Laws

The Laws Concedes What the Republic Could Not: That Ananke Governs the Soul of the City

Plato’s Laws is his longest dialogue and his last, composed during the final years of his life, and it is routinely dismissed as the work of a mind grown conservative — a descent from the visionary heights of the Republic into mere legislation. This reading is catastrophically wrong. The Laws represents Plato’s most honest reckoning with the fact that Nous alone cannot govern the psyche, whether individual or collective. The Athenian Stranger who leads the dialogue — conspicuously not Socrates — builds a legal architecture for a second-best city precisely because the first-best city, ruled by philosopher-kings who have seen the Forms, has been acknowledged as unrealizable. What replaced the vision is not bureaucracy but a sophisticated psychology of containment. As James Hillman demonstrated in his reading of the Timaeus, Plato’s two archai — Nous and Ananke, Reason and Necessity — cooperate as co-creating principles: “the world is a mixture resulting from this combination.” The Laws is the political application of this metaphysical insight. The city must be designed not for the rational soul alone but for the errant, “scared and crazy movement” (Laws 791a) that E. R. Dodds identified as the permanent irrationality “incompletely mastered by the rational will.” Where the Republic dreamed of mastering this movement through education and dialectic, the Laws builds institutions — drinking regulations, choral training, nocturnal councils, marriage laws — that contain it without pretending to eliminate it.

Dionysus Returns as Legislator: Wine, Ritual, and the Therapeutic State

The most psychologically radical passage in the Laws is Plato’s extended treatment of wine (672a-d, 666a-b). Hillman flagged this passage as foundational: “the gift of Dionysus, even including ‘Bacchic possession and all its frenzied dancing,’ is made a source of music… the gift was meant as a medicine, to produce modesty of soul, and health and strength of the body.” Plato prohibits wine for boys under eighteen, permits it moderately for men under thirty, and then — astonishingly — prescribes it for men past forty as a sacrament of aging, inviting “the presence of Dionysus in that sacrament and pastime of advancing years.” This is not temperance legislation. It is a ritual pharmacology of the soul. Plato recognized that the aging psyche requires loosening, that the Apollonian structures of civic duty calcify unless periodically dissolved. He contrasts this with Sparta’s abstinence (Laws 637a-b), which Hillman reads as a “misperception of Dionysus and his entire significance.” The Laws thus corrects not only the Republic but the entire ascetic tradition that would later claim Plato as its patron. The dialogue insists that the irrational — what Hillman calls pathologizing, “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder” — must be given its due within the city’s structure, or it will destroy the city from within.

The Inferior Soul as Constitutional Principle

The Laws introduces what Dodds called the “inferior soul” (897d), a cosmic principle that produces “crazy and disorderly movements” analogous to the “discordant and disorderly movement” of primordial chaos in the Timaeus (30a). Hillman’s interpretation is decisive: “This abnormal, scared, and crazy movement of the soul is not only necessary; it is Necessity itself.” The Laws does not merely acknowledge this principle theoretically — it builds an entire political order around its permanent presence. Cody Peterson’s analysis of how Plato’s Republic demoted the thumos from sovereign partner to guard dog of reason illuminates what is different in the Laws: here, the legislation itself functions as a thoracic container, an externalized thumos that holds the irrational without crushing it. The nocturnal council, the regulated symposia, the carefully calibrated musical education — these are not instruments of rational control but vessels of endurance, what Peterson’s Homeric analysis calls the tlaō function: containment that constitutes rather than annihilates. Edward Edinger’s observation that Plato’s eidos is the direct precursor of Jung’s archetype gains new force in this context. The Laws legislates not for abstract citizens but for souls inhabited by archetypal forces — the Forms as they actually manifest in embodied, errant, appetitive human beings.

The Epinomis and the Ensouled Cosmos: Why the Laws Is the Gateway to Archetypal Astrology

Richard Tarnas identified the Epinomis — written as an appendix to the Laws and regarded by scholars like A. E. Taylor as possibly Plato’s own work — as “the earliest surviving Greek writing that names all the known planets” and “explicitly postulates an a priori association between the planets and specific deities.” The Laws itself emphasizes the divinity of the celestial bodies, but the Epinomis makes the archetypal logic explicit: Aphrodite, Hermes, Ares, Zeus, Kronos are not metaphors projected onto indifferent matter but names for the ensouled intelligence governing cosmic motion. This is the seedbed of the entire tradition that would run through Plotinus, the Hermetic corpus, and ultimately into Jung’s concept of synchronicity and Tarnas’s own archetypal cosmology. Murray Stein recognized that Jung’s depth psychology is “a psychologically based version of Plato’s philosophical vision of human nature and the transcendent Forms.” The Laws is the specific Platonic text where this vision becomes most embodied — where the Forms descend from the hyperouranios topos into the grain of daily civic life, into drinking laws and dance regulations and the timing of festivals.

The Laws matters for anyone encountering depth psychology today because it is the document where Western philosophy first admitted that the soul’s pathology is not an aberration to be cured but a force to be housed. Every therapeutic modality that seeks to contain rather than eliminate the symptom — from Jung’s attitude toward the complex to Hillman’s insistence that “pathologizing never comes to an end” — finds its earliest institutional expression here. No other Platonic dialogue, and no other ancient text, attempts what the Laws attempts: to build an entire civilization around the proposition that Necessity will not be persuaded, only accommodated.