The Tragedy of the Philosopher-King
To many readers of the Republic, nothing is more infuriating than the suggestion that Socrates “didn’t really mean it” or that he is “just kidding” about the just city; and indeed, there could hardly be a more trivializing approach. On this account, Socrates is reduced to a kind of low humorist, a two-bit stand-up comedian of the spirit, and his very word, his constant avowal that the unjust life is not worth living, turns to ashes in the mouth. But as any reader who has taken up more than a handful of Plato’s writings knows—the reader who has kept their first copies of Plato with reverence and has not returned even the most pitiful translation back to be sold to other mere purchasers—the speeches of his most devilishly interesting character possess more than the ordinary qualities of language which we mortals employ. Such is the burning quality of Socrates’ statement that: until philosophers are kings, or kings take up philosophy in all sober seriousness, there will be no end to the evils of this world. What a crowning dialectical achievement, for the mortal that wrote it—the one who loved this sentence so well that he wrote it twice, as the central puzzle, the central “if” of both the Republic and the Laws, only substituting out the philosopher part for divine law in the case of the latter (713d). What hubris, that is nevertheless enrapturing; indeed it is the most hubristic of all theoretical statements, that some one idea would do away with all human ills—Plato taking the trouble to construct two entirely different enunciators of the phrase.
In the Republic, Plato allows us to witness this remarkable statement as out of the mouth of someone who is admittedly devoted above all things to philosophy—a partisan of the profession, if there ever was one. Socrates on the evening of the Bendidea is utterly buoyant, perfectly genial, but famously, on occasion, moved to anger—spiritedly verbal to the point of long-windedness whenever he gets on the subject of philosophy’s low account in the public eye. And so it makes perfect sense that his solution to the political evils of mankind would be just that: to put a philosopher in charge; the irony of which is not lost, at any rate, to the most casual of unsympathetic readers. To counter the words of Cleitophon, who saves his opinions about Socrates’ behavior in the Republic till another day, Socrates himself does not come in like a god on a stage; in fact he comes from Athens; truly demonic though his way with words is, he himself is nevertheless mortal, with all the human marks and wrinkles that set the illuminating boundaries of an individual soul. Without the care of Plato’s artful specificity, Socrates would be impressive, but hardly interesting.
And so, for the reader of the Republic, as with any of Plato’s books, to read the book is first of all to allow oneself to be enraptured by the extraordinary language of his most extraordinary main character: whose avowed purpose is not merely to seem to convince us to choose the life of justice, but really to do so. On the other hand, we’d be stubbornly remiss if we refused to notice the paradox of not only his shameless willingness to change the ground of the argument depending on who he’s talking to; but the troubling lordliness of each of his visions, that seem to ask more than human beings may well be capable of, or even what would be ultimately good. Plato as an author asks us to witness Socrates’ failures as much as his successes, the full reach of his words with all their scraping drawbacks. Alas, while in the Symposium we are helped by the late entrance of Socrates’ desperately unsuccessful lover Alcibiades, to point out the flaws and yet the gold inside, the Republic ends without some insightful last word from somebody else; and the burden is placed rather on the reader. And so, our work is always to allow ourselves to bear witness to Socrates’ infinite irony: the presence of, in everything he says, of everything he leaves of necessity that time unsaid, which is the very essence of irony itself.
In what follows, I will consider the nature of the problem Socrates worries over again and again, and what he insists his paradoxical bon mot is supposed, in part, to solve: the suspicion and disdain that even very decent and respectable members of any human community bear toward the practice of philosophy, and the troubling inability of its practitioners to see what’s in front of their noses. There is a quarrel at work here, no less than the quarrel Socrates admits to between philosophy and poetry; if we are being honest, philosophy is a somewhat quarrelsome venture; part of its charm is its willingness to pick yet another fight, when the occasion demands it. Now, the gnomic way of naming this particular quarrel, is to call it the fight between philosophy and the city; “the city” here meaning something not unlike what, in the telling phrase from 18th-century English, novelists from Oliver Goldsmith to Fanny Burney would term “the world,” as in, the world of human beings in a community who take pride in their commitment to what is merely worldly. At its best, “the city” bespeaks partisans of the human community and its political institutions, who insist on their ability to prosecute their love without the need of being a philosopher themselves. A sign of this problem is the too obvious fact, that no one who is not a partisan of philosophy would ever dream of voting it the kingship, no matter what Plato wrote in his book. Although it may seem laughable to say so, it is not an over-dramatization to note that, in its most extreme form, the death of the philosopher is the natural result of such tension. But the other side of this problem is the legitimate humor the city expresses at the philosopher’s expense, when by some word or action he reminds us that he too is all too human. In fact, the reason why this quarrel is at all interesting is because right is not solely on philosophy’s side.
The strange picture of infallible philosophy that Socrates presents in the Republic, at odds with his more aporetic and/or erotic moments, is supposed to rescue philosophy in the eyes of its detractors by the selfless pursuit of truth at all costs. But it nevertheless comes with a price: with taking up divine infallibility, it loses the ability to articulate human things. The Republic is not merely another work of political theory; rather it allows us to see at once the possibilities and the flaws of political theory itself.
When a philosopher has been put to death by their native city, it would seem trivial, perhaps, to consider that something so lighthearted as laughter could cast any serious shade on his activities. Socrates indeed notes, before making his proposals in Book V public, that to fear laughter when giving voice to the truth is childish (450e); yet nevertheless records, with painstaking accuracy and frequent repetition, the predicament that announces itself, when philosophy becomes a figure of fun. He introduces his plan for philosopher-kings, of course, as that which will drown himself in particular, Socrates, with billows of laughter and a nasty reputation (473c). But even without such a questionable and infamous promotion, the practice and the practitioners of philosophy are, he fears, amusing enough. Socrates talks often about the persistent problems of reputation and laughter elsewhere in the dialogues: while the witty, sensible handmaiden laughs at Thales when he falls into a hole, and attempts to school him into better wisdom, the many have far less sympathy, and merely find the philosopher absurd (Theaetetus 174a, 174e, 175b). Laughter in the Republic forms much of the subject of the interlude between the initial announcement of philosopher-kings in Book V, and the justly famous images of the work of philosophy in the last part of Book VI and the first part of Book VII. Adeimantus objects to the notion of philosopher-kings, since most people who practice philosophy are cranks and scoundrels; and those few decent ones are useless (487d). Socrates sets out to prove him wrong, insisting that the problem lies with the wrong people taking up in the practice, and in the wrong way: they do not follow the lead of truth (490a).
