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5. Introduction to Political Philosophy: Philosophers and Kings: Plato's Republic, III-IV
Poziom:
Temat: Społeczeństwo i nauki społeczne
Professor Steven Smith:
Today Republic,
Act 2.
And what I want to do is
continue with the account of the
various figures,
various persons who populate,
who inhabit this dialogue,
and who they are,
what they represent,
and how they contribute to the
argument and the structure of
the work as a whole.
Last time, and I won't repeat
this, last time we talked
briefly at the end of class
about Cephalus,
and Socrates' treatment of
Cephalus, the embodiment of
convention, the embodiment of
Athenian opinion in the way in
which Socrates as it were chases
Cephalus out of the dialogue,
out of the conversation.
We never hear from him again.
And the speakers are able,
presumably, to pursue the
audacious arguments that will
appear in the rest of the book
without the oversight of the
head of the household,
the embodiment of conventional
opinion.
And Socrates next pursues this
discussion with the son of
Cephalus, Polemarchus,
the man who first had Socrates
approached on the Piraeus.
Polemarchus is described as the
heir of the argument as well as
the, to be sure,
the heir of the family fortune.
Polemarchus is what the Greeks
would call a "gentlemen."
Let us just say he is a person
willing to stand up for and
defend his family and friends.
I don't mean necessarily by a
"gentlemen" somebody who holds
the door for others,
or so on, but somebody who
stands up for his family and
friends in the way that he does.
Unlike his father however,
Polemarchus shows himself
concerned not just with the
needs of the body as Cephalus
represented,
but Polemarchus is concerned to
defend the honor and safety of
the polis.
He accepts the view that
justice is giving to each what
is owed, but he interprets this
to mean that justice means doing
good to your friends and harm to
your enemies.
Justice, we might say,
is a kind of loyalty,
it is a kind of loyalty that we
feel to members of a family,
to members of our team,
to fellow students of a
residential college,
and the kind of loyalty we feel
to a place like Yale as opposed
to all other places.
That is to say,
Polemarchus understands justice
as a kind of patriotic sentiment
that citizens of one city or one
polis feel for one another in
opposition to all other places.
Justice is devotion to one's
own.
And one's own is the good for
Polemarchus.
One's own is the just.
But Socrates challenges
Polemarchus on the grounds that
loyalty to a group,
any group,
cannot be a virtue in itself,
and he trips Polemarchus up
with a very, in many ways,
familiar Socratic argument "Do
we ever make mistakes?"
he asks Polemarchus.
"Isn't the distinction between
friend and enemy based on a kind
of knowledge,
on a perception of who is your
friend and who is your enemy?
Have we ever mistaken a friend
for enemy?"
The answer seems to be,
"Of course we have."
We all know people who we
thought to be our friends but we
found out that they were talking
behind our backs,
or that they were operating to
deceive us in some way or
another.
Of course, it's happened to
everyone.
"So how can we say that justice
means helping friends and
harming enemies," Socrates asks,
"when we may not even be sure
who our friends and our enemies
really are?
Why should citizens of one
state, namely one's own have any
moral priority over the citizens
of another state when,
again, we don't know them and
we may well be mistaken in our
assumption that they are enemies
or friends?
Isn't, in other words such an
unreflective attachment to one's
own bound to result in injustice
to others?
Socrates seems to be asking
Polemarchus.
Once again, in many ways,
we see Socrates dissolving the
bonds of the familiar.
At no other point in the
Republic,
I think, do we see so clearly
the tension between
philosophical reflectiveness on
the one hand in the sense of
camaraderie,
mutuality and esprit de
corps necessary for
political life on the other.
Socrates seems to dissolve
those bonds of familiarity,
loyalty and attachment that we
all have by saying to
Polemarchus,
"How do we know,
how do we really know the
distinction between friend and
enemy?"
But Polemarchus seems to
believe that a city can survive
only with a vivid sense of what
it is.
Of what we might say,
what it stands for,
and an equally vivid sense of
what it is not,
and who are its enemies.
Isn't this essential for the
survival of any state,
of any city?
To know who its friends and
enemies are?
Who its challenges are?
