Drawing Rein: Shame and Reverence in Plato’s Law-Bound Polity and Ours

Pulling Back in Shame in the Laws

At the beginning of the Laws the Athenian Stranger meets two other older gentlemen, Kleinias from Crete and Megillus from Sparta, en route to the Knossian cave where Zeus reputedly gave laws to Minos, the lawgiver of Crete (624A–625B; see also Minos 319E). Early in the dialogue the Stranger considers the excellence of a lawgiver (637C–D). The lawgiver should look to the “whole of virtue,” and not focus on victory in war (628A–631B) as the lawgivers of the Cretan and Spartan regimes apparently did—at least according to Kleinias and Megillus (625C–626C, 666E–667A). With this broad view, a good lawgiver must have regard to creating within citizens the right relation to pleasures and pains (631E–632A, 636D–E, 653B–C). In this context Megillus criticizes the drinking parties (symposia), which Sparta forbids and Athens allows (637A–C). The Stranger, in response, defends well-governed drinking parties for men properly educated in music (670A–E) and aged between thirty and sixty years old, who form a “Dionysian chorus” (664D, 665B–674C), where “a chorus is the combination of dance and song taken together as a whole” (654B). Such drinking parties offer a “safeguard for education” (653A), presumably because they “put aidōs in the soul and health as well as strength in the body” (672D). Later in the Laws the Stranger will say that the best way for the old to bequeath aidōs to the young is not by rebuking shamelessness but by exemplifying aidōs in their own lives (729B–C). Hence the Dionysian chorus would enhance the aidōs of all Magnesians.

Choral performance is essential to education (for all ages) because it helps habituate human beings to feel pleasure and pain appropriately (653B–654B). But as men age they become reluctant to sing in front of others. Wine can make them “more malleable” and “less ashamed” (aischunomenos) to sing before others (665D–666C). So symposia are to make older men in a certain way impervious to shame in order that they become open to education through music. But a key educational purpose of the Dionysian chorus is also to cultivate aidōs as a sense of shame. The Stranger says that a lawgiver, who is trying to habituate citizens to courage, would, if possible, use a “fear drug” (phobou pharmakon) to fill citizens with fear and then have citizens practice overcoming that fear and thus become courageous by acting courageously. Similarly, we might consider wine a drug that encourages “shamelessness” (anaischuntous). Under its influence a human being becomes “filled with complete license of speech [parrhēsias], believing himself wise; isn’t he filled with freedom [eleutherias] and total fearlessness [aphobias] so that he doesn’t hesitate to say or even to do anything?” Wine thereby provides an opportunity to “practice becoming as little filled with shamelessness and boldness as possible, and instead be afraid to say or suffer or do anything shameful [aischron]” (647C–649D). At a well-governed drinking party, laws given by the good lawgiver will be guarded by “steady and sober men” over the age of sixty and “when ignoble boldness appears, these laws will be able to send in as a combatant the noblest sort of fear accompanied by justice, the divine fear to which we give the name aidōs and aischunē” (671C–E). The supervising elders prod the carousers to practice holding onto a sense of shame in a situation that encourages shamelessness.

In Books 1 and 2, the Stranger does not distinguish between aidōs, on the one hand, and aischunē as a sense of shame, on the other. He refers to aischunē as “fear” of “opinion, when we think we will be considered evil if we do something that is not noble” and shortly thereafter calls that fear “aidōs” (646E–647B; see also 649B–D, 671C–D). While some scholars see aidōs and aischunē, at least in their later usage, as synonymous, ¹⁰ there is still a lingering difference. Aischunē can refer to either an “inhibitory emotion,” which prevents the acts for which we feel shame (e.g., 671D), or to the negative feeling that follows transgression (e.g., 671E). In contrast, aidōs does not normally refer to “the feeling of shame for acts committed.” Rather, as in the passages just cited, aidōs usually refers to an inhibitory emotion that prevents the acts for which we feel shame. ¹¹ As an inhibitory emotion aidōs is an affect within which we pull back from a transgression, or hesitate before a violation or an overstepping of limits (especially with regard to the sacred). It is not merely a sense of shame or a sense of honor, but can also be reverence, modesty, respect, or awe. It is possible to revere somebody (and so refrain from violating them in some way) for reasons that are not reducible to a fear of disgrace. ¹² At the same time, aidōs is more than an inhibitory emotion; it also arises from “the perception of one’s place in the social structure and of the obligations which accompany that place.” ¹³ This helps us understand how aidōs can also encompass regard for others, respect for superiors, forgiveness toward others, and “restraint in treatment of the helpless,” as well as respect for community-constituting history and tradition. ¹⁴ In the drinking parties, the “Dionysian leaders” (supervising elders) plausibly represent the communal whole. It appears that they pull the carousers back from possible transgression by reminding the carousers of the laws and legal penalties. They thereby perform the communal gaze and so encourage a sense of shame in the carousers around communal expectations of virtue. Those who obey the laws and the Dionysian leaders will become “closer friends than they had been before.” Those who do not “will bear shame [aischunē] equal to or surpassing that of the man who is disobedient to Ares’s commanders” (671C–672A).

