Plato Archives - James E Hartley

Is Socrates Being Ironic in The Republic?

“Unless…the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, and political power and philosophy coincide in the same place, while the many natures now making their way to either apart from the other are by necessity excluded, there is no rest from ills for the cities my dear Glaucon, nor I think for humankind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of the sun.”

(Plato, The Republic, Bloom translation)

The Republic is a sprawling book. It starts off focused on the idea of Justice, but before long, Socrates is off leading his interlocutors on a wandering journey, crafting the perfect state. Well, not exactly perfect. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to live in Socrates’ republic. But in his mechanical way, Socrates knocks down objection after objection.

Should the philosophers be kings? Well obviously, right? You do want wise people running the state, right? And someone who loves (philo) the study of wisdom (sophos) is by definition a philosopher. So, one of the steps of a great republic is to have it ruled by philosophers. How are you going to argue with that?

The whole book is like that. Just one reasonable thing after another. But yet, there is that nagging sense that there is a mistake in there somewhere, because Plato’s Republic really does seem like it is describing a very odd place.

For a number of years, I have heard that many (well, probably most) of those who make the study of Plato a source of their income were convinced that Socrates was not being serious in The Republic, that he did not mean what he said. I have always found that argument strange—there is no place in the entire book where Socrates gives a wink and a nudge to suggest he is just kidding. He seems to be seriously advancing this argument with great determination.

I’ve asked people who are skeptical that Socrates is being serious where they got the idea. The most detailed answer I ever heard was something along the lines of “Socrates talks about using a microscope and microscopes distort.” In rereading The Republic recently, I think this might be referring to the part in Book II where Socrates talks about studying justice in the city and in the individual, but it is not at all clear how that section indicates that Socrates is not seriously advocating what he says.

But as I continued along in that recent rereading and talking about it with a former student (Izzy Baird, who always insists on getting acknowledged for being involved in an interesting discussion), an idea started small in the back of my mind and then expanded the further I went along.

In Book IV, Socrates discusses the Noble Lie. The idea is that all the lower classes, the non-philosophers, will need to be convinced that the society in which they live is the best society. So, the idea of a Noble Lie is proposed, a wonderful story which is not true but will make all those farmers believe that they really do live in a great society.

What if The Republic is a Noble Lie of this sort? Then the people who argue that Socrates is being ironic are right! I think it is a coherent argument to say that Socrates knew the Republic would fail, he expected philosophers would discover the errors, but there is some virtue in telling the non-philosophers that this would be the ideal state.

This would explain why Socrates keeps steering the conversation into even more outrageous places. There is no hint in the book that he is not being serious because that very much is part of the game. Naked coed gymnastics? Sure, what’s the problem with that? What makes this way of thinking about the book really interesting to me is how it changes the way the reader has to respond to the book. If Socrates really believed this was the best state, it is easy to dismiss the argument because it is just crazy. But if he didn’t believe it is the best state, then the challenge is to come up with the counterargument that you think Socrates could not easily handle by just becoming more outrageous and yet staying perfectly logical. That is a lot harder to do—which means you have to think even more about why it is objectionable.

What fascinates me about this way of reading The Republic is that this is a parlor trick I pull all the time in teaching. All. The. Time. Stake out an absurd position and then defend it against all the inevitable counter-arguments. It really makes students think hard. They know what I am saying is absurd. But why is it absurd?

Take the philosopher-king idea. Part of what intrigues me about the idea is Socrates’ contrast between true philosophers and those who are not philosophers but claim the title of philosopher. Socrates would surely be disgusted with modern philosophy departments. If that is right, then what he means by a philosopher king is most surely not modern doctors of philosophy becoming rulers.

Which then raises the question, is it possible for anyone to be the type of philosopher Socrates asserts are the good rulers? If nobody could ever be that type of philosopher, then there is no possible philosopher-king. That fits with the idea I now cannot evade that the point of this exercise is not describing a real blueprint for a society. We all fail to be pure philosophers.