His decision to expand upon this interlude leads to a passionate defense of true erotic philosophy (487d); and while he describes a philosophy only questionably related to the coursework he has in store for the guardians, he does tip his hand to why he thinks not just the city, but philosophy will be better off, should philosophers rule: philosophy is in trouble, under ordinary laws. Its status is no better than that of an orphaned maiden, who can’t choose her lover but is at the mercy of any opportunist who comes along, and in danger of dishonor and even defilement (495c). The neatness of the comparison between the state of women under customary laws is the more apt, since it captures not only the problem of reputation and eros, but likewise hints at the darker side of violence. Upon hearing the plan for philosopher-kings, Glaucon remarks that men, and not trivial ones, will come after Socrates with weapons (474a); as Socrates points out, the laughter of Aristophanes is his most dangerous accuser (Apology 18d). The tension between philosophy and other members of the polis has both a dark and a lighter side, represented by death on the one hand and laughter on the other—with the ever-present danger of laughter flipping into something darker. Socrates names death as a danger to any philosopher who engages in a public life under ordinary laws, rather than a private life at Republic 496d, describing such a death as being ripped apart by wild beasts. But while violence is never off the table, Socrates spends more time on the question of the disrespect that laughter announces, and that a poor reputation makes endemic. To not be taken seriously, perhaps, is a fate worse than death; to not be listened to, is for the truth to remain unheard.
Into this tension steps Socrates with his plans for philosophers not merely to avoid imprisonment, but to rule the city in all public right. While the rule of philosopher-kings is ostensibly for the good of the city, which requires the philosopher’s knowledge for its just preservation, Socrates’ measure, as it plays out, has the happy further result of solving things for philosophy, as well. In the city in speech, philosophy, instead of being laughed at or persecuted, would be given the highest honors, sacrificing to them as to divinities (540c); instead of being at odds with the city, fearful of its life or in danger of public shame (535c), the best souls of the city would be handed over to it as students (519c, 536b).1 When put like this, it begins to sound that philosophy will be much the gainer in this transaction. Indeed, in this city, philosophy needs no cloak of respectability to hide its outlandish habits; it simply rules outright, without the need for any form of concealment to preserve its position; it rules publicly as the proper pastime of the best human souls and the natural preserver of the city.
Now, the flaws in the rule of the philosopher-king are usually examined in the light of the question of whether such a measure, as Socrates insists, is the one and only thing that could bring the just city into being, and so whether such a city run on rules that are explicitly meant to ignore consequences would be possible or loveable; and this is certainly a just mode of attack. On the other hand, this programme tends to ignore the other side of the problem: philosophy’s qualifications for governorship in the first place—and its own private troubles under all other governing plans. To ask whether philosophy can possibly rule, is not so much the narrow question of whether the philosopher could install himself into the ruling seat; but whether this philosophy will do what it says it will: if it will answer everything we hope of philosophy, and everything we expect out of a king. Philosophy in the Republic has to do a lot of work: it has to show itself to be not the practice of cranks, but the respectable, trustworthy practice of the pursuit of truth; it has to actually be in the possession of the truth, in order to make everything run smoothly.
HOW THE GUARDIANS GO ABOUT PHILOSOPHIZING
But what constitutes knowledge for the guardians? It is not a sort of godlike omniscience that is already in possession of every particular, and so every particular answer to a given problem? While Socrates’ images of true knowing are justly famous for their ability to inspire no less than stick in the memory, the question is complicated by the distance between Socrates’ modest description of his share in the business of philosophy (Phaedo 61c), and the guardians who are said to look on the light of the Good (518d). Of course, to really do justice to philosophy as described in Books VI and VII would require a longer road; but several elements stand out: the Good, the forms, and the commitment, first expressed at the end of Book V, to knowing only what always is (480a).
Though the goal of the evening’s conversation is Justice itself, the hunting guardians have a higher quarry: the Good, which stands above even justice and beauty in nobility and precedence. But this stratospheric peak comes with a rider: the Good is beyond being (509b); to this revelation, Glaucon shouts amusingly, “Apollo! What daimonic hyperbole!” Though such a principle might well have, as Glaucon also puts it, “perfectly seamless (ἀμήκανον) beauty . . . if it grants knowledge and truth, yet is more beautiful than these” (509a), it may come with too a high price for the lover of learning. If the guardians hunt for the Good, they will certainly never reach it, for what is beyond being is beyond knowledge: if knowledge is of that which always is (478a), the Good cannot properly be said to be.2 The hunt is perpetual; and as such, in danger of being vitiated. Despite being one of the most exalted images of philosophic knowing, this vision of the Good has drawbacks; though indeed, as readers are caught up in the fervor, such things often sink into the background.