In Book 3, when the Stranger discusses the origin, transformation, and corruption of political regimes, aidōs emerges as more than mere shame: it is concern for lawfulness and an amenability to rule more generally. Arguing that regimes should mix monarchy and democracy, with despotism and freedom kept within due measure (693D–698B), the Stranger claims that the earlier Athenian regime was able to defeat the Persians (in part) because there was “a certain despotic mistress—Aidōs—on account of whom the Athenians were willing to live as slaves of the laws that then existed.” When this previous rule of Aidōs was coupled with “fear” of the “magnitude of the invading force,” the Athenians became “even more the slaves of the rulers and the laws, and all these things created a very strong sense of friendship among us” and are the reasons why the Athenians “banded together” to protect the communal whole, “to defend themselves” as well as “the temples, the graves, the fatherland, and their relatives, as well as their friends” (see 698B–C and 699C–D). In this provocative use of the language of slavery—enslavement to Aidōs made earlier Athenians slaves to the laws—the Stranger echoes the Republic’s Socrates, who claims that democrats wrongheadedly equate all subjection to law with slavery, even though their refusal of all rule and ruling hierarchies itself ultimately invites tyranny and mass slavery (Republic 563D–564A). By allowing the rule of Aidōs, and so enslaving themselves to laws, the Athenians were able to prevent themselves from becoming enslaved in a literal sense to the Persians. Later we shall see how the Stranger’s treatment of the preludes can be understood as an attempt to draw on aidōs to encourage a less slavish relation to law.

The Stranger says “the fear which [the Athenians] possessed as a result of their enslavement to those previous laws” is what he has earlier called “aidōs” (699C). This earlier reference to aidōs must be in the discussion of the drinking parties, where aidōs was fear of shame. But the character of aidōs becomes more complex in the Stranger’s depiction of how the Athenian regime, marked by aidōs, was later corrupted through the emergence of lawlessness in music. The “poets became rulers,” mixed the distinct forms of musical composition, and championed the idea that the standard for judging music was audience pleasure. Now instead of deferring to the authority of those who know about “what is beautiful in the Muses and what is not,” “the many” came to think they were adequate judges, that “everyone is wise in everything.” At this point, the “people became fearless, as if they were knowers, and the absence of fear engendered shamelessness [anaischuntia].” They became “so bold as not to fear the opinion of someone who is better” (701A–B). Shamelessness in music cascades into a refusal to obey anyone or anything else: rulers, parents, elders, laws, oaths and pledges, and finally, the gods. This leads to “a harsh epoch in which there is never a cessation of evils” (701C, echoing Republic 424B–425C, which warns against changes in music). ¹⁵ Here aidōs is depicted through its absence not simply as fear of others’ opinion but rather as fear of the opinion of those who know more. It is modesty about one’s own knowledge, a modesty that should lead one to hesitate before a violation of limits prescribed by law, custom, age, and knowledge. Aidōs is then also an openness, in light of one’s finitude, to being ruled. A hint of this more complex aidōs occurs in the earlier discussion of the drinking parties: the effects of drunkenness, which aidōs must combat, include the drinker’s failure to listen to others and his insistence that he is “capable of ruling the others as well as himself” (671B).

Christopher Bobonich sees an evolution of shame, which is his translation of both aidōs and aischunē, over the Laws and presumably as a possible trajectory for Magnesian citizens. Shame begins as fear of opinion in the drinking parties; then, where Aidōs is a “despotic mistress,” shame arises from “rejecting the control of a superior”; and eventually in the preludes it becomes shameful (slavelike) not to understand the grounds for laws, to be “unable to grasp the rules concerning one’s behavior.” He thereby argues that in the Laws shame eventually “comes to a point beyond itself.” ¹⁶ In the next two parts of this study, I show how attention to the structure and movement of aidōs as a pull back and an encounter with a whole helps to explain more precisely how shame might actually be cultivated such that it becomes other than mere shame. But first we should note a telling moment in the Laws just after the Stranger concludes his tale of the fateful corruption in Athenian music. He asks after the purpose of the dialogue so far: “Why, again, have these things been said by us?” His own answer is, “All these things have been discussed for the sake of understanding how a city might be best established sometime, and how, in private, someone might best lead his own life.” Justifying his question he says, “In my view, at least, it’s clearly necessary to pull up [analambanein] the argument [tou logou] like a horse, every now and then, and not allow oneself to be carried along by force [bia] as if the argument had no bridle in its mouth” (701C–702B). In the Phaedrus, again appearing in an equine image, aidōs leads to a pull back, which prevents one from getting “carried along by force,” and in which one gives deference to or acknowledges a larger purpose or a knowledge that surpasses what one currently grasps. The Stranger’s preferred mode of argument captures the very movement of aidōs I am elaborating.

Encountering a Whole in the Phaedrus

In the Phaedrus ¹⁷ Plato’s Socrates reimagines the Greek practice of paederasty where older men pursued erotic relationships with younger men and adolescent boys. These paederastic relationships could take on a sexual character, and the relationship was also one in which the older man was to provide mentoring and education for the younger beloved. Such relationships are the topic of early speeches in the Phaedrus, and Socrates feels he was then disrespectful to divine Erōs—those speeches were “shameless” (anaidōs)—and he seeks to remedy his error (242B–243D). As Socrates presents the possibility of an ennobling, but preferably chaste, erotic relation between an older man and a younger lover, through which both rise to philosophy, he suggests how the human soul might be habituated to greater aidōs. The soul, he says, is like “the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer” (246A). The charioteer has “pronoia,” forethought or intelligence (254E). In the human soul (unlike divine souls) only one of the horses is “beautiful and good” (246A–B). The other horse appears to stand for the appetitive part of the soul. He is “companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined” (253E). The good horse is “a lover of honor [timē] with self-control [sōphrosunē] and aidōs; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone” (253D). Mortal souls are embodied as humans, if—in the time before they are embodied—when they follow the gods in a procession through the heavens they are able to glimpse the ideas (Plato’s eternal essences) beyond the heavens. Notably, for the present study, the souls follow the gods as part of a “chorus” (247A, 250B, 252D). ¹⁸ Those who manage to follow Zeus in the divine procession, despite the unruliness of their bad horse, catch a fuller glimpse of the ideas and so, when embodied, they have the greatest possible recollection of the ideas: “A soul that has seen the most will be planted in the seed of a man who will become a lover of wisdom [i.e., a philosopher] or of beauty, or who will be cultivated in the arts and prone to erotic love” (247A–251C, 252E).