Now that I am convinced Socrates is using this as a thought experiment rather than a blueprint, the discussion of the reluctant philosopher-king part makes way more sense. There can never be a philosopher-king because the philosopher will be thinking about things far above the mundane details of being a king. That is why philosophers have to be compelled to be kings, which means they can’t really be philosophers anymore. You can’t spend all day studying Truth, which is by definition the highest calling of a philosopher, and spend all day ruling the city. So, the philosopher-king must only get a small bit of wisdom before being hauled back to city management. It can’t work. As Glaucon notes, it is an injustice to make a philosopher abandon philosophy—and Socrates does not disagree that this is not just to the philosopher. Socrates says that the injustice to the philosopher is necessary to have justice for the city, but then the city is not just for one of the classes in the city. This is so incredibly interesting—how had I never noticed this before? Socrates is very clever at laying traps for the unwary. It is an even better book than I thought.

On a different note, like everyone, I really enjoy The Cave ™. But, what I most like about it is that it perfectly agrees with Christian notions of Revelation. Man is trapped in his sin and cannot see the light. Someone comes into the cave saying that there is more to this world than what can be seen, but the people in the cave reject it. So, they have to be led into the light, and only then they can understand.

What intrigues me most about this is figuring out the causality. Does this sort of description of Christian theology resemble Plato’s cave because a) Plato was inspired or b) the merger of Athens and Jerusalem is the reason I think about revelation in this way. I think it is a), but I don’t know how to be sure because I cannot imagine a non-Platonic Christian theology to see how it would be different. Obviously, since God is sovereign, then it is not accidental that Christianity is born into the Greco-Roman world, so the counterfactual is not really relevant…but it still intrigues me a lot.

And that is why The Republic is worth reading and rereading. As anyone who has read the whole thing will tell you, it is a slog to get through it. But, scattered throughout are things that will make you pause and think deeply. Every time you read it, you’ll pause at different points. You’ll learn a lot, not from accepting the argument in the book, but rather from trying to figure out why the argument in the book is wrong. Sometimes Great Books are Great because they are so very wrong.

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A Sweet and Virtuous Soul

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

That is “Virtue” by George Herbert. The idea is intriguing. Of all the sweet things (day, rose, spring, soul), only the virtuous soul does not die. Virtue outlives the days and season. If you could give a gift to someone you love, it is far better to bequeath virtue than a rose.

Ah, but can you give virtue to another? Is virtue something which can be taught? Enter Socrates.

Meno by Plato is an extended attempt to answer that very question. Just like every time Socrates joins a conversation, the whole matter ends up being tied in more knots than you imagined could have existed. Indeed, this particular dialogue has a marvelous interaction (Jowett translation):

Meno O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits’ end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.
Socrates You are a rogue, Meno, and had all but caught me.
Meno What do you mean, Socrates?
Socrates I can tell why you made a simile about me.
Meno Why?
Socrates In order that I might make another simile about you. For I know that all pretty young gentlemen like to have pretty similes made about them—as well they may—but I shall not return the compliment. As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry.

I truly love that shtick when Socrates insists he is not confusing others, but rather that he is the one being confused. (I have been known to use that line on occasion in assorted classes and reading groups. The classics never go out of style.)

But, let’s see if we can clear up the confusion. Can virtue be taught? First off, we have to figure out what virtue is, which leads Meno into all sorts of trouble. We all know about virtue and we would have no trouble rattling off a list of virtues, but what is the definition of virtue itself? What is virtue in the abstract, not in the particular example, but the essence of virtue? What is it that quality which unites honesty and faithfulness and temperance and courage and so on? Good luck.

So, let’s take the easier question. Assuming we all know virtue when we see it, can we teach it? First, we have to find out if virtue is a form of knowledge. That is also a bit tricky. Surely virtue is something we can know, and is thus a form of knowledge. Then, if virtue is a form of knowledge, it can be taught. Thus, if virtue cannot be taught, it must not be a form of knowledge. Can virtue be taught? It is easy enough to teach someone about virtue. But, is teaching someone about honesty the same thing as teaching someone to be honest? Obviously not. Which is virtue? Knowing about honesty or being honest?

