IN THE BEGINNING there would be four persons. Maybe five. Just about as many as the needs of the body. A farmer for food, a mason for housing, a weaver for clothing. To these let us add a shoemaker and some other worker to provide for material necessities.
That is how Plato’s republic presents itself. Without a deity or founding legend. With individuals, needs, and the means to satisfy them. A masterpiece of economy: with its four or five workers Plato founds not only a city but a future science, sociology. Our nineteenth century will be grateful to him.
His own century had a different judgment of it. His disciple and critic Aristotle put it succinctly: a city is not simply a concentration of needs and a division of the means of production. Right from the start something else is needed—justice, the power of what is better over what is less good. There are greater or less noble tasks, jobs that are more or less degrading, natures appropriate for one group or for another, and all these must be distinguished. Even in a republic of four or five citizens, there must be someone to represent and ensure respect for the common good that defines the aim [la fin] of the city above and beyond the satisfaction of needs. How else could justice ever come about from simply gathering together equally indispensable workers?1
There must be a misunderstanding somewhere. Or a trick. For justice is, precisely, the subject of Plato’s dialogue, and in order to define it he constructs his society as a magnifying glass. So justice must be there already in his egalitarian gathering of workers, or else it will never turn up at all. It is up to us to look for it.
A first clue might be a slight fluctuation concerning the number of equals. Four or five, we do not know exactly. But whether the number is even or odd ought to have some consequence for a philosopher infatuated with mathematics. Later on he will subject even the couplings of his warriors to the golden number, but for the moment he seems indifferent to the details of his inventory. In the city of necessity he leaves open the possibility that there is one person too many.
That may be a first reply to our question and to Aristotle’s objection. No one among the equals is superior, but one of them could be less indispensable than the others. Could it be the fifth man, whose essential function is not spelled out any further? Or could it be the shoemaker? Is a specialist in footwear really needed when a single worker suffices to handle all aspects of building houses? It is no big deal to provide Attic peasants with footwear, and Plato himself tells us later on that they will carry on their work in summer “for the most part unclad and unshod.”2 If so, should one-fourth of this primitive labor force be assigned to that office? Or should we assume, rather, that the shoemaker is also there for something else? The fact is that at every strategic point in the dialogue—whenever it becomes necessary to think about the division of labor, to establish difference in natures and aptitudes, or to define justice itself—the shoemaker will be there in the front line of the argument. As if he were doing double duty behind the scenes. As if this worker who is not to judge anything but footwear retained some usefulness for the philosopher that goes far beyond the products of his trade: the marginal and at first glance paradoxical function of allowing a doubt to hover about the actual utility of useful workers.
And yet our shoemaker and his fellow tradesmen are there to teach us a fundamental principle: a person can do only one thing at a time. It would be inconvenient for the farmer to stop his labor in the fields and devote three-fourths of his time to repairing his roof, making his clothes, and cutting out his shoe leather. The division of labor will take care of that problem. It will assign a specialist exclusively to each activity, and all will be for the best: “More things are produced, and better and more easily, when one man performs only one task according to his nature, at the right moment, and is excused from all other occupations.”3
Many things in such few words. First, a question: it is true that more will be produced under this system, but why is it necessary to produce so much? Apparently these people are already living within a market economy, even if this market is quite limited. And one need not have read Adam Smith to realize that such a division of labor will quickly produce unexchangeable surpluses. Starting with shoes, of course. With such a limited population and such limited needs, the division of labor is an absurdity. It may not be “more convenient” for the shoemaker to cultivate a plot of ground, but it is certainly a safer bet for him to do so.
So argues the economy of Adam Smith. Plato’s economy differs in that the needs of the first members of his society are not restricted—indeed, at the beginning they are infinite. He tells us at the start that these men need many things. Later he will tell us that these workers need many tools. From the very outset it is necessary to make more, and for that, time is lacking. It is not that the worker must work all the time, but he must always be available to do his work at the right moment, and that is why he must have only one job. An observation then occurs to Socrates just in the nick of time: experience shows that nature provided for this necessity by distributing diverse aptitudes to different individuals. These aptitudes will be suited in turn to various occupations and everything will run smoothly.
Though not very clearly. The argument about time is itself already not so simple. If it is true that the job does not wait for the worker, the converse is not true as well. Nature may have given the farmer exactly the right dispositions for working in the fields, but it has also given vegetables their growing cycles. And it has made the seasons, which put unequal demands on the exercise of these agricultural dispositions. Is the farmer really supposed to spend the whole off-season and bad-weather days waiting for the right moment to turn over the soil? Isn’t there a right moment for him to cultivate his field and another moment, just as right, for him to make his clothes and those of others? That is what many farmers still will think in the very midst of the Industrial Revolution, without agriculture or industry having anything to complain about—except wages. But that is a different matter.
Would a philosopher so expert at describing for purposes of comparison the operations of artisans be so ignorant of the conditions surrounding their exercise? That is highly unlikely. If he pretends not to know whether nature leaves the farmer and the mason with sufficient leisure, and whether society does the same for their fellow workers, it is because he has decided that they should not have all the time that circumstances, sometimes too generously, have given them. The very principle of a social nature shaping temperaments to functions could be the price of this omission. Behind the apparent paradoxes of this economy another game is being played, slightly askew, as four terms arrange themselves into a pattern: countless needs, time in short supply, workers who are more or less indispensable, and aptitudes among which we do not know how to distinguish. For while we readily admit that nature gives individuals different aptitudes and tastes, and that it forms some bodies better suited to work in the open air and others to the workshop’s shade, how are we ever to differentiate a weaver-nature from a shoemaker-nature except through that absence of time which, combined with the urgency of the tasks at hand, never allows the one worker to be found in the other’s place?
And so the argument moves ahead on its two lame legs. The difference in natures comes to rescue the poorly demonstrated impossibility of performing two separate functions. And that impossibility, in turn, evades the questions posed by the same enigmatic difference that would shape in advance the division of labor. If this economically improbable division can be expressed in the natural evidence of social utility, the reason is that this is where the arbitrariness of nature and the conventionality of the social order exchange their powers. The agent of this exchange is a notion too trivial to engage much attention: time.
