Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1)

by Peter S. Adamson

Now, if you wanted to figure out the most just possible way of running a city, how would you do it? An obvious strategy would be by choosing an existing city which seems to do well and modeling your theory on that city; or by learning from the mistakes of cities that do badly. But this is not how Plato does it. In this way he is very unlike Thucydides. As a historian, Thucydides does convey ideas about how cities should be run, how wars should be prosecuted. But he does this by artfully framing actual history, for instance, by showing us the consequences of the swaggering imperialism of Athens. Aristotle, as we’ll see later in this book, characteristically takes a

middle road: he presents general observations about political structures, yet frequently refers to the ways actual Greek cities are run. In the Republic, by contrast, Plato has Socrates start with a blank slate, designing an ideal city from scratch.

Socrates’ first attempt to describe an ideal city is strikingly modest. The best city would be fairly small, a cooperative, one might almost say communitarian group of farmers, craftsmen, and traders

Socrates says that if the city is

to afford luxuries, it will need to expand, to develop a powerful military for taking and protecting more land than it strictly needs (373d–e). This is the origin of the infamous class system of Plato’s Republic, since it sets up a division of the city into two types of people, the guardian soldiers and the laborers. The guardians will rule over the craftsmen, and their rule will, as we’ll see shortly, be absolute and unquestioned.

In the course of their education, it becomes necessary to separate out this higher class into two sub-classes. There will be the “true guardians,” who actually rule the city, because of their natural gift for self-control. And there will be the helpers or “auxiliaries,” who will serve as a fearsome army for defending the city

there are the true guardians, who do the ruling; then the auxiliaries, who do the fighting; then the craftsmen, who do everything else. It’s paramount that the right citizens are placed into the right classes. To make this possible, sexual relations between the citizens are

highly regulated. People are assigned by a rigged lottery to mate with carefully selected partners (460a). The guardians have no private property but share all things in common, even children, who are taken away from their mothers at birth and raised by the ...

proposal that there should be women in the guardian class.

Socrates is adamant, though, that without such firm control over the class system and the reproductive arrangements that sustain it the city is bound to degenerate. He invents a mythic story which will be fed to the citizens of the city—the so-called “noble lie.” According to this noble lie, the citizens of the city all have an admixture of metal in their blood. The true guardians have gold in them, the auxiliaries silver, and the craftsmen bronze and iron (415a). This will persuade them to see the importance of staying within their own class, or “doing their own,” as Socrates puts it (433a–b). The justice of this perfect city consists, in fact, in the various classes’ doing what they are meant to do, with the guardians ruling, the auxiliaries fighting, and the craftsmen

obeying.

Can we really, as Socrates suggested, understand justice in the city as a larger image of justice in the soul? Socrates argues in the fourth book of the Republic that we can. He points out that, like the city, the soul must have more than one aspect. For the soul can be in harmony or tension with itself.

the soul is not

simple, but has several aspects which can struggle against one another. Socrates argues that, like the city, the soul has three aspects: reason, spirit, and appetite (437b–441c). Reason is the highest aspect, which is directed towards truth. Spirit is directed towards honor, and with this aspect of our soul we are able to feel such emotions as anger and courage. Appetite, finally, is the set of drives we possess for such things as food, drink, and sex. Justice in the soul, then, is very like justice in the city. It is for the three parts of the soul to do what they should, for the ruling part—reason in the soul and the guardians in the city—to rule, with the assistance of the spirit or auxiliaries, over the lowest part, namely appetite or the craftsmen.

Finally, if this is how justice is established in the city and the soul, what about injustice? What happens when a city or a ...

in one story we get a sequence of individual men, worse sons born to better fathers (546a–e); in another story worse political arrangements arise from better ones (547a–c). For instance, the best arrangement after the ideal city is a so-called timocracy, in which the city is dedicated to honor and victory (548c). This is basically the ideal city shorn of its true rulers, and guided solely by soldiers who long to distinguish themselves on the battlefield (547d–549a). From this arises an oligarchy, a city of the rich (550c–551c); then democracy, the city ruled by the common people

Finally, Socrates tells us that the natural next step from democracy is tyranny, which is rule by a single, vicious man

On the

soul side there are individual personality types, as we might call them, which correspond to these cities. There is the timocratic man who wants nothing but honor, the oligarchic man who wants wealth, the democratic man who wants freedom. Worst of all is the tyrannical man, whose lust for power ironically winds up enslaving him to his own desires (579b). Just as it’s natural for, say, an oligarchic city to degenerate into a democratic one, so it...

Plato agrees that democracy is attractive, despite being defective.

