Socrates' Second Sailing: On Plato's Republic

by Seth Benardete

In this section-by-section commentary, Benardete argues that Plato's Republic is a holistic analysis of the beautiful, the good, and the just. This book provides a fresh interpretation of the Republic and a new understanding of philosophy as practiced by Plato and Socrates.

"Cryptic allusions, startling paradoxes, new questions . . . all work to give brilliant new insights into the Platonic text."—Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Political Theory

Genres: Philosophy, Criticism

248 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 1989

About the author

Seth Benardete was an American classicist and philosopher, long a member of the faculties of New York University and The New School. In addition to teaching positions at Harvard, Brandeis, St. John's College, Annapolis and NYU, Benardete was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benardete is far more difficult to read than Plato. His thought process reminds me of Newton's demonstrations in the Principia -- he skips intermediate steps in each argument because he assumes they are obvious, which for the adequately educated and supremely observant they are. He will explain what he means by a phrase like "dialogic city" exactly once and the reader is expected to remember it. Strangely, this doesn't come across as arrogant, and he never talks down to the reader -- just the opposite. He expects that his readers are as smart as he is, so there is no need for unnecessary explication.

But stick with the man and there are incredible insights to be found here. I open the book at random and find this:

Socrates laughs only on the day of his death, and in the Republic, while Adiimantus of course never laughs, Glaucon often does and speaks of laughable things, but he gives up laughing once Socrates has the Muses sing how the best city must perish.

This book follows the Republic in excruciating detail, section by section, so it serves as a kind of running commentary. I found that just reading the section and then reading the commentary was not sufficient -- with Benardete I had to read Plato, read the commentary, read Plato again, and then look back at the commentary again to notice all the details I had missed and how they fit into Benardete's conception of the Republic. And this is not easy to see because his conception circles back, or looks forward to the Phaedo and the question of the philosophical life.

Maybe Benardete's conclusion is simply this, which he writes on the last page: "To figure out the best life is the best life."

[Will Spohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really mysterious, I don’t think I understood much of it. Bernadete is still beyond me. A good, different reading of the Republic, though.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a particularly dense, practically poetic commentary, which presupposes familiarity with the Straussian reading the Republic (a good geist of which is given, among other places, in The City And Man). Thus, it is essentially tacit here that Socrates' construction of the Republic is an impossible hypothetical which the interlocutors fail to appreciate, and Benardete's comments often tend to go even further beyond this and create his own terse invocations of the platonic symbolism to expand the paradoxes present in the dialogue. As such, the book is not one to read straight through but rather one to approach like a Nietzsche book (however ironically), each paragraph a very dense aphorism to be reflected upon & decoded. The book then is not necessarily the most helpful in decoding the Republic even at its more fundamentally correct level, given that even the latent arguments are often passed by rather quickly. Nevertheless, a very fine companion to the dialogue, if quite the investment in time (my first reading took me three weeks, my second nine months, goodness knows if I'll live to complete a third).

(My Review from my first reading:
I don't fully understand this book, or the Republic either, but this is definitely a book worth reading if you're going to read the Republic for anything other than a purely surface-level interpretation. Benardete pays close attention to the subtle changes in ideas that Socrates makes as he outlines his theoretical city, and also to whom the speech is made. I don't think this is an exhaustive study (but 200 pages is not enough for such a commentary), and focuses more on the internal logic of the Republic than on its linguistic, allusive, and pragmatic aspects. Nevertheless everything he says is unexpected, stimulating, and worth considering. I may update this review as I continue to revisit it in conjunct with the Republic or other dialogues; I certainly can't make any full-scale judgment other than an amateurish endorsement.)