Time, Feuerbach will tell us, is the privileged category of the dialectician because it excludes and subordinates where space tolerates and coordinates. Again we must be precise. The time of which Plato is speaking here is not that of physical necessity, the time of generation, growth, and death. It is that more ambiguous entity—half philosophical and half popular, half natural and half social—which determines one’s availability for a task or the right moment for supply to meet demand. It is not the time needed to accomplish a task (ergon) but the time that permits or prohibits a pastime (parergon)—i.e., the fact of being beside the necessity of work. It is not the time measured by water clocks but the time that compels some people to its measure and exempts others from it. It is leisure (scholē) or its absence (ascholia).
The factor of exclusion is the absence of time, or absence of leisure, ascholia. The notion is not peculiar to Plato; it is a commonplace in discussions about the relationship of the order of labor to the political order. But if the place is common, the paths leading up to it are anything but: from Plato to Xenophon, or from Xenophon to Aristotle, the absence of leisure lends itself to the most contradictory and disconcerting lines of argument. For Xenophon, it is impossible for artisans to participate in the political life of the city. They are always working in shadows, seated by a corner of the fire. Theirs is an indoor life, an effeminate life that leaves them no leisure to concern themselves with anything but work and family. Farmers, on the other hand, out in the open air and bright sunshine, are the best defenders of the city because they have—a strange way of putting it—not the most leisure but the least absence of leisure.4
In Aristotle the same criterion produces the same alternative, but his argument is exactly the reverse. Artisans are effectively the ruin of democracy, but the reason is that they have too much leisure. They spend all their time loitering in the streets or the agora, which means they can attend all the assemblies and meddle in everything indiscriminately. The democracy of farmers, on the other hand, will be the best—or rather, the least bad. Farmers are confined to their fields, and the assembly is too far away; they will not have the leisure time to go to town and exercise their power, so things can only run better. Because if they did go to town, they would behave like men who do not possess the only leisure that counts, the leisure of thinking. Farmers make the least bad sort of democracies, those in which the democrats do not have the time to exercise their power. But for the very same reason, in a well-governed state they will not have their place.5
Thus leisure and its absence zigzag in these cases to produce the same result: the artisan cannot be a good citizen. The originality of Plato’s Republic, however, lies in its not posing this question as such. Aristotle, Xenophon, and Plato himself in the Laws frame the question in its alternate form: can one be a citizen while engaging in a trade? Which occupations qualify or disqualify people, provide the time to participate in political life or take it away? In the Republic, on the other hand, citizenship is neither a trade nor a status but simply a matter of fact. One belongs to the community, and this community knows only different occupations. Where Aristotle, for example, distinguishes between four types of manual labors, Socrates can raise in passing the case of people whose bodies are sturdy but whose minds are rather slow, all of whom will be admitted into the community nevertheless—they will be the common laborers, the unskilled wage earners. There are different natures but apparently no differences in nature. The jobs themselves are all equivalent. There are no slaves.
So there is only one principle of exclusion. Plato’s Republic does not decree that one cannot be a shoemaker and a citizen at the same time. It simply establishes that one cannot be a shoemaker and a weaver at the same time. It does not exclude anyone by reason of the baseness of his job, but simply establishes the impossibility of holding more than one job at a time. It knows only one evil, but this is the absolute evil: that two things be in one, two functions in the same place, two qualities in one and the same being. Only one category of people, then, finds itself de facto without employment, those whose specific occupation consists in doing two things in one—the imitators.
There is no reason for the imitators to trouble the first city’s order. To expand beyond its four or five pioneers, the city needs only three or four supplementary categories: some joiners and smiths to make the tools for work; some wage earners for the heavy labor; and two kinds of tradesmen to handle exchange—small shopkeepers for the local market, and merchants for trade between cities. Since the merchants must have goods to exchange for those that will satisfy the needs of the community, the number of producers will be increased accordingly. And with that we can consider the community complete and perfect. The citizens will live joyously in harmony and piety; crowned with myrtle and reclining on beds of bryony, they will feast fraternally on wine and wheat cakes served on reeds or fresh leaves.
This is not a form of communism but an egalitarian republic of labor, vegetarian and pacifist, adjusting its production to its needs and its birthrate to its resources. An apolitical society of industrious well-being [la santé travailleuse], the myth of which will come to life again in the age of anarchism and neo-Malthusianism.
Health, we grant. But what about justice? The regulation of equal and unequal? Socrates and his interlocutor are searching for it, and we have sensed its field of play in this society in the slight inequality to itself of strictly divided labor—i.e., in the abundance of needs, the fluctuation of the number of workers, the regulation of time that is equally lacking to all but could not be lacking to some.
It is at this point that Glaucon intervenes. He is Socrates’s interlocutor and Plato’s brother, and in his view this republic of workers is fit only for pigs. He wants its banquets to have different forms of pomp and new ornaments: couches and tables, fancy seasonings and dainty tidbits, fragrances and courtesans …
Raising the bar is a regulative function of Plato’s dialogues, which need to portray someone rejecting the maxims of good sense, the counsels of prudence, the regimens for the hygienic life proposed by Socrates. This role is usually filled by people of quality: the ambitious Callicles or members of Plato’s own family—his cousin Critias the tyrant, and his two brothers Adimantus and Glaucon.
To please Glaucon, Socrates will bid a nostalgic farewell to the healthy city and we are ushered into the city of humors and arts of refined living. Glaucon’s intervention makes visible the subterranean logic of the preceding moment. Justice exists only through the disordering of health and, as such, was already indirectly at work in the interplay of lacks, excesses, and fluctuations that were upsetting slightly the perfect equilibrium of the healthy city. Justice is the returning of healthy and useful workers to their specific place.
The new city, the one where injustice and justice are possible and thinkable, begins with the seasonings and decorum of the banquet. Should we say that we also have here the origin of politics with the table manners of the ethnologist, the distinction of the sociologist? Perhaps, but the banquet is confusion as much as distinction. At the banquet of the poet Agathon, for example, the intoxication of Alcibiades the pleasure seeker encounters the enthusiasm of the philosopher Socrates. In other instances, the simulacra of discourse conspire with the reality of needs, and democratic aspirations with aristocratic pomp, until they all become, at the very heart of the modern age, one of the symbols of political subversion.
