Plato’s Republic

 

 

 

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Plato employed his theory of Forms not only in metaphysical speculation about the original creation of the everyday world in which people live but also in showing the way human society should be constructed in an ideal world. One version of Plato's utopian vision is found in his most famous dialogue, the Republic . This work, whose Greek title (Politeia) would be more accurately rendered as System of Government, primarily concerns the nature of justice and the reasons that people should be just instead of unjust. Justice, Plato argues, is advantageous; it consists of subordinating the irrational to the rational in the soul. [Compare this to the greater and lesser jihad in Islam.]  By using the truly just polis as a model for understanding this notion of proper subordination in the soul, Plato presents a vision of the ideal structure for human society. Like a just soul, the just society would have its parts in proper hierarchy, parts that Plato in the Republic presents as three classes of people, as distinguished by their ability to grasp the truth of Forms. The highest class constitutes the rulers, or “guardians” [These are the golden people who are driven by intellect] as Plato calls them, who are educated in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. Next come the “auxiliaries,” [These are the silver people who are driven by spirit] whose function it is to defend the polis.  [To this end, they are trained in gymnastics, mathematics, music, etc.] The lowest class is that of the producers, [These are the iron class who are driven by appetite] who grow the food and make the objects required by the whole population. [Their education comes from practical life experience and early schooling.] Each part contributes to society by fulfilling its proper function.  [Plato theorizes that by letting each person follow their own nature and arête, the society will naturally find harmony and balance.]

 15.8. XV. Guardians in the Republic

Women as well as men qualify to be guardians because they possess the same virtues and abilities as men, except for a disparity in physical strength between the average woman and the average man. The axiom justifying the inclusion of women, namely that virtue is the same in women as in men, is perhaps a notion that Plato derived from Socrates. The inclusion of women in the ruling class of Plato's utopian city-state represented a startling departure from the actual practice of his times. Indeed, never before in Western history had anyone proposed-- even in fantasy-- that work be allocated in human society without regard to gender. [Except for Egypt, of course.  Many people, it seems, don’t consider Egypt a part of Western history or culture, though I see many of the seeds of much Western thought and innovation harkening back to ancient Egypt.]  Moreover, to minimize distraction, guardians are to have neither private property nor nuclear families. Male and female guardians are to live in houses shared in common, to eat in the same mess halls, and to exercise in the same gymnasiums. The children are to be raised as a group in a common environment by special caretakers. [In Plato’s ideal daycare, the children would be exposed exclusively to “the good” and would only be introduced to any corrupting influence once they had completed their formative years.]  Although this scheme is meant to free women guardians from child-care responsibilities and enable them to rule equally with men, Plato fails to consider that women guardians would in reality have a much tougher life than the men because they would have to be pregnant frequently and undergo the strain and danger of giving birth. At the same time, he evidently does not believe they are disqualified for ruling on this account. The guardians who achieved the highest level of knowledge in Plato's ideal society would qualify to rule over the ideally just state as philosopher-kings.  [Philosopher-rulers were denied nuclear families and were expected to complete in excess of fifty years of intense education and training before taking the helm.  What benefit would this stipulation have?  Why do you think guardians were disallowed nuclear families?  Why do you think Plato believed the village should raise the child?  How do you think Plato would feel about censorship in his utopia?]

To become a guardian, a person from childhood must be educated for many years in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics to gain the knowledge that Plato in the Republic presented as necessary if one was to rule for the common good. Plato's specifications for the education of guardians in fact make him the first thinker to argue systematically that education should be the training of the mind and the character rather than simply the acquisition of information and practical skills. Such a state would necessarily be authoritarian because only the ruling class would possess the knowledge to determine its policies and make decisions determining who is allowed to mate with whom to produce the best children. [As reasonable as this may have seemed to Plato, eugenics has since become notorious because of Hitler’s similar views on the subject and the resultant atrocities born of this ideology.]

15.5. XV. Platonic Forms

Plato refused to accept the relativity of the virtues as reality. He developed the theory that the virtues cannot be discovered through experience; rather, the virtues are absolutes that can be apprehended only by thought and that somehow exist independently of human existence.  (The sophists believed that virtue depended in large part to circumstances and that morality and truth are relative for the most part.) The separate realities of the pure virtues Plato referred to in some of his works as Forms (sing. eidos , plur. eide , or sing. idea , plur. ideai ); among the Forms were Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality. He argued that the Forms were invisible, invariable, and eternal entities located in a higher realm beyond the empirical world of human beings. The Forms such as Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality are, according to Plato, true reality; what humans experience with their senses are the impure shadows of this reality.

Each Form, Plato seems to say, is an essential quality, one that people experience only through contrast between opposites. For example, that a stick embodies equality to another of the same length but inequality to a stick of a different length demonstrates equality only through contrast with the unequal stick. The Form Equality, however, is the pure essence of equality, which under no circumstances can be unequal or possess the quality of inequality. Such a pure Form is beyond human experience. The same reasoning applies to the other virtues such as goodness or beauty or justice.