Humans who experience earthly erōs are recollecting in varying degrees the idea of the beautiful, which becomes visible to the eyes through the encounter with a beautiful beloved. Such recollection is less available to a man who “has become defiled” or who is long past his encounter with the ideas. Hence he does not “revere” (sebetai) the beloved when he looks upon him; the verb sebomai has the sense to feel awe or fear before God, to feel religious awe. Instead he “surrenders to pleasure,” and “goes after unnatural pleasure too, without a trace of fear or shame [ou dedoiken oud’ aischunetai]” (250D–251A). Martha Nussbaum argues that what is contrary to nature here, according to Plato’s Socrates, is not homosexual acts per se but the single-minded pursuit of sexual pleasure with “no interest in the soul.” This interpretation is supported, in part, by the fact that later in the Phaedrus, as Nussbaum emphasizes, and as we shall see, Plato’s Socrates is generous toward those lovers who succumb to physical desire but do so “sparingly” because they do not approve of it with their “whole minds” (256B–D). ¹⁹

Socrates is focused on the erotic madness that strikes those with a capacity for philosophy, namely, those who (recently) followed Zeus in the processional (see 250B–253B). The “recent initiate, however, one who has seen much in heaven—when he sees a godlike face or bodily form that has captured Beauty well, first he shudders and a fear comes over him like those he felt at the earlier time; then he gazes at him with the reverence due to a god [prosorōn hōs theon sebetai].” He is flooded with desire and his feathers attempt to regrow (the entire soul used to have feathers) (251A–B). Although the charioteer feels desire for the beloved, neither the charioteer nor the good horse initially move to act on this desire. The good horse “is obedient to the charioteer” and “is still controlled, then as always by its aidōs, and so prevents itself from jumping on the boy.” In contrast, the bad horse, driven single-mindedly by a desire for sexual pleasure, is ready to ravish the beloved and “no longer responds to the whip or the goad of the charioteer; it leaps violently forward and does everything to aggravate its yokemate and charioteer, trying to make them go up to the boy and suggest to him the pleasures of sex” (253E–254A).

“At first,” the charioteer and the good horse “resist, angry in their belief that they are being made to do things that are dreadfully wrong.” But “at last, however, when they see no end to their trouble, they are led forward, reluctantly agreeing to do as they have been told.” However, when they get close to the boy, “they are struck by the boy’s face as if by a bolt of lightning. When the charioteer sees that face, his memory is carried back to the real nature of Beauty, and he sees it again where it stands on the sacred pedestal next to Self-control [sōphrosunē]. At the sight he is frightened [edeise], falls over backward awestruck [sephtheisa] . . .” (254B). Thus the charioteer must come to the cusp of a transgression in order to grasp more fully the stakes in that transgression. As Elizabeth Belfiore notes, the bad horse always initiates the movement toward the beloved (254A, 254D) and so plays an essential role in the edification of the charioteer (and ultimately the soul as a whole); the charioteer learns from the bad horse’s desire even as he thwarts it. This is similar to, though more intense than, the pedagogy offered by Magnesia’s regulated drinking parties, where there must also be a provocation, by another kind of intoxication, to transgression. ²⁰

When the charioteer falls back, he “has to pull the reins back so fiercely that both horses are set on their haunches, one falling back voluntarily with no resistance, but the other insolent and quite unwilling.” When the good horse is yanked back, he “drenches the whole soul with sweat out of shame [aischunē] and awe [thambous].” In contrast, the bad horse “bursts into a torrent of insults . . . accusing its charioteer and yokemate of all sorts of cowardice and unmanliness for abandoning their position and their agreement” (254B–D). As this pattern of yielding and resisting continues, the effect on the charioteer of the close-up encounters with the beloved becomes “worse.” The charioteer “violently yanks the bit back out of the teeth of the insolent horse, only harder this time, so that he bloodies its foul-speaking tongue and jaws, sets its leg and haunches firmly on the ground, and ‘gives it over to pain.’” After this struggle occurs “time after time,” the bad horse “stops being so insolent; now it is humble enough to follow the charioteer’s warnings [pronoia].” Now when the bad horse sees the beloved, “it dies of fright [phobos].” Henceforth the “lover’s soul follows its boy in aidōs and awe [aidoumenēn te kai dediuian]” (254E). Significantly, while aidōs is originally attributed to the good horse, here aidōs is attributed to the whole soul; the soul’s overall aidōs has been enhanced.

