Republic, by Plato
Introduction
Plato’s Republic is one of the most famous books on political philosophy, and served as a kind of seed out of which many different branches of political thought grew, especially in the West. I chose to read Republic because I had recently read Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and It’s Enemies”. In that book he blames Plato for totalitarian ways of thinking that eventually turned Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. Popper’s writing had a big impact on me, and I found myself agreeing with most of what he was saying, but about one third of the book is about Plato, and I had never read any Plato. So rather than take Popper’s word for what Plato had said, I wanted to read it for myself and make up my own mind.
Context
Plato wrote Republic sometime around 380 BCE. In the decades prior, Athens had gone through an intense period of political turmoil. Democracy was overthrown and Athens was ruled as an oligarchy by a group known as the Thirty Tyrants. My understanding is that one of Plato’s uncles, Critias, was one of the Thirty Tyrants, and was killed during the restoration of democracy.
More importantly, the Athenian democracy sentenced Plato’s mentor, Socrates, to death for corrupting the youth and worshiping his own gods rather than the gods of the state.
This context is important, because Plato’s Republic is not pro-democracy. While he acknowledges certain benefits of democracy, he is quite critical of it.
Summary of Content
Plato’s Republic follows a fictional version of Socrates as he goes to Piraeus to attend a festival. While he is there he gets into a discussion with a group of men. The discussion starts with the question, “what is justice, and does it pay to be just?”. This takes them deeper into discussion, with Socrates leading the way. During this discussion Socrates explores what the ideal state would look like, and what the ideal person would look like within it.
Themes and Analysis
The most important theme of the book is an analogy between the state and the soul. Plato argues (through his portrayal of Socrates) that if you want to figure out what the “just man” looks like, you can look at the bigger picture and first look at what the “just” or ideal society would look like.
Through this analogy, Plato presents his “tripartite model of the soul”, which says the soul has three parts:
Reason - This is the philosophical element in us. The lover of knowledge.
Spirit - This is the part of us that acts. It is something like the idea of passion, or even indignation.
Appetitive - This is the part of us that desires. It craves basic needs, as well as sensory and material pleasure.
Each of these elements has a corresponding class in Plato’s ideal state:
Reason - This is the class of philosopher rulers. Plato believes that the ideal state should be ruled by reluctant philosopher kings. These people would be trained in mathematics, philosophy, and the art of “dialectic” which is essentially uncovering the truth through discussion. They would not own property, and would share everything with each other. They would prefer not to rule, but they would do so because they know the alternative would be living in a worse society where reason does not rule.
Spirit - This is the class of soldiers. Their job is to protect the state, but they are linked with the philosopher rulers. In both the analogy of the soul and the state, Plato believes it is important for this spirited element to serve reason, rather than serve appetite/desire.
Appetitive - This is the working class. Plato doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about this group, but its function is to do the various trades and business activities that are required to make society work.
Continuing the state/soul analogy, Plato later goes through different systems of government including timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.
For each system of government he describes how it might come about, but more interestingly, he describes the type of person that corresponds to that state.
His analysis of the democratic state and the democratic man are particularly interesting. He claims that while democracy is attractive in the freedom it allows for individuals, it has a problem. In a democracy, people are told to figure out for themselves how to live. This means that the state is agnostic on which desires a person should work to satisfy, so the democratic man believes no one desire are better or worse than other desires, and lives trying to satisfy them all. This leads to a situation where the Appetitive part of the soul dethrones Reason as the ruler of the soul. Plato then claims that this way of life is bound to lead to tyranny. His reasoning is as follows: desire runs amok in the soul of the democratic man. If you take this desire to the extreme, you get what Plato calls “the tyrannical soul”. In this type of person desire has completely taken over. And according to Plato, once you start producing people with this character, one of them is bound to gain political power, going from a private person with a tyrannical to an actual tyrant.
Personal Reflection
Overall I think Plato’s vision for the individual is much more compelling than his vision for the state. His vision for the state seems unbelievably far-fetched, impractical, and unethical. But that same vision augmented as a set of guidelines for how to live well as an individual is quite compelling.
Two aspects of Plato’s argument resonate with me: the tripartite model of the soul, and the challenges of desire run amok in democracy. Let’s take a look at both:
The tripartite model of the soul
I love the metaphor of trying to put Reason on the throne in your soul. In particular I love the idea that you have to get Passion working for Reason, and not for Desire. As human beings we have energy that we can apply to whatever aims we choose. But if we are desire-driven people, we will put all of our ingenuity toward satisfying our short term pleasures rather than the deeper pleasure of living well, learning, and practicing moderation.
The challenges of desire run amok in democracy
The book that brought me to Plato’s Republic was Karl Popper’s, “The Open Society and It’s Enemies”, in which Popper blames Plato for dangerous anti-democratic ideas that have plagued the world throughout history, especially around the time of World War II. I fully agree with Popper’s assessment that we have to preserve democracy, and I’ll outline why later. But I find myself agreeing more with Plato when we switch to looking at the individual, rather than the system of government.
For all the precious freedoms that come with living in a democracy, we have to pay a price: uncertainty. It is totally up to us to figure out how to live. Democracy doesn’t give us an opinionated moral compass. It tells us that pretty much whatever desires we have are worth pursuing, so we’re left without a map. And while the freedom is great, we don’t know how to rank our desires. So we tend to try chasing all of them, wondering why they’re generally ineffective in making us happy.
When you live in a wealthy and free society, the main challenge of life is simply figuring out what the hell to do with yourself. The default answer is, “just do what makes you happy”. But what makes us happy? We see millions of things offering to give us pleasure in one form or another, so we end up chasing those all the time. But short term pleasure isn’t happiness. This is the hedonic treadmill.