Plato's concept of Forms required the further belief that knowledge of them came through the human soul, which must be immortal. When a soul is incarnated in its current body, it brings with it knowledge of the Forms. The soul then uses reason in argument and proof, not empirical observation through the senses, to recollect its pre-existent knowledge.

Plato was not consistent throughout his career in his views on the nature or the significance of Forms, and his later works seem quite divorced from the theory. [Plato lived to be a very old man, and as is usually the case, the knowledge gained in his youth transmuted as he gained experience and wisdom.  The Greeks have two words for wisdom:  sophia and sophon.  Sophon is the unshakable certainty possessed by the young whereas sophia is the wisdom that is the marriage of knowledge and experience.] Nevertheless, Forms provide a good example of both the complexity and the wide range of Platonic thought. With his theory of Forms, Plato made metaphysics a central issue for philosophers ever since.

15.6. XV. The Platonic Demiurge

Plato's idea that humans possessed immortal souls distinct from their bodies established the concept of dualism, [a.k.a. psychophysical dualism, which another famous philosopher, Rene Descartes, would capitalize on two millennia later] positing a separation between spiritual and physical being. This notion of the separateness of soul and body would play an influential role in later philosophical and religious thought. In a dialogue written late in his life, Plato said the pre-existing knowledge possessed by the immortal human soul is in truth the knowledge known to the supreme deity. Plato called this god the Demiurge (“craftsman”) because the deity used knowledge of the Forms to craft the world of living beings from raw matter. [This parallels the Judeo-Christian God known as Jehovah or Yahweh or simply YHWH.  The Gnostics also had a similar god, named Yaldaboath, who came into existence when Sophia, the feminine element of the overarching deity, had a thought.  This thought became a creator god who thought he was the almighty because he didn’t know his origins.  His name literally means, “He who knows not from whence he came.”]  According to this doctrine of Plato, a knowing, rational God created the world, and the world therefore has order. [The Greek word for order is cosmos.  In Greek myth, order was born out of the primordial chaos.  Not coincidentally, most, if not all, religions that posit a creator deity share this birth of order from chaos as the initial act of creation.]  Furthermore, its beings have goals, as evidenced by animals adapting to their environments in order to flourish. The Demiurge wanted to reproduce in the material world the perfect order of the Forms, but the world as crafted turned out not to be perfect because matter is necessarily imperfect. Plato suggested that the proper goal for human beings is to seek perfect order and purity in their own souls by making rational desires control their irrational desires. The latter cause harm in various ways. The desire to drink wine to excess, for example, is irrational because the drinker fails to consider the hangover to come the next day. Those who are governed by irrational desires thus fail to consider the future of both body and soul. Finally, since the soul is immortal and the body is not, our present, impure existence is only one passing phase in our cosmic existence.

15.1. XV. The Life of Plato

Socrates's fate had a profound effect on his most brilliant follower, Plato (ca. 428 -348 B.C.), who even though an aristocrat nevertheless withdrew from political life after 399 B.C. The condemnation of Socrates had apparently convinced Plato that citizens in a democracy were incapable of rising above narrow self-interest to knowledge of any universal truth. In his works dealing with the organization of society, Plato bitterly rejected democracy as a justifiable system of government. Instead, he sketched what he saw as the philosophical basis for ideal political and social structures among human beings. His utopian vision had virtually no effect on the actual politics of his time, and his attempts to advise Dionysius II (ruled 367-344 B.C.), tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, on how to rule as a true philosopher ended in utter failure. Otherwise we have almost no evidence for the events of Plato's life.

Political philosophy formed only one portion of Plato's interests, which ranged widely in astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics (theoretical explanations for phenomena that cannot be understood through direct experience or scientific experiment). After Plato's death, his ideas attracted relatively little attention among philosophers for the next two centuries, until they were revived as important points for debate in the Roman era. Nevertheless, the sheer intellectual power of Plato's thought and the controversy it has engendered ever since his lifetime have won him fame as one of the world's greatest philosophers.

15.4. XV. Platonic Doctrines

Plato's views seem to have changed over time, and he nowhere presents one, coherent set of doctrines. Although it is unwise to try to summarize Plato rather than to read his dialogues as complete pieces, it is perhaps not too misleading to say that he taught that human beings cannot define and understand absolute virtues such as goodness, justice, beauty, or equality by the concrete evidence of these qualities in their lives. Any earthly examples will in another context display the opposite quality. For instance, always returning what one has borrowed might seem to be just. But what if a person who has borrowed a weapon from a friend is confronted by that friend who wants the weapon back to commit a murder? In this case, returning the borrowed item would be unjust. Examples of equality are also only relative. The equality of a stick two feet long, for example, is evident when it is compared with another two-foot stick. Paired with a three-foot stick, however, it displays inequality. In sum, in the world that human beings experience with their senses, every example of the virtues and every quality is relative in some aspect of its context.