The Phaedrus suggests that aidōs is an affect through which one pulls back before a limit in light of a whole that gives greater significance to that limit, and that different kinds of motivation, attaching to different parts of the soul, can ultimately coalesce to inculcate aidōs in the soul. The charioteer certainly appears gripped by a fear of the divine, plausibly a fear of the divinities he recalls as he recollects the glimpse of the idea of the beautiful. But he may also feel aidōs as reverence before the memory of a divinely accompanied encounter with the ideas. The charioteer may even feel aidōs as modesty before the possibility of a greater knowledge, which is similar to aidōs as it was glossed in Book 3 of the Laws; but here the charioteer’s aidōs is directed to the kind of overarching knowledge made possible by the ideas. He recalls what he only barely glimpsed and he draws back in deference to what he has seen and yet does not fully know, which is itself a reminder of the difference between mortals and immortals. The charioteer would be wary of further widening his distance from divinity by succumbing to desire and relinquishing the opportunity to contemplate the idea of the beautiful within the beloved. The charioteer comes to understand that to surrender to sexual desire would be a violation of larger proportions than he originally recognized. If we can describe aidōs in the charioteer as a kind of shame, it is fundamentally a shame at falling away from the highest human possibilities. The charioteer feels a powerful antipathy toward debasing a sacred memory and destroying an edifying possibility. ²¹

The bad horse ultimately learns to pull back from fear (phobos) of pain. It learns to anticipate and so avoid the pain of the charioteer’s violent reaction to and thwarting of the bad horse’s desire, a thwarting that is much more painful when desire is on the very cusp of satisfaction and when the motivation of the thwarter is the possibility of becoming more divine. The good horse, we know, is always already moved by aidōs, but how is this aidōs transformed, if at all, by this practiced drawing rein? ²² Perhaps the good horse is always simply motivated by fear of shame, understood as fear of others’ opinion. However, while Socrates does say that fear of appearing stark mad prevents the lover from worshipping and sacrificing to the beloved as a god (251A), he also says that in the grip of erōs, a lover has less regard for customs, family, friends, and other obligations (252A–B). If so, then it seems that the lover in the throes of erōs is generally less sensitive to the gaze of others, to shame in the narrow sense. So perhaps the good horse simply continues to obey the charioteer out of established habit. Or perhaps, through the charioteer’s struggle to draw rein, the good horse is made amenable to the shame of relinquishing the most divine human possibilities; the good horse’s aidōs may follow, albeit less reflectively, the evolving concerns of the charioteer. The good horse may also follow the charioteer out of a willingness to be ruled by the charioteer as one who knows more. As the one who directs the soul as a whole, the charioteer looks to the choice of life as a whole and not merely to actions and desires attaching to a particular part of the soul. ²³ Further, the charioteer is the one who initially glimpses the ideas (248A–B) and later recollects them when embodied (253E–254B). The charioteer’s superior knowledge may be confirmed for (but still not understood by) the good horse when the charioteer is struck by the recollection of the ideas. If so, the good horse’s aidōs is akin to aidōs as theorized in Book 3 of the Laws.

Even after its training, the bad horse of the lover “has a word to say to the charioteer—that after all its sufferings it is entitled to a little fun”; but “its yokemate, along with its charioteer, resists such requests with aidōs and reason [logos]” (255E–256A). Yet we know the charioteer and good horse have, in the past, been worn down by such protests. Indeed, if the lovers “adopt a lower way of living, with ambition [love of timē/honor] in place of philosophy, then pretty soon when they are careless because they have been drinking or for some other reason, the pair’s undisciplined horses will catch their souls off guard” and the lovers will indulge their physical desire. They will do so “sparingly, since they have not approved of what they are doing with their whole minds.” Although their relationship does have its own attenuated blessings, they fall short of the highest philosophical friendship and its attendant blessings (256B–E). The Phaedrus suggests that humans need constant training in aidōs, the kind of training that occurs in Magnesia’s drinking parties or, as I am about to argue, through its legal preludes.

Preludes as Pause

It is plausible that the Stranger’s proposal for preludes to laws is aimed at cultivating aidōs. The Stranger is emphatic that aidōs should be a foremost concern of the lawgiver and the preludes are an explicit legal innovation in the Laws (722B–C; see also 857C–E). Moreover, many individual preludes speak of aidōs and its practice (879C, 920D–921A, 943E, 917A–B). ²⁴ Just as musical preludes “artfully attempt to promote what is to come,” legal preludes encourage citizens to receive the laws in the spirit of a patient who is willing to be educated (722D–723B). Laws without preludes are akin to the way “slave doctors,” who treat slaves, issue “commands” to their patients in the manner of a “headstrong tyrant.” Free doctors, who treat free men, seek to “persuade” their patients (719E–720E) and even “come close to philosophizing” (857D). A lawgiver should avail himself of both compulsion, from the command and penalty of the law, and persuasion from the prelude (721D–723B), and so mix slave doctoring and free doctoring. Significantly, “anyone who is persuaded by the preludes will be obedient to the rein [euēnios]” (880A). ²⁵ For the recalcitrant, the main part of the law stipulating the command and the penalty are necessary for obedience (880D–E).

The preludes are directed to citizens, but often address them as though they are on the cusp of transgression, perhaps either because they are actually vulnerable to transgression (and so are unhealthy, like “patients”) or because taking citizens even imaginatively to the cusp of transgression helps to bring home the stakes in transgression (the philosophical lover in the Phaedrus is brought to the cusp of transgression, as are the carousers in the drinking parties). Thus with regard to the prelude to the law concerning “temple robberies” (853D), the Stranger says, “Someone would say the following, by way of dialogue and encouragement to that man who is urged during the day and awakened at night by an evil desire to despoil something of the sacred things. . . . These are the preludes we sing to those who are considering all these deeds that are impious and destructive of the city” (854A–C). But how do the preludes actually reach citizens? Citizens are to study the law code as a whole (811B–812A). Gerard Naddaf points to evidence throughout the text of the Laws (see, e.g., 812A–813A) suggesting that the Stranger wants citizens to sing and dance the laws as part of the citizen choruses. ²⁶ Thus it is plausible that the preludes are also sung and danced. Such a musical training would teach citizens to approach the law through the prelude and habituate, in an embodied way, a pause before the law. Tellingly, the Stranger presents his main arguments for preludes just when he and his companions have “paused in this altogether lovely resting place” (722C). The very form of the prelude is a pause before law, a drawing rein before a limit.