The forms share an analogous danger: they are infamously separate, divorced from perception (511b–c); this poses a string of problems, not the least of which being, since they can’t account for motion or change in things, or be the being of an individual, the forms cannot account for the soul.3 To be sure, this is not a function required of them in this dialogue; here they have a higher purpose. Consider this: in Book V, once it has been established that philosophers will rule, Socrates declares that their next order of business is to say what philosophy is, from 474c to 480b. Socrates describes the passage as a somewhat lengthy argument (484a), and it’s rather divorced from what comes before and after it; yet it sets the tone and the ground rules for the philosophizing of the philosopher-kings. This is the argument where the forms first make their appearance in the Republic, at 479a, under the aegis of the Beautiful Itself. Likewise, this is where the initial distinctions between opinion and knowledge (478a), being, non-being and the hazy realm of what is in between, later named as becoming (479d), arise. The most important of these principles for our current purposes comes roughly at the center of this section, when Socrates ask Glaucon whether, when we know, we know something or nothing. Glaucon responds, “Something that is; how could something that is not be understood?” (477a) Well might Glaucon ask this. Socrates follows along with this: “Then have we sufficiently got this, even if we were to look at it from various angles, that what wholly is, is wholly knowable, while what is not in any way, is not knowable at all?” Glaucon responds that it is indeed sufficient. This principle may seem reasonable in the abstract, but it entails a limitation on knowledge that is quite extreme: first of all, if we only can thoroughly know what completely is, that means that anything less than that, anything changing or perceptible, is less than fully knowable. This includes both the natural realm and the human realm—even the political arena itself would be off limits, and worst of all, knowledge of ignorance: for knowing that one knows nothing is to know something is not. But the restriction doesn’t stop in Book V; what is not is off the table completely, and this is no small deprivation: the ascent to the sun begins with a prohibition against the knowledge of shadows and darkness itself. Socrates’ later images of the divided line, sun, and cave are more vivid, striking, and memorable than this passage, but they all depend upon this preference for pure being for their hierarchical structure, and there’s never any question of revising the position on non-being. Indeed, Socrates makes sure to get Adeimantus’ agreement as well to the notion that true philosophers are lovers of what is and the truth (501d), as the final refutation to his objections against philosophy as it’s customarily practiced. All in all, the philosophizing of the guardians is a cold, pure business; the light of the sun is not praised for its warmth. The argument at the end of Book V concludes with Socrates’ question: “Those who welcome gladly each thing itself that is must be called philosophers, and not lovers of opinion?” to which Glaucon responds, “Absolutely” (480a). It is this sort of philosopher that Socrates says should be put in charge of the state.
Now, although Socrates as lawgiver has instituted the rule of this sort of philosophy, such philosophizing does not perfectly remind us of Socrates’ own activities, even granting that the Forms are a favorite hobby-horse of his; this discrepancy forces us to acknowledge the depth of the strangeness in the way philosophy is officially practiced in the city in speech. First of all, the philosophers here are not only compelled to rule, they must first be compelled, in a sense, to get their first glimpse of the truth (519b): their whole soul and body must be turned around by outward redirection in order to get the first glimpse of the Good (518c–d). It is not slavish compulsion: Socrates takes care to show that while outside redirection is required, it is the redirection of real teaching, which is not forceful in the same way as political compulsion; such teachers, Socrates notes, do not “put sight into blind eyes” (518c); but it’s still more of a question of compulsion than one of desire.4
Furthermore, as Rosen points out, in the city in speech, everyone is a Platonist: there are no other schools of thought.5 And though the philosophers rule, there are checks and balances to their absolute knowledge, as I just noted: philosophy is limited in what it can know, and how such can be known; there is no cheerful contemplation of Dasein on a free afternoon.6 Indeed, this separation exacerbates the distance between the proper activity of a philosopher and the ruling he will be compelled to do.7 But the biggest oddity of all is that in the city in speech, the philosophers do not philosophize out of eros for wisdom; this separates the guardians’ philosophy from Socrates’ avocations most distinctly, since he is the practitioner of the erotic art (Phaedrus 257a); and it vitiates the promise of wisdom from those educated in such a manner. This is consistent with Socrates’ prohibition of the is not, since eros is born not only from plenty but from lack (Symposium 203b). Now, I argued in chapter 3 that eros is present in a limited way among the guardian class, as signified by the addition of the hunt to the otherwise city-bound guardian duties; but such a private hint of eros—especially when coupled with the thumotic desire for victorious hunting—is not the same thing as a public acknowledgement of its role and power. The guardians would be likewise bereft of more than this inward orientation; again, even though all souls seek the Good, outside agency is required to turn them around to the actual sight of the sunlit realms. Likewise, while the hunt is a leisurely event that takes place outside of the city in the forest and mountains, in all of Socrates’ images of the guardian’s way of knowing, there’s never any question of an exploration of the natural realm—there’s simply the firelit cave with its ambiguous image-bearers, and the realm of pure light.8 In short, the philosophy of the guardians is about as tame sort of philosophizing that one can well achieve; they are bred by the city, limited in their philosophic grasp, all belong to the same school of thought, and are not given to erotic pursuits. Why does Socrates legislate for the rule of a philosophy that would lack his own knowledge of erotics?
Socrates has accomplished one thing at least: he has painted a picture of a philosophy that definitely would be unwilling to rule. Glaucon calls attention to the extent of the problem before Socrates points it out: the guardians will consider their ruling activities as far less worthy than their philosophizing (519d). But the unwillingness to rule is one of the strongest reasons to be persuaded that philosophy is qualified for the office; and Socrates reminds Glaucon that the philosophers have no call to refuse, since the city has bred them like king bees to preside over the hive (520b). If rule must be courted by non-lovers (521b), then Socrates has found a genos of people who have some claim to the possession of this crucial qualification, without which there is no solution to the city’s problems. Despite the otherworldliness of the guardians, they do look at least unworldly; the philosophical ethos of the guardians has a plausibility to it, that Socrates very much needs for his project of the promotion of philosophy’s rule. Socrates needs to conceal philosophy’s desires, or at least the strength and variety of them, in order to make its rule look reasonable. Our willingness to entertain the notion that philosophy could rule a city rests on the tameness of such guardians—and by entertain I mean, as a baseline, to consider it for the space of time required to read about it, and not throw the book down in disgust. Such unworldliness is part of Plato’s appeal to the landed and educated gentry, or those who sympathize with such, as in the case of the Oxford idealists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.9 There is no generally plausible or average-reader-friendly way to argue for erotic philosopher-kings, despite the persuasiveness of philosophy as something desirous to know.