The challenge is thus to teach someone to be virtuous, not to know about virtue. Can that be done? How? Surely we can agree that to teach virtue, one must be virtuous. To teach knowledge, one must have the knowledge to be taught, so to teach virtue, doesn’t it follow that someone must have the virtue to be taught? Thus, we need to find virtuous people to see how virtue is taught. We suddenly run into another problem: virtuous people would surely want to teach others to be virtuous. In particular, virtuous people would want their own children to be virtuous, and thus would teach their children to be virtuous. But the children of virtuous people are not always virtuous. Does that mean virtue cannot be taught?

If virtue cannot be taught, how then do we learn to be virtuous? How do we even learn what constitutes virtue? Socrates’ conclusion? “To sum up our enquiry—the result seems to be, if we are at all right in our view, that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous.”

Now that is a rather fascinating conclusion. It is exactly the argument Paul makes in his letter to the Romans. Man rebels against God, and is hopelessly mired in an unvirtuous state.

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! (ESV)

Man’s nature cannot teach him virtue. Virtue cannot be acquired through any of his own efforts. Which causes Paul to exclaim: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” The answer: “To sum up our enquiry—the result seems to be, if we are at all right in our view, that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous.” Or as Paul actually put it: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Athens and Jerusalem once again point at the same conclusion.

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Becoming a Link in a Chain

You will never write anything that is of even remotely the same caliber as what Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens wrote. You just are not that good.

Is that an insult?

I also will never write even a single paragraph which could bear comparison to anything in Shakespeare. Is your instinct to tell me I shouldn’t think that about myself?

One of the strange byproducts of all of us being raised and told we can be whatever we want to be is that we get a warped idea of greatness. Pick a random kid you know and ask yourself, is it really true that if for this kid to be greater than Shakespeare, all that is necessary is the desire to be so? It is true that the kid could be a writer; but is it also then true that the kid could become a great writer, a writer of prose so divine that it makes you weep with joy to read it?

Enter Plato’s Ion. The dialogue (rather short) is between Socrates (surprise!) and Ion, a professional rhapsode. Now that is a career which has died out. A rhapsode was a person in ancient Greece who recited the Greats, particularly Homer. (By the way, when we tell kids they can be whatever they want, does that mean they can become professional rhapsodes? Can you make a career doing dramatic recitations of Homer?)

Ion is, at least in his own telling, the greatest interpreter of Homer alive, delivering prize-winning recitations of The Odyssey and The Iliad. People laugh at the funny parts and weep at the sad parts and Ion merrily collects his payment. The question which puzzles Ion is why he is so amazing when it comes to Homer, but bored to death whenever anyone is discussing, say, Hesiod. Why doesn’t the ability to deliver the best possible interpretation of Homer translate into the ability to do the same thing with Hesiod?

Socrates explains:

The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. (Jowett translation)

The image there is perfect. Homer composed his immortal works not through the art of crafting great tales but because he was inspired from on high by the Muses. You can’t teach someone to write something as great as The Odyssey; such a work comes to the poet from the outside, from the gods or God. Then along comes Ion. Ion also cannot be taught to do what he does so very well. Instead, like a link in a chain, he attaches himself to Homer and the magnetic power emanating from the Muses, flows through Homer into Ion and Ion exhibits the magnificence of the Divine Inspiration. Homer is merely an interpreter of the divine muse. Ion is an interpreter of the interpreter. And, we, lower links on the chain are attracted to the divine message through the magnetic force flowing through Homer to Ion to Socrates to Plato to us.

You will never be as great as Homer. But you could be as great as Ion. Is that an insult?