The order established by the banquet is the order of mixture. If the city began with the clearcut distribution of useful workers, politics begins with the motley crowd of the unuseful who, coming together into a mass of “workers,” cater to a new range of needs—from painters and musicians to tutors and chambermaids; from actors and rhapsodists to hairdressers and cooks; from the makers of luxury articles to swineherds and butchers. But in this mixed crowd of parasites don’t we need to acknowledge that some workers really are as useful as those in the original group, so long as they, too, agree to do only one thing at a time? After all, the first workers themselves were obliged to mingle the superfluous with the necessary for the dishes, tables, and trimmings of the banquet.
We can, however, easily discern a division within this group of newcomers, even though the split is not emphasized. The superfluous is itself divided into two types that may overlap but still remain for the most part distinct: the simple production of luxury goods and the production of images. Plato elaborates further on two kinds of arts, those of acquisition and those of imitation. The new workers of the city are split accordingly into two groups, acquisitive men (the hunters who provide for superfluous needs as such) and imitators who introduce into the realm of the superfluous a production of a wholly distinctive sort, one that reproduces and falsifies the image of the necessary.
Now we are in a position to see injustice enter the picture, but not from the quarter we might have expected. Luxury is not what corrupts the city. It is of little import that the joiners embellish banquet couches instead of honing their tools, or that the smith turns himself into a carver. And while it is quite true that the taste for luxury, especially when such goods become scarce, impels people to invasion and war, a life of softness finds in war its antidote. War is a professional trade, so one need train warriors to do one thing, and one thing only; like good guard dogs, they must bite the enemy, but only the enemy. Gymnastics and music will train them to be hard on their adversary and amiable toward the city.
But here is where the imitators come in. They are, indeed, good at music. With the poet’s lyre they soften the hearts of the future warriors; with their fables about violent and deceitful gods they introduce immoderation. And behind their invitation to imitate bad actions is the principle of evil itself, the invitation to imitate in general—the power of the double, of representing anything whatsoever or being anyone whosoever. In vain does Socrates attempt to protect himself against it by choosing to see in imitation once again the division of labor: he asserts that human nature is “minted in such small coinage” that one can imitate only one thing at a time.6 Unfortunately, the new machines of the theater are there to belie his nice optimism. On the stage, before a public that is no longer one of warriors but of artisans, these machines tear to pieces his fine principle of the functionality of the division of labor in producing the whole of creation. It is an excess far more dangerous than that of luxury, since luxury adds new specialties to the division of labor and corrupts only those with the means to afford it. The art of the total imitator, on the other hand, implicates all members of a society by putting in question their very simplicity, i.e. their adherence to their respective functions.
Note the crossplay [ jeu croisé]: it is in the relationship of the chief hunter to the imitator that the simplicity of the artisan will receive new meanings. As opposed to the imitator, the artisan could be given immediately the positive role of counterexample. The artisan shows what the simple artist must do in order to occupy his place. He is the one who knows how to make useful objects of which the painter produces the inconsistent copy. Smith or saddler, he places himself in the service of the horseman in making the horse’s bit and bridle, subordinating his technical knowledge to the warrior science of ends. If he is a joiner, he makes beds, patterning them on an idea of a bed. Not the Idea of the bed, or the real Bed of which God alone is the author. But those who use his services do not demand that much. It suffices that the artisan’s know-how be guided by an idea in keeping with the purpose of the object.
The painter knows nothing about all that—nothing about horsemanship, saddlery, or joinery. Of the artisan’s technique he retains only what is needed to imitate the appearance of his objects. He will make couches, saddles, and bits without knowing anything about them, and in a burst of inspiration he will leap over the barrier separating the work of art from the work of nature. He will make horses, horsemen, and even—God knows for what use—shoemakers and carpenters. He will imitate God. He will paint plants and animals, earth and sky, Olympus and Hades. And on the theater stage the imitator will mix everything into a cacophony: works of nature and those of artisans; thunder, wind, and hail; axles and pulleys; flutes and trumpets; and dogs, sheep, and birds.7
By contrast with this forger, the image of the artisan can be recommended to the warrior for several reasons. The artisan is a man with know-how dedicated to the service of others, but he is also in possession of health, the virtue specific to the first city. He will teach the warrior to dispense with the maladies and medicines of indolence, for in a well-constituted state each has his own specific task that no one else can carry out for him: no one “has leisure to be sick and nurse himself all his days.” But in our poorly made city only the artisan offers verification of this principle. Because the carpenter feels “that he has no leisure (scholē) to be sick, and that such a life of preoccupation with his illness and neglect of his work is not worth living,” whenever he does become ill he asks “his physician to give him a drug that will operate as an emetic on the disease, or to get rid of it by purging or the use of cautery or the knife.”8 From this virtue of necessity warriors will be able to learn the necessity of virtue, the full employment of their time.
The worker is the master of a virtue he thus is not at liberty to choose. The lesson is far from being lost, and even today it adorns the frontispiece of all our chapels. But artisans also have less constraining virtues to offer the defenders of the city. To train warriors in the art of combat, the model that suggests itself is the apprenticeship that governs the acquisition of a trade, the anticipation of the gestures and disciplines of a craft. That is how the sons of potters learn their trade, and that is how the élite warriors of the future will learn theirs.9 Candidates for political posts—Alcibiades, for example, or Callicles—would be well advised to do the same.
