Notice Board

SPEAKER:  J. von HEYKING, Professor, Dept. of Political Science, University of Lethbridge

TOPIC:  LEARNING TO DANCE:  POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP IN PLATO’S LAWS

TIME & DATE:  12:15 - 1:30 p.m., Thursday, September 25

PLACE:  PE - 275

The Athenian Stranger establishes the choruses as the paradigmatic expression of political friendship in Magnesia.  Choral performance is the form of politics from the perspective of the citizen. This paper considers the festive choruses as the form that political friendship necessarily takes when the polity is governed by Nous.  Dancing and hymning together, in festivity, expresses the rule of reason over the non-rational (in Greek, Nous over soma), and the desire of the non-rational to be ruled by reason, which is called a symphonic relationship. As such, the choruses participate in the higher friendship constituted by dialecticians who follow the song (nomos) sung by the logoi. The choruses practice political friendship by recollecting, in hymn and dance, the Athenian Stranger’s demiurgic action of world creation, the founding of the rule of Nous that is completed when the “original cause” of all beings “allows of perception by perceivers” (Laws, 894a). If that does not sound weird enough, I shall also advance the laughable claim that Plato's account of friendship as the form of politics holds true when we consider the practice and self-understanding of great statesmen.