Imagine for a moment an educational system which worked like that. Instead of a rhetoric of trying to turn every kid into a miniature Homer or Shakespeare or Newton, we instead say “None of you are that good. But you can be an excellent link in a chain passing along the excitement of a Homer or Shakespeare or Newton.”

The first objection is surely that we may be crushing the next Shakespeare. But, can the next Shakespeare be crushed that way? If Genius comes from a communication with the Divine Muses, then the idea that the educational system can either create or destroy Genius is pure hubris. No matter how well I teach, I cannot create the next Eliot, nor would my failures stop Eliot from becoming Eliot.

Instead of telling every student they can be great and that the options in life are greatness or failure, why not say this: “You should aspire to be great and you should know you will fail. But, you can become a link in the chain of greatness; by considering what makes Shakespeare a greater writer than you, you can learn to pass along the Divine Joy of Shakespeare to others.” Ion is a great rhapsode not because he composed verses equivalent to those of Homer, but because he did not do that. Instead, he discovered the inspiration flowing through Homer and passed that along to others. To do this, he had to immerse himself in Homer and because he did that, others were able to see through him the Beauty from on high which an inspired Homer passed along in verse.

We have lost this idea that being a part of a chain is a High Calling. We tell students to be great and when the fail, they become the equivalent of middle management, soulless drones moving paper around. Ask yourself this: who is the divinely inspired artist that everyone who meets you learns to see the amazing insights that artist provided? Jane Austen needs her own Ions, and truth be told, Austen’s Ions are everywhere and you cannot meet one without thinking you really should go reread Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. But where are the Ions for Plato? Dickens? Newton? Euclid? Locke? Augustine? Dante?

Imagine a world in which everyone you knew was taught in school to find a link in a chain attached to a Divine Muse, to find one of the many Greatest of the Greats, and then to attach to that chain and pass along the magnetic force flowing through that artist. Imagine if we celebrated the idea of those who become the links in the chain, those who inspired us to learn just a bit more about plants or Virgil.

The world is an amazing place, full of beauty and insight. We settle all too often for an education which lacks all trace of that divine inspiration. Which is the better high school Physics class: The one in which a bored teacher marches through a boring textbook, but at least covers all the parts, or the one in which the teacher inspired by Galileo’s The Divine Messenger spends the whole year passing along the excitement of planetary movements, drawing students in by the sheer magnetism passing through Galileo to their teacher to them? The latter class covers far less material, but conveys the beauty of physics. The former class is the one taught in just about every school out there.

A year ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who is a teacher in high school who was having a difficult time getting his class of high school seniors to share his enthusiasm for The Brothers Karamazov. I had no solution at that time for the problem, but I think Ion points out why my imagination failed. I struggled with trying to figure out how to get high schoolers excited by Dostoevsky by imagining what would have happened if I had been assigned that book by my high school teachers. I would have hated it; they would have sucked the life out of the book.

But, now I realize the problem is not the book, but the whole way my high school classes were conducted. Now I imagine having this teacher who wrote me and who loves the book spending a semester doing nothing but sharing his love of the book. Every day is a fresh excitement as he reads out passages and captures the tension of the book. I imagine being asked to imagine what it would be like to have Alyosha or Ivan or Dmitri as a brother or to live in that monastery or to actually meet Father Ferapont. Imagine if every day in class was just swimming in that world with a teacher who was excited to show us the marvels. I think I would have loved this book in that high school class.

So is it possible that our attempts to cover everything in high school have crushed the ability to see the magnetism flowing from on high? What if the goal of school was to have every student find some link to the Muses and simply attach themselves to that link and let the magnetism flow through. What if instead of telling everyone that they can be the next Shakespeare or Newton, we just told them to find a Shakespeare or Newton and enjoy?

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Do You Have a Soul?

“O my friends, he said, if the soul is really immortal, what care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time which is called life, but of eternity! And the danger of neglecting her from this point of view does indeed appear to be awful.”

That is Socrates talking in Phaedo, Plato’s account of the last conversation of Socrates’ life. If the soul is immortal, then surely Socrates is right. Indeed, if the soul is immortal, it is hard to imagine how that could be wrong.

