Lies like the truth: On Plato’s Lesser Hippias

How is it possible that we can be so deeply affected by poetry even when we are not altogether sure what it is about? By way of interpreting a Platonic dialog, “Lies Like the Truth: On Plato’s Lesser Hippias” links this human capacity to our ability to lie, which, in turn, grounds our ability to tell the truth. Truth-telling requires the option of not telling the truth—it cannot simply be mechanical; it thus always involves looking at the world through multiple perspectives, being polutropos like Odysseus and not simple like Achilles. This polutropia is the source of both our multiple perspectives and our striving to unify them. We could not feel at odds with ourselves unless we sought to be whole. This is connected to the fact that we are never really in a position either simply to affirm or to deny a logos but are always compelled to interpret it and to how we necessarily encounter human beings as neither altogether knowable to us nor altogether unknown. Our susceptibility to poetry and our ability to lie thus reveal the structure of the human soul as a hidden unity necessarily showing itself as a multiplicity