So Plato brings us to this realization that we are overwhelmed with options, and we need some map to guide us. And this is exactly where Karl Popper’s argument becomes so important: right at the moment where you realize just how hopeless this treadmill run is. Here we are at a fork in the road, and at one turn Plato is telling us, “look it’s all too overwhelming, let’s turn back, engineer society from scratch and fix it.” At the other turn, Popper is telling us “now is not the time to freak out. There is no turning back. We can’t wipe the canvas of society clean and re-engineer it. It’s both impossible and dangerous to even try. This is how we got Nazism and Communism. We have to be brave as a society and walk forward into the uncertainty, because the alternative leads us to horrible places”.
I fully agree with Popper on the societal level, but I feel he fails to address Plato’s remarks about the individual. Great, let’s keep individual freedom and democracy, but how does the individual keep his or her desires in check and put Reason at the helm? How does a person make sure their Passions work for Reason, and not for Desire?
Plato gives us some tips: study math to orient the mind toward truth. Become a lover of knowledge, wisdom, and learning. Live moderately. Even if we live in a culture of excess, living strictly can help us navigate the abundance.
Unfortunately, Popper doesn’t offer much advice at the individual level.
To me the difference in the two philosophers’ views can be summed up as follows:
Question: What are WE supposed to do?
Plato’s answer: Censorship, eugenics, abolish the family unit, abolish private property, implement rigid class structure, and fully re-engineer society according to “the right values”.
Popper’s answer: Whatever you do, don’t panic.
Question: What am I supposed to do?
Plato’s answer: study math, learn to get your pleasure from learning, practice moderation, establish hierarchy in your desires as some are truly better than others.
Popper: [silent]
I think Popper’s vision for leaving the closed society behind and embracing the open society is both beautiful and correct, but I wish he would have given the individual some advice on how to navigate the uncertainty.
Plato’s noble lie
In the Republic, Plato advocates the use of a “noble lie” in his ideal society. While he advocates against lying, he believes it would be critical to create a beneficial lie to explain the beginnings of the society as it would help with social cohesion and maintaining the class structures that he believes are important for creating harmony in society.
The noble lie that Plato proposes is a myth that the citizens of his imagined society spawned out of the ground, and each person was born with either a gold element, silver element, or bronze element in their soul, according to their class: gold for philosopher-rulers, silver for auxiliaries, and bronze for the working class.
While this all sounds kind of ridiculous, it turns out that we have a noble lie of our own. Our noble lie came from Christianity, that all men are created equal. Of course it’s not literally true – there is huge variation in abilities and circumstances, but it’s beneficial for us if a society if we all choose to believe that we are equal and not question it too much.
The irony is that Plato’s proposed noble lie was the exact opposite: that people are created unequally. Their class differences are built into their souls, and can’t be changed.
Critical Evaluation
I hope to expand on this section in the future, but for now my critical evaluation will focus on the city/soul metaphor. As I’ve mentioned above, I think Plato’s vision is much more compelling for the individual than his vision for society. His vision for society seems bound to fail because it relies on the false assumption that you can wipe the canvas clean and re-implement society according to a master plan, and it will work like a machine. I think there are far too many variables in society for this to be a realistic approach.
This is a common critique of Plato’s Republic, so one thing I’ll add to be fair to Plato is something that I think get’s overlooked when making this criticism: “the state” that Plato refers to is polis in Greek, which at that time would have been a city-state of around a few hundred thousand people, not a massive country, continent, or even global political system. While I think that some of Plato’s ideas are even too far-fetched at that small of a scale, I do think this is an element that shouldn’t be overlooked: the smaller-scale your project is, the more you are able to control the outcome.
Key Takeaways
Plato tries to uncover what “justice” is, and whether it is beneficial for a person to live justly.
In order to answer this question, he zooms out to first consider what the “just society” would look like.
The goal is to take those learnings, then zoom back in to the individual to figure out how to live justly.
To Plato the just society is ruled by philosopher-kings who do not own private property, and rule reluctantly.
The other two classes (the auxiliaries and the working class) are ruled by “Reason” (the philosopher kings).
This goes on for a while, but we eventually zoom back in to the individual, and Plato shows us that those same three elements: Reason, Passion, and Appetite are present as the three elements of the soul.
He argues that just like we must put Reason at the helm in society, we should do the same in our souls.
Conclusion
Throughout reading Plato’s Republic, I kept thinking of the book as a prism. As you read it you can look at it from slightly different angles and see it very differently. For example, some of his ideas from a certain angle look right-wing fascist. From another angle they look left-wing communist. Sometimes the book looks feminist, at other times it looks deeply hierarchical and oppressive.
This prism effect prompted me to read it twice in a row (with a different translation), which gave me an even deeper appreciation for the work. While I don’t agree with a lot of what Plato is proposing, I can see that Plato is less interested in presenting us with dogma, and more interested in getting us to ask questions. Reading the book feels like a dialogue between the reader and Plato himself, who existed 2400 years ago. This is an incredible thing to experience.
The world was a very different place then, and we have the luxury of 2400 years of history and intellectual and technological advances that give us new ways of understanding the problems Plato was trying to solve back then.
I was impressed with Plato’s way of analyzing problems. In general I was struck by just how hard he was willing to try intellectually. Nothing was off limits. To Plato there is a pure essence of truth that can be realized through the practice of philosophy. I walked away feeling deeply appreciative that I could engage with Plato’s writing millennia after he wrote it. I feel like he gave me a new perspective on societal issues and helped me to see things from a different paradigm than the typical left/right political spectrum that we are used to today.
The Republic has been so influential in the history of political thought that if one has any interest in the topic at all, it is worth reading all the way down to Plato before you come back up to modern times. Again, I’d highly recommend Popper’s “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” to see the links going from Plato to Marx, and others.