Nikkolas Reads Plato's Republic

Nikkolas · Feb 6, 2018

The philosopher Simon Critchley listed five books of philosophy to read. One of them was Plato's Republic and he explained his choice thusly:

Let's turn to the books. Your first choice is Plato's Republic (380 BCE) This is a foundational text in philosophy but I wonder why you've singled it out particularly in your recommendations for continental philosophy.

Yes, it's a bit cheeky because obviously it's common to every approach to philosophy. I guess, I've been writing on it recently; I'm writing a book on philosophy and tragedy at the moment that I've been working on for years and years. So, I've been looking at the Republic closely again and thinking about it. The first thing to say is that 'philosophy' as a term, as a term of art, is something that Plato coins. So, we're justified in coming to Plato in order to answer that question. And there are literary aspects of the Republic that are really important and fascinating, and there's the whole question of the form of the dialogue. There's the idea that philosophy begins not with a treatise – an essay – it begins with a dialogue, a drama: a drama set at some point in the recent past with a hero, Socrates, who is killed by the city.

The other thing to say is that the Republic is a perennial book in the sense in which it's perennially read but also the ways that it shows up will be different at different points in history. If you think about the Republic right now, one's eye is drawn to the critique of democracy. The main argument of the Republic is that democracy is a fine and 'a many-coloured' political form, but it leads ineluctably to tyranny. The key value in democracy for Socrates is freedom, and he says that freedom flips over into private licentiousness and that licentiousness gives rise to the licentiousness of the tyrant. So, democracy will lead to tyranny. That seems to be very germane to what's happening in countries like the United States where freedom becomes a kind of licentiousness, a tyranny of private pleasure, and the country is now under the tyranny of the king of private pleasure, Donald Trump.

So, to that extent, negatively, the Republic has a great deal to say to us at this point: there is something wrong with democracy. And then, positively, the argument that Socrates makes is that there must be guardians: people trained to govern the city. This would be an abomination for western societies to follow; it would be against the whole idea of the open society, going back to Karl Popper. But maybe Plato has a point. Maybe society should be governed by the people who actually know something, rather than tyrants. But going back to the Republic now opens that question about democracy. Philosophy has always had a very odd relationship to democracy, overwhelming negative up until about John Dewey really. So, the Republic is something that we could do well to go back to at this point in history and maybe think about the value of democracy: what is the value of democracy and why are we so committed to it? Because it is a rather peculiar way of governing society, if you think about it. I'm in favour of it, of course, but philosophy does raise some questions.

The Republic is also the text where poetry and the poets are banned from the envisaged ideal state. That seems to be something that would jar with the continental figures who you've mentioned are quite literary, are writing fiction and so on.

Yes, for sure. Continental philosophy from Hegel onwards – and particularly in Nietzsche – is deeply deeply anti-Platonic, particularly on the question of the arts. Plato's thought in the Republic is that if we admit theatre into the just city then we'll end up with the tyranny of spectacle: people will just end up gawping at things that they are attracted to, that they like, because they're excessive and wild and they don't seem to directly involve them. So, there's a kind of tyranny of aesthetic experience in place which needs to be controlled in his view. And we find that outrageous, but then maybe it's a question that we need to think about.

What is going on when we wake up listening to the sound of gunshots from the Mandalay hotel in Las Vegas on the television? Am I just concerned and shocked by that – or am I getting some pathetic aesthetic thrill out of that experience? Plato lets us question those things in ways which I think are unsettling. We think of art as just a good. Is it? Maybe it's like feasting at a time of plague, something we shouldn't necessarily be proud of. It's a question that Plato reasons with, let's put it that way.

I have a long road ahead of me in my philosophical explorations but it seemed clear to me, and others I listened to agreed, that Plato is the place to really start. Not only did he inspire all of Western Philosophy, the Dialogue format makes his writing so much more accessible than a medieval treatise or a modern paper. I do hope I can someday read all those more complicated things but I have to start somewhere and, in spite of what some people say, Plato and Aristotle are still quite relevant.