Socrates' disillusion of that
very framework,
challenges, it seems to me,
the very possibility of
political life by questioning
the question or the distinction
between friend and enemy.
Although Polemarchus,
like his father,
is reduced to silence,
it is notable that his argument
is not defeated.
Later in the Republic
you will see,
not that much later even,
Socrates will argue that the
best city may be characterized
by peace and harmony at home,
but this will never be so for
relations between states.
This is why even the best city,
even Kallipolis will require,
as he spends a great deal of
time discussing,
will require a warrior class,
a class of what he calls
"auxiliaries."
War and the preparation for war
is an intrinsic part of even the
most just city.
Even the Platonic just city
will have to cultivate warrior
citizens who are prepared to
risk life in battle for the sake
of their own city.
So in many ways,
it seems that Polemarchus'
argument, while apparently
refuted in Book I,
is rehabilitated and re-emerges
in its own way later in the
dialogue.
And we might want to think
about this because it is an
argument that is very important
to contemporary twentieth
century--important twentieth-
century political theorist by
the name of Schmitt who made the
distinction between what he
called the friend and the enemy,
you remember,
are central to his
understanding of politics.
This is an argument that comes
from Polemarchus in Book I of
the Republic.
Polemarchus is dispatched in
one way or another,
and this creates the
opportunity for the longest and
in many ways most memorable
exchange in Book I,
and perhaps even the
Republic as a whole,
the exchange with Thrasymachus
who represents a far more
difficult challenge in his own
way than either of the first two
speakers.
In many ways,
because Thrasymachus could be
seen as Socrates' alter-ego in
some way, his sort of evil twin.
He is, how to put it?
He is the Doctor Moriarty to
Socrates' Sherlock Holmes.
You know, the evil doppelganger
in some way.
Thrasymachus' is a rival of
Socrates in many respects;
he also like Socrates is a
teacher clearly.
He is an educator.
He claims to have a certain
kind of knowledge of what
justice is, and claims to be
able to teach it to others.
He is teaching a kind of,
we will find out,
a kind of hard-headed realism
that expresses disgust at
Polemarchus' talk about loyalty
and friendship and the like.
"Justice," he asserts,
"is the interest of the
stronger."
Every polity of which we know
is based upon a distinction
between the rulers and the
ruled.
Justice consists of the rules,
that is to say,
that are made by and for the
benefits of the ruling class.
Justice is nothing more or less
right than what benefits the
rulers, the rulers who determine
the laws of justice.
Thrasymachus is,
of course even for us today,
a familiar kind of person.
He is the intellectual who
enjoys bringing,
you might say,
the harsh and unremitting facts
about human nature to light,
who enjoys dispelling illusions
and pretty beliefs.
He's the one who probably would
be the first to tell you there
is no Santa Claus.
He is that kind of hard-boiled
realist.
No matter how much we may
dislike him in some ways,
one has to admit also there
maybe a grain,
if not more than a grain of
truth in what he seems to be
saying.
And what he seems to be saying
is this: we are beings who are
first and foremost dominated by
a desire for power.
This is what distinguishes,
you might say,
the true man,
the real man,
the alpha male you might say,
from the slave.
Power and domination are all we
truly care about.
And when we get later in this
semester to Thomas Hobbes,
remember Thrasymachus.
I'll just say that for now.
Remember Thrasymachus when we
get to Hobbes.
Power and domination are all we
care about.
And what is true of individuals
is also true for collective
entities, collective nouns like
states and cities.
Every polity seeks its own
advantage against others,
making relations between states
a condition of unremitting war
of all against all.
In the language,
if I can switch to the language
of modern economics,
one could say that for
Thrasymachus politics is a
zero-sum game.
There are winners and there are
losers, and the more someone
wins that means the more someone
else will lose.
And the rules of justice are
simply the laws set up by the
winners of the game to protect
and to promote their own
interests.
It didn't take Karl Marx to
invent, or to discover that
insight, that the rules of
justice are simply the rules of
the ruling class.
That comes straight out of
Thrasymachus,
Book I of the Republic.
Well, how to respond?