Aside from their own cavils at the philosophizing of the guardians, the reader learns of the limitations of the tame guardians from Socrates himself. In Book VI, in the course of answering Adeimantus’ objection that most philosophers one hears of are cranks, scoundrels, or useless (487d), Socrates permits himself to describe how philosophy comes about, not just for the city in speech, but in any city at any time (496b–c). Indeed, the city in speech is only vaguely on the horizon, and the more ordinary, fevered problems of ordinary cities are back in force.10 It’s in this context of defense that Socrates speaks of philosophy as the orphaned virgin, unwed and abandoned by her friends (495c); getting more and more worked up, he speaks of the “slur on philosophy that has taken hold, and has done so unjustly” (497a). A moment later, he says to Adeimantus: “Since you’re here with me, you will observe my bold-heartedness (προθυμίαν). Behold how spiritedly (προθύμως) and recklessly (παρακινδυνευτικῶς) I’m now going to say, it’s necessary for a city to take up [philosophy] in a complete reverse of the way it does now” (497e). Adeimantus agrees with him: “How truly do you seem to me to speak spiritedly, Socrates” (498c). What is the cause of all this spirited eagerness from Socrates? The reason comes right after this, in his softened restatement of the proposal for philosophy’s rule: no city or polity or even a single man, he says, will reach fulfillment unless the few living philosophers who are not scoundrels pay heed to the city, or a “true erotic desire for true philosophy” comes over kings or the sons of kings (499b). Socrates allows himself to speak boldly, “forced by the truth,” on behalf of a kind of philosophy different than that of the guardians of the city in speech: a philosophy that resembles the erotic love of wisdom that Socrates speaks so eloquently about on other occasions. Socrates can’t conceal, while temporarily free of the graceful fiction of the city in speech, his preference for philosophy in a different guise, where eros can be praised instead of blamed.
And here in Book VI, Socrates does more than simply praise true eros for wisdom: he speaks of defense, dishonor, slur, abandonment; his language is of spirit leaping to the rescue of its beloved. The weapon employed is truth itself: truth must lead the potential philosopher, and it must be sought for “always and in everything,” or else the seeker will be “a faker who has no part in true philosophy in any way” (490a); and when “Truth was the leader, I don’t suppose we’d ever declare that a chorus of evils follows it” (490c). Of course, the irony of specifically spirited defense on behalf of eros should not be lost on us; the more so, since in these passages it becomes clear that Socrates doubts whether the guardians back in the city in speech will ever really philosophize adequately. Socrates notes at 497d that there is a need for someone as wise as the original lawgiver to be always in the city, but he purposefully sidesteps the question of whether the city they’ve designed is the same as one which would possess such a person. But although it is by means of a spirited defense, Socrates nevertheless reveals his preference for erotic philosophy in the Republic itself, even as he proposes that a more thumotic philosophy should rule.
To be sure, Socrates later finds himself laughable when he finally goes too far in his spiritedness: “… because I was looking at Philosophy while I spoke, and I saw her spattered with mud, and it was so wrong, and I seemed to myself to be moved to passion (ἀγανακτήσας), as if wild with anger, and had my say too seriously about the people responsible” (536c). Glaucon, in contrast to his brother, is ready to let Socrates off the hook for this charge, but Socrates responds that he indeed manifested this quality: while the reader might well wish to preserve Socrates from any hint of the thumotic, Socrates insists that he “seems so to himself;” the same sort of way he speaks of all the observations he makes about the state of his interlocutors that evening (349a, 548e). And indeed, there is Adeimantus’ earlier evidence that Socrates was speaking thumotically (498c); Adeimantus is always of the lookout for overweening spirit, as when he accuses Glaucon of a love of victory (548d). This moment of anger is important precisely because it does provide a rare insight into Socrates’ internal state: even Socrates is capable of getting angry, on such an important topic as the proper lovers of philosophy—even Socrates displays philosophy’s thumotic desire to rule; a reminder to all other mortals to take care. This is not to say a thumotic free-for-all is appropriate; Socrates’ blame of himself in this instance alone seems to imply that ultimately, anger against those who “drown philosophy in ridicule” would be going too fair. Again, as Socrates remarked at the beginning of Book V, it would be childish to fear being laughed at (451a).11 On the other hand, a vindication of how philosophy would flourish with proper lovers, and a defense against those who would dishonor it by lumping all its suitors together, is not at all unjustified—at least among friends.
Although Socrates records this particular instance as a transgression, he ultimately gives himself a long rope in all this spiritedness, allowing many further bold words to be spoken. As before, there are erotic concerns at stake: here, Socrates lets his desire to speak of the true suitors of philosophy triumphing over the unworthy run wild, and can’t resist putting the upstarts—his example is a short bald blacksmith—in their place (495e). Socrates wants the absolute best for philosophy: angry at the way things usually turn out, he thinks things should be arranged better. And lest the reader be too concerned at Socrates’ manifestation of thumos, we should recall what we’ve gained from his honesty; surely we are more than willing, perhaps even grateful, as lovers of philosophy, to hear more of the truth of true erotic philosophy in the record of this evening’s conversation about justice; if Socrates had restrained himself, we would be confined to tame praise of the philosophy of the guardians merely, and its prejudice in favor of the thumos. But this strange dramatization of Socrates’ willingness to display his affection for true philosophy, is more than just an opportunity to remind the reader of what’s missing from the dialogue; it’s also dramatically necessary that Socrates, as a lover of philosophy, to reveal his underlying commitment to philosophy’s preeminence, honor, and right to the best of what the city has to offer: in short, it’s important that Socrates display the desire of philosophy, under certain circumstances, to rule—because not to do so would be to falsify the nature of the desire to know.