So, let us begin.

How odd the Republic should start with a discourse on something I think about a lot - death and what might come after. Unfortunately I am not a rich person so I am afraid I've committed all sorts of injustices in my life.

The second conversation, "what is justice?", is also quite relevant to me. Note the example of being given an axe by your sane friend but then refusing to give it back to them when they are insane. I dare say many of my RPG Pc's might have given back the axe.... But, well, this is why I've been rethinking where my morals come from.

"Then you don't understand the wages of the best men," I said, "on account of which the most decent men rule, when they are wilHng to rule. Or don't you know that love of honor and love of money are said to be, and are, reproaches?"
"I do indeed," he said.
"For this reason, therefore," I said, "the good aren't willing to rule for the sake of money or honor. For they don't wish openly to exact wages for ruling and get called hirelings, nor on their own secretly to take a profit from their ruling and get called thieves. Nor, again, will they rule for the sake of honor. For they are not lovers of honor. Hence, necessity and a penalty must be there in addition for them, if they are going to be willing to rule— it is likely that this is the source of its being held to be shameful to seek to rule and not to await necessity— and the greatest of penalties is being ruled by a worse man if one is not willing to rule oneself. It is because they fear this, in my view, that decent men rule, when they do rule; and at that time they proceed to enter on rule, not as though they were going to something good, or as though they were going to be well off in it; but they enter on it as a necessity and because they have no one better than or like them-selves to whom to turn it over. For it is likely that if a city of good men came to be, there would be a fight over not ruling, just as there is now over ruling; and there it would become manifest that a true ruler really does not naturally consider his own advantage but rather that of the one who is ruled. Thus everyone who knows would choose to be benefited by another rather than to take the trouble of benefiting another. So I can in no way agree with Thrasymachus that the just is the advantage of the stronger.

Part of this really reminds me of a quote from Dumbledore in Harry Potter. (I am an uncultured swine. I'm trying to improve though)

"It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well."

"Come, let's consider this now: is there some work of a soul that you couldn't ever accomplish with any other thing that is? For example, managing, ruling, and deliberating, and all such things — could we justly attribute them to anything other than a soul and assert that they are peculiar to it?"
"To nothing else."
"And, further, what about living? Shall we not say that it is the work of a soul?"
"Most of all," he said.
"Then, do we say that there is also some virtue of a soul?"
"We do."
"Then, Thrasymachus, will a soul ever accomplish its work well if e deprived of its virtue, or is that impossible?"
"Impossible."
"Then a bad soul necessarily rules and manages badly while a good one does all these things well."
"Necessarily."
"Didn't we agree that justice is virtue of soul, and injustice, vice?"
"We did so agree."
"Then the just soul and the just man will have a good life, and the unjust man a bad one."
"It looks like it," he said, "according to your argument."
"And the man who lives well is blessed and happy, and the man a who does not is the opposite."
"Of course."
"Then the just man is happy and the unjust man wretched."
"Let it be so," he said.
"But it is not profitable to be wretched; rather it is profitable to be happy."
"Of course
"Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice is never more profitable than justice."

I'm reminded of two things:
1. Thee interesting observation made by someone elsewhere that heroes think with their heart and villains with their heads. Evil choices are presented as the desirable path precisely because they are smart. A hero will reject the smart path due to morality trumping practicality. The heart rules over the head. This argument though presents justness as the logical thing to do. Reason wins out, not emotion.

That brings me to the second thing. Unhappy Anchovy once told me Sauron was stupid. I pointed out all the gret things Sauron accomplished and how he was a brilliant strategist. UA just said "sure but to be evil is to be stupid." I think I maybe see where he's coming from now. He certainly knew about all thee philosophical works before I ever did.