In the phrase “if the soul is immortal,” one might think that it is the “if” which is the point of discussion. But, as it turns out, the “if” isn’t the problem at all. The problem these days is the word “soul.”

We talked about this book in one of my reading groups (The Grecian Urn Seminar). The room was sharply divided on whether there is such a thing as a soul. Socrates spends a lot of time in the dialogue proving that your soul existed before you were born and will continue to exist after you are dead. But, in order to figure out the life-span of the soul, it is obviously first necessary to believe in the existence of the thing itself.

The soul is not much in fashion in intellectual circles these days. What is the soul?

To hear the chatter in the academic world, the soul is dead. With the extraordinary advances in brain imaging, people have become quite confident that our brains are making decisions before we are even conscious that these decisions are being made. There is incredible confidence that the day is not far off when we will have cracked the code and we will be able to predict what you will think by watching your brain at work. Note: that is not “predict what you will do,” but “predict what you will think.” Free will has died. Your thoughts are just neuro-physical-chemical reactions in the lump of cells we call your brain.

Having shown that there is no free will, that you are just a lump of flesh falsely thinking it is making decisions, there is no need for and no room for the soul anymore. Once we can observe your thoughts as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen, what is left for the soul to do?

Ah, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The strange thing about the soul which has been destroyed by modern research is that it bears almost zero resemblance to the soul as discussed by Paul or Augustine or Aquinas or…well, by anyone who ever took the soul seriously. Nobody who ever believed the soul was real and important would be the least bit troubled by all that research on the brain.

Now I understand that modern scientists and philosophers are all far too cool and hip to actually go read a theology book and take the argument seriously and think about it for five minutes before they rush out to declare the soul is done and gone. But, surely all the cool kids could at least read Plato. Right?

And, further, is not one part of us body, and the rest of us soul?
To be sure.
And to which class may we say that the body is more alike and akin?
Clearly to the seen: no one can doubt that.
And is the soul seen or not seen?
Not by man, Socrates.
And by “seen” and “not seen” is meant by us that which is or is not visible to the eye of man?
Yes, to the eye of man.
And what do we say of the soul? is that seen or not seen?
Not seen.
Unseen then?
Yes.
Then the soul is more like to the unseen, and the body to the seen?
That is most certain, Socrates.
And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard when under their influence?
Very true.
But when returning into herself she reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom?
That is well and truly said, Socrates, he replied.

The soul is by definition the part of man which is unseen. By definition. So, if someone wants to come along as talk about all the things we can now see, that discussion is by definition not about the soul at all.

To repeat what should have been obvious: by definition, the existence of the soul cannot be disproven by any physical means.

The mistake being made here is, to be honest, a bit shocking. Consider the argument: “we cannot prove the existence of the soul, therefore the soul does not exist.” Obviously faulty logic. How about “I cannot reason out why the soul needs to exist, therefore the soul doesn’t exist”? Or, “I cannot provide a precise definition of the soul, therefore there is no such thing”? Or…well, you get the idea. These are all just variations on a theme.

Imagine we define the soul as the unseen and unseeable part of a human, the divine spark in the image of God, that part of a human which longs for God or Heaven or immortality or truth. The soul is, in other words, the essence of the person, the immortal part of the person, the only part of the person that really makes a person a person instead of merely a hunk of decaying flesh. Such a soul would not even be fully describable in human language; it is something that transcends the physical realm that we can sense.

Now, defining the soul that way does not prove that it exists. But, if that is what a soul is, then it cannot be proven to exist. It would only be discoverable by faith.

And recall, the argument “If something can only be discoverable by faith, then it does not exist” is not a reasonable or logical argument.

Incredibly, Socrates provided a description of all those in the modern age convinced that they have proven the soul does not exist:

the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy

That passage is pretty funny when you think about it. Feel free to use it the next time someone tells you that all truth exists only in a bodily form in the realm of things we can observe.