And again, Socrates challenges
Thrasymachus with a variation of
the argument that he used
against Polemarchus.
That is to say "Do we ever make
mistakes?"
That is to say,
it is not self-evident,
or it is not always intuitively
obvious what our interests are.
If justice is truly in the
interests of the stronger,
doesn't that require some kind
of knowledge,
some kind of reflection on the
part of those in power to know
what is really and truly in
their interest?
People make mistakes and it is
very possible to make a mistake
about your own interests.
And of course,
Thrasymachus has to acknowledge
this, of course the rulers make
mistakes,
and he tries to invent an
argument that if a ruler makes a
mistake, he's not really a true
ruler.
The true ruler is the person
who both acts on his own
interest and of course knows
what those interests are.
But the point that he admits is
all, in a sense,
that Socrates needs;
justice is not power alone,
justice requires knowledge.
Justice requires reflection.
And that is of course at the
core of the famous Socratic
thesis, that all virtue is a
form of knowledge,
all the virtues require
knowledge and reflection at
their basis.
But much of the exchange with
Thrasymachus turns on the
problem of what kind of
knowledge justice involves,
and justice is a kind of
knowledge.
If justice equals self-interest
and self-interest requires
knowledge, well what kind of
knowledge is that?
Thrasymachus contends that
justice consists of the art of
convincing people to obey the
rules that are really in the
interests of others,
the interests of their rulers.
Justice, in other words,
for Thrasymachus is a kind of
sucker's game;
obeying the rules that really
benefit others largely because
we fear the consequences of
injustice.
Justice is really something
only respected by the weak who
are fearful of the consequences
of injustice.
Again, the true ruler,
in some ways,
is one, Thrasymachus believes,
who has the courage to act
unjustly for his own interest.
"The true ruler," he says "is
one who is like a shepherd with
a flock, but he rules not for
the benefit of the flock but,
of course, for his own
interests, the good of the
shepherd."
Justice, like all knowledge,
is really a form,
again, of self-interest.
And so one can ask,
"Is Thrasymachus wrong to
believe this?"
And I realize I'm moving over
this very quickly,
but is Thrasymachus wrong to
believe that?
Socrates wins the argument in
Book I with a kind of,
you might even say,
sleight of hand.
Both he and Thrasymachus
believe that justice is a
virtue, but Socrates says,
"What kind of virtue is it to
deceive and fleece other
people?"
Thrasymachus is forced to admit
that the just person is a fool,
Thrasymachus believes,
is a fool for obeying laws that
are not beneficial to him.
But the best life,
Thrasymachus believes,
it doing maximum injustice to
others, doing whatever you like.
And with that realization,
we see a very dramatic moment
in Book I, even in the book as a
whole.
Thrasymachus blushes.
He blushes when he realized
that he has been defending the
claim not that justice is a
virtue,
but that justice is something
that is really a form of
weakness.
Thrasymachus himself seems to
be embarrassed by his defense of
the tyrannical life,
of the unjust life.
The suggestion Plato seems to
be making by making Thrasymachus
blush is, despite all of his
tough talk,
that he's not as tough as he
appears to be,
as he wants to think of himself
to be.
He's shamed by the fact that he
has been defending injustice and
the tyrannical way of life.
And so it appears,
the three conversations end,
Book I ends with uncertainty
about what justice is.
We have had three views of
Cephalus, Polemarchus,
and Thrasymachus.
They have all been refuted,
but no clear alternative seems
to have emerged.
Certainly Socrates has not
really proposed an alternative
to Thrasymachus in his exchange
with him;
he has only,
as it were, forced Thrasymachus
to see that the logic of his
ideas,
the logic of his argument that
justice is in the interest of
the stronger,
is a defense of tyranny,
and is a defense of the unjust
way of life.
So all of Book I is really a
kind of warm up for what follows
in the rest of the book.
We find out presumably what
justice is.
Until that point,
we have no reason to really
give up on our current existing
ideas about what justice is.
And this is where the two most
important figures of the
Republic begin to make
their voices heard.
Those are Glaucon and
Adeimantus.
Glaucon tells Socrates that he
is dissatisfied with the
refutation of Thrasymachus,
and so should we.