There is a strange disharmony in the inner constitution of the lover of philosophy: a desire not to rule, and yet to rule. The desire not to rule is the more familiar: those who have seen the Good wish to stay there and not come down among the prisoners (519d), because they believe they live in the Isles of the Blessed while still living (519c); only by representing it to these men that it is a necessary thing to return (520c), and that they owe it to the city that raised them on purpose to philosophize to help it out (520b) are they brought, grudgingly, to rule. If philosophy is the greatest pleasure, who would wish to leave off, for any extraneous purpose? The wish, nevertheless, to rule in some way is less familiar, but no less present; Socrates’ spirited defense of true philosophy against the all-too-just charge of being a genos peopled by cranks and scoundrels, is one of the more overweening examples, but we experience something like this concretely, in the pleasure we receive when we witness Socrates refute someone like Ion or Euthyphro; in those dialogues, the joke is squarely at the expense of the thoughtless. Or, to put it a different way: philosophy minds the business of all; and so would seem qualified, if truthful, to tell everyone what to do; and in the pride of its strength—that is, in pride of the truth—it already has thoughts on just what everyone ought to do instead.12 Although the truth is the private possession of no one, the lover of philosophy does feel pride on its behalf—and this is proper pride—but with this pride is the absolute conviction of its universality for all others, whether or not they know it—in short, a conviction of its absolute/ultimate dominion. While the truth is no one’s private possession, it is still universal; and even benevolent tyranny is tyranny.13 And so, on the everyday, human level, we regularly feel the wish for forethought to triumph over ignorance, and this is a sign of both the presence and the pervasiveness of this phenomenon.14 Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that when Socrates contends that the being of philosophy is to know what is, as I considered above, Socrates makes a continental divide between knowledge and opinion. He even gives them the questionable merit of separate faculties (478a); opinion has to be placed as opposed to knowledge as possible, because in a sense, it is the enemy. Likewise, the lover of sights or arts is “on one side,” and the philosophers are “on the other side” (476a–b); knowledge “surpasses” (ὑπερβαίνουσα) opinion in clarity (478c); this language is an excellent example of the notion that thumoeidetic analysis makes for strange categorical bedfellows, for it’s the thumos that provides the heat, the harshness, and the clarity of the division.15
Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying this native tendency is good from start to finish, or present equally and in the same way for all members of the genos, or even all bad; but it is bred in the bone, and at once something to be on guard against, and yet to cherish.16 Consider this: if the philosopher did not love truth in this way—who would? If truth is a human phenomenon, different from being and beings, in some sense truth needs a human champion in order to exist at all.17 And so, I would argue that there is a philosophic indignation, just as there is a philosophic eros; while true eros might have more divine potential for wisdom than thumos in that it gives us the end, it’s not as though eros is any more trustworthy than thumos: for we are capable of desiring things that are bad for us even when we already know they are bad, despite what Socrates says at parties.
Socrates’ change of subject in Book I from the merits of old age combined with money to justice proper, is another instance of just this sort of revolutionary spirit. While pressing homeward from the festival of Bendis, Socrates is shanghaied with playful force to the house of Cephalus; impatient with Cephalus’ obtuse urbanity, Socrates commits an act of nearly outright rudeness—I say nearly, because anyone who’s hosted Socrates before must know it’s likely the conversation will end up in philosophy—and pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of politeness and exchange of anecdote into a place where Socrates, and not his host, is at home; the conversation is only saved by the goodwill and the rather more agile urbanity of Polemarchus. But although justice becomes the topic of conversation for quite a while, even this regime will ultimately give way; and it’s no coincidence that eventually the conversation turns to philosophy, even beyond its sponsorship as the solution to the just city.
But all these things pale in comparison to Socrates’ proposal of philosopher-kings: announced in the very center of the dialogue, it is the circumstance that most exemplifies the desire of philosophy to rule in the dialogue as a whole. Socrates’ pronouncement seems to come from nowhere: dramatically speaking, it’s unexpected, since it’s not at all what was requested by his interlocutors. Indeed, what human being could even think up, let alone argue for, such an outlandish suggestion—other than that daimonic man? On the other hand, once proposed, philosophy is willing enough to consider itself qualified, if not ultimately likely to obtain rule: as I argued above, Socrates argues that philosophy is knowledge of what is, and all other exercises of apparent knowing possess only shadows (480a); but the step from such hard and fast knowledge as a qualification to rule does not receive a lengthy argument. Socrates presents it as fairly uncontroversial that those who have sharp sight rather than blindness, those who have knowledge of what is, would be the best for the ruler to possess, with the small addition that they will also have some experience as well (4484b–d). Glaucon does express hesitation that the guardians will have enough experience (“so long as they are not left behind in other respects,” 784d); this hesitation is largely done away with in Glaucon’s mind over the course of the next few pages; but this is just the argument that makes Adeimantus speak up with his objections about cranks, scoundrels, and useless men (487b). The reader is never in a place to seriously question the efficacy of philosophy’s peculiar knowledge in ruling; and while Adeimantus does object to the current of Socrates’ argument, his worry about cranks, scoundrels, and useless men still leaves open the possibility that the merely useless man could be turned to use.18 Glaucon’s willingness at this point to trust Socrates’ judgment in the question of rule, despite some slight hesitation over the question of experience, sets the stage for the reader’s momentary willingness to find the measure plausible; we are in Socrates’ hands at this point in the dialogue, and only he knows what will happen next. But though it’s important we possess this fleeting acceptance, it should not distract us from the revolutionary action that has just taken place. When the question of who should rule was first carefully introduced, Socrates remarks, “By Zeus, it’s no trivial thing we’re calling down as a curse on ourselves” (374e); as I argued before, the question of who should rule is one that of itself inspires deep interest and even immediate calculation: the bare content of the proposal of the Third Wave is alarming in its novel and total allotment of rule to a strange genos. To be sure, it’s been argued that Socrates’ action in the Republic is to defend philosophy, and make an apology for it, a better one than his public defense speech.19 And certainly philosophy’s reputation is in an important sense ameliorated by what takes place that evening. But the truth is, more than amelioration is at work: Socrates proposes nothing less than the outright, public rule not just of wise men, but philosophers in truth. And make no mistake, Socrates’ spirited actions remind us that this tendency to wish for philosophy to rule is not just a characteristic of thumotic guardians, but of the daimonic Socrates as well.20 Perhaps it seems impious to suggest that Socrates himself is capable of such—but that it would seem even impious, would rather suggest our spirited attachment to the image of selfless philosophy.
Socrates’ proposal that philosophers should rule in the city to rid humankind from evils is the perfect dialogic revenge. Considering his enforced presence in the conversation at Cephalus’ house, it was no doubt satisfying to turn the conversation to philosophic consideration of justice, but this is still a subtle pleasure; moreover, the usurpation remains partly concealed by the fabric of social intercourse. But in Book V, Socrates revenges himself with a total reversal of the ordinary hierarchy of power: he declares not merely that philosophers should be consulted in the forming of the city or in questions of justice, but that they should rule as the final authority in the city. Philosophers ought to rule outright: they ought to rule publicly in full recognition of their role as philosophers. In a sense, by this act, Socrates is declaring that he himself, and those such as he, should be the true ruler of both the just city and everything else you can think of. Heretofore, Socrates’ role as philosophic lawgiver was only implicit, as he voiced and named the laws in Books II–IV; this demand for public recognition of what was already quietly the case is as revealing as it is public.21 It’s dramatically necessary that Socrates, on his own dialogic authority, publicly declare that philosophy should rule, because only then does Socrates display the truth of philosophy’s desire to rule. This is the action of Socrates’ argument for the rule of philosophers: his action of taking up the rule displays the hidden desire of philosophy to rule. Now, this is not to say that Socrates commits this deed without genuine interest in solving the problems that people have both in living with others, and trying to live with themselves. But if rule can only be courted by non-lovers (521b), this raises a serious doubt as to the ultimate legitimacy of philosophy’s kingship.