How to be a Good Friend

What is Friendship? That is one of those questions which I instinctively answer, “It’s obvious,” but whenever I read something about the matter, I think the essay I just read misses the point.

Consider Plato’s Lysis, his dialogue on Friendship.

Not a very good work if one evaluates a work of philosophy on the criterion of providing an answer which is even worth considering. Nothing here on that front. A decent work if one uses the criterion of whether it has the possibility of provoking thought on an interesting subject, but the work is strained by the absurdity of the way Socrates spends far too much time asking if the fact that Like should be friends with Unlike and not Like, means that Good cannot be friends with Good. But since Good cannot be friends with Not Good, then how can friendship exist?

Such is the sort of argument that gives philosophy a bad name. It gets worse when he proceeds to define the nature of Friendship by asking whether the Body is Friend to Health and then works out the implications for that Friendship between Body and Health on Friendship between two humans.

So (news flash) Plato fails to give an answer here. But Montaigne’s essay on Friendship is not much better, arguing as it does that you can only have one Friend and that it obviously can’t be someone of the opposite sex.

Bacon does better by limiting his essay to the benefits of friendship, but leaves the question of a definition alone.

Emerson—uh, when did Emerson ever define anything?

Aristotle? By the time he is done dissecting Friendship, I have learned a lot, but it looks so lifeless on the lab bench.

Cicero does a decent job in his essay on the subject, but like all Cicero, it leaves me wanting a bit more.

Why is Friendship so hard to Define? As I think about it, I stumble on a related problem—is Friendship the same as Love? Is love necessary and sufficient for friendship? Or are they different? Can you have a friend you do not Love? Odd idea. Can you love someone who is not your friend? Well, Christ does say “Love Your Enemies,” but does that make them your friends?

And then there are all those types of friendships; my wife is my friend—my best friend, no less—but I have other friends too. Are these different classes or different degrees of friendship?

This troubles me. It should be easier than this.

And, it leads to the more practical concerns. If Friendship is a Good—and I think it is self-evident that Friendship is a Good—then it seems like we have a moral obligation to be perfect in our Friendships.

So, imagine you resolved to be the best Friend you could be to everyone who is a friend of yours. The best possible friend. What would you do? Is such a thing even possible? As soon as I start puzzling over how to be the best possible friend to everyone I consider a friend, I realize that my immediate thoughts turn toward things involving Time, which as much as I might like it to be otherwise, does come in fixed quantities.

If I wanted to be the best friend possible for my wife (as noted above, my best friend), then how can I also spend the appropriate amount of time being the best possible friend to all my other friends? Is it enough to be there when they call? Or does be the best possible Friend involve more proactivity?

The longer I think about this, the more I realize I have significant failings as a Friend. Maybe this is why Montaigne wrote his silly essay—if I define Friendship in such a way that I can only have one friend, then my problem is solved.

But, then what about all my other friends? They aren’t just acquaintances after all. They are my Friends. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, I’m just not a very good friend. I’m not being maudlin or anything here—and I am certainly not fishing for “Oh, you aren’t so bad” comments; just as a philosophical matter, I am not sure a) what defines friendship or b) how to be a perfect friend, and thus it is hard to see how I could be doing a very good job at this.

Another way of putting it, I am not sure how anyone else could be doing a good job at this either—does anyone think they are the Perfect Friend?

Now my inability to conceive of the existence of a Perfect Friend (Well, OK except a Friend who is Fully God…but that’s cheating), does not excuse my failings as a Friend. After all, I cannot imagine a sinless life, yet I should still aspire to perfection in all things. That would seem to include perfection in friendship. I’m just not sure how to go about this. How do I stop being such a bad friend?

Leadership in The Republic

As a manual on leadership, Plato’s The Republic is a very useful thought experiment.

But, it is a useful guide to leadership?

First off, The Republic a mammothly sprawling book. It is a conversation which wanders all over the place, constantly circling back to the general theme.