Thrasymachus has been shamed,
he has been forced to see where
the logic of his argument takes
him, but that is not the same
thing as being refuted.
Thrasymachus is really,
as it turns out,
a kind of girly-man who is
ashamed to be seen defending the
unjust life.
"But why should we be ashamed
to praise injustice?"
Glaucon challenges Socrates.
"It's not enough to show that
justice is wrong," Glaucon says.
"What we need is to hear why
justice is good," or more
precisely to hear justice
praised for itself.
"Is there, in your opinion,"
Glaucon asks Socrates,
"a kind of good that we would
choose because we delight in it
for its own sake?"
358A.
Is there a kind of good that we
delight in for its own sake?
And this is where the rubber
hits the road.
Who is Glaucon?
Glaucon and Adeimantus are the
brothers of Plato,
and other than their appearance
in this book,
there is no historical record
left about them.
But Plato has given us enough.
In the first place,
they are young aristocrats,
and Glaucon's desire to hear
justice praised for its own sake
indicates something about his
scale of values.
It would be vulgar,
he believes,
to speak of justice,
or any virtue in terms of
material rewards or
consequences.
He does not need to hear
justice praised for its benefit,
he's indifferent to the
consequences.
Rather, he claims that he wants
to hear justice defended the way
that no one has ever defended it
before.
The brothers desire to hear
justice praised for itself
alone, and that seems to be
expressive of their own freedom
from mercenary motives and
incentives.
It reveals to us something
about their idealism and a
certain kind of loftiness of
soul.
And certainly the brothers,
we find out,
are not slouches.
They are not slouches at all.
Although it is easy to remember
that later in the dialogue most
of their contribution seems to
be of the form of "Yes Socrates,
no Socrates," they seem to be
rather passive interlocutors.
Their early challenges to
Socrates show them to be
potential philosophers.
That is to say the kind of
persons who might one day rule
the city.
Of the two, Glaucon seems to be
the superior.
He is described as the most
courageous, which in that
context means the most manly,
the most virile,
and later Socrates admits that
he has always been full of
wonder at the nature of the two
brothers.
And at 368a,
he cites a line of poetry,
you'll remember,
written about them for their
distinction in battle,
they have been in war,
they have been tested in war
obviously.
They are also,
and we see this from their
relationship between one
another, and the way they speak
to one another,
they are also highly
competitive, super achievers.
A little bit like some of you
perhaps.
There is quite a bit of
jousting between them that you
need to be attentive too.
And each proposes to Socrates a
test that he will have to pass
in order to prove the value of
justice and the just life.
Glaucon goes on to rehabilitate
the argument of Thrasymachus in
many ways, in a more vivid and a
more expressive way than
Thrasymachus did himself.
Glaucon tells a story,
you'll remember,
a story that he modifies from
the historian Herodotus,
a story about a man named Gyges
who possessed a magic ring that
conferred on him the power of
invisibility.
Who has not wondered what we
would do if we had this power,
the power of invisibility?
Gyges, in Glaucon's retelling
of the story,
Gyges uses this ring to murder
the king and to sleep with his
wife, and to set himself up as
king.
What would you do if you had
this power, the power of this
magic ring, where you could
commit any crime,
indulge any vice,
commit any outrage and be sure
you could always get away with
it?
Why if you could do that would
you wish to be just at the same
time, or wish to be just instead
of that?
This is the challenge that
Glaucon poses to Socrates.
Why would someone with absolute
power and complete immunity to
punishment, why would they
prefer justice to injustice?
"Tell me that Socrates,"
Glaucon asks.
"If justice truly is something
praiseworthy for itself alone,
then Socrates should be able to
provide an answer that will
satisfy Glaucon's retelling of
the story of Gyges,
that is certainly a very tall
order.
And that is where the brother,
Adeimantus, joins in.
Adeimantus has a somewhat
different set of concerns.
He has heard justice praised
his whole life from parents and
from poets and from other
authorities,
but for the most part,
he has only heard justice
praised again for the benefits
justice confers both in this
life and the next.
