Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 025 - Soul and The City - Plato's Political Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Soul and the City, Plato's political philosophy. One of the most famous scenes in the history of the Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides presents a dialogue between the representatives of Athens and the people of a small island called Melos. The Athenians are embroiled in their long-running war against Sparta and its allies. The Melians have preserved their neutrality in this war, but now, the Athenians want to persuade the people of Melos to join the fight against the Spartan alliance. When the Melians ask why they should do this, the Athenians admit that they can offer no principled reason. Instead, they point out that they are powerful, whereas the Melians are weak. Their argument is simple, join us or be smashed. The Melians opted not to join Athens and were duly smashed. The men of the island were massacred, the women and children sold into slavery, and the island made into an Athenian colony. As Thucydides has the Athenians observe, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Actually, this traditional translation of Thucydides's famous aphorism is not particularly accurate, but in any translation, the scene shows Athens giving Melos a brutal lesson in realpolitik. Thucydides has his own reasons for putting this speech into the mouths of the Athenians, because it helps him develop his great theme of Athenian arrogance and expansionism. On his telling, the Athenians reap what they sow when they lose the Peloponnesian War. This shook the political institutions of Athens to their foundations. As I've mentioned in a previous episode, in the wake of the defeat, the democratic constitution of Athens was overthrown by a cabal of men, the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Once the tyrants were removed and the democracy restored, the good people of Athens indulged in some civic spring cleaning, including the trial and execution of Socrates. Thucydides is our most important source for reconstructing the confrontation between democratic Athens and the oligarchic city of Sparta, but the events of the late 5th century have echoes in other ancient Greek writings, such as the plays of our old friend Aristophanes. Those echoes can also be heard in a dialogue that is usually regarded as the founding text of political philosophy and the greatest work of Plato, the Republic. The Republic is a work of extraordinary complexity and length. It takes in not only political philosophy, but also moral psychology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to think of an area of philosophy not explored in the Republic. I'm going to devote two podcasts to it, but I could easily do ten podcasts, one for each book, and still leave out a lot. In this first episode I'll deal with the Republic's central idea, the structure of the ideal city, and the parallel Plato draws between the city and the human soul. We get a taste of the themes of the Republic on its very first page. Socrates is the narrator, and tells us of an encounter he had at the time of the festival of the goddess Bendis. He has seen a religious procession and is returning to Athens, when he's intercepted by a group led by one Polemarchus. In a darkly amusing passage which resonates with Thucydides's Melian dialogue, Polemarchus invites Socrates and his friend Glaucon to come home for some hospitality. He points out that if Socrates doesn't want to come he can be forced to do so, since Polemarchus's companions outnumber Socrates and Glaucon. Polemarchus's group is physically stronger, so it's inevitable that they will get what they want, one way or another. Already in this opening sequence Plato has made us think about the role of strength and compulsion in human affairs, a central issue throughout the Republic. Socrates agrees to go quietly, and winds up back at Polemarchus's house. Among the people gathered there three are particularly important. There is Thrasymachus, a sophist, who locks horns with Socrates in this first book, and there are Glaucon and Adeimantus, who will be the main interlocutors for Socrates for the remaining nine books of the Republic. These two characters just happen to be the brothers of Plato. The discussions Socrates has with Thrasymachus and then with Glaucon and Adeimantus are about the nature of justice. Thrasymachus holds a view much like the one defended by Calicles in Plato's dialogue the Gorgias. On this view, justice is simply whatever benefits the strong. Thrasymachus admires the man who is bold enough to commit any number of so-called injustices, to take what he can get, to become a tyrant and enslave his enemies. Real justice is, if you will, for the strong to do what they can, and for the weak to suffer what they must. Thrasymachus admits that this is not what people usually mean by justice. But for him, the popular understanding is a perversion. The so-called justice, admired in Athens and other Greek cities, is the reverse of what is really just. Common conceptions of justice help the weak rather than the strong, because they keep the strong in line and allow