“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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