In substance, the preludes are an eclectic mix of affective appeals, imagery, metaphysical claims, and less encumbered reasons. Certain preludes appeal to the good of the city (e.g., 950A–D). Others clarify or appeal to the longings, corrupted or uncorrupted, of human beings (e.g., 869E–871A, 918B–919D). The prelude to the marriage law links the human yearning for immortality to the begetting of children: “by leaving behind the children of children and remaining one and the same for always, [the species of human beings] partakes of immortality by means of coming-into-being” (721B–C). Others both appeal to the city’s good and speak to human longings (772E–774A, 922E–923C). The preludes often warn about retribution in Hades for injustice and the possible disapproval of gods, such as Athena and Hephaistos (870D–871A, 927A–927B, 916D–917B, 920D–921A). Thus the preludes themselves, like the laws, often threaten penalties, albeit from gods (872E–873A) and also from the souls of ancestors who continue to look after their own (926E–927B). Hence certain preludes will be unpersuasive to unbelievers (870E–871A). Unbelievers, and those who believe the gods are bribable, may need the threat of a legal penalty to comply with the law (see, e.g., 873A; see also 907D–909D). So the preludes do not mimic philosophical dialectic. Indeed, the Stranger characterizes certain preludes as “myths” (e.g., 872D, 927C). It is clear, then, that the preludes do not simply provide justifying reasons for particular laws. Rather, the preludes also direct citizens to see how a law is part of a larger whole in which they themselves are implicated. That is, the form of the prelude as a hiatus before a law presents the pulling back belonging to aidōs. The substance of the prelude is the encounter with the whole belonging to aidōs.

This larger whole might be one’s life as a whole. Thus the prelude to military laws invokes the ideal military life and becomes a meditation on the need to allow rule over the totality of one’s life, to live in common with others, and to inure oneself to anarchy or disorder (942A–943A). The whole encountered in the prelude may also be the polity, sometimes theorized as a long line of ancestors. The prelude to the inheritance law says that “neither yourselves nor this property belong to you, but that they belong rather to your entire family, both past and future, and that to an even higher degree the entire family, as well as the property, belong to the city” (923A–B). The prelude to the laws concerning violent assault says, “Every one of us is to evince awe [aideistho], in deed and word, toward one elder than himself. Whoever exceeds us by twenty years in age, male or female, should be considered as a father or a mother, and care must be taken accordingly: one must always abstain from the entire generation that is capable of having begotten or borne one, for the sake of the gods who preside over childbirth” (879C–D). The preludes may also invoke the cosmos in which the polity is embedded, a cosmos that a god or gods direct according to “intelligence” (nous), as we are told by the extensive theological prelude to the laws against impiety in Book 10. In the first presented prelude to the laws of Magnesia (retrospectively called a prelude at 724A), the Stranger stipulates the proper order of “pious reverence” (eusebeia) in Magnesia: first to the gods, then demons, then heroes, and then ancestral gods, and then living parents (717A–718A). Citizens’ indebtedness to gods and ancestors creates an interconnected whole.

There are certainly scholars who agree that the preludes bring an overarching whole to light, though they do not directly theorize this encounter with the whole as part of the double movement of aidōs. Julia Annas sees the preludes as presenting ideals of a virtuous life as a whole, such that when laws are followed in light of the preludes, compliance can transcend mere rule-following and become part of an integrated virtuous practice. ²⁷ John Schaar, who does connect the preludes to a feeling of reverence, argues that the preludes provide a “rationale” for “authority”: “The rationale consists of a more or less coherent body of shared memories, images, ideas, and ideals that gives to those who share it an orientation in and toward time and space. It links past, present, and future into a meaningful whole, and ties means and ends into a continuum that transcends a merely pragmatic or expediential calculation.” ²⁸ Malcolm Schofield notes that in the marriage law prelude, with its references to the human longing for immortality, “Plato opts for a metaphysical premise with theological resonances.” Here the “persuasive rhetoric of the prelude” does not seek to rationally justify the specific requirements of the marriage law but is instead “designed … to get people to see themselves and their lives in a framework larger than politics.” ²⁹ In sum, the preludes invoke the wholes in the light of which specific limits have meaning. They draw attention to the shape of one’s life as a whole, which is itself embedded in the shared life of the polity, and the polity is itself part of a reason-inflected cosmos.

