4TH CENTURY BC
The Republic, written around 360 BC, set out Plato’s ideas about justice and goodness, and how they could best be reflected in an ideal society. While his prescriptions for a city-state run by all-powerful philosopher-kings have yielded little practical application, his ideas about gaining enlightenment and practising goodness offered ethical guidelines for living. In particular, Plato’s wider contrast between an imperfect, changeable physical world of mortal bodies and a permanent, immaterial realm of perfect forms and immortal souls exerted a significant influence on the development of both Christianity and Islam – and on Western philosophy generally.
Plato was born into one of the leading families of Athens in either 428 or 427 BC, during the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and her allies. His thoughts about justice may well have been sharpened by two events: his personal experience of oppressive government under the brief rule of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ installed by the victorious Spartans in 404 BC; and in 399 BC the execution (enforced suicide by hemlock) of his close friend and mentor Socrates, by the democratic politicians who followed the Tyrants.
After the death of Socrates, Plato left Athens and is believed to have spent several years travelling in Greece, Egypt and Italy. After returning to the city, he founded an academy to train aspiring politicians around 387 BC, where astronomy, ethics, biology, geometry and rhetoric could be taught. He spent the rest of his life in teaching and research; one of his pupils, and later one of his teaching colleagues, was the philosopher Aristotle. Another pupil was Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse, in whom Plato made some efforts to inculcate his concepts of philosopher-kingship during the 360s.
Scholars are confident that all of Plato’s works have survived. Apart from the Republic and epistles – some of doubtful authenticity – he also wrote a famous account of the trial of Socrates, the Apology, along with a number of other dialogues exploring the nature of knowledge, belief, perception and reality. In the later dialogue, Laws, he returned to the Republic’s central theme of government. The Republic itself is one of a series of dialogues in which Plato lays out his philosophical ideas as a conversation among several characters. These often feature ‘Socrates’, a sign that Plato regarded himself as an intellectual heir to his great predecessor. In the Republic, the Socrates character tries to explain to Glaucon, a young Athenian who has been quizzing him about justice, that the concept means finding what is ‘good’ and acting in accordance with it. Their conversation is interrupted by Thrasymachus, a wandering intellectual who argues that justice is nothing more than the exertion of strength, and that there is no such thing as ‘goodness’.
Socrates sidesteps Thrasymachus’s challenge, likening the concept of the ‘good’ to the light given by the sun, and he goes on to describe an ideal city where there is no private property, where wives and children are held in common, and where everything is sacrificed to the common good. The population, made up of foreign slaves, auxiliaries (soldiers, police and government officials) and the mass of workers and merchants, is controlled by learned rulers – philosophers – who know what is good.
While the Republic elaborates a rationalist philosophy of an ideal society, its form – as a dramatic and philosophical dialogue, rather than a political treatise – means there are still arguments over whether its suggestions were intended as realistic proposals for governing an actual state. Republic, itself, is a later title for the dialogue, from the Roman orator-politician Cicero some 250 years after Plato: it does not accurately represent Plato’s Greek word politeia, which means ‘system of government’ or ‘rights of citizenship’.
Certainly, the city-state that the Socrates character describes has little to do with any kind of elective, participatory republicanism as it might be understood today: censorship is strict, invalids may be left to die, and those regarded as irredeemably corrupt are to be executed. Rather, a small group of people holds power, supposedly for the sake of the majority. The philosopher-rulers and their auxiliaries (collectively referred to as the Guardians) have a harsh, austere lifestyle, with strict mental and physical training regimes, and their position of authority is reinforced by the spreading of what the Socrates character calls a ‘noble lie’ – that the gods have made them physically different from the lower classes.
They have, though, been educated so that they can see through the mental and sensory obstacles that clutter human minds to perceive truth, justice, beauty and reality – to use Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, they are the citizens who have escaped the darkness and been taken into the light. And it is their enlightenment that qualifies them to rule.
Plato’s conception of justice has nothing to do with modern ideas of equality. On the contrary, he says that the Guardians of his republic will be happier and more privileged than the rest of the population. But his aim, he says in this extract, is the happiness of the state as a whole – and that will best be achieved by everyone knowing his place.
Our guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but … our aim in founding the state was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a state which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered state injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier.
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK 4, TRANSLATED BY BENJAMIN JOWETT, 1892
In this stress on enlightenment, Plato was offering Greek society a quite different notion of education from that which they were used to. For Greeks of the 4th century BC, memorizing the great poetic works of Homer was the backbone of learning; for Plato, famously, poets (and artists generally) were to have no place in his ideal society, for they toyed with perceptions and could turn falsehood into ‘truth’.
No state has ever been deliberately organized along the lines that Plato proposed. Some modern totalitarian regimes have, though, reached similar destinations without recourse to Platonic philosophy, suppressing debate in favour of an oppressive rule vested in oligarchies who, perhaps, convince themselves that they have attained their own ‘enlightenment’. But the ‘Socratic method’ of constructing a philosophical case through a series of questions, which Plato passed on through the dialogues, proved highly influential.
‘Neoplatonism’ – the dominant pre-Christian philosophical umbrella until the 6th century AD – was, as its name suggests, deeply indebted to Plato, and it prepared the ground for early Christianity by elaborating a concept of dualism, whereby philosophical rationalism and ethical concerns on the one hand combined with mystical ideas of the soul and God on the other. The early fathers of the Christian church, such as St Clement (of Alexandria) and Origen, and most notably St Augustine (of Hippo), all combined Platonic reasoning with Christian doctrine in their thinking. Plato’s contrast between everyday experience and a world of abstract perfection fitted well with Christian theology, where imperfect humans beset by Original Sin struggled to attain entry to Paradise.
The Republic and several other dialogues were also translated into Arabic, and frequently figured in the discussions of Islamic intellectuals, while the 1st-century AD Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria is often seen as a channel by which Platonic thought reached Jewish culture. Plato’s thinking, of which the Republic is such an important part, stands at the headwaters of the main channels of philosophy and ethical thinking in both Europe and the Islamic world.