But if the warriors are to train in the manner of artisans, it is impossible that artisans could look to the warriors for any model. The shoemaker cannot be a warrior. This point, in a sense, does not need to be proven. If war is a specific occupation, it is a matter for professionals. The shoemaker will not bear arms for the same reasons that keep him from the weaver’s shuttle, the farmer’s plow, and the tools of the building trade: so that shoemaking will be practiced in keeping with the rules of its art. But time marks a slight inflection, for we no longer are dealing here with the mere virtuality of leisure or the right moment, of scholē or kairos, but much more now with the time devoted to professional training. It is not enough to make lots of shoes; they must also be made well. And the apprenticeship that perfects the artisan is truly unending, which is why it was necessary to assign only one occupation to each—the one “for which he was fit and suited by nature and at which he was to work all his days to the exclusion of others, not letting slip the right moments for doing the work well.” How could the demanding business of shoemaking ever leave time enough for learning the business of arms when “no one could become an expert player of draughts or dice who did not practice the game exclusively from childhood but played it only as a pastime”?10
The argument undergoes a change here. If the shoemaker cannot be a good warrior, the reason is, first of all, that he cannot be a good dice player. This is not as offbase as it seems. For the dice player shares with the warrior the same privilege that is denied to both the carpenter and the shoemaker: he is a child of superfluity. He reminds us that the warrior has become necessary only because of the taste for luxury and hunting, and he shows us at the same time the logic of this development. The hunt for the superfluous, the transgression of the principle of sticking only to one’s own occupation, was needed to make some occupations in the city more important than others, to make justice possible thereby as a hierarchy of functions and virtues. The dice player’s superfluousness corresponds to the equivocal necessity of the fifth man and gives the shoemaker’s full employment its meaning. The shoemaker is now above all the man who cannot be a warrior. The player’s move has turned up the deal [a retourné la donne] as the division of labor no longer reflects clearly the relationship of usefulness to professionalism. The egalitarian necessity that each keep to “his own occupation” has discreetly tipped over into a hierarchy that now can be only a hierarchy of natures. This is what the draughts player recalls here and in the Statesman, that the functional distribution of aptitudes is also a distribution of gifts of unequal value. How could the masses govern their common affairs when so few champion draughts players come from their ranks?11
Through this interplay of time and status, the relationship of justice to nature has come into question, and it is this “conformity to nature” that must be examined. We first ran into it as an enigma: how could one recognize justice? Now we must take things from the opposite end. It is in the realm of the superfluous that one can distinguish among and hierarchize natures, since the order of necessary occupations and adequate skills [techniques] can never, on its own, create separate ranks. In the democratic city of the honest sophist Protagoras, the trades belong to specialists and the virtue of the common good to the assembly of all the citizens. Egalitarian rhetoric will incessantly hammer home the notion that the smith is as indispensable to the warrior as the warrior is to the smith. Moreover, utility lends itself only to ambiguous superiorities. Though the general saves the city, it remains an open question whether the city was in fact worth saving. The conquering soldier may well be like the able-bodied seaman who brought men safely through the storms he would have done better to abandon to the justice of the waves.12 For the elevation of the warrior another principle is needed, a principle known only to philosophers. One philosopher, the biggest homebody of them all, will say later on that “war has something sublime about it.”13 Is this because pure thought better finds its image in the slashing sword or purifying fire? Hardly. The dialectic method claims to be impervious to the social dignity of its models: “When it makes comparisons … it does not regard the art of the general as a more brilliant illustration of the art of hunting than the art of the exterminator. Most of the time it finds the first example simply more inflated.”14 The superiority does not lie in the art of war but in the nature of the warrior, which is homonymous with the nature of the malady: the warrior is the man of temperamental humor, of inflated mood. His primary superiority over the artisan or the exterminator is that of humor over health.
That must be our starting point. The warrior is the man who could do something else, such as bite his friend. He is the man who requires a special education, the judicious dose of gymnastics and music that the educator-magistrate can provide only if he is a philosopher. The warrior’s superiority lies not in his occupation but in his nature insofar as the formation of his nature is the specific task, the masterwork, of the philosopher-king. The virtue of the warrior also makes the philosopher necessary.
Between the philosopher who trains the warrior and the artisan who offers him models of apprenticeship, another cross-relation establishes itself—a skewed one. The philosopher, too, is a child of luxury. He is at the end of the thread drawn out by Glaucon’s intervention, at the peak of the new necessity governed by excess. A new function is needed, that of the rulers, to guard the guardians of the inflamed city. And a new nature is needed to optimize the exercise of that new function, the nature of philosophers.
We are talking about true philosophers, of course: breeders of herds, not hunters of livestock or bounty; laborers in truth, not artisans of appearance. To mark themselves off from their imitators—rhetoricians or sophists, false politicians or false experts—philosophers, too, will have to learn from true artists. They will refer themselves constantly to the expert gestures and verifiable results of artisanal practice. For want of a divine shepherd, the weaver-king of the Statesman will work to plait into harmony the unequal and diversely colored threads of the temperaments that are to make up the fabric of society. The philosopher-guardian of book IV of the Republic will prepare human souls for instruction the way dyers prepare fabrics that are to be given an indelible tint. The dialectician of the Sophist, in attempting to define philosophical purification, will not hesitate to dwell on the operations of carders, tanners, and fullers, for “the dialectic art never considers whether the benefit to be derived from the purge is greater or lesser than that to be derived from the sponge, and is not more interested in the one than in the other. It seeks to know what is and what is not kindred in all the arts in order to gain understanding and discernment, and it honors them all alike in that respect.”15
But the dialectician’s familiarity with textile workers has a very specific function, which is to make him recall that in the weaver’s trade the woof of the governed is not as important as the warp of the governors. It is no accident that among the basic arts the dialectician chose that of the weaver and his helpmates, for their arts bring together the threads of the social order, even as the art of dyeing gives just the right tint to the soul of the warriors. Even more importantly, these are all arts of distinction, sorting, selection. If the philosopher puts the text of any discourse to the test of the carder’s brush or the fuller’s tub, he does so to distinguish the purification of thought from all the sorting and scouring of artisan trades. As concerns purification, he cares not at all which name fits it best; it suffices to know how to separate out justice from hygiene, what purifies the soul from what cleanses everything else: “The art of dialectic is in no wise particular about fine words, if it may be only allowed to have a general name for all other purifications, binding them up together and separating them from the purification of the soul or mind. For this is the purification at which it wants to arrive, and this we should understand to be its aim.”16
So the comparison of practices is intended only to mark the incomparable character of natures. And the test of truth, the touchstone provided by artisanal work, serves that purpose foremost. At first sight the shoemaker and the fuller are the philosopher’s helpers in his search for the simulacra of poetic, rhetorical, and sophist discourse. One need only translate their propositions into the idiom of shoemaking to puncture their inflated bombast. Callicles claims that the best and the strongest should have more than others. Does that mean that shoemakers will have more and larger shoes than their inexpert customers? The ridiculousness of the application suffices to show that the words of the rhetorician (“the best,” “the strongest,” “have more”) are nothing but the simulacra of ideas. But Callicles is not wrong in expressing annoyance and demanding that Socrates compare comparable things instead of mixing together shoemaking and philosophy.17 For the comparison constantly presupposes what it claims to prove, positing the kinship of all the arts so that it may better affirm the separation between what depends on the arts and what evades their technique: philosophical breeding. To suit the needs of his case, the philosopher gives the artisan a doubly illusory positivity. In the first place, the proof of truth is always a proof by way of the ridiculous, the stigmatizing of baseness. When Socrates denounces the painter or the sophist, the artisan sinks into the “positivity” of an exterminator. And he does it to show Callicles that his grand aristocratic thinking is at bottom only a philosophy of simple resourcefulness, a shoemaker’s kind of thinking. Secondly, when the philosopher denounces imitators, he is denouncing technique in general. The painter’s major fault is not making falsely what the artisan makes in truth; it is using an artisanal technique to counterfeit the work of the deity, which is always a living work and hence unique. God does not engage in mass production, and neither does the philosopher. Through the ridiculousness of comparisons with the shoemaker, the philosopher denounces the sophist’s discourse as a fabricated discourse that counterfeits the living discourse of his own science.