But even there, it isn’t entirely clear what the general theme actually is. Justice? Good Government? Education? Moral Character?

In previous readings, I had read the book as an argument about a Good Society. This would put the book in the same category as Locke’s Second Treatise or Hobbes Leviathan or Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.

So, it was rather interesting to read it this time, thinking about it as a manual on leadership. (This was one of the texts in my course “Leadership and the Liberal Arts.”)

Part of the definition of a Great Book is that you can reread it and learn something new every time. With Plato’s Republic, such a thing is easy. Just pick a new central organizing principle and embark on a journey.

It is a fun book. This is truly one of those books where you just go along for the ride and see where you end up.

About halfway though I started wondering how well the whole thing would work as a stage play. A curious production, but I suspect, if acted well (which would not be easy), it could be great. The acting would be a problem though. It wouldn’t be easy to convey the sense that this is just a rambling conversation. The temptation to make it more directed or philosophical-seeming would be quite large.

What do we learn about leadership in The Republic?

Well, first, Socrates is, as always, in pursuit of Leadership, with a capital L. He wants to discover the Truth (capital T) about Leadership, the Form of Leadership of which all earthly examples are merely pale reflections.

This is, after all, where Plato’s Cave originates. You are all in a cave staring at shadows, and I have gone forth into the light and have come back to tell you all (I shall tell you all) about Leadership, the real thing, not the shadow of the real thing.

You want to know the Truth? To be a Leader, you obviously must be a philosopher, a true lover of wisdom, someone who pursues knowledge and wisdom to the exclusion of all else. The Leader is the one who understands the Truth.

You want Justice? You need a leader who understands Justice, True Justice, not the pale imitation which normal people call justice, but the Form of Justice.

You want, whether you know it or not, The Philosopher King.

There are two immediate implications of Plato’s argument (or should that be Socrates’ argument?—it is never easy to tell) which are rather interesting:

1. There are not different types of leadership. There is only good leadership and bad leadership; good leadership is that which comes closest to the Platonic Ideal of Leadership.

2. True Leaders will undoubtedly fail in a real society because it would take a True Leader to recognize the importance of True Leadership. The masses—all the farmers and soldiers, the people obsessed with honor and material gain—will have no ability to appreciate or even understand the best leaders. All those masses are still stuck in their caves, and they cannot comprehend the Beauty and Perfection of Leadership as it truly is.

Those two points are related. We think there are different types of leaders because we cannot recognize True Leaders.

And so, the best Leaders, those who would be closest to the Platonic Ideal, end up not being Leaders in the world in which we live.

Imagine the Platonic Ideal Leader coming to earth and walking among us. That Leader does not lead because nobody follows. So, is the perfect Leader still a leader if nobody follows?

Is the ability to attract followers a part of the Platonic Ideal of Leadership? Why not?

In some ways it is hard to take the idea of the Philosopher King seriously because, quite frankly, people with a Doctorate in Philosophy are not great material for leadership. (Recall William F Buckley’s quip that he would rather be ruled by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.)

But, Socrates would have an easy time noting that our contemporaries with Ph.D.s (doctorates in philosophy) are not generally lovers of wisdom. They are the sham philosophers, the charlatans, who masquerade as knowledgeable so that they can get paid to do very little in a tenured sinecure.

So, set aside the charlatans. Imagine the true philosopher, the person truly committed to gaining wisdom and knowledge. Would you want that person as the leader of your society or organization?

The short answer is “No.”

But why not? I suspect it is because when we think about leadership, we mean more than simply knowing where all the parts should go. We also imagine a mechanical or practical skill—the ability to get things done—and it is not at all obvious that knowing what would be best thing to do is the same thing as accomplishing the best things.

In Plato’s Republic, a society which could never actually arise on Earth, it makes sense to have the Philosophers as Kings.

But, here on Planet Earth? It’s not enough to have seen the light. You also need to have the ability to inspire the rest of us to want to leave the cave and the ability to lead the expedition.