FALLING INTO HOLES WHILE LOOKING AT STARS
This revealing action shows the most vexed source of the tension between philosophy and the city: the philosopher’s sense not only that he knows better about the city than the city itself, but his reluctance to leave the city and its wrongheadedness alone—and more than reluctance, his outright desire to publicly mind the business of every other citizen on behalf of the truth itself; in short, his desire to rule. If it is Socrates who founds political philosophy, in his action of assigning rule to philosophy, he prefigures everything praiseworthy and troubling about the new discipline. When alerted to this fact by the practice of political philosophy, the city understandably becomes angry; it senses not an otherworldly resident on the fringes, but a direct rival to its proper business. The city is tempted to put the philosopher to death, because it senses a rival—and the danger is pressing because the rival is a legitimate one. The city is alarmed not merely because it is told that it has opinion, not knowledge, and so is necessarily dependent on its ancestral opinions; though of course it is so alarmed, the more so when such pronouncements are made publicly. But more than this, the city senses a sort of pride on the philosopher’s part in something more than opinion, an even warlike pride; and the city suspects the philosopher of being no better than its own flawed self—that philosophy’s strident claims for the necessity of its radical removal and distance from ordinary human life promises no better truths than someone who remains committed wholly to the city. If philosophy too is capable of vehemence in that it seems to have no better claim to rule than the city’s imperfect one—and very likely a worse one, given its notorious penchant for what looks to be abstract. Thoughtful citizens admit the flaws of the city in private; but resent it when philosophy seems to overstep itself, offering advice that announces itself as the unassailable crown of wisdom. The city justly recognizes that philosophy is—a busybody.
Socrates officially paints his proposal as likely to provoke a wave of laughter (473c), but Glaucon, though himself willing to listen calmly, speaks out about the probability of men rushing at Socrates with weapons (473e); Socrates lets us know he takes such anger seriously. He couches his portrait of philosophy as knowing what is as something that surely wouldn’t provoke angry responses (480a); he finally disarms Adeimantus’ crucial objections by insisting on the nature of the philosopher as one who is a lover of what is, of the truth, and is best (502a). The very thing that causes the tension has become the means of rehabilitating the philosopher; the love of truth is both the qualification and the disqualification to rule. The reality and justice of such anger is why Socrates takes care to conceal the desire of philosophy to rule, by making an image of non-erotic philosophers who must be dragged away from their favorite work to rule reluctantly over the citizens. But as I argued above, Socrates can’t conceal this desire entirely, and in his spirited defense of true erotic philosophy (499b) against those who would drown it in ridicule (536b), he lets us see what real philosophy looks like in its unconcealed partisanship for itself—both the appeal of such, because when the subject is philosophy itself we need to hear the truth about its erotic attachment, since this is a major reason to regard its claim to truth as legitimate; and the attendant danger of becoming overly vehement on its own behalf. With his proposal that philosophy should rule, Socrates indicts himself, and even his own peculiar attempt to philosophize about the human things by means of accounts (Phaedo 99d); as I argued above, even Socrates seems too vehement, too tyrannical to himself, and even knowledge of ignorance wishes to defend itself as having something to say.
Of course, it’s worth noting that while the city is right to be suspicious of the philosopher, the city’s conscience isn’t entirely clean. The city announces itself, and needs to announce itself as the residence of tame men, men who are no longer quite the same as other animals. It exists and does its work, however, as an expression and an attempt to satisfy our native pleonexia, our desire for more, that is not tame; and a sign of the truth of this is its devotion to the hunt and to war. The city can’t afford to be overly honest about its dependence on a living tension between wildness and civilization; its dependence on war even as it announces itself as the champion of peace; its preference for and praise of its citizens who are such by no extraordinary merit, but by accident of birth; and its exclusion of all who are accidentally not born there.22 The city can’t afford to publicly listen when philosophy announces the city’s limitations; and so while its anger against the philosopher is in part justified by the nature of the philosopher’s attachment to truth, the necessity of its dishonesty shows that there’s something disingenuous about the way the city carries on the quarrel. The city and philosophy are mutually responsible for the tension between them—though the city’s role, perhaps, is less forgivable.
But there is a tragic flaw in philosophy’s heroic plan to save us from ignorance and all human ills, and the root of the problem is its love of pure truth, of heavenly wisdom rather than the human variety. Socrates claims truth will solve all problems: “if truth leads the way, I don’t suppose we’d ever declare it’s followed by a chorus of evils” (490c); but this is not quite true. The love of the pure light of pure truth is not a love of human things but of divine; the lover of truth finds himself caught in the apparent dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete, the universal and particular; and to state it baldly, this love tempts him to favor what is universal and abstract; or even to confuse what is ultimately still wrongheadedly universal for something that is the right dialectical expression of both the universal and particular.23 I argued above that we needed to account for not only the anger of serious citizens committed to the prosecution of political things, but their laughter as well; this tendency inherent in the proper love of truth leads the philosopher to appear ridiculous—as something other than a serious human being. When Socrates displays the desire of philosophy to rule with his momentary vehemence against the all-too-frequent pursuit of philosophy by those unworthy of her, Socrates describes himself as laughable (γελοῖον, 536b), if not absolutely ridiculous (καταγέλαστος). On Socrates’ own authority, when this desire to rule overreaches itself, it looks foolish. It’s not merely funny that Thales, who does not speak on political matters, would fall into a hole while looking up at the stars, though his moment of abstraction is indeed funny. It’s funny that Socrates, that lover of philosophy, who all too eagerly wants the best things for philosophy possible, even after having recommended the happy ending of the rule of philosophy, and the organization of all civic things for philosophy’s benefit, would still become incensed at the paltry, customary state of the beloved. Only desire to rule, over and above the limitations of the city, can account for the humor of this; because if philosophy is simply right and the city simply wrong, well, there’s nothing funny about that. Philosophy’s rule in that case would be ultimately desirable, if simply unfeasible—but in that scenario, the Third Wave would not participate in the humor of Book V’s triad, as we nevertheless know that it does. Socrates’ proposal for the rule of philosophy, at the heart of the conversation of the Republic, not only acts as an apology for his activities, or presents his second sailing into political things, but dramatizes the danger involved for philosophy as a rival claimant to the throne of the city. Socrates graciously and beautifully allows us to see, at his expense, that such a proposal is deeply, deeply funny.24 Indeed, the fact that we the readers can find this potential overreach of philosophy to be funny, rather than simply dangerous, displays the hope that philosophy, or the human being, could eventually find for itself some better wisdom.