In denouncing imitators, the philosopher sends the “good” artisan back to the truth of his specific technique. Left to itself, separated from the science of ends that is exterior to it, all technology is mere counterfeiting. The opposition of the useful demiurge to the imitator is illusory. All technology is ignorance of its own end, and thus—as a counterfeit, a lie—it is the power to do anything whatsoever. The work of the poet, painter, or rhetorician radicalizes this potentiality in the deliberate production of appearances. If it is possible for the artisan to be opposed to them, it is not as a technician of the useful but solely as a monotechnician, the producer of one thing and one thing only.
The specialization of the artisan thus becomes the simple prohibition against doing anything else, though precisely that capacity is lodged within technology as such. This “polytechnic” counterfeiting inherent to technology must be compensated for constantly by a social rule: the artisan-fabricator is the man to whom play, lying, and appearance are forbidden. The painter and the sophist are not false artisans; they are artisans who transgress the rule fixing their status.
Here it is no longer a question of lack of time or continuing vocational training. The division of labor could now be expressed in the form of a principle that is wholly indifferent to the contingencies of production: the artisan is the technician who has no right to lie. Plato quotes two verses from Homer to make the point: “If the ruler catches anybody else lying in the city, any of the craftsmen, ‘whether a prophet or healer of sickness or joiner of timbers,’ he will chastise him for introducing a practice as subversive and destructive of a state as it is of a ship.”18
It is not that lying is an evil in itself, any more than luxury or play is; the point is that it must be reserved. In the city where superfluousness has been introduced, hierarchy first appears as knowledge and regulation of the simulacrum. The science of order is a science of the lie. It assumes that the order of the simulacrum is radically separate from the order of technology. The absolute simplicity of artisans, their absolute lack of leisure, and the endless process of perfecting their trade must be postulated to exorcize the Promethean threat: not that workers would become, or seek to become, gods, but that they would set in motion a city of productive work that is at the same time a city of absolute artifice, a city producing its discourses as its tools—in a word, a democracy or, what comes down to the same thing for Plato, a technocracy where the power of the tradesmen and that of the people are equivalent.
The superfluousness of luxury, war, and philosophy guards against this danger as it contains the excess latent in the alleged simplicity of technology. As against the potential complicity of useful work with the untruth of technology, justice presupposes a different alliance, a different alloy of the absolute simplicity of nature and the declared arbitrariness of lying. The philosopher will be a specialist in nature and the lie. To be precise, he will be an engineer of souls.
His function is, first of all, to reply to the enigma of nature, which shifted its place with the arrival of the warrior on the scene. Beyond the division of tasks, the warrior is there to exemplify the difference in nature that values the artisan least. But this difference is established solely by the selection of the philosopher-guardian. In other words, it is selection that determines nature. The difference in nature is not the irrational that thought runs up against, nor is it the “ideology” where the history of social oppression conceals itself. Nothing in fact is concealed. Plato says openly that nature must be an object of decree in order to become an object of education. It is the presupposition laid down by the selecter-breeder of souls to begin the work of forming natures. Nature is a story declared to be such. As the only one who knows the relationship between suitable means and desirable ends, the engineer of souls is the only one who has the power and the knowledge to lie—the lie that is an imitation of truth, the good lie; the lie that suffices to establish an order safe from the true lie [du véritable mensonge], the technological ignorance of principles and ends.
And so the engineer of souls will inaugurate the necessary and sufficient lie, the axiom or undemonstrable principle that bears a resemblance to the end of his work, nature. Through a counter-technology, he will find a means (mēchanē) to make the city believe a noble lie—which is to say, a lie about nobility, a genealogy in the manner of the poets, a “Phoenician” tale that took place elsewhere a long time ago and that need not be justified, only told, need not be believed, only accepted. A tale of men who could be persuaded that the education they had received was merely a dream, that in reality they sprang forth from the earth fully armed and prepared for their respective functions. Such is the myth or lie of the three metals: “While all of you in the city are brothers, we will say in our tale, the deity who fashioned you mixed gold in the makeup of those fit for rule, for which reason they are the most precious. In that of the defenders he mixed silver, and iron and brass in the makeup of the plowman and other craftsmen.”19
We know that Plato did not invent the theme of the three orders of human beings made up of gold, silver, and brass. What interests us here is the particular details he gives it.
First of all, the myth is not exactly anti-egalitarian. It does not seek to consecrate an immemorial order. The philosopher-molder is egalitarian in his own way. Once the educational machine is in operation, it should handle the necessary declassifying and reclassifying for each generation. Most of the time, the brother citizens in each category will have children like themselves. But it might happen that warriors and educators produce children with souls of iron, and these must be dropped down pitilessly into the class of plowmen and artisans. By the same token, the sons of plowmen or artisans who display some gold or silver in their soul will have to be elevated to the class of warriors or guardians. This is a myth of education more than a myth of hierarchy. A meritocracy, then? Its application nevertheless may pose some problems. For it is easy enough to see how the apprentice warrior could reveal the soul of a shoemaker, but not as easy to see where and how the apprentice shoemaker will have the leisure to reveal his warrior-soul or guardian-soul. There is, apparently, no provision for sending the children of the laboring classes to school. The egalitarianism is in danger of operating in one direction only—downward. The main concern seems to be preventing iron and brass from corrupting the city’s élite.
