scholars have begun to recognize the full importance of the Laws within Plato's oeuvre. Yet even these readings, while acknowledging the originality of the Laws, nevertheless tend to subordinate the Laws to the metaphysics (and political theology) of the middle dialogues, and above all the Republic. The following paper will argue that the Laws represents a much more fundamental revision of Plato's metaphysics than has been recognized. Indeed, it marks a turn away from metaphysics to a concept of political, and ultimately philosophical, choreography. The focus of my paper is on several deliberate inversions and transformations of the imagery and conceptual hierarchies of the Republic. By challenging the dichotomy of the playful and the serious (and, accordingly, theory and practice, and speech and writing) upon which Plato's earlier metaphysics depends, the Laws insists on the impossibility of the separation, given such powerful expression in the cave analogy of the Republic, of philosophy from everyday life. The Laws also transforms the motif of the cave: the interlocutors of the Laws are on a pilgrimage towards the cave and temple of Zeus, the legendary site of the original lawgiving of the Minoan kingdom. And finally, the Laws challenges Plato's earlier understanding of the relation between the political and poetic work -unlike in the Republic, where the former is the imitation of the idea of the good, and the latter a mere imitation of an imitation, poetry and politics are placed on the same level. These various inversions and transformations, I argue, suggest a fundamental change in Plato's understanding of the nature of philosophy: the laws no longer represent an image of a truth that has been securely grasped in an act of philosophical intuition, but instead prescribe forms of praxis that, if followed, will bring a community of beings nearer to an experience of a truth that has only been glimpsed and not securely grasped.