Should I Read the Republic or the Dialogue First

Commonwealth by Plato

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Plato's Commonwealth is an ironic novel of ideas, a satire designed to mock the pretensions of reason, and an ingenious exposure of its narrator'south unreliability, with intermittent flights of utopian lyricism that brand its critique of utopian thought all the more poignant. It is usually seen as the foundational text of political philosophy in the due west, and many subsequent approved political concepts can be found somewhere in this volume, from Hobbes's social contract to Rousseau'southward general will to Wollstonecraft's feminism to Hegel's statism, not to mention that the whole argument might be read as a reply to Nietzsche avant la lettre. But what if we can't sympathise the Republic until nosotros acquire to run across it every bit the ancestor not of any subsequently political treatise, but rather of Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels, of Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain, of Lolita and Herzog?

For one thing, Plato didn't write treatises; he wrote dialogues. A treatise takes the form of an statement that advances past the force of logic; information technology is an impersonal genre, and its author—Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza—does not phase his own personality but rather casts himself equally a aqueduct for truth. By contrast, a dialogue by its nature dramatizes its speakers as characters whose situations and particularities come to the surface and interfere with the transparency of reason. A dialogue is ready amid the plural claims of this world, no affair that its speakers may argue for the transcendent. The dialogue is the child of the drama and the ancestor of the novel.

When this dialogue begins, our narrator, Socrates, is on a day trip with Plato's brother Glaucon to the Piraeus for the festival of the huntress-goddess Bendis. He's not there to worship, simply rather "to see how they would manage the festival," a beginning-paragraph detail that strikes the dialogue's keynote of investigating how human communities are organized. Then Plato'southward other blood brother, Adeimantus, waylays Socrates along with some friends and strong-artillery him into spending the night.

Later, at the business firm of another friend, Socrates falls into a word first with an old man named Cephalus and then with a bitterly cynical Sophist named Thrasymachus about what might establish justice. Cephalus defines justice as we might expect a worldly and successful man, a proto-bourgeois who styles himself "money-maker," to define it: "speaking the truth and paying whatever debts ane has incurred." Socrates quickly dispatches this—sometimes nosotros need to lie for the benefit of our friends, for one thing, a precept that will become important later.

Then Thrasymachus, representing the Sophist position, issues a much more forceful claiming ("he coiled himself upwardly like a wild brute about to spring, and he hurled himself at us as if to tear united states to pieces"): "justice is aught other than the advantage of the stronger." That is, Thrasymachus anticipates much after critiques by Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault when he claims that whatever nosotros telephone call "justice" is merely a rationalization imposed past the most powerful members of a society on the weakest members to justify the former's rule. (For the social and political background of this confrontation of Sophist with philosopher, see my essay on I. F. Rock's Trial of Socrates.)

Socrates logically rebuts this skeptical philosophy to a patently unconvinced Thrasymachus, who sardonically replies to Socrates's clinching argument, "Permit that be your banquet, Socrates, at the feast of Bendis." From the Sophist perspective, why should he be convinced? Logic, similar a justice, is only a manner of speaking, and isn't Socrates'due south will-to-truth just another class of the urge to boss? The residue of the Commonwealth may exist read every bit a total-calibration reply to Thrasymachus's moral nihilism, as Socrates dominates a long colloquy on justice with Glaucon and Adeimantus. They decide that justice is best observed in the macrocosm of a metropolis, from which they will reason backward to the constitution of the individual soul, hence the discussion's lengthy turn to politics.

The detail and care with which Plato stages this disquisition, with the festival for the divine huntress succeeded by Socrates'due south menacing quasi-detention and Thrasymachus'due south abominable challenge, which will ring our ears throughout the work, evidence how novelistic in texture the Republic really is, at least in its opening. This more-than-hint of fiction, with its attendant conflicts and ironies, shadows every determination to which Socrates comes through the abstract force of formal logic. Even the shape of the argument itself is pleasantly bewildering. In the crystalline realm of Socrates's reasoning, the structure of the just metropolis is entailed by the structure of the just soul; only he has to describe the just city before he can form any movie of this soul. The work, as a proof, has to exist read backwards, a defamiliarization of fabula past syuzhet that would be the envy of any experimental novelist.

The full general ideas that have been extracted from this text are and so well known that I will summarize them merely briefly and in logical sequence, rather than as they're given in the dialogue. Socrates comes to believe that the soul consists of three divisions: the rational role, directed toward transcendent knowledge of immutable beingness, rather than of beings subject to change and decay; the spirited part, which has as its object honor and victory in man order; and the appetitive part, driven with lust and want toward the mere things of this globe, such as nutrient, sex, and material gain. A good person is one in whom the rational commands and directs the spirit and the appetites; otherwise, spirited-directed people will become merely domineering, while appetite-driven people will become squalid and base.

In the soul as in the city, a but society should be dominated by the most rational people, those whose master desire is for transcendent truth. The just city should exist ruled, in other words, by philosophers. The minority of philosophers—such rational people are, like all good things, rare—will preside over the city'south spirited defenders and its appetitive citizenry, whose task equally craftspeople will be the concrete and social reproduction of the polis.

