Plato belonged to the elite of Athenian society and was active as a philosopher in the first half of the fourth century BC. He is arguably the most important philosopher in the history of Western philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead famously said, ‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato’. There is a wealth of scholarly literature on Plato and his influence in the history of Western philosophy. The Republic has generated its own cottage industry of academic publications which demonstrate its continued relevance in contemporary philosophy. Plato’s thought has also been the subject of several academic studies. This particular essay will consider aspects of Plato’s epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy as they unfold in the narrative of the Republic.
Plato’s Republic is arguably his most famous and influential dialogue. It is a complex inquiry into the nature of justice as a virtue. In book one, Socrates argues against Thrasymachus that injustice is never more profitable than justice - this sets the scene for the rest of the dialogue. In book two, Glaucon takes up the analogy of a magic ring that turns the wearer invisible. He argues that, given the opportunity, anyone would use this ring to act unjustly without suffering any repercussions for their actions. Socrates comes to the defence of justice by arguing that it is easier to see what justice looks like by considering the example of an ideal city - something bigger and more obvious than an individual. Socrates turns to the political to understand the nature of justice more clearly. He distinguishes workers and craftsmen from guardians and auxiliaries (the soldiers). Soldiers are to receive a comprehensive education but one that heavily censors poetry. Tales that the gods cause bad things to happen as the poets sometimes suggest are to be censored. The gods are to be seen as wholly good and benevolent and never to be portrayed in a negative light.
In book three, Socrates continues with his programme of censorship - deleting passages from the poets as he sees fit for the benefit of the guardians’ education. This is followed by a discussion concerning the value of imitation in poetry. Having dealt with what must be said in stories, Plato now considers how it must be said. Plato favours an austere and minimalist style with little attention to imitation. Socrates also considers the physical health of the guardians - especially the value of exercise and medicine. The best guardians are to be chosen as rulers; typically, this will be older men and women with the virtue of wisdom. Socrates suggests a myth be told as part of his indoctrination programme. They will tell the people that god mixed gold into those equipped to rule, silver into the auxiliaries who defend the city and make war, and iron or bronze into the workers and craftsmen. He allows for social mobility in this system by suggesting that some children born to bronze parents may have silver or gold mixed into their natures, whereas some born to gold parents may be of a silver or bronze nature. The guardians and auxiliaries are to live austere lives owning no private property and living communally.
In book four, Socrates argues that the four cardinal virtues are present in the city - wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. The particular virtue Socrates is considering (justice) is said to consist in doing one’s own work - soldiers will be soldiers and farmers will be farmers. This is justice at the communal level, but it remains to be discovered at the level of the individual. A city is just when the three natural classes each do their own work. Similarly, a person is thought to be wise when the respective parts of his soul achieve the right balance. The city is a projection of the individual and the constitution of his soul. Socrates distinguishes three parts of the soul - the rational, the appetitive, and the spirited - comparable to the respective social classes. The individual soul is said to be just when each of the three parts of the soul is doing its own work and achieving balance in the same way that the city as a whole achieves its particular balance. Plato gives precedence to the rational part of the soul which is said to rule over the appetitive and the spirited in much the same way that guardians rule over the auxiliaries and workers in the city at large.
In book five, Socrates breaks off the discussion about various types of constitution to inquire into what happens with wives and children in his ideal city. His listeners desire to know what the common possession of wives and children will amount to for the guardians and how such children will be educated. Socrates argues that women are to be completely equal with men in the roles they undertake in society - learning alongside of men, training with them in the nude, and even going to war with them. Children are to be possessed in common by the guardians so that no parent will know his or her own child and no child will know his or her parent. Plato advocates a system of eugenics to breed the best children much like you would breed the best dogs or horses. Supremely, philosophers will rule as kings in this ideal society:
Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide … cities will have no rest from evils … nor, I think, will the human race.
Political power is to be concentrated in the hands of a highly educated elite few who rule over the soldiers and workers.