He wants to show how the ideal city could, at least in principle, actually come into existence. It could only happen, says Socrates, if the rulers of the city were philosophers

the allegory of the cave. Also found in this stretch of the Republic are two more well-known images, the divided line and the comparison between the sun and the Form of the Good.

we should remember that Socrates is thinking of a successful philosopher.

Socrates tells us who the philosopher is by telling us what knowledge is, and how it compares to belief and ignorance. Knowledge and belief, he says, are both powers, and powers are distinguished by their objects (477d). For instance, sight is the power that concerns visible things, whereas hearing is the power that concerns audible things. So if knowledge and belief are powers, what are their objects? According to Socrates, knowledge is the power that concerns what is, whereas belief is the power that concerns both what is and what is not. Ignorance, meanwhile, only concerns itself with what is not

The most common way of understanding the passage, and one which became popular among Platonists in later antiquity, is that the objects of knowledge are a completely different level or realm of reality, the Forms.1 The Forms are separate from physical things in the world around us. These physical items are in turn the things that “are and are not,” the objects of belief.

Socrates means to say that knowledge only “is” in the sense that it is always true, whereas belief can be either true or false, and thus concerns both what is and what is not.

the ruler will have to be

the person who grasps the nature of justice.

So what exactly does the philosopher know, which qualifies him or her for political rule, the way the art of navigation qualifies the true captain to steer the ship?

Well, clearly justice itself, and apparently beauty itself too. In short, the philosopher knows about the Forms,

the Form of the Good. Knowledge of the Good will be a kind of capstone to the philosopher’s wisdom, because without knowing the nature of goodness the philosopher will not understand what is good about all the other Forms

Just as the sun makes the visible objects around us visible to sight, so the Form of the Good renders the other Forms intelligible to the soul.

a kind of super-Form which gives other Forms their goodness and intelligibility

the Good is a kind of first principle for Forms. The Form of Justice could not be what it is

without being good, and neither could the Form of Beauty. So grasping the Good will be a kind of key that unlocks for us the understanding of all the Forms. It seems to stand as the highest principle in a kind of hierarchy, presiding over the Forms. The physical things around us in the visible world partake of these Forms, and thus can be thought of as images of the Forms. Then, at the very bottom of the scale of reality, there are images of these images—for instance, shadows or reflections of physical things.

The lowest segment represents those mere images of physical objects, the shadows and reflections (510a). The next represents the physical objects themselves—the things that non-philosophers take to be really real, like giraffes, rocks, and the Eiffel Tower. These two segments together symbolize the whole visible realm. The second, longer part of the line represents what we can know rather than what we can see (510b). It likewise is divided into two segments. Here we are expecting Socrates to say the two higher segments are supposed to stand for the Forms and then,

at the very top, the Form of the Good. This isn’t quite what he says, though. Instead, he says that the first segment represents the use of hypotheses. Hypothesis could be confirmed only on the basis of some other, more fundamental principle. Then the final, longest segment of the line represents the grasp of those fundamental principles, the truths on which all other truths are founded

the basic principle will not be something we simply postulate, like an axiom in mathematics. It will be something certainly and unshakably

true. This, then, is the role played by the Form of the Good. An object of completely certain knowledge in its own right, it grounds all our knowledge and makes that

knowledge come o...

the allegory of the cave is extremely concrete. We are to imagine a group of prisoners chained at the bottom of a cave. Behind and above them is a low wall, and beyond that a fire (514a–b). There are more people just behind the wall, carrying statues. Thanks to the firelight, these statues cast shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners (514b). The unfortunate prisoners can see nothing but these shadows, and hear nothing but the echoing noises made by the people walking along carrying the statues. They are radically removed from reality, because they see nothing but shadows of things that aren’t even real, namely the statues. They engage in pointless games which, in their ignorance, they take to be deathly serious—but all they are in fact doing is competing to predict and identify shadows.

Just as the philosopher grasps the Forms, using the Form of the Good as a principle, so the freed prisoner sees the real things outside the cave by the light of the sun. This explains why philosophers seem useless and otherworldly in our corrupt societies. The philosopher has no interest in the shadow-games and second-hand images of normal folk.

to what extent is it a serious proposal for political reform, and to what extent just a kind of abstract consideration of the nature of justice that could never be put into practice?

But there’s another problem: why would the true philosophers agree to rule? It’s clear they would have no interest in descending back into the darkness of the cave.

But they are not selfish, and they must see that the demand of justice is for them to take command of the city if at all possible

it is precisely those who would prefer not to rule who must be made to do so.

Two misconceptions frequently arise here. The first is that the cave allegory commits Plato to some kind of radical separation between our world and the world of Forms.

But if the shadowy cave world is separate from the sunny world outside, it isn’t radically separate.

Instead, the point might be to