Socrates allows two exceptions to his belief in hierarchy. First, it does non employ to gender: when it comes to souls, there is no meaningful difference between men and women ("at that place has been no kind of proof that women are different from men with respect to what we're talking about"), then female person philosophers besides as male person philosophers should dominion in the city. Second, Socrates besides states that philosophical aptitude is not inherited; given this, information technology will be necessary to promote to the ruling classes some of those built-in in the subordinate classes who are nevertheless fit for control. To continue society in the metropolis, however, it is necessary that all classes agree to the justice of the general 3-grade sectionalisation, so Socrates proposes the dissemination of a "noble falsehood" to mythologize and naturalize the prevailing inequality. This falsehood holds that citizens were fashioned by the gods in three classes of metallic—aureate, silver, and atomic number 26—corresponding to their placement in the social club.

The theory of the noble falsehood suggests the importance of didactics in Socrates'southward utopia. Teaching—training in physical strength, music and poetry, and mathematics—is how Socrates plans to nurture rationality in the philosophical soul and bones self-field of study and self-command in the souls of the denizens. Socrates, therefore, places restrictions on the curriculum. The music he proposes to teach, for case, should reflect "the rhythms of someone who leads an ordered and courageous life," whereas poetry that "gives a bad image of what the gods and heroes are similar," like that of Homer and Hesiod, hardly draws the pupil toward piety.

Moreover, poesy itself poses a problem for Socrates since information technology so often takes the class of imitation. In forms like the lyric, the drama, and even the dialogic parts of the epic, the poet aims to represent sure types of characters and their emotional states. These imitative genres are dangerous because, as vectors of emotional contagion, they induce the audition itself to mimic these disordered attitudes and feelings. Mimesis, anyway, is an essentially inferior action, Socrates argues, since all extant phenomena are themselves simply stake reproductions of the rational ideas accessible to the centre of reason alone. The poet, then, produces imitations of imitations, third-order copies, more than degraded fifty-fifty than base matter; for this reason, Socrates says that there is an "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy since each orients the soul in a dissimilar direction, and a worse one in verse'south case. Poetry, therefore, should in the just democracy be restricted to "hymns to the gods and eulogies of adept people," whereas,

If you acknowledge the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic verse, pleasance and pain will exist kings in your city instead of the law, or the thing that everyone has e'er believed to be best, namely, reason.

Because all earthly things change and decay, Socrates understands that his own platonic republic will fall. He theorizes, therefore, the "five constitutions"—i.east., 5 types of state or political government—and further explains how they plummet into one another in a vicious cycle. The best type of government is the 1 he has evoked, with its rational rule by philosopher-monarchs. These monarchs' spirited children, withal, volition grow weary of reason, or be incapable of it in the kickoff identify, and produce in place of the ideal republic a timocracy, consecrated to beloved of strength and honor. Their own children will utilise their strength to hoard wealth (in Socrates's ideal republic, by contrast, the philosopher-kings lived in a commune, sans personal riches or even private belongings); the timocrats' children, therefore, will establish an oligarchy. The vast population dispossessed past the oligarchs will in turn mount a revolution and install a democracy, but democracy, with its cluttered diversity and its lack of all general social standards, volition exist unable to defend itself when a tyrant seizes information technology. The tyrant, a homo of uncontrolled appetite, battens on the state until brought low by his ain paranoia and isolation as a usurper who can't trust any of his fellow citizens. Presumably, the children of tyranny will grasp the value of philosophy and begin the cycle anew.

The previous six paragraphs summarize, every bit I said, the political theory that can be isolated from this book, and it is an ambitious theory synthesizing ontology, epistemology, ideals, and aesthetics. Withal the Republic is a narrative dialogue, not a systematic sequence of axioms, and it is as a narrative dialogue—as the antecedent of the novel—that I propose to read it.

Novels are ofttimes ironic, and they convey their irony by well-planned disjunctions between what characters say and what they exercise, and by as intricate echoes among the unlike phases of the narrative. For case, aided by Thrasymachus's centre for the self-justifying hypocrisy of power that frames this whole soapbox, tin can we help but notice how Socrates has imaginatively structured an ideal club that happens to be ruled by those of his ain social class and vocation? This is not an anachronistic ascertainment, not a reading of Marx or Foucault dorsum into the text, simply just an application of one part of the text (Thrasymachus'due south early voice communication) to another (the central description of the merely city). This is what it means to read the Republic like a novel.

Some other mode to read a novel is to look for motifs, for patterns of description and incident that suggest a subtextual, implicit significance. One obtrusive pattern is Socrates's frequent apologetic recourse to "images" to substantiate what we would expect to be merely logical arguments. Merely this imagery at the micro-level is writ big in the dialogue's whole structure, for what is Socrates doing merely providing an image of the just urban center and the but soul? He even pleads, effectually the heart of the volume, that he is, similar the imitators he scorns, producing a mimetic fiction and is therefore not responsible for proving its possibility:

Do you think that someone is a worse painter if, having painted a model of what the finest and most beautiful human being would be like and having rendered every detail of his movie adequately, he could non prove that such a human could come into being?

