‘Unless communities have philosophers as kings,’ I said, ‘or the people who are currently called kings and rulers practise philosophy with enough integrity – in other words, unless political power and philosophy coincide… there can be no end to political troubles, my dear Glaucon, or even to human troubles in general…’ (V, 473d)
Plato advances the claim that in the well-ordered state the ruling elite needs to be composed of philosophers, knowing in advance that it is going to make jaws drop. Before seeing why, it may be worth pointing to moderately bland things that might be meant by it. It is, after all, not so very radical to suggest that people who know relevant things make better leaders than those who do not. A guide who knows the terrain is better than a guide who has never set foot on it. A captain who knows how to sail is better than one who does not. It requires only some analogy between the job of the rulers and other craft skills to suggest that things go better if the ruling elite know their way about.
Of course, ‘knowing their way about’, in the case of ruling a state, may imply a whole range of knowledge and abilities: being able to understand the motivations of people, being able to anticipate the upshot of different decisions, being imaginative enough to generate strategies for getting over a whole variety of problems, and so on. We naturally think in terms of a conglomeration of different experts: economists, strategists, planners, people sensitive to the reactions of other cultures, and so on. It is not at all radical to hold that governments need to be informed in order to work at all well. This much is still Plato-lite, although it formed a large part of the ideology of the modern world. The education of the public servants who make up the Establishment was a Victorian preoccupation, and in Britain at least it went on self-consciously in the shadow of Republic.1
The experts still have to submit their judgements to those who make the final decisions. A ruler may be told that he can afford to go to war, that he has the manpower, that the technical problems are not insuperable, but he or she still has to judge whether it is the thing to do. Here, as Plato well understood, the analogy between ruling and craft skill begins to look shaky. The mountain guide or the captain of a ship, like the shoemaker or other producer, works with reasonably fixed ends: to find the route, to complete the voyage safely and swiftly, and so on. But in judging that something is the thing to do, the ends may not be fixed. Precisely the problem may be that if you look for one outcome, then there is one way to go about it, but if you look for a different one, then there is a different thing to do – and the problem is to know which to go for. If you want acquisitions, then the thing to do might be to go to war. If you value more highly the safety of your people, it may not be. The ruler has to decide which. He has to order a plurality of possible goods.
On Hume’s picture of reason and passion, that we met above, there is a point here where reason goes silent. Its function as the slave of the passions is to present the situation in all its complexity. It can present what philosophers call conditionals: if you want this outcome, that is the way to go about it, or this is the risk you are running. But it cannot tell you to want the outcome, or how urgent it is to avoid the risk. About that it goes silent while the passions fight for possession of the soul of the ruler, or in other words, jostle for ascendancy over the decision. What you do will depend upon what you want, and although wants can certainly be criticized in the light of other wants, eventually the whole web of desire exists with whatever shape it may have independently of reason. For Plato this is not true. There is an answer which either ranks the alternatives outright, or at worst tells you that a number tie for first place, in which case it does not matter which you choose. But when there is an answer a sufficient exercise of wisdom or understanding will enable the ruler both to find it and to control his passions so that it becomes the most attractive option for him, the thing to do. For Hume we can say that a ruler made a wise decision, or showed that he knew what to do, but we can’t really mean it as Plato intends. It would be a compliment, paid because we happen to share the ruler’s priorities or profile of desires and fears. It would not signal that the ruler has brought his decision into conformity with truth or reason, precisely because truth and reason are silent about overall ends.
Plato does not think like this. The charioteer controls the horses of passion and spirit; the ruler controls the martial arm and the people of the state. So the ruler first has to know what it is best to do. But this in turn raises the question of how the ruler is to gain and exercise this wisdom and understanding. So this becomes the topic, and Plato rapidly makes it clear that he has something much more radical than a well-educated civil service in mind. It is here that we get to the ‘perennial philosophy’ and Plato-lite turns into Plato very heavy indeed.
The crucial argument comes from V, 474d, to the end of Book V, at 480a. In outline, Socrates first gets agreement that the philosopher desires the whole of knowledge, not just some part of it (as it were, knowledge of this or that particular subject matter). In addition, and crucially, the philosopher is not just an idle sightseer or theatre-goer, content to collect diverse sights and sounds. The philosopher understands what he sees. He can get beneath the surface. He can discriminate and distinguish what is common or essential, and especially what is common or essential to the plurality of particular good or beautiful things. Mere theatre-goers and sightseers skate on the surface. They are constitutionally unable to get beyond the particulars themselves, to appreciate their common essence.
