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Platonic Unitarianism, or What Shorey Said

I COME not to bury unitarianism but to praise it. And since, as Agathon suggested (Plato Symp. 195A), the proper way to praise a thing is to begin by saying what it is, I follow his advice. Or rather, since Paul Shorey is the most quotable of Platonic scholars, let us hear his own description of this reprehensible and unfashionable thesis. On the final page of The Unity of Plato's Thought he writes: "I have not meant to sophisticate away the obvious and inevitable variations in Plato's moods, and minor beliefs from youth to old age. Nor in the study of such development would I reject the aid of a sober and critical method of style statistics. My thesis is simply that Plato on the whole belongs rather to the type of thinkers whose philosophy is fixed in early maturity . .. rather than to the class of those who receive a new revelation every decade. ..."I Or again: "Without wishing to be held to say that Plato had no period of growth and never changed his mind, I think the dialogues do show that he belongs to the thinkers whose thought is first revealed to us in its maturity and remains essentially the same through life, rather than to the Hegels and Schellings who go through periods and have a first, second, and third manner."2 The fact is that, if we listen to "what Shorey said," there is no need to suppose that his conception of unity precludes development, or to hold, with such a scholar as J. E. Raven, for instance, that there is a great gulf fixed between the evolutionary view of Plato's work, and the Shoreyian or static view.3 Having given this brief description of the Shoreyian view, I now proceed to praise it. And this I shall do, not directly, but by noting the special qualities of Shorev's Platonic scholarship-qualities which appear to me to entitle their possessor to almost any view of Plato he might care to advocate. First to be noted is Shorey's quite extraordinary knowledge of the dialogues. Passages from the Euthydemus, the Statesman, and the Laws spring as readily to his retentive mind as passages from the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Republic. The margins and notes of What Plato Said are packed with seemingly inexhaustible cross-references to points of doctrine, idiom, and stylistic device. By this system of cross-reference Shorey succeeds in counteracting "the atomnism . . . that treats each dialogue as an isolated unit," such treatment being, he says, "the renunciation of all method."4