Now, Socrates does indeed make a case for the usefulness of the theoretic in the practical realm as practical, when he argues that “anyone who’s going to act thoughtfully either in private or in public needs to have sight” of the Good, the highest source and cause (517c); and it is a sign of his knowledge of erotics that he manages to make it look compelling. Eva Brann speaks of “a knowledge so alive and rich that it goes immediately over into action without leaving room for the mediation of a wavering or perverse will”; this comes about when “our souls are alight with, are filled with, what truly is.”25 Now, on this argument, there’s no difference at the highest level between the theoretic and practical knowing; and Socrates’ proposal is in some sense asymptotic. But whatever the truth of things at the far end of the world, there is still the problem of the unsettling, exciting effect of even a little theory on the feckless soul. Socrates conceals that the tendency of the theoretic is to cut a tyrannical swathe through the practical details of a state of affairs, to arrange the details in the image of its theory; expressed another way, the tendency of philosophy, and not just political philosophy, is to become ideology, a fixed code of true things that gives no quarter.26 He conceals this by setting the Good as the highest thing the philosopher must look to, higher than being—the strangest of hierarchies—and a different sort of thing from the One; and this ranking allows the highest theoretic knowledge to look practical. It describes the highest theoretic knowledge of the cosmos as of immediate practical efficacy; indeed, the only thing that makes practice efficacious (517c). He reveals, however, the problematic nature of this notion by placing the Good beyond the realm of what would actually be knowable, that is, beyond what is. If the source of our good action is unknowable, how could we hope to contemplate it to ameliorate our vision of the world? Nor would the promotion of the practice of a more publicly erotic philosophy get Socrates’ argument for philosophy’s better wisdom off the hook; its wildness at once announces its disqualification from promoting the tameness that the city requires, if only because of the real danger of its lack of sympathy for what looks, to erotic philosophy, to be merely tame. Again, Socrates portrays himself as a case in point of the dangers of this tendency; and his lawgiving has a character that is at once less forgiving and less practical than the Athenian Stranger’s, whose commitment to the rule of law that imitates the gods (Laws 716c), instead of philosophy, explicitly makes for more moderate laws for its citizens—though indeed, has its own fatal dependence on philosophy.27 As I will argue in the following chapter, Socrates’ specific plans for women to rule and philosophize are a crucial sign of the danger of Socrates’ own idiosyncratic lawgiving.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE RULE OF PHILOSOPHY
Socrates’ third proposal in Book V of Republic is deeply problematic: it would not be good for the city if its official rulers were philosophers; there would be no end to human evils, and in fact, certain evils threaten all the worse. The city is a place where people in all their humanity make their home; should philosophers rule as such there, their commitments to sources beyond the human realm, as well as to eros, would lead them to enact monstrous things and become monstrous themselves. Socrates gives us a sign of this, when he suggests at the end of Book VII that the only way to first bring about the rule of philosophers would be to send everyone over the age of ten “out into the countryside” (541a).28 Such an enactment is not merely preposterous. Again, the problem with the city in speech is not only that a too-strong commitment to justice is at work—though it is that—but also a willingness to do whatever is best for philosophy at the expense of ordinary human life, brought on by the intoxicating principle of giving free reign to philosophy’s love of truth, which ought to rule.29 A sign of the difference between these two ruling desires, is that while the pursuit of perfect justice radically restricts the purview of the poets, after it becomes clear that philosophers themselves would be in charge of the city, the poets are outlawed entirely: Stanley Rosen remarks that Socrates has a “need to be unjust to philosophy’s greatest rival.”30 Philosophy, in its desire to rule in perfect truth, enacts stricter control over the republic of letters, and what may rival it in wisdom, than even the desire for justice without regard for consequences. The city ruled by philosophers stands in danger of becoming no longer recognizably human, in the same sense that the city of pigs was not recognizable as a desirable place to live; neither extreme is reasonable. Socrates insists, in the last moments of his discussion of the philosophic education, that the city as described and as ruled by philosophers is just barely possible (540d); and perhaps he is telling the truth, since the possibility that a political ideology, in its belief in its own wisdom and right to rule, could instigate a successful revolution on its behalf, should it be able to convince warriors to back it, is hardly an unfamiliar sight. But this final grotesque transformation of philosophy into ideology through an indulgence of this underlying belief is a revealing one: whether or not such a city is possible, it is not desirable.31 Ideology is not a desirable ruler, because it has a commitment to theory over practice; it admits no measures that go against its theoretic prepossessions.
Now, possibility, in itself, is a tricky notion. At one extreme there is bare conceivability, and at the other is Aristotle’s strongest example of unshakable nature, the stone that can’t be taught other than to fall (Nic. Eth. II.1). The trouble is that cities, in all their variety, fall in between these two extremes, and man is the animal capable of anything—even the worst things. Arguments among human beings about whether some collection of laws is really possible, in any sense, will never cease to take place; and we should note that the same sort of endless conversation is just as inevitable for Aristotle’s city ruled by gentlemen, and the Athenian Stranger’s city ruled by law aspiring to the divine; or any outlandish city described by Herodotus. But leaving such conversations to the side, as pleasant as they are in the right company, the more interesting human problem is that participants in such talk are known to grow frustrated with discussion, pick up their weapons, and attempt to enact their own such scheme, letting the details of the possible fall as they may. A perfect city, hazily conceived, is indeed in some important sense possible, because of the love for the truth that sets all men free, which philosophy by right encourages, leads them to think ideology fitly usurps the current state of affairs. It is this tendency, how it arises and whether it may be educated, that is the most pressing question, and it is what Plato’s art both reveals and seeks to doctor.