The way that the preludes invoke a whole appears to be similar to the effects of what the Stranger, in Book 7, describes as the lawgiver’s “writings that reveal what is noble and ignoble to him” (822D–823A). These writings are separate from the laws proper, and appear to be like self-standing preludes; ³⁰ though it does seem that the preludes are often very close in character to these writings and are not always clearly distinguishable from them. ³¹ The best citizen complies not only with the laws, but also with the lawgiver’s other writings; that citizen has “unbroken obedience” “to those writings in which the lawgiver legislates, praises, and blames” (822D–823A). While dishonor is a pervasive punishment for noncompliance with laws, the lawgiver’s writings call citizens to seek honor beyond a law-abiding reputation, to look beyond specific laws, and to consider larger questions of the good life and the whole of virtue, including possibly even philosophical virtue. For example, with regard to hunting, the lawgiver should discuss the different kinds of hunting, some of which are “lazy,” and others in which the hunters are “cruel and lawless,” and clarify how “hunting is a very widely extended activity even though it is now comprehended, for the most part, in a single name.” The hunting of humans “that occurs through friendship” is “sometimes praiseworthy, sometimes blameable” and is different from the hunting in warfare (823B–824A). A praiseworthy friendship might be like the Phaedrus’s friendship, in which friends together engage in philosophy. ³²

Within the broader discussion around the drinking parties there is an account of law consistent with the claim that the preludes, as supplements to laws, seek aidōs. The Stranger imagines the human being as a “divine puppet” moved by strings. Though pulled by passions, which are “like tendons or cords” and are “hard and iron” and draw us in “opposite directions,” “each person should always follow . . . the golden and sacred pull [agōgē] of calculation [logismos],” “never letting go of it and pulling with it against the others” (644D–645A). Logismos is often “arithmetical calculation” (e.g., see Republic 522Cff), but it can also be reasoning in a broader sense and what allows apprehension of the Platonic ideas. ³³ Here logismos considers future possibilities of pleasure and pain and their relative merits (644C–D). “Law” (nomos) appears to be the explicit articulation of logismos in the city (644D) and also the ally of logismos in the city (644E–645A). ³⁴ Yet the “noble pull [agōgē] of law” needs assistance “because calculation, while noble, is gentle rather than violent” (645A–B). The violence threatened by law can assist logismos; that is clear. But the context of these passages indicate that aidōs also helps the pull of law, and so helps logismos. Soon after “the myth about us being puppets” (645B), the Stranger turns to the “effect” of “drunkenness” on such puppets and aidōs debuts in the Laws (647A–B). The Dionysian leaders, who prompt the carousers to pull back before a violation of the laws, are like the preludes and also the earthly vision of the beautiful in the Phaedrus. They provoke a pull back before a limit by invoking a whole (the community of praise and blame) and so make law’s claim stronger.

Understanding the preludes as attempts to cultivate aidōs solves several interpretive puzzles around the preludes. Scholars worry that the preludes do not reflect a “free doctor carrying on a dialogue with a free man” (857D), ³⁵ or that the preludes appeal more to the emotions rather than to reasoned argument, ³⁶ and so cannot create a free-doctoring regime. However, understood as attempts to cultivate aidōs, the preludes can still come “come close to philosophizing, grasping the disease from its source and going back up to the whole nature of bodies” (857D), as the free-doctoring analogy claims. The preludes invite the kind of consideration of the whole—a turn to overarching unities—that belongs to philosophy as Plato conceives it. Free doctoring is not merely triage, it also has a wholistic dimension (to slip into contemporary parlance). The preludes open citizens to limits by invoking the wholes within which those limits are embedded. The religious appeals to the afterlife within the preludes, in addition to their threats of divine penalty, could also be efforts to help turn citizens’ attention to their existence as a whole and to the cosmos as also inhabited by divinities. These appeals need not be ignored, ³⁷ or explained away simply as aberrations from, or less desirable augmentations to, the rational persuasion aspired to by the preludes ³⁸ —moves that positive interpretations of the preludes sometimes make. As invitations to philosophy not limited to bare arguments, the preludes are in some way akin to Plato’s own dialogues like the Republic: rife with imagery and myth, including imagery of the afterlife (recall the Myth of Er). The affective and not narrowly rational elements of the preludes, together with the embodied musical performance of the preludes, are consistent with the way Plato envisages the cultivation of aidōs earlier in the Laws’ treatment of drinking parties and in the Phaedrus. Law relies on aidōs to open us to law’s reason, but aidōs itself is cultivated in an experiential and embodied fashion. ³⁹

Scholars have also faulted the preludes as skimpy window dressing for the brute command and violence of the law. ⁴⁰ Rather than minimizing the slave-doctoring character of the threat of legal penalty, the aidōs-focused interpretation of the preludes suggests how the threat of force can support the work of the preludes, as worrying as this may be. The threat of punishment that belongs to the law is always present, and this may be a motive not merely for compliance with the law, but also for the pause before law. The threat of legal penalty may help habituate the initial pulling back and pause before a whole. A repeated pulling back and pause, from mixed motives, may become a habit that endures beyond the threat of penalty or shame (akin to the bringing of the different parts of the soul to aidōs in the Phaedrus, a habituation that also involved violence and the threat of violence). Over time, the pulling back and pause may disclose more profound wholes, which give more meaning to laws. Eventually an awareness of these wholes may become the principal provoker of pause. In this way Magnesia harbors the hope that free doctoring gradually predominate over slave doctoring, and we see more precisely how, as Bobonich suggests, shame may “come to a point beyond itself.” The twofold movement of aidōs reveals how this development can occur.