The argument now sets out to prove that the theatre-goers and sightseers live in a dream world, and by contrast the philosopher, who has the ability to see beauty and goodness themselves, lives in the real world. An equivalent way of putting it, Plato thinks, is that the philosopher has knowledge, whereas the others have only beliefs. Of course it is a little hard to convince the believers of this, and of their relatively poor state of health compared to the person of knowledge. That’s just how it is: it is always difficult to persuade those who live in the dark that they are missing something. But we must accept that knowledge and belief are different faculties or capacities, for knowledge is infallible, and belief is not. And different faculties have different domains, or spheres of operation. The proper domain of knowledge is reality, while the proper domain of belief must be something different, something not quite real, since that is reserved for knowledge. It is something half real, an inferior subject. It is not entirely unreal, since that is the domain of incomprehension. Belief must find an intermediate subject-matter.
If we return to theatre-goers and sightseers, we find what this inferior subject matter is. We can ask them:
is there is one beautiful thing, in this welter of beautiful things, which won’t turn out to be ugly? Is there one moral deed which won’t turn out to be immoral? Is there one just act which won’t turn out to be unjust? (V, 479a)
The answer (surprisingly) turns out to be that there is not. Any member of a plurality ‘no more is whatever it is said to be than it is not whatever it is said to be’. So now we have located the domain of belief. It is the ‘welter of things’ that the masses conventionally regard as one thing or another – beautiful, for example. The beauty of these things, as it were, hovers between reality and unreality, since in truth they are no more beautiful than non-beautiful, or no more good than not good. It is only the philosopher who can see beauty or goodness itself ‘in its permanent and unvarying nature’ who can aspire to knowledge, and hence be in touch with the real.
Even Plato’s admirers (beginning with Aristotle) tend to jib at all this, and one can understand why. There is an immediate (but, we see later, superficial) objection to the whole separation of belief and knowledge as distinct faculties, therefore with distinct subject-matters. We more naturally suppose that you can know something which you previously only believed, as when you come to learn what was hitherto only conjectural, for instance by going and looking. Knowledge is true belief that has a decent pedigree, according to an account heralded in one of Plato’s other dialogues, Theaetetus. In that case, by putting himself in a better position, one person may know what another merely believes. Someone may fear, or suspect, or even believe that there is a bear in his rubbish bin, and when he opens the lid he rapidly comes to know that there is. But what he knows is exactly what he previously suspected. There is no distinction of the domains of knowledge and belief. So here in Republic we seem to be offered little more than a flimsy excuse to take us away from the ordinary world, substituting instead some strange otherworldly ‘permanent and unvarying’ subject-matter for the philosopher.
And even if we can make sense of that, in the game with the likes of Thrasymachus and Glaucon, the move looks set to be a spectacular own-goal. If the philosopher only knows about otherworldly things, he is not likely to be at all adapted to knowing about the day-to-day problems and hand-to-mouth solutions that make up the art of government.
To some, Plato’s apparent flight from the world around us has all seemed outrageous enough to make us conclude that there must be some kind of unconscious moral and emotional agenda driving him. Nietzsche diagnoses it as the sadism of the ascetic, the desire to disown and vilify everyday life, to promote a self-denying retreat from the world, a disparagement of our passions and senses and life itself. He was in no doubt about its malign influence and importance. It marks not only the beginning of the end for the golden world of classical Greece (ruled by thumos) but it is the side of philosophy that, vulgarized and mingled with other currents, made up the religious instinct of Christianity. It did, however, give us what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ‘will to truth’, which is in a sense the engine-room of Western civilization:
Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist’s error – namely, Plato’s invention of pure spirit and the good as such. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier – sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life, when one spoke of spirit and the good as Plato did. Indeed as a physician one might ask: ‘How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contract such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? Could Socrates have been the corrupter of youth after all? And did he deserve his hemlock?’
But the fight against Plato or, to speak more clearly and for ‘the people’, the fight against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – for Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’ – has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals.2
Immanuel Kant, himself often found guilty of the otherworldly philosophy of German idealism, put it more sympathetically, and more beautifully:
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses… 3
For Nietzsche, Plato is here the sick, sadistic ascetic who plunged Europe into the darkness of his extra-terrestial nightmares. For Kant, he has made a slightly more pardonable blunder, believing that in the name of real understanding he can simply jettison the connection with sense experience which alone makes understanding possible. If this is our first encounter with a Plato that is not Plato-lite, it is not very promising.