Now, to say that the city in speech of the Republic is not desirable, is not to discount that something like wisdom is just what the city, any city, stands in need of. The risibility of the Republic’s city in speech has to be weighed alongside its ability to appeal and inspirit: why is it nevertheless tempting to give rule to the philosopher? Many readers leave the book with something like an impossible wish, not merely that their internal constitutions be ordered, but that the polis could see a little more philosophy; and this is no less the work of the book, than the working out of our sense of what is off about the city in speech. But in the Platonic corpus, the city of Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, is the funny one; the Athenian Stranger’s city is tamely boring. As Aristotle notes, there is a temptation on the part of those who speak about political matters toward thinking of what could be best, rather than what suits any particular polity (Politics 1288b35); it ought to go without saying, though of course it doesn’t, that this is a modern temptation no less than an ancient one. That Plato has artfully displayed the humor of this particular human temptation, is the blessed dramatic achievement. Human beings want to live in human cities, not the unrecognizable locales constructed by philosophers who turn their eyes to human things; and it is right that it should be so. The Republic displays for us that the solution to all human ills is not to put the philosophers in charge, into outright, public political rule—however charmingly they make the argument, or however much we as lovers of philosophy might desire it to be so; or however much we might desire an end to human ills. In Socrates’ image, the eyes of those returned to the cave from the sight of the Good are filled with darkness, and they appear ridiculous to those standing by (517d); the other side of this is to learn to find our own theorizing selves, if not ridiculous, at the least, humorous enough.
NOTES
1.See Strauss, CM, 125; Bloom, IE, 468; and Rosen, PRS, 9.
2.See Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra: “this solution is bought at the price of the limits which are set for the logos” (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 99. See also Brann’s discussion of the importance, as well as difficulty of conveying, Plato’s unwritten teachings on the One (“Music of the Republic,” 205–6).
3.Aristotle is very witty on the inadequacy of “participation” as the saving link in Metaphysics I.9.
4.Contra Strauss, CM, 128.
5.Rosen, PRS, 391.
6.Heidegger’s description of the thing that stays for a while, and in its presencing draws together the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, is precisely what the guardians are not to see (“The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 171–2).
7.Rosen, PRS, 284.
8.Contra Strauss, CM, 125; and Benardete, SSS, 175; but see Rosen, PRS, 275.
9.See Melissa Lane, Plato’s Progeny, 97–108.
10.See Page, “Polemarchus,” 267n42.
11.See Michael Davis, “Spirit of Ideas,” 31.
12.Strauss, CM, 57.
13.Contra Strauss, CM, 115.
14.Rosen, PRS, 229.
15.See Davis, “Spirit of Ideas,” 24; and Burger, “The Thumotic and Erotic Soul,” 66.
16.Rosen, PRS, 166. Contra Strauss, CM, 110-11.
17.Consider Robert Sokolowski’s account of man as the “agent of truth” (Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–4).
18.Contra Strauss, Natural Right, 140–43.
19.Bloom, IE, 307.
20.Page, “Polemarchus,” 248–9.
21.Rosen, PRS, 87, 167.
22.See Strauss, Natural Right, 104.
23.See Rosen, PRS, 396. I will add that in this category falls Bloom’s odd contention that philosophy is best understood as stripping, in a nod to the female guardians’ disrobement: “souls, in order to know, must strip away the conventions which cover their nature” (IE, 382; see also Berg, “The ‘Woman Drama,’” 56). This seems unnecessarily dichotomous, and ignores philosophy’s need to understand nature in dynamic relation to custom; Benardete has a more subtle reading of the relation when he argues that law, in a sense, reveals Being (see Ronna Burger’s exegesis in “Definitional Law in the Bible,” 9). Whereas, I will note that it is Kant who shares this affinity for philosophy as stripping: “To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality stripped of all admixture of what is sensuous” (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), 34n19). Nietzsche, by contrast, in the “Preface” to The Gay Science, speaks against the desire to “truth at any cost” that demands unveiling and uncovering what is “hidden for good reasons,” such as the “riddles and iridescent uncertainties of nature” (trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974,) 38); later, in aphorism §352, he remarks that Europeans fear their nakedness not from shame at body, but from shame at their mediocrity and weakness: “it is precisely as tame animals that we are a shameful sight, and in need of moral disguise” (295). I fear that Bloom has fallen into Kant’s trap, for the reasons Nietzsche details.
24.Contra Rosen, who considers that the joke is on Socrates without his participation, and that this is Socrates’ actual best solution to the just city, and the best one (PRS, 8–9); in Rosen’s version, the ironist has to be only Plato.
25.Music of the Republic, 331.
26.Rosen, PRS, 6, 229, 394.
27.For the paradox of the Laws’ relation to philosophy, see Strauss (The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 14, 185–6). For its commitment to moderation, see Laws 716c.
28.Rosen is eloquent on the ugliness of this plan: “Plato, Strauss, and Political Philosophy: An Interview with Stanley Rosen,” Diotima II, no. 1 (Spring 2001): http://college.holycross.edu/diotima/n1v2/rosen.htm (accessed April 15, 2015). Heidegger's life, for instance, is a memorial to the absurdity of philosopher-kings; likewise, the blindness of such eyes is why Plato tried to link philosophy to study of city in the first place; consider also Richard Velkley discussion of what Strauss considered lacking about Heidegger’s understanding of the tyrant (Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 110–118).
29.Rosen, PRS, 9.
30.PRS, 369.
31.Contra Strauss, CM, 127; Natural Right, 141; for Strauss there is no essential reason why the truly wise should rule. I will note that Michael Kochin’s contention that if the city is meant to be satirical, then one can’t learn anything of practical value from it, is worth considering but not quite right: the Republic engenders equally endless conversation about all of Socrates’ practical details, as well as his shockingly accurate understanding of the degenerate regimes, to great practical benefit—as well as opening up the larger point about possibility and ideology (Gender and Rhetoric, 82). Kochin appears to share Strauss’ sense that the wisdom of the guardians’, as well as Socrates, is simply correct about whatever it would be correct for the city to do, if possible, even if there are insuperable problems to its enactment (ibid., 128–9).