So it is an anti-oligarchic rule rather than an anti-populist one. The main thing is to separate the gold of power from the metal of trade. Workers grown newly rich should not be able to convert their capital into power, and the guardians and warriors should not be able to make money from their functions. As always, it is a cross-relation. The guardians are the ones being addressed: they must be preserved from the seductions of wealth; they must be paid in symbolic money of a kind scarce enough to turn them away from hard cash, to persuade them to leave to the men of iron and brass the petty advantages of ownership. In short, the chief aim of the myth is to get magistrates and warriors to accept the principle of the non-ownership of goods, which alone can prevent the corruption of the State: “Gold and silver, we will tell them, they have of the divine sort from the gods always in their souls. They have no need of the metals of men, and it is impious to contaminate their possession of divine gold with the possession of mortal gold.”20
As a result, they will not even handle gold or silver, or enter a house that harbors these metals, or wear them, or drink from cups made of them. But this prohibition must be understood correctly, for the danger here is not the gilded enervation of luxury but the brass austerity of thrift: “But whenever they acquire land for themselves and houses and coin, they will be householders and farmers instead of guardians. They will become despots and enemies of the rest of the city instead of being their defenders, hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against.”21
A complex hierarchy of metals both precious and base, of realities and symbols, of possession and what follows from it. The philosopher does not say here that the occupation of manual workers is too lowly to form the soul of a citizen. He simply says that the possession of exploitable goods is incompatible with the defense of the city. The object of the prohibition is the oligarch, the capitalist, rather than the manual laborer (for example, the smith who also profits from a little joinery enterprise on the side).22
But the distinguo is the most malicious of tricks. It gives us to understand that what is specific to souls of iron is the thinking only of money, of hard cash, to the exclusion of all symbolic honors. The oligarch, on the other hand, is no conman: “He is thrifty and hardworking. He satisfies only his necessary needs, wasting no expense on all his other needs and repressing them as vain and unprofitable.”23 The oligarch is the good worker, the model worker for whom the modern age will create the savings bank. And that is why he is contemptible: not because he is an industrious body opposed to the leisures of the soul, but because he is the man of material goods, of commodities, whose function degrades body and soul together. The realm of labor can be only the realm of egotism and the war of all against all. Excluded from leisure and dedicated to the ceaseless fabrication of commodities, the worker is condemned to the shameful privileges of thrift, accumulation, and wealth. He is always a potential capitalist and, for this reason, the philosopher can stigmatize him while reserving to highborn souls the symbolic currency of honor and power associated with the rulers’ lack of ownership.
In short, to say that the worker cannot be a guardian or warrior is simply to say that he is unworthy of being a communist. His unworthiness derives from the fact that he always possesses some property. Work, in and of itself, is property, and trade is discord. Communist workers of our own nineteenth century, in seeking to realize the city of equal laborers, would experience more or less naïvely or perversely that communism is a system conceived only for the élite guardians of the city. Work and community are strictly antagonistic. Communism is not the fraternity of the classless society but the discipline of a class domination ideally removed from the logic of work and property. At bottom, the squaring of the philosophical circle can be formulated simply. For the city to be well organized, it is necessary and sufficient that the authority of the dominators over the dominated be the authority of communists over capitalists. The Columbus’s Egg of the just city: the workers, soldiers, and philosophers of communism have not yet departed from it.24
Let’s not feel too sorry, however, for these workers condemned to labor without leisure. They might well have won the privilege, over their incomparable guardians, of a certain right to idleness. For now one fact must be admitted: some functions are more indispensable, some qualifications more serious than others. Thus the guardians will bear the cost of their elevation, and their lives certainly will be poor in gilded enjoyments. On the other hand, they are slated less than any of the others for an individual happiness that is not the goal of the happy city: “We could clothe the plowmen in robes of state, deck them out in gold, and let them cultivate the soil at their pleasure; and we could let the potters recline on couches, let them feast and pass the cup around before the fire, with their wheel beside them, free to work when they felt like it. … But urge us not to do this, since, if we yield, the plowman will no longer be a plowman, the potter a potter, nor will any other of the types that constitute a state keep its form.”25
The danger is clearly delimited and lies in disguise rather than idleness. The state does not need so many pieces of pottery; it merely needs to know how to recognize potters. And how is one to recognize potters if they are not at their wheel? It may suffice, indeed, for them simply to appear to be at work. The danger is not a drop in production but a lack of identity, for while all forms of production may be equivalent, the same is not true of identities. As we are told almost immediately, the issue is quite serious in the case of the guardians: “For cobblers who deteriorate, are spoiled, and pretend to be the workmen they are not, are no great danger to a state. But guardians of the law and of the city who are not what they pretend to be, who are guardians only in appearance, utterly destroy the entire state, I would have you note.”26
With this right to idleness the artisan has also rewon a right to lie. But to one lie, and not to any lie whatsoever. Only a lie having to do with the specialty that alone defines his being. The shoemaker truly must be nothing other than a shoemaker, but he is not obliged to be one truly.
We already had suspected a bit of exaggeration. Were so many shoes really needed, and so much time to learn how to make them? Now we know that a true shoemaker is not someone who makes good shoes but someone who does not pass himself off as anything other than a shoemaker. Indeed, ignorance of the craft may be even better than expertise in it to guarantee the monotechnics that alone constitutes the virtue of the artisan. Idleness and incompetence are the dispositions best suited to ensuring what is singularly important, that the artisan does only one thing, the thing that marks him off and serves to put him in his place. Because a person who is expert at making his shoes could also be expert at weaving his cloak, plaiting his belt, and engraving his ring. And why wouldn’t he also turn himself into a manufacturer of discourse and a merchant of wisdom? Such a character actually exists—Hippias the sophist, who was seen arriving in Olympia with nothing on his back that was not the work of his own hands. He also brought with him his poems, epics, tragedies, dithyrambs, and his scientific knowledge relating to the true and the beautiful, music, grammar, and mnemonics. Even before the city, perhaps, the philosopher should be protected from this crafty artist who can carry over to every other matter the shoemaker’s ways of doing and thinking.27
God preserve the philosopher from these too skillful artisans! In all cases it is necessary to limit the pretensions to perfection of any variety of craft [art de faire]. It is also necessary to place philosophy outside and above every one of these. The Protagoras spells out the problem well, for if virtue is taught in the same way as shoemaking, then shoemakers are kings in the city and philosophers are useless. The rights of philosophic virtue depend upon their strict separation from the virtue of shoemaking, and the separation of the latter from the quality of shoes.