In book six, Socrates discusses what the philosopher should be like in comparison with the non-philosopher. He considers the difficulty of setting up the government of his ideal society. He argues that only guardians will become philosophers and that there may only be a few of them in government. He likens the state to the command of a ship. Only the philosopher-kings are intellectually fit to captain this ship because only they are able to see the Form of the Good and thereby to act justly. Socrates compares human knowledge to that of a divided line in two unequal sections - dividing the visible from the intelligible. In the visible realm, knowledge is gained through imagination (eikasia) and belief (pistis), but in the intelligible realm knowledge is gained through understanding (noesis) and thought (dianoia). The intelligible realm is home to pure mathematics, geometry, and the Platonic Forms. It is the world of pure being in general. The Forms are universals such as the Good, the Just, the Beautiful, but also perfect forms of shapes such as triangles and circles, as well as of trees, dogs, and cats for instance. The visible realm is the world of becoming and sense experience. This is the world we experience with our senses - the world we see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.
In book seven, Plato considers the famous analogy of the cave. He imagines a story about prisoners who have been living in a cave from childhood and know nothing else. They have been fixed in the same place with bonds and fetters, unable to turn around. There is a fire raised behind them casting light and shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. Behind them there is a path stretching between them and the fire and there are people carrying all sorts of objects like puppeteers casting shadows onto the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners never see the objects themselves or the light of day. They think the shadows they see on the wall are reality. It is all they have ever known. Plato compares the condition of the prisoners to the epistemic state of humanity. Human beings are like the prisoners seeing only shadows of objects, assuming them to be the real thing. This is what it is like to live in the world of becoming, mistaking shadows for reality.
Suppose a prisoner was to be released and taken upwards out of the cave. He would gradually be able see the light of the fire, the objects people were carrying, and eventually the light of day and the world outside. Seeing the sun would be the Platonic equivalent of seeing the Form of the Good. Now suppose the prisoner was taken back down into the cave among the prisoners - they would suppose him to be a madman with all his talk of a fire, real objects, a world outside, and the light of the sun by which all things are seen. This is perhaps how the Athenians viewed the historical Socrates, a story that ultimately ended in his execution for impiety. For Plato, education is about leading a person to the Form of the Good. Plato recommends mathematics, geometry, harmonics, and astronomy as a system of education conducive to learning the Forms, all of which consider the invisible and lead to the intelligible realm. These subjects are a prelude to the subject of dialectic which leads to the Form of the Good. This preliminary education should begin in childhood, but not forced in any way; rather children should learn through play - a decisively modern idea!
In book eight, Socrates identifies five types of constitution: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. According to Plato, each system degrades into the system that follows it in the above order: aristocracy into timocracy, timocracy into oligarchy, oligarchy into democracy, and democracy into tyranny. Aristocracy is rule by a select few, ideally philosopher-kings. Timocracy is rule by those who love honour and military victory, much like the Spartan system of government. Oligarchy is a form of rule by the rich or a plutocracy. Plato is deeply suspicious of the democracy (rule by the people), probably owing to the fact that it was a democracy that executed Socrates on charges of impiety. One wonders what Plato would make of modern representative democracy. The possibility of a technocracy becomes increasingly possible in the West as highly educated politicians take the seats of government. Are we ruled by sophists or philosophers? This is a question for modern political philosophy. The democratic state of government gives way to tyranny, rule by a lone tyrant who executes those who displease him and rules by force. In book nine, Socrates continues to explore what a tyranny is like and the nature of the tyrannical man whose soul is disordered. He considers the psyche of the tyrant in relation to the tripartite division of the soul and how this constitution is most of all unhappy.
In the final book, Plato takes aim at poetry once more and imitative art to the extent of excluding them from his ideal city. In making copies of particulars, poets and painters are a third removed from the forms and hence true understanding or noesis. For example, god has an idea of a perfect bed (this is the Form of the Bed), a carpenter makes a copies of the ideal bed in his craft, but an artist merely imitates copies made by the carpenter, he does not grasp the Form itself. Plato closes the Republic by arguing for the immortality of the soul and the consequences for the just and the unjust in the afterlife. He takes an example drawn from the near-death experience of a man called Er, the son of Armenias, who describes in detail what happens to the soul after death - the unjust are punished and the just receive their reward. Plato concludes with a word about justice:
If we are persuaded by me [Socrates], we’ll believe that the soul is immortal and able to endure every evil and every good, and we’ll always hold to the upward path, practicing justice with reason in every way.
The extent to which Plato has answered Thrasymachus’ question about justice is debateable, but there is certainly much here to capture the attention of philosophers, which perhaps explains why Plato’s Republic is one of the founding documents of Western civilization.
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