Book 2 makes a much better argument for the proliferation of injustice. I am reminded of a John Oliver video I watched from a few years ago where some British Lord was recorded with a prostitute. I personally objected only to the fact he was cheating on his wife. The fact he was being given money to snort coke off a hooker just made me think he was living the dream. So I might be projecting when I think that a lot of people would feel similarly but at the very least, for 2500 years, people have been saying similar things. With our mouths we praise virtue but in our hearts we truly admire vice.

But now we're getting into the real ideals of the Republic. Perhaps I wouldn't think such things if my mother hadn't shown me Hellraiser IV when I was little. Aren't we fixated now on what our media does to us? "This bit of media is fascist, that bit of media is problematic, it's all corrupting/reinforcing these bad things and we should do something about it." Well, looks like Plato had a solution to these problems, albeit a horribly illiberal one. Still, he's merely taking the next step - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?

Note: I do not favor censorship of any kind. But it's not like his suggestions are all that radical and there are plenty of people around now, even Left or liberal folks, who believe in the inherent evil of some media and that we have to "do something" about it. But what is to be done? Take for example the plague of Far Right YouTubers who are no doubt contaminating the minds of many young people. Should they be silenced for the good of society? A very short while ago I would have said "yes" but I'm trying to fight that impulse.

"Quite right in that," he said. "But what do you say about this, Socrates? Won't we need to get good doctors in the city? And, of course, those who have handled the most healthy men and the most d sick ones would be the best, and the best judges, similarly, would be those who have been familiar with all sorts of natures."
"Yes indeed, I mean good ones," I said. "But do you know whom I consider to be such?"
"I would, if you'd tell me," he said.
"Well, I'll try," I said. "However you asked about dissimilar matters in the same speech."
"How's that?" he said.
"Doctors," I said, "would prove cleverest if, beginning in childhood, in addition to learning the art, they should be familiar with very many and very bad bodies and should themselves suffer all diseases and e not be quite healthy by nature. For I don't suppose they care for a body with a body— in that case it wouldn't be possible for the bodies themselves ever to be, or to have been, bad— but for a body with a soul; and it's not possible for a soul to have been, and to be, bad and to care for anything well."
"Correct," he said.
"A judge, on the other hand, my friend, rules a soul with a soul, 409 a and it's not possible for it to have been reared and been familiar with bad souls from youth on, and to have gone through the list of all unjust deeds and to have committed them itself so as to be sharp at inferring from itself the unjust deeds of others like diseases in the body. Rather, it must have been inexperienced and untainted by bad dispositions when it was young, if, as a fine and good soul, it's going to make healthy judgments about what is just. This is exactly why decent men when they are young, look as though they were innocents^^ and easily h deceived by unjust men, because they have in themselves no patterns of affections similar to those of bad men."
"Yes, indeed," he said, "this is the very thing that happens to them."
"That, you see, is why," I said, "the good judge must not be young but old, a late learner of what injustice is; he must not have become aware of it as kindred, dwelling in his own soul. Rather, having studied it as something alien in alien souls, over a long time, he has become thoroughly aware of how it is naturally bad, having made use of knowledge, not his own personal experience."
"Well," he said, "a judge who's like that seems to be most noble."
"And good, too," I said, "which is what you asked. The man who has a good soul is good. That clever and suspicious man, the one who has himself done many unjust things and supposes he's a master criminal and wise, looks clever, because he is on his guard, when he keeps company with his likes — taking his bearings by the patterns within
himself. But when he has contact with good men who are older, he now d looks stupid, distrustful out of season, and ignorant of a healthy disposition, because he does not possess a pattern for such a man. But
since he meets bad men more often than good ones, he seems to be rather more wise than unlearned, both himself and to others."
"That is," he said, "quite certainly true."
"Then it's not in such a man that the good and wise judge must be looked for but in the former," I said. "For badness would never know virtue and itself, while virtue in an educated nature will in time gain a knowledge of both itself and badness simultaneously. This man, in my opinion, and not the bad one, becomes wise."
"And I,'' he said, "share your opinion."
"Will you set down a law in the city providing as well for an art of medicine such as we described along with such an art of judging, which a will care for those of your citizens who have good natures in body and soul; while as for those who haven't, they'll let die the ones whose bodies are such, and the ones whose souls have bad natures and are in- curable, they themselves will kill?"
"Well," he said, "that's the way it looked best for those who undergo it and for the city."
So, Glaucon," I said, "isn't this why the rearing in music is most sovereign? Because rhythm and harmony most of all insinuate them- selves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them; and they make a man graceful if he is cor- e rectly reared, if not, the opposite. Furthermore, it is sovereign because the man properly reared on rhythm and harmony would have the sharpest sense for what's been left out and what isn't a fine product of craft or what isn't a fine product of nature. And, due to his having the right kind of dislikes, he would praise the fine things; and, taking pleasure in them and receiving them into his soul, he would be reared a on them and become a gentleman. He would blame and hate the ugly in the right way while he's still young, before he's able to grasp reasonable speech. And when reasonable speech comes, the man who's reared in this way would take most delight in it, recognizing it on account of its being akin?"