the weak a share in decision-making. Socrates proceeds to refute Thrasymachus in his inimitable fashion. He tries to show Thrasymachus that political rule must look to the benefit of the ruled, not that of the ruler, just as the art of shepherding looks to the benefit of sheep, not shepherds. After this dialogue between Socrates and Thrasymachus, Book 1 of the Republic comes to an end. When Book 2 opens, Glaucon and Adeimantus complain that Socrates' refutation of Thrasymachus has left them unsatisfied. They would like to be convinced once and for all that justice really is better than injustice. People claim to admire justice, but is this what they believe in their heart of hearts? Glaucon does a good job of playing devil's advocate here. First, he suggests thinking of justice as a kind of tacit agreement between people not to harm each other. We would all gladly be cruel to one another, to take what we can and make others suffer what they must, but we agree not to, because a situation in which everyone is trying to harm everyone winds up being bad for most people most of the time. This is reminiscent of later accounts of morality or political institutions, which we now call contract theories. If all goes well, this series of podcasts will eventually reach the most famous such theory in the work of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, you know of nasty brutish and short fame. But unlike Hobbes, Glaucon backs up his contract theory with a mythical story in which a farmer discovers a ring that turns him invisible. Using the ring, the farmer manages to kill the local king, seduce his wife, and become a tyrant. And let's face it, says Glaucon, we would all do the same if we were given a ring of invisibility. I note that Hobbes would seem to be an exception to this rule. But hobbits aside, the example of the ring is supposed to show that people don't really value justice, because if they could get away with it, their actions would prove that they think injustice is more advantageous. This then is the task set for Socrates in the Republic, to show Plato's brothers, and of course us, the readers, that justice is more choice-worthy than injustice. For Socrates, the hard-nosed real politic which sacrifices justice for the sake of expediency, as the Athenians did at Milos, betrays a crass misunderstanding of our real interests. This will be true at the level of the city, as well as the level of the individual person. Socrates introduces this parallel between soul and city, by suggesting that, if we wanted to read some words that were written in small letters, we would be happy of the opportunity to look at the same words written elsewhere in much larger letters. In the same way, he suggests, we can learn about justice in the soul of an individual by studying justice in the city. Here you might complain that Socrates is simply assuming that there is a parallel between city and soul. Shouldn't he be arguing for this if it's going to be so important? Well, we do in fact talk about justice at both the level of society and of the individual. Unless we're using the word justice in two completely unrelated ways, Socrates must be right that political justice and individual justice do have something in common. Besides, the proof is in the pudding. If Socrates can discover parallel features and structures in both the soul and the city, then his strategy will show itself to be a good one. So let's look at justice at the political level. We can start with the very word political. It relates to the ancient Greek word polis, which means city or city-state. As you may know or already have noticed from my allusions to classical Greek history, the political units of the ancient world were cities, like Athens and Sparta, not countries like Greece or Italy. But a polis was a city in a rather broad sense of the word. Athens, for instance, was a polis which dominated the area called Attica, and its democratic constitution allowed for the sharing of political power among the citizens of this whole area. Often the various cities banded together in alliances, like those which clashed in the Peloponnesian War, or cooperated to repulse the invasions of the Persians. They also came together to celebrate the Olympic Games, to sponsor and worship at religious centers like Delphi. Such cooperative or competitive activities certainly had a political aspect. Still, when both Plato and Aristotle talk about political constitutions, they normally have in mind the workings of a polis, a single city. They do, of course, talk also of the Greeks, but this has to do with cultural affinity, for instance common language and religious practices, and not an overarching political unity. Now, if you wanted to figure out the most just possible way of running a city, how would you do it? An obvious strategy would be to choose an existing city which seems to do well, and modeling your theory on that city. Or you might learn from the mistakes of cities that do badly. But this is not how Plato does it. In this way he is very unlike an author like Thucydides. As a historian, Thucydides does convey ideas about how cities should be run, how wars should be prosecuted. But he does