Aidōs before the Law-Ruled Polity as a Fragile Whole

Throughout the Laws the Stranger presents the polity ruled by law as a precarious achievement. The opening line of the Laws actually throws the divine origin of laws into question: “Is it a god or some human being, strangers, who is given the credit for laying down your laws?” (624A). In an age where humans are no longer directly ruled by “a more divine and better species” (as they were in the blessed age of Kronos), humans must play an extensive role in lawgiving (713B–714A). However, humans should still be modest about their powers to found and preserve political regimes. The art of lawgiving requires knowledge of that for which to “pray,” so divinity still has a role. And chance also has a role: “no human being ever legislates anything,” but rather “in all things god—and together with god, chance, and opportunity—pilots all the human things” (709A–D). Given how fraught lawgiving is, citizens should “forgive” (suggnome) the lawgiver—“almost as a common prelude”—for being unable to manage the “private calamities” of men while he looked to the “common things,” and for giving laws in “ignorance” such that one day they might be unfulfillable (925E–926A). And recall how changes in music led to the unraveling of the law-bound Athenian regime (701A–C). In light of the foregoing, it is impressive that the rule of law is at all.

The Stranger seeks to make the citizens fully aware of the fragility of the law-bound regime. He actually assigns the text of the Laws—“the speeches [logoi] we’ve been going through since dawn until the present”—as a “model” for all of Magnesia’s prose and poetry and for children and their teachers to study. His “own speeches brought together” are “especially appropriate for the young to hear.” There would not be “anything that would be better” for “the Guardian of Laws and Educator . . . to bid the teachers to teach the children, other than these things and things that are connected with them and similar” (811B–812A; see also 858E–859A). The innovation constituted by required study of the lawgiver’s writings—all the laws and “things interwoven with the laws” in Magnesia are to be written down (823A)—is noteworthy. That all children are to learn to “write and read” (810B) is also a departure from Athenian practice. ⁴¹ Thus Magnesia manifests a strangely transparent authoritarianism. The highly and punitively regulated citizens are invited to an insider’s view of the task of lawgiving. They are shown how they are shaped by the lawgiver and for what ends, and are educated about the polity’s contingency and artifice, ⁴² even as their intensive study of the laws arguably also constitutes a program of indoctrination. ⁴³

The guiding “Stranger” in Plato’s Statesman says that we ought to “wonder” at the “stability that inheres in the state” given that “many, to be sure, like ships that founder at sea, are destroyed, have been destroyed, and will be destroyed hereafter.” ⁴⁴ This observation, albeit in a different Platonic dialogue, suggests how grasping the fragility of the polity can inspire a distinctive kind of reverence, a wariness of despoiling what has been created painstakingly and fortuitously, akin to the feeling one might have before a delicate work of art. While the Laws’ Stranger does not explicitly articulate such a strain of reverence, this reverence is consistent with his presentation of Magnesia, which he calls “a tragedy that is the most beautiful and the best” (817B). In the drinking parties and through the preludes, citizens learn to hesitate before violating a law perhaps because they see the whole (the overall shape of their lives, the communal whole as a community of praise and blame, the polity, the reason-inflected cosmos) they may violate through a specific legal transgression. Reverence as a constant hesitation before the law-bound polity as an ever-fragile achievement could further provoke Magnesians, and arguably does or could provoke us, to see laws in light of the polity, which the laws help constitute. Such aidōs encourages us to ask, when we violate or strategically stretch or alter law, how we might be violating, stretching, or altering —for better or for worse—the polity that the specific laws constitute? Speaking of the polity in terms of its frailty, rather than its actual, possible, or past “greatness,” may not be politically marketable, but it manifests an understanding of the rule of law as what provides the architecture of the polity’s substantive way of life and not only as what brings predictability to a polity.

Aidōs as reverence for the fragility of the law-bound polity resonates with attempts to articulate less belligerent and less nationalistic attachments to the polity. As Simone Weil once said, “The thought of weakness can inflame love in just the same way as can thought of strength. . . . One can either love France for the glory which would seem to ensure for her a prolonged existence in time and space; or else one can love her as something which, being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account.” ⁴⁵ In a similar vein, Patchen Markell has shown how Habermas’s “constitutional patriotism,” which provides a “civic nationalist” alternative to an exclusionary “ethnic nationalism,” could be better understood as an affective attachment to a “fragile political culture,” rather than an attachment to a completed constitutional vision. This more nuanced constitutional patriotism is marked by an awareness that the constitutional project is always compromised and inadequate to its universal principles, which themselves are ever incomplete and in need of augmenting particulars. ⁴⁶ Plato’s Laws makes vivid some of the affects and habits of thought and action that might accompany and support acknowledgment of the fragility of a polity. Further, its comprehensive legal education strives to keep that acknowledgement alive; it is all too easy not to pause before law. The need to constantly cultivate aidōs only confirms the law-bound polity’s frailty. The affective acknowledgement of a polity’s fragility could drive exclusions, surveillance, and punitive measures to protect the polity. Arguably, awareness of fragility helps drive Magnesia’s authoritarianism. As Markell warns, there could never be an affect that is entirely “safe” for liberal democracy. Indeed, if such a safe affect were possible, then the polity would be less fragile. ⁴⁷

Late Modern Democratic Aidōs

Aidōs is a feeling of hesitation before limits in view of the whole, which those limits are animated by and may point toward, protect, or make possible. It opens us to thoughtful comprehension of the law, but it is not reducible to reason. Revisiting Plato reminds us that the constitutional order, despite its “machine” language of check and balances, ⁴⁸ is still an affective endeavor and relies on its participants feeling hesitant before limits. It is now especially difficult for us to draw rein in our approach to law because, as Brian Tamanaha has argued, our political language and practice encourage us to see law primarily as an instrument to be wielded for the strategic realization of particular policy, partisan, or personal goals. Viewing law as a “means to an end” undermines the capacity of particular limits—say, the right to vote or a prohibition on torture—to serve as a constitutive limit for the polity. ⁴⁹ Importantly, a diligent following of laws may also be too disconnected from the larger, albeit contested, purposes and aspirations that define the polity. ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, the Laws teaches us that care for the letter of the law can itself help generate pause and so need not culminate in mere proceduralism.