That is why the test of artisanal truth can be reversed on occasion. Socrates asks Thrasymachus whether artisans mistake themselves on the subject of their art. No, replies Thrasymachus; they are precisely artisans because of their competence. A shoemaker who does not know how to make shoes proves nothing against the art of shoemaking. He merely proves that he is not a shoemaker. Only he who can practice an art merits the name of artisan.
His reply makes good sense, but that is precisely the sort of good sense that must be rejected in order to destroy the pretensions of artisans. A shoemaker is simply a man who is forbidden to engage in any activity other than shoemaking. Starting from that premise, the philosopher can play a double game: he can argue for the competence of the artisan as a specialist, or for an incompetence that verifies the insignificance of all such specialities.
Here again the squaring of the circle is simple: the artisan must have a virtue that is not truly one. Each category must have its own specific virtue so that the city may be constituted and justice in it be defined. The artisan, too, must have his virtue, but it cannot be the virtue of his art. Art and nature are antinomic. An artisan will never be in his place if it is art that defines nature. For him we must find a specific virtue that is actually alien, a positivity that is a simulacrum.
Once again Aristotle states the problem frankly. He rejects the idea of a purely functional division of tasks. For him the difference between functions and natures is primary; those who have nothing better to offer us than the raw use of their body are condemned by nature to slavery. That spotlights a basic question: how are we to define the virtue of the inferior person in general, and of the artisan in particular? The inequality of virtues establishes the hierarchy, but it also makes its exercise hazardous. For the virtue of command to be implemented, for example, obedience must be a virtue, too, and not merely a relationship of dependence. But the one who executes commands must have just the right amount of virtue to obey his orders; if he had more virtue than was necessary, he might imperil the hierarchy of natures.
How is this balance to be achieved? In the slave’s case this is not too difficult since it is up to his master to inculcate in him the modicum of virtue needed to carry out his servile tasks conscientiously. But the “free” artisan poses a very different problem. He is not a free man sharing in the virtue of the city, but neither is he a slave whose virtues derive from the diligent administration of the domestic economy. A false free man and part-time slave, the artisan belongs neither to his trade nor to the one who assigns him work. He cannot derive virtue from his own sphere or from a relationship of dependence.28 But one who has no virtue has no nature. The artisan is not simply a lowly being to be kept away from the government of the city. Properly speaking, he is an impossible being, an unthinkable nature. The free worker of the market economy is a denatured being, an accident of history. Neither included nor excluded, this hybridity is an unpardonable disturbance for the city. And the unworthiness of chrematistics, i.e. of political economy as such, is linked not only to the traffic in money but also to the promotion of this hybrid-being devoid equally of economic and political virtue.29
Plato tries to circumvent this unthinkability of the artisan through the interplay of a simulated nature and a fictitious virtue. Each order must be defined by its own virtue, but only a government of philosopher-guardians can give the first order its own virtue, wisdom (sophia). The warrior’s virtue, which is rightly applied courage, is a kind of dyeing, of pedagogically inculcating the right opinion as to what he should and should not fear.30 The artisan, however, is not made of a material that the philosopher could dress and dye. There is no virtue or education that belongs to the laboring people. Their “own” virtue—moderation, common “wisdom” (sōphrosunē)—must come to them from outside. There is no “self-mastery” that the inferior can claim as its own virtue since, by definition, mastery presupposes a superior. The “wisdom” of the people cannot be either a “good sense” or a “common sense” shared equally by the most educated and the least educated; nor can it be a quality specific to inferiors. It is simply the submission of the lowest part of the state to its noblest part. This wisdom of the artisan, which exists outside him, is simply the order of the state that puts him in his place.
Each person now has his virtue. Justice should not be very far away. Socrates makes a new observation once more based on experience: we often waste a lot of time looking for something that is right under our nose or within arm’s reach. He and his interlocutors have been searching for justice, but this is what they have been telling us from the very beginning—that each person should do his own business (ta heautou prattein) and nothing else (mēden allo). Justice is wisdom governing the state, courage inspiring the warriors, and “moderation” (sōphrosunē) reigning among the body of artisans. Indeed, the latter provide us with the model. The image of justice is the division of labor that already organizes the healthy city: “It is right for the shoemaker by nature to make shoes and occupy himself with nothing else, for the carpenter to practice carpentry, and similarly all others.”31
“Clearly,” replies Glaucon. Strange, though, that the false virtue of the inferior should serve as the model of justice in the perfect city. The virtue of “moderation” means simply that the artisan stays in his place, even if it means cheating on his function. And the justice that should harmonize the virtues proper to each order simply reiterates the supposed functionality of this relation of dependence. The justice of the well-constituted state would be analogous to the health of the state fit for pigs if this latter were not already elevated by an order of dependence that is also an order of fiction.
This fiction, for all that, maintains a rather equivocal relationship with common wisdom. Shouldn’t each do his own bit of business and not concern himself with that of the others? Isn’t that the healthy morality of Cephalus, the merchant of the Piraeus and oligarch and father of the democrats Polemarchus and Lysias, who welcomes Socrates and his aristocratic companions?
Moreover, it is a definition we have heard elsewhere, in another family circle. Socrates is questioning the young Charmides, Plato’s future uncle. He asks the wise adolescent to define wisdom—not sophia but the simple sōphrosunē of decent folk. Prompted by his cousin, the future tyrant Critias, Charmides offers his answer: wisdom means that each man does “his own business.” Bizarrely, Socrates finds this definition inconsistent and even ridiculous, for in that case artisans could not be wise since they do business for others. The sophism is obvious, and Critias easily unmasks it: it is simply a matter of not playing games with the word “do.” The shoemaker does his own business well when he makes shoes for his customers. And the practice of virtue is not to be confused or equated with the making of shoes. Here Critias is a better Platonist than Socrates.