this by artfully framing actual history, for instance by showing us the consequences of the swaggering imperialism of Athens. Aristotle, as we'll see in a later episode, characteristically takes a middle road. He presents general observations about political structures, yet frequently refers to the ways actual Greek cities are run. In the Republic, by contrast, Plato has Socrates start with a blank slate, designing an ideal city from scratch. The lessons for real cities like Athens remain implicit. For instance, when democracy is criticized in Book 8 of the Republic, we aren't invited to focus on actual events in Athens or in other democratic cities. Socrates' first attempt to describe an ideal city is strikingly modest. The best city would be fairly small, a cooperative, one might almost say communitarian group of farmers, craftsmen, and traders. They eat a restricted, vegetarian diet, wear simple clothing, and live in peace. Glaucon immediately objects that this sounds more like a city of pigs than a city of men. He wouldn't have enjoyed living in a 1960s hippie commune. Glaucon's objection here changes everything. Socrates says that if the city is to afford luxuries it will need to expand, to develop a powerful military for taking and protecting more land than it strictly needs. This is the origin of the infamous class system of Plato's Republic, since it sets up a division of the city into two types of people, the guardian soldiers and the laborers. The guardians will rule over the craftsmen, and their rule will, as we'll see in a minute, be absolute and unquestioned. This aspect of the Republic has come in for its share of criticism. Famously, the philosopher Karl Popper accused Plato of being an enemy of what he called the open society, and saw the Republic as a founding text of totalitarianism. Now, I don't want to be an apologist for Plato. Actually, I take that back. I do want to be an apologist for Plato. Part of my defense would be that the introduction of a ruling class is explicitly marked by Socrates as being a departure from the true ideal, which is his more simple, agrarian community. The city which includes luxuries is, as he says, fevered, rather than truly healthy. As the next several books of the Republic unfold, we are given much more detail about this feverish version of the ideal city. The guardian class takes center stage. We get a lengthy discussion of the education that will turn the guardians into a patriotic and disciplined fighting machine. In the course of their education, it becomes necessary to separate out this higher class into two subclasses. There will be the true guardians who actually rule the city because of their natural gift for self-control. And then there will be the helpers or auxiliaries, who will serve as a fearsome army for defending the city. So in the end the city Socrates is describing winds up with three classes, not two. There are the true guardians, who do the ruling, then the auxiliaries, who do the fighting, then the craftsmen, who do everything else. It's paramount that the right citizens are placed into the right classes. To make this possible, sexual relations between the citizens are highly regulated. People are assigned by a rigged lottery to mate with carefully selected partners. The guardians have no private property, but share all things in common, even children, who are taken away from their mothers at birth and raised by the whole community of guardians so that they form one big happy family. Now I know what you're thinking, this all sounds pretty wacky. Sharing children? Assigning people to mate with each other by lot? It's hard to take all this seriously as a real set of policies. Plato's audience would probably have agreed, and would have been particularly shocked by the proposal that there should be women in the guardian class. Women were treated as far less than equal to men in Greece as a whole, and got a particularly bad deal in Athens. But Plato has Socrates argue explicitly that even if women are not actually equal to men, they should be capable of performing all the same roles in society. Of course for us this is admirable and forward thinking, but Socrates's proposals for the sexual politics of the ideal city do have some disturbing resonances for us too. These days eugenics doesn't exactly have a good name. But Socrates is adamant that without such firm control over the class system and the reproductive arrangements that sustain it, the city is bound to degenerate. He invents a mythic story which will be fed to the citizens of the city, the so-called noble lie. According to this noble lie, the citizens of the city all have an admixture of metal in their blood. The true guardians have gold in them, the auxiliaries silver and the craftsmen bronze and iron. This will persuade them to see the importance of staying within their own class, or doing their own, as Socrates puts it. The justice of this just city consists in fact in the various classes doing what they are meant to do, with the guardians ruling, the auxiliaries fighting, and the craftsmen obeying. Here admittedly you can see why Popper and others might have caught a whiff of totalitarianism in the Republic. But