Honesty is the best policy,
we've heard Cephalus being
concerned about returning to
others what you owe as a way of
pleasing the gods in the
afterlife,
and Adeimantus rightly takes
this kind of argument to mean
that justice is simply a virtue
for the weak,
the lame and the unadventurous,
if you were only concerned with
the consequences.
A real man does not fear the
consequences of injustice.
Rather, Adeimantus' concern,
and he gives a very revealing
image of what he takes justice
to be,
is with an image of
self-guardianship,
or self-control.
He tells us at 367a that each
would be his own god.
In other words,
we should not care what people
say about us,
but we should be prepared to
develop qualities of
self-containment,
autonomy and independence from
the influence that others can
exercise over us.
"How can I develop those
qualities of self-guardianship
or self-control?"
he asks Socrates.
And who has not felt that way
before?
The two brothers desire to hear
justice praised for itself,
Glaucon, and to live freely and
independently,
Adeimantus.
And that shows to some degree I
think, their own sense of
alienation from their own
society.
Or if I can put the case for
them slightly anachronistically,
these are two sons of the upper
bourgeois who feel degraded by
the mendacity and hypocrisy of
the world they see around them.
And anyway, what person with
any sensitivity to greatness has
not felt this way at one time or
another?
The two are open to persuasion,
to consider alternatives,
perhaps even radical
alternatives,
to the society that has
nurtured them.
They are, to put it another way
perhaps, not only potential
rulers and potential
philosophers,
they may also be potential
revolutionaries,
and the remainder of the book
is addressed to them and of
course people like them.
But the speeches of Glaucon and
Adeimantus, you might say the
circle around Socrates is
effectively closed.
He knows he will not be
returning to Athens that
evening, and he proposes to the
two brothers and those listening
to the conversation a kind of
thought experiment that he hopes
will work magic on the two.
"Let us propose," he says,
"to watch a city coming into
being in speech."
Let us create a city in speech.
"It is easier," he says,
"not to view justice
microscopically in an
individual, but rather let's
view justice as it were through
a magnifying glass."
Let's view justice in the large
sense.
Let us view justice in a city
in order to help us understand
what it is in an individual.
And this idea that the city is
essentially analogous to the
soul, that the city is like the
soul,
is the central metaphor around
which the entire Republic
is constructed.
It seems to be presented
entirely innocuously,
no one in the dialogue objects
to it,
yet everything else follows
from this idea that the city,
the polis,
is in the central respect like
an individual,
like the soul of an individual.
What is Socrates trying to do
here, and what is that metaphor,
that central metaphor,
what function does it serve
within the work?
To state the obvious,
Socrates introduces this
analogy to help the brothers
better understand what justice
is for an individual soul.
The governance of the soul,
Adeimantus' standard of
self-control,
must be like the governance of
a city in some decisive
respects.
But in what respects?
How is a city like a soul and
in what respect is
self-governance,
the control of one's passions
and appetites,
in what respect is self-control
like the governance of a
collective body?
Consider the following example:
when we say that so and so is
typically American,
or typically Taiwanese for
example, we mean that that
person expresses certain traits
of character and behavior that
are broadly representative in
some way of the cross section of
their countrymen.
Is this a useful way to think?
More specifically,
what does it mean to say that
an individual can be seen as
magnified in his or her country,
or that one's country is simply
the collective expression of
certain individual traits of
character?
That seems to be what Socrates
is suggesting.
Right, that's what he's getting
at.
One way of thinking about the
metaphor of city and soul
together is to think of it as a
particular kind of causal
hypothesis,
about the formation of both
individual character and
political institutions.
In this reading of the
city/soul analogy as a kind of
causal relation,
maintains the view that as
individuals we both shape and
determine the character of our
societies,
and that those societies in
term shape and determine
individual character.
The city and soul analogy could
be seen then as an attempt to
understand how societies
reproduce themselves,
and how they shape citizens who
again in turn shape the
societies in which they inhabit.
That seems to be one way of
making sense of the city/soul
hypothesis, but again it doesn't
seem to answer the question in
what way are cities and
individuals alike.
To take the American case for
example, does it mean that
something like the presidency,
the congress and the court can
be discerned within the soul of
every American citizen?