This is a reversal of roles appropriate to a dialogue that is paradoxical in all respects. Critias, the most discredited of the Thirty Tyrants who oppressed the city under the aegis of Sparta, steps in before Socrates to reflect on the “Know Thyself” of the Delphic Oracle. And he insists on what divides this divine invocation from the counsels of prudence and temperance that common sense and vulgar economy have carved alongside it: “Nothing to Excess” and “Be Temperate.”32
Socrates, on the other hand, shrinks from no sophism to refute Critias’s quasi-Platonic theses. It is as if Plato were trying to contrast two genealogies of Socratic thought, a Socrates responding to the exigencies of Critias’s aristocratic distinction, and a Socrates reducing the divine invocation to the recipes of popular wisdom. Where Xenophon tells us that the real Critias would have forbidden Socrates to concern himself at all with carpenters and shoemakers, his double in the Critias indicts a caricature of Socrates, the plebeian moralist of Plato’s competitors for the Socratic heritage, the cynics.
But the game undergoes a reversal here because this caricature of Socratic thought also serves to mark the difference between Platonic justice and the “wisdom” of the tyrant Critias, who wants to separate philosophic and political virtue from artisanal techniques and forms of popular wisdom. But he cannot ground his distinction, and his inability to do so surfaces clearly when he tries to propose a higher definition of sōphrosunē: it is, he says, the science of science and ignorance in all things. Socrates wonders what sort of city government could result from such a science: “Then each action will be done according to the arts or sciences, and no one professing to be a pilot when he is not, no physician or general or anyone else pretending to know matters of which he is ignorant, will deceive or delude us. Our health will be improved; our safety at sea and in battle will be assured; our clothes and shoes, and all other instruments and implements, will be skillfully made, because the workmen will be good and true.”33
But is this city of science really the city of happiness? Weren’t they too hasty in agreeing that it would be good for all if “each does the task he knows and leaves the tasks he does not know to competent people”? It is certainly true that the citizens of this state would live better according to science, but that does not mean they would live well and be happy. Missing from this panoply of sciences is the only one that counts in this matter, the science of good and evil.
Two things about Socrates’s argument strike us. Why, despite Critias’s protests, is he always so eager to reduce his “science” to technical competence alone? And what role does happiness play here? What if the technicians in Critias’s city do not possess the science of happiness? But Plato himself does not even risk promising his soldiers and plowmen any happiness other than that of living in a city where everyone remains in his own place. In such a city, can the “science of good and evil” be anything other than the science of ends that is identical with the science of truth and error? So where is the difference between the technocracy of the tyrant Critias and the aristocracy of Plato’s justice? Perhaps it may lie in the paradoxical fact that in the Platonic city it is not necessary for the specialists to be competent—or, if you wish, that their competence has nothing to do with truth and can even be a lie in order to preserve the only important thing: the “nothing else,” the virtue of those to whom the philosophic lie concerning nature has bequeathed iron as their portion. Missing in Critias’s science and city is this Platonic incompetence, which is the other side of the philosophic lie that anticipates truth and reserves the place of science. The science of good and evil comes by way of the science of truth and lying. The latter must first effect the apportionment [le partage], reserving room for the royal science of the idea of the good. Only lying permits a radical separation of the royal science from the division of competences.
Hence the first definition of the division of labor, the adaptation of natural dispositions to indispensable functions, will appear as a double lie—about nature and function alike.
One who is a shoemaker by nature should make shoes and nothing else. But we still do not know by which signs we are to recognize the specific aptitude for shoemaking. Moreover, how are we to conceive the precise relationship between natural aptitudes and social functions when the new order comes to overturn the least disputed model of this relationship, the sexual division of aptitudes and tasks? Nature is there to show the philosopher that female dogs are just as apt as male dogs for hunting and tending flocks. Why should it be different with human beings? Why shouldn’t women be trained in the same gymnastics and music that prepare warriors? Aside from coarse jokes about nudity, what arguments do the scoffers have to offer? To remark upon difference in aptitudes is to say nothing precise. One must know what sort of difference is relevant for a given function in defining an aptitude or an inaptitude. It certainly would be ridiculous to bar from shoemaking men who have hair on their heads on the grounds that baldheaded men practice the trade. And it would be equally unreasonable to reserve the profession of arms to one sex and forbid it to the other on the grounds that men beget children whereas women bear them.34
Élite women, then, will integrate the corps of warriors and leave us with our uncertainty. Being a man or woman is of no more consequence than being bald or hairy. All that matters are differences “relating to occupations,” but what these are remains obscure. How are we ever to recognize the differences between a shoemaker-nature and a carpenter-nature, differences that introduce an exclusivity implied not even in the most natural and incontestable of differences, the difference between the sexes?
All that remains for us to identify the worker is his work alone. Not his production, as we now know, but the fact that he is not to do “anything else” than his trade. And even that is no longer necessary: “Do you think it would greatly injure a state if a carpenter were to undertake to do the work of a shoemaker, or a shoemaker the work of a carpenter, or if they were to exchange their tools and their wages, or if one of them were to get it into his head to do both trades at once, or if all trades were exchanged that way?”35
“Not much,” replies Glaucon. That the shoemaker remains a shoemaker or the carpenter a carpenter is not the important thing. All considerations of nature and social utility aside, they can exchange their trades, and even indulge in the forbidden activity of doing two things at once, without doing any great harm to the state. Why? Because these two things are completely equivalent. The differentiation of useful works and aptitudes is reducible to the equivalence of wage-earning labors. The shoemaker-nature is as interchangeable with the carpenter-nature as commodities are with gold and gold with commodities. It is necessary that their virtue should not lack anything else than this universal equivalence that defines the unworthiness of the artisan. The only danger lies in confusing orders. Between artisan and warrior, or between warrior and ruler, there can be no exchange of place and function; neither can two things be done at the same time without bringing doom to the city.
The barrier of orders is the barrier of the lie. Nothing remains of the fine functionality of the division of labor. Each was obliged to do the one task for which nature destined him. But the function is an illusion just as nature is. All that remains is the prohibition. The artisan in his place is someone who, in general, does nothing but accredit, even at the cost of lying, the declared lie that puts him in his place.