interestingly, Socrates himself sees the ideal city as unsustainable, since he supposes that the eugenic lottery will inevitably fall short of perfection, and the classes will get mixed up after all. That then is a sketch of Socrates' just city. But what about the just soul? Can we really, as Socrates suggests, understand justice in the city as a larger image of justice in the soul? Socrates argues in the fourth book of the Republic that we can. He points out that, like the city, the soul must have more than one aspect, for the soul can be in harmony or in tension with itself. Consider for instance your desire to drink a beer. Your desire for the beer might be very strong, but you might exercise self-control, and refrain from the beer, for instance if you are going to drive later or need to study for an exam. This shows that the soul is not simple but has several aspects which can struggle against one another. Socrates argues that like the city, the soul has three aspects, reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason is the highest aspect which is directed towards truth, spirit is directed towards honor, and with this aspect of our soul we are able to feel such emotions as anger and courage. Appetite, finally, is the set of drives we possess for things such as food, drink, and sex. Justice in the soul, then, is more or less exactly like justice in the city. It is for the three parts of the soul to do what they should. For the ruling part, which is reason in the soul, and the guardians in the city, to rule, with the assistance of the spirit, or the auxiliaries, over the lowest part, namely appetite or the craftsman. Finally, if this is how justice looks in the city and the soul, what about injustice? What happens when a city or a soul degenerates and becomes worse? Plato extends the analogy between soul and city when he comes to consider the degenerate cases. He has Socrates tell us two stories in parallel. In one story we get a sequence of individual men, worse sons born to better fathers. In another story, worse political arrangements arise from better ones. For instance, the best arrangement after the ideal city is a so-called Timocracy in which the city is dedicated to honor and victory. This is basically the ideal city shorn of its true rulers and guided solely by soldiers who long to distinguish themselves on the battlefield. From this arises an oligarchy, a city of the rich, then democracy, the city ruled by the common people. By the way, all these English words come from ancient Greek. Democracy comes from the Greek words for honor and rule, while oligarchy means rule by the few, and democracy means rule by the people, the demos. Finally, Socrates tells us that the natural next step from democracy is tyranny, which is ruled by a single vicious man. On the soul side, there are individual personality types, as we might call them, which correspond to these cities. There is the Timocratic man who wants nothing but honor, the oligarchic man who wants wealth, the democratic man who wants freedom. Worst of all is the tyrannical man whose lust for power ironically winds up enslaving him to his own desires. Just as it's natural for, say, an oligarchic city to degenerate into a democratic one, it's natural for a father with an oligarchic character to have a son who goes bad and who develops a democratic character. We may find it shocking that Plato sees democracy as the second worst form of government. For him, only tyranny, ruled by the worst of all possible rulers, is worse than democracy. There's little doubt that Plato is here registering his dissatisfaction with the performance of democratic Athens. They did, after all, execute Socrates. On the other hand, his critique of democracy is rather nuanced. When the people, the demos, are in charge, there is total freedom for all. So all desires can be satisfied, every lifestyle is approved. It's a wide open society, and its chaotic ethical pluralism is far removed from the adamantine laws of Socrates' ideal city. We might retort that these are in fact the very things we appreciate in democracy. And Plato agrees that democracy is attractive, despite being defective. He has Socrates say that this is the most beautiful constitution, like a many-colored garment in its variety. Also disturbing is his suggestion that tyrannies naturally arise from democracies. Here Plato may again have been thinking of the experience of Athens, and the seizure of the city by the Thirty Tyrants in the wake of the Peloponnesian War. His reflections on the relation between democracy and tyranny stand as a warning to all of us who live in democracies today, even if we don't agree that democracy is already about as bad as it gets. Suppose though that we did agree that there is a better way to go than democracy. Suppose we liked the sound of Plato's ideal city and wanted to create one. What would be our first step? What kind of people would we need to select for our true guardians? I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that those of us who do philosophy for a living are going to like Plato's answer. We'll find out why next week, here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.