That would be absurd to think
that obviously.
I mean, I think that would be
absurd.
Maybe you want to argue it and
we could have a discussion,
but it might mean that American
democracy,
or democracy of any kind,
helps to produce a particular
kind of democratic soul.
Just like, you might say,
the old regime in France,
the old aristocratic society
existing before the revolution,
tended to produce a very
different kind of soul,
a very different kind of
individual.
Every regime will produce a
distinctive kind of individual,
and this individual will come
to embody the dominant character
traits of the particular regime.
The remainder of the
Republic is,
again, devoted to crafting the
regime that will produce a
distinctive kind of human
character,
and that of course is why the
book is a utopia.
There has never been a regime
in history that was so
single-mindedly devoted to the
end of producing that rarest and
most difficult species of
humanity called simply
philosopher.
So, city and soul.
That leads to our next topic
that I want to pursue for the
remainder of the class,
the reform of poetry and the
arts.
Socrates' city speech proceeds
through several stages.
The first stage proposed by
Adeimantus is the simple city,
what he calls the city of
utmost necessity.
That is a city limited to the
satisfaction of certain basic
needs.
The primitive or simple city,
the city of utmost necessity,
again it expresses the nature
of Adeimantus' own soul,
there is a kind of noble
simplicity in him that treats
subjects as bodies or creatures
of limited appetites.
The simple city is little more
than a combination of households
designed for the sake of
securing one's existence.
And at this point,
and you can hear his brother
chastising him,
at this point Glaucon retorts
that it seems as if Adeimantus
has created a city only fit for
pigs,
a city of pigs.
Are we only such that we want
to feed at a common trough?
Is there nothing more to
politics than that?
And Glaucon says,
"Where are the luxuries?
Where are the relishes," he
asks.
"Where are the things that make
up a city?"
And hereto Glaucon's city
expresses his own tastes and his
own soul.
The war-like Glaucon would
preside over what Socrates calls
a feverish city,
one that institutionalizes
honors, competitions and above
all war.
If Adeimantus,
again, expresses the appetitive
part of the soul,
Glaucon represents the quality
that Plato calls spiritedness,
or thumos in Greek.
Spiritedness is the central,
psychological quality of the
Republic.
The entire thrust of the book
is devoted to the taming of
spiritedness,
and to the control of
spiritedness.
Spiritedness is that quality of
soul that is most closely
associated with the desires for
honors, fame and prestige.
It is a higher order
psychological quality.
It seeks distinction,
the desire to be first in the
race of life and lead us to seek
to dominate others.
We all know people of this
sort, do we not?
And we all to some degree
embody this quality in
ourselves.
It is the quality that we
associate with being a kind of
alpha personality.
This is the issue for Socrates,
how to channel this wild and
untamed passion of spirit or
heart, how to channel this to
some kind of common good.
Can it be done?
How can we begin the
domestication of the spirited
Glaucon?
The rest of the book is to some
degree about taming,
asking the question whether
Glaucon can be tamed.
And it is here that Socrates
turns to his first and perhaps
even his most controversial
proposal for the establishment
of the just city.
"The creation of the just city
can only begin," he says,
"with the control of music,
poetry and the arts."
And this is where Plato's image
as an educator drives.
The first order of business for
the founder of a city,
any city, is the oversight of
education.
And his proposals for the
reform of poetry,
especially Homeric poetry,
represent clearly a radical
departure from Greek educational
practices and beliefs.
Why is this so important for
Socrates?
Ask yourself,
if you were founding a city,
where would you begin?
Socrates' argument seems to be
something like this:
it is from the poets and I mean
that in the broadest sense of
the term,
myth makers,
storytellers,
artist, musicians,
today we might say film and
television producers,
it is from these people that we
receive our earliest and most
vivid impressions of heroes and
villains,
gods and the afterlife.
These stories,
the stories we hear from
earliest childhood on,
shape us in some very
meaningful sense for the rest of
our lives.
And the Homeric epics were of
course for the Greeks what the
Bible was for us.
Maybe even is in some
communities.