A couple ironies occur to me, especially because of this last passage:
1. Plato proposes crafting a race of the Good, who will know the Good innately. Yet Socrates is known always for questioning, wondering, digging. What people take for granted, Socrates took apart. Yet Plato is absolutely a moral realist. These questions were not merely undermining things, trying to get at the heart of a riddle with no answer. There is an answer out there, an objective truth, but I guess Plato felt normal Greeks weren't able to grasp it and thus this elaborate social engineering program.

2. Somebody somewhere at sometime is probably going to try and get this book banned from being taught in schools or universities. If not for the state of our education system, especially in terms of the classics, they'd probably already be bitching about it now.

And that's Book III down. I figure I'll post this now. It's quite the..illuminating read in a lot of ways. I normally don't like doing these threads because I don't exactly feel I have insightful commentary on books. I mean, to the extent I have insightful commentary on anything, it's usually video games where I make choices because it's fun to explain my choices and the thinking of my character as it compares/contrasts with other perspectives. But for a book, especially one as famous and discussed as this? I can hardly contribute anything new. But I gotta start somewhere and the reason I'm getting into philosophy is the same reason it was started - to expand my mind, and that won't happen unless I talk to others. So I apologize if my thoughts seem simple and stupid.

Nikkolas · Feb 8, 2018

"I mean," I said, "that courage is a certain kind of preserving."
"Just what sort of preserving?"
"The preserving of the opinion produced by law through education about what— and what sort of thing— is terrible. And by preserving through everything I meant preserving that opinion and not casting it out in pains and pleasures and desires and fears. If you wish I'm willing to compare it to what I think it's like."
"But I do wish."
"Don't you know," I said, "that the dyers, when they want to dye
wool purple, first choose from all the colors the single nature belonging
to white things; then they prepare it beforehand and care for it with no little preparation so that it will most receive the color; and it is only e then that they dye? And if a thing is dyed in this way, it becomes color-fast, and washing either without lyes or with lyes can't take away its color. But those things that are not so dyed — whether one dyes other colors or this one without preparatory care — you know what they be- come like."
"I do know," he said, "that they're washed out and ridiculous."
"Hence," I said, "take it that we too were, to the extent of our power, doing something similar when we selected the soldiers and a educated them in music and gymnastic. Don't think we devised all that for any other purpose than that — persuaded by us — they hould receive the laws from us in the finest possible way like a dye, so that their opinion about what's terrible and about everything else would be color- fast because they had gotten the proper nature and rearing, and their dye could not be washed out by those lyes so terribly effective at scouring, pleasure — more terribly effective for this than any Chalestrean b soda^4 and alkali; and pain, fear, and desire — worse than any other lye. This kind of power and preservation, through everything, of the right and lawful opinion about what is terrible and what not, I call courage; and so I set it down, unless you say something else."
"But I don't say anything else," he said. "For, in my opinion, you regard the right opinion about these same things that comes to be without education — that found in beasts and slaves — as not at all lawfully and call it something other than courage."
"What you say," I said, "is very true."
"Well, then, I accept this as courage."
"Yes, do accept it, but as political courage," I said, "and you'd be right in accepting it. Later, if you want, we'll give it a still finer treatment. At the moment we weren't looking for it, but for justice. For that search, I suppose, this is sufficient."