With this elaboration of aidōs in hand, let us return to the worry about politicians who lack a sense of shame and so threaten law’s rule. Do we gain much by reframing our worry as a critique of a lack of reverence for the law-bound polity as a fragile achievement? After all, faulting political actors for their lack of reverence is also a way of shaming them for how they further imperil the fragile polity. My claim is that the language of reverence for a fragile whole makes it more clear that the problem with politicians who lack pause around law is not their ethical character per se or even primarily the harm of specific violations. Rather, their shortcoming is their inability or refusal to pause and look to the whole—the law-bound polity—which suffers the reverberations of specific transgressions. Their ethical failing is less about measuring up to a vision of a noble or normal individual life, but more about failing to direct attention outward to the shared home emerging from the intersection of myriad limits. ⁵¹ Shame can also be a provocation to look at the whole; yet the language of shame is more likely to render a problem of politics a problem of character. We can also moralize reverence; it too is a risky affect. But at least initially, reverence directs our attention to the polity, its structures and structural needs. It seems harder to apologize away imperiling a fragile polity than a personal moral failing; repentance for the former just seems inapt. And awareness of the polity’s fragility inhibits our ability to valorize shamelessness as authentic action, when this shamelessness is untethered from consideration of the polity. Reverence for the polity as what is perishable may be our best hope for cultivating an affect for pause before the polity and the limits that create the polity, without relying only on shame. In light of the risks attaching to appeals to shame, we could even say that one of the frailties of our law-bound polity may be its reliance upon, or tendency to appeal to, shame as a support for the rule of law.

It is easy to equate political contestation with irreverence. But reverence for the law-bound polity as a fragile achievement need not demand resignation or unconditional obedience to laws, deny law’s politicized character and flaws, or require exclusively incremental reform. This reverence is not reverence for particular laws but for law as such. So it asks for fidelity to the overall aspirational project of the law and need not lead to obedience to particular laws, including specific unjust laws. Further, the distance between aspiration and reality may actually constitute the fragility of the polity to which we must attend. Finally, reverence is an affect that directs one to hesitate so that one may have a view of the polity as a whole, and fundamental change precisely requires a view of the whole. Thus a reverential pause may provoke a radical act. ⁵² Reverence as it is theorized here calls for a pause before obeying, manipulating, or violating law—for a pause in which one attends to what one is doing to the polity. This approach helps us understand how, as George Kateb argues, Lincoln was willing to suspend the U.S. Constitution apparently out of “reverence” for the unique egalitarian “promise” harbored by the “polity” that was the Union, ⁵³ even as Lincoln famously called for “reverence for the laws” as “the political religion of the nation.” ⁵⁴ Reverence for the law-bound polity as a fragile whole is, in a sense, less rigoristic than reverence for laws, but perhaps it is enough—in the long term—for the rule of law and for the polity the rule of law constitutes.

Capturing the tension between democratic political contestation and aidōs more generally, Arlene Saxonhouse argues that Athenian democracy valorized parrhēsia as “fearless speech,” which opens up a present and a future not bound to tradition and the hierarchies and exclusions of the past, and that such fearless speech was distinguished by its lack of aidōs. The Stranger arguably echoes this idea when he casts those under the influence of wine as “filled with complete license of speech [parrhēsia]” (649B) and as lacking aidōs. ⁵⁵ At the same time, Saxonhouse argues that democracy (including ours) actually relies on aidōs as a kind of reverence—bolstered by sensitivity to what others think—for the limits that support democracy. Aidōs prevents parrhēsia from becoming a power-seeking manipulation of truth rather than the egalitarian speaking of truth to power. Reverence for the law-bound polity as a fragile whole may be a candidate for the “inherently contradictory democratic aidōs” that Saxonhouse suggests democracy needs, or needs to avow. ⁵⁶ Aidōs as the reverence attracted by vulnerable creations may alert the reverent to the contingencies of the polity’s emergence and structure, and so invite present and future egalitarian recreations, but always in light of the precariousness of what they are working with and within. Aidōs and democratic political contestation may not be fully reconcilable, but perhaps the foregoing strain of reverence might show their possible coincidence and how care for lawfulness—pausing before law—need not forestall democratic agitation.

We late moderns might learn from civics lessons about the ineradicable fragility of constitutional order. Although, as Weil suggests, acknowledgment of frailty can elicit an impassioned solicitousness, a civics lesson likely lacks the intensity of the experiential training that both the Laws and the Phaedrus suggest is necessary for aidōs. Right now, as ever, perhaps all that is required to cultivate aidōs before the fragile law-bound polity is attention to politics. The spectacle of politicians, lacking pause, and taking themselves to the cusp of violation and beyond, could be a powerful lesson in the polity’s precariousness. ⁵⁷ This experience, while not the erotic mania of the Phaedrus, can be disorienting, and is potentially our own occasion for practicing drawing rein: in reaction to the times, we are tempted to release the reins altogether and treat and avoid law strategically. ⁵⁸ But to learn from such a political moment, we need a language for saying how care for lawfulness, whether or not it ultimately issues in obedience, can be an antiauthoritarian stance, and need not be thoughtless submission, empty proceduralism, or an expression of naiveté about law as a configuration of power. Plato’s treatment of aidōs as drawing rein gives us such a language and remains all too relevant.