The names of Achilles,
Priam, Hector,
Odysseus, Ajax,
these would have been just as
familiar and important to the
contemporaries of Plato as the
names of Abraham,
Isaac, Joshua and Jesus are for
us.
Plato's critique of Homeric
poetry in the Republic is
two-fold;
it is both theological and
political.
Maybe you might even say
following Spinoza,
that this is the core of
Plato's theological political
treatise here.
The theological critique is
that Homer simply depicts the
gods as false,
as fickle, and inconstant.
He presents them as beings who
are unworthy of our worship.
More importantly,
the Homeric heroes are said to
be bad role models for those who
follow them,
they are shown to be
intemperate in sex,
overly fond of money,
into these vices Socrates adds
cruelty and disregard for the
dead bodies of one's opponents.
The Homeric heroes are ignorant
and passionate men full of blind
anger and desire for
retribution.
How could such figures possibly
serve as good role models for
citizens of a just city?
And Socrates' answer is,
of course, the predation of
poetry and the arts in Books II
and III.
He wants to deprive poets of
their power to enchant,
and something Socrates admits
in the tenth book of the
Republic,
to which he himself has been
highly susceptible to the
enchantment of the poets.
We need to deprive,
again, the poets,
the song makers,
the lyricists,
the musicians,
the mythmakers,
the storytellers,
all of them,
the power to enchant us.
And in place of the pedagogical
power of poetry,
Socrates proposes to install
philosophy in its place.
As a result,
the poets will have to be
expelled from this city.
Imagine that.
Sophocles will be expelled from
the just city that Socrates
wants to create.
This always raises the question
that you will discuss in your
section, whether or not
Socrates' censorship of poetry
and the arts is an indication of
his totalitarian impulses.
This is the part of the
Republic most likely to
call up our own first amendment
instincts.
"Who are you,
Socrates," we are inclined to
ask, "to tell us what we can
read here and listen to?"
And furthermore,
Socrates seems to be saying not
that the Kallipolis will have no
poetry and music,
it will simply be Socratic
poetry and music.
And there's another question
which you would no doubt be
concerned to discuss,
namely what would such
Socratically purified music and
poetry look like?
What would it sound like?
I don't know that I have an
answer to this,
but perhaps the Republic
as a whole is itself a piece of
this Socratic poetry that will
substitute for the Homeric kind.
But it's important to remember
that the question of education
and the question of the reform
and censorship and the control
of poetry is introduced in the
context of taming the war-like
passions of Glaucon and others
like him.
The question of censorship and
the telling of lies is
introduced, in other words,
as a question of military
necessity, controlling the
guards or the auxiliaries of the
city,
its warrior class.
Nothing is said here about the
education of farmers,
artisans, merchants,
laborers, the economic class.
Maybe, to speak bluntly,
Socrates just doesn't care that
much about them.
It's okay what they listen too.
Nor has anything really been
said up to this point about the
education of the philosopher.
His interest here is in the
creation of a tight,
and highly disciplined cadre of
young warriors who will protect
the city much as watchdogs
protect their own home.
That is to say,
recalling Polemarchus,
those who are good to friends
and bark and growl at strangers.
Such individuals will
subordinate their own desires
and pleasures to the group,
and live a life by a strict
code of honor.
We have to ask:
are Socrates' proposals
unrealistic?
Are they undesirable?
Or are they desirable?
They are not undesirable if you
believe as he does that even the
best city must provide
provisions for war,
and therefore a warrior's life,
a soldier's life,
will require harsh privation in
terms of material rewards and
benefits as well as a
willingness to sacrifice for
others.
It would seem far from being
unrealistic, Socrates engages
what we might call maybe a kind
of Socratic realism.
Far more unrealistic would be
the belief of those who argue,
and I'm thinking here of names
like Immanuel Kant and others
from the eighteenth and
nineteenth century,
that one day we can abolish war
altogether, and therefore
abolish the passions that give
rise to conflict and war.
So far Plato believes,
is a passionate or spirited
aspect of nature remains strong
so long will be necessary to
educate the warriors of society
who defend it.
So on that I'm going to end
today and next time we will talk
about justice,
the philosophers and Plato's
discovery of America.