Plato gives a pretty good description of Lawful Neutral, I think. Somebody who is unswayed by everything except the law they believe in.

Then again, I'm reminded of those people who say righteousness is something you have to find in yourself and merely "going through the motions" or following orders is not true righteousness. Same thing for courage. Plato's Socrates believes wisdom and courage can be instilled in his chosen groups through his chosen methods but can it really? How long until they just devolve into sterility and mediocrity where the wise are wise according to set laws and the brave are only brave because of set training? I just don't see any room for dynamism in this formula.

I don't know if this is utilitarianism, the actual philosophy of which didn't come around until over two millennia after Plato, but having always had utilitarian sympathies where I viewed people as cogs int eh machine, I think I begin to see the flaws in that viewpoint when that viewpoint is "blown up" in my face.

Or maybe I just want people to like me and so I'm like "hey, look how wiser and more moral I have become. To me, this has always been my primary, personal ethical struggle. What is my "genuine goodness" and what is just my personal failings or human weaknesses? I don't think Plato really considered the resilient psychology of human beings but I guess he didn't even have Freud there to help him so.... I'm sure he did the best he could and he is still describing things I see today so he wasn't too off the mark.

I wonder if Plato's theory of the tripartite soul influenced Freudo's Ego, Supergo and Id?

"After that, I suppose injustice must be considered."
"Plainly."
"Mustn't it, in its turn, be a certain faction among those three—a meddling, interference, and rebellion of a part of the soul against the whole? The purpose of the rebellious part is to rule in the soul although this is not proper, since by nature it is fit to be a slave to that which belongs to the ruling class. Something of this sort I suppose we'll say, and that the confusion and wandering of these parts are injustice licentiousness, cowardice, lack of learning, and, in sum, vice entire."
"Certainly," he said, "that is what they are."
"Then," I said, "as for performing unjust actions and being unjust and, again, doing just things, isn't what all of them are by now clearly manifest, if injustice and justice are also manifest?"
"How so?"
"Because," I said, "they don't differ from the healthy and the sick; what these are in a body, they are in a soul."
"In what way?" he said.
"Surely healthy things produce health and sick ones sickness."
"Yes."
"Doesn't doing just things also produce justice and unjust ones injustice?"
"Necessarily."
"To produce health is to establish the parts of the body in a relation of mastering, and being mastered by, one another that is according to nature, while to produce sickness is to establish a relation of ruling, and being ruled by, one another that is contrary to nature."
"It IS."
"Then, in its turn," I said, "isn't to produce justice to establish the parts of the soul in a relation of mastering, and being mastered by, one another that is according to nature, while to produce injustice is to establish a relation of ruling, and being ruled by, one another that is contrary to nature?"
"Entirely so," he said.
"Virtue, then, as it seems, would be a certain health, beauty and e good condition of a soul, and vice a sickness, ugliness and weakness."

I have not read Rousseau yet but I am interested in his theory, wrong as I think it is, that humanity is naturally good. That seems to me to be, roughly, Plato's idea too. Maybe a totally different way from Rousseau but when you compare justice to health and injustice to sickness, how else can I view it? Health is the "default" for most people while sickness is the unnatural part.

This reminded me of something more modern and less esoteric, though. I'm thinking of Jurassic Park, the novel, and Chaos/Complexity Theory. No idea how legit that actually is but one of Malcolm's speeches goes like "we have convinced ourselves that order is the default and things like car crashes are just aberrations. But those "accidents" are baked into the fabric of existence. They will happen."

Justice and Health are no more "natural" than injustice or sickness. It's all part of the same system that is Life. I can't vouch for the math and scientific logic of the arguments in the novel but at least according to my tiny little brain and my tiny little view of the world, that's how I see things and understood what Malcolm was saying.