While this argument-by-image may be the philosopher'due south concession to sublunary necessity—pure logic just isn't possible down here on earth—it is also a performative contradiction, or a subsidiary aspect of the even larger performative contradiction inherent to the mismatch between Socrates'south statement and Plato's genre. The Republic is a fiction that argues confronting fiction. Here is a character in an imitative genre—a narrative dialogue—inveighing against literary fake, and hither is a "fictionalized" philosopher forced once more and once again to use fictions to make his ideas intelligible. Nosotros take already seen his advocacy for the noble falsehood. There is also, in Book VII of the dialogue, the famous myth of the cave that allegorizes the difference between transcendent cognition of being (as when ane is outside in the dominicus) and immanent knowledge of beings (every bit when 1 is confined to a cave, watching a shadow-play on the wall).

Finally and most spectacularly is the dialogue's conclusion, where Socrates tells the myth of Er to illustrate the ultimate triumph of justice. Er was a man who died and came back to tell of the rewards and penalties of the afterlife. In this text steeped in Homer and Hesiod, alluded to on every other page, Plato hither challenges them on their ain ground with a literally epic finale that describes in item the very construction of the universe as seen past souls on their style from 1 life to another. The tale culminates when the souls of the expressionless, having enjoyed or endured their just desserts for their most recent lives and having called new lives in turn, return to our world:

[T]hey travelled to the Plain of Forgetfulness in burning, choking, terrible oestrus, for it was empty of trees and earthly vegetation. And there, abreast the River of Unheeding, whose water no vessel tin hold, they camped, for dark was coming on. All of them had to drink a certain measure out of this h2o, but those who weren't saved by reason drank more than that, and, as each of them drank, he forgot everything and went to sleep. But effectually midnight there was a clap of thunder and an convulsion, and they were suddenly carried away from there, this way and that, upwardly to their births, similar shooting stars.

Every bit Socrates argues in the Phaedrus, verse is a divine madness, and the poet is inspired in his visions and his rhythms by the very gods. The supposed "quarrel" between verse and philosophy notwithstanding, this truth holds no less for the philosopher when it comes time for him to fashion images of the just soul and the well-ordered city, to say cypher of the cosmos at big. Mere reason will non suffice.

"[Due west]hatever management the argument blows united states of america, that's where nosotros must go," Socrates tells his interlocutors at 1 point, equally if he were helpless earlier some iterative chain of logic to which he'd bound himself with a premise—i.east., the primacy of reason in the soul—that is not even articulated until the dialogue'due south 2nd half. This line hints to me at an argument Socrates tin can't make past the terms of his own logic, simply which we might discern anyhow.

Socrates conspicuously describes the defects of the soul's non-rational divisions; by contrast, reason, ordained as it is to apprehend the perfection of the idea, is presumably faultless. Still I would advise that Socrates's forgetting that divine inspiration is the source of poiesis, fifty-fifty every bit he utters poetry in praise of reason, is a flaw. If the mistake of the soul's appetitive part is an insatiable quest for more than and more physical satisfaction, and if the fault of the soul'southward spirited role is a desire for victory or conquest without limit, then might we not theorize a parallel danger in the soul's rational office? And doesn't Socrates exemplify this danger when he follows the democratic logic of his argument past all experience, including the poet's experience of divine inspiration? Socrates himself, obviously pained to lose Hesiod and Homer, of whose verse he can quote line upon line, invites my riposte:

[I]f the poetry that aims at pleasure and faux has any argument to bring forward that proves it ought to have a place in a well-governed urban center, we at to the lowest degree would exist glad to admit it, for we are well aware of the charm information technology exercises. […] Therefore, isn't it just that such poetry should return from exile when it has successfully defended itself, whether in lyric or in whatever other meter?

Reason leads him to forget what he should have known in the first identify, which is the all-time defense of poetry: neither an apprehension of the platonic nor a philosophical concept can be had or told without poiesis. Poetry, not philosophy, is therefore the true queen of the sciences, the legitimate archon of the city, and the best captain of the soul.

It is a grave mistake, then, to quote the Republic as if it represented "Plato'southward philosophy." In this foreign volume Plato does not issue any philosophy. Instead, he dramatizes philosophy's conditions of possibility, its pitfalls, perplexities, and potentials. When we call back of this book, practise we recall the syllogisms, or do we remember Thrasymachus pouncing similar a brute, the benighted citizens bound in their firelit cave, the souls of the dead flying back to life from the riverbank of Unheeding? And when nosotros recall of Socrates, do we always think his arguments, or practice we rather recollect his ironic diffidence, his cunning humility, his drive for truth? What tin can we call the writer who shows us such people as Thrasymachus and Socrates, such images as the just city and the myth of the cave, only some term akin to "poet"? Equally a consummately ironic artist in narrative and dramatic prose, Plato may well be aught less than the starting time novelist of genius.

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Source: https://johnpistelli.com/2020/07/30/plato-republic/

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