(Malcolm would probably really hate Plato as Plato is being very "scientific" in his attempts to engineer a society and make everything predictable. Then the Greeks become dinosaurs and escape. Life finds a way.)

"As you say," he said, "it's true that the one class is quite dominated in virtually everything, so to speak, by the other. However, many women are better than many men in many things. But, as a whole, it is as you say."
"Therefore, my friend, there is no practice of a city's governors which belongs to woman because she's woman, or to man because he's man; but the natures are scattered alike among both animals; and woman participates according to nature in all practices, and man in all, but in all of them woman is weaker than man."
"Certainly,"
"So, shall we assign all of them to men and none to women?"
"How could we?"
"For I suppose there is, as we shall assert, one woman apt at medicine and another not, one woman apt at music and another un-musical by nature."
"Of course."
"And isn't there then also one apt at gymnastic and at war, and another unwarlike and no lover of gymnastic?"
"I suppose so."
"And what about this? Is there a lover of wisdom and a hater of wisdom? And one who is spirited and another without spirit?"
"Yes, there are these too."
"There is, therefore, one woman fit for guarding and another not. Or wasn't it a nature of this sort we also selected for the men fit for guarding?"
"Certainly, that was it."
"Men and women, therefore, also have the same nature with respect to guarding a city, except insofar as the one is weaker and the other stronger."
"It looks like it."
"Such women, therefore, must also be chosen to live and guard with such men, since they are competent and akin to the men in their nature."
"Certainly."
"And mustn't the same practices be assigned to the same natures?"
"The same."
"Then we have come around full circle to where we were before and agree that it's not against nature to assign music and gymnastic to the women guardians."

Ya know, Plato's dream totalitarian state is still preferable to, and more progressive than, Ancient Athens. Again I must draw on my pop culture knowledge and point to my love of The Qunari in Dragon Age as a superior system at least when compared to the feudal awfulness in the rest of the setting.

"Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils—nor the human race, as I believe—and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day."

This, I have no real problem with. He is thinking in terms of an enlightened despot I guess butt he idea that a ruler should have dedicated training in philosophy - that is, ethics, metaphysics, whatever - is spot-on so far as I'm concerned.

"We know it to be universally true of every seed and growth, whether vegetable or animal, that the more vigorous it is the more it falls short of its proper perfection when deprived of the food, the season, the place that suits it. For evil is more opposed to the good than to the not-good.98
"Of course."
"So it is, I take it, natural that the best nature should fare worse than the inferior under conditions of nurture unsuited to it."
"It is."
"Then," said I, "Adeimantus, shall we not similarly affirm that the best endowed souls become worse than the others under a bad education? Or do you suppose that great crimes and unmixed wickedness spring from a slight nature and not from a vigorous one corrupted by its nurture, while a weak nature will never be the cause of anything great, either for good or evil?"
"No," he said,"that is the case."
Then the nature which we assumed in the philosopher, if it receives the proper teaching, must needs grow and attain to consummate excellence, but, if it be sown and planted and grown in the wrong environment, the outcome will be quite the contrary unless some god comes to the rescue."

Great People will be Great but education determines whether that greatness is for Good or Evil. This is an interesting idea to me. Dunno if I agree with it but it's something to ponder.

I should post this now before it runs on too long. I wanted to wait until after I finished Book VI but I've written a lot in this, or rather, I've quoted a lot.

LSkullD · Mar 23, 2018

Man, it's a shame that this was discontinued.

I actually want to do a let's read on something like this...

Any textbooks on post-modernism?

Nikkolas · Mar 23, 2018

I was near the ending and had a bit more written up but I got distracted and my initial writings are gone. So I'm sorry about that.

You can try asking on Reddit's AskPhilosophy if you need any sort of info on what to read.

Nikkolas Reads Plato's Republic

Nikkolas

Nikkolas

LSkullD

Banned Forever

Nikkolas