Void House Book Club: The Republic

Plato and Aristotle stand in the center of Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, which is a favorite painting of mine for (hopefully) obvious reasons. They stand out among an otherwise cluttered cast of characters because they’re the only ones standing in front of the archway out of the school instead of a stone wall, such that there is much sharper contrast between their bodies and the background. The message is clear: Greek philosophy had many characters, but in the end, it was the story of Plato and Aristotle.

Before reading The Republic and The Politics (which I will discuss in a couple of weeks), my primary exposure to the thought of either Plato or Aristotle came in what others had told me about them, especially in the famous philosophy textbook The Great Conversation (which features The School of Athens on its cover). While I strongly recommend this book and absolutely do not feel misled by it, it is limited in scope, and my own preconceptions and misinterpretations caused me to adopt a flawed view of both Plato and Aristotle. I understood that the great trinity of Greek thinkers included Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but that Plato was not really at the same level of influence as the others and included only because he was the middle link between Socrates and Aristotle. Socrates was more or less the foundation of western philosophy, as most pre-socratic philosophers and sophists made great assumptions in their thought which Socrates rejected. He was the first to demand that we reach conclusions through reason alone. Aristotle was even more important, as for most of western history he was the secondary authority on nearly every subject pertaining to how reality functions, behind only Jesus Christ. He codified logic and used it to promote his own positions on everything from physics and biology through metaphysics to ethics, politics, and even aesthetics. He also held moderate, approachable positions on most subjects; he was the “common sense philosopher.” Plato couldn’t claim the same achievements of either Socrates or Aristotle, and further, his ideas were strongly divorced from reality, contingent on the existence of a mystical “world of forms” which was separate from our material reality. You even see this in The School of Athens, where Plato points upward because he focuses on unreal things in the heavens, where Aristotle points downwards because he focuses on the things we can see in our own world. As such, I aligned myself more with Aristotle, who was clearly more important to understanding the development of western thought and whose hardline logical approach felt more persuasive.

This changed a little bit last year, when I read Nicomachaean Ethics. The core argument of that book is that virtuous behavior is always the mean between two behaviors that differ only in degree, such that one is deficient and the other excessive. For example, Aristotle argues that, when exhibiting confidence, one can be rash and thereby foolishly endanger oneself, or cowardly and fail to do good out of fear, when the correct quality to have is courage, which lies in the middle of rashness and cowardice. This does seem like the “common sense” position to me, because having the wrong amount of some quality is by definition wrong, but it didn’t seem to follow the same rigorous logic that I expected from Aristotle. I couldn’t figure out how to construct this argument using axioms, modus ponens, and modus tollens. What I did see was an obvious error: Aristotle held that the mean was always best because he intentionally ignored qualities which one ought to maximize or minimize. To explain what I mean, imagine that instead of confidence, we were discussing virtue itself. Would Aristotle argue that, because the mean is always best, that a person should only exhibit middling virtue, because having too little virtue and too much virtue are both bad? Obviously not. The mere fact he even wrote Nicomachaean Ethics suggests that he wanted readers to maximize their virtue, which doesn’t sound like a golden mean to me!

I reevaluated my position on Aristotle from that. Yes, he was the moderate, common sense philosopher, but that didn’t mean he was right. Sometimes it is better to take an extreme position. I would probably describe myself as politically extremist, and I feel that way because I genuinely believe that the extreme position is superior to the centrist one. How can I deify Aristotle further when my own ideas are so strongly opposed to his?

The Republic fully shifted my position on Plato and Aristotle. I was shocked when I read it to discover that Plato was more or less correct about everything. His approach was far less dry and systematic than Aristotle, yet he still managed to accurately describe an ideal state and defend it well. I don’t mean to say that Plato isn’t logical — in fact, Socrates’s approach to defining the state is to ask a series of questions and use his friends’ rational responses to justify his position — but Plato has a willingness to explore the unconventional that Aristotle lacks.

To be clear, Plato did make errors in minor places. Although the world of forms is good as a thought experiment to help us define and understand terms, Plato spoke about it as though it was a real place that existed outside of our universe, and that somewhere out there existed the true forms of concepts like “chair” or “sandwich” or even “square” in some physical form. He never provides any ground for this position, which is unsurprising because it is clearly a faith-based religion. Another striking example is that he argues the upper class should practice free love instead of marriage and should not know who their children are, because then they would show no preference for their family and instead treat everyone as potential lovers or children. I admit that this argument is valid, but not sound. Plato fails to prove the axiom that people who don’t know their lovers or children would treat everyone like lovers or children, and in fact free love communities like this exist and people do not behave this way in them. When I say Plato was “more or less correct about everything,” what I mean is that the strong majority of his errors are disposable to the core argument he makes about how to structure a state, which is generally correct.

Many people describe Plato as a fascist. I understand that he promotes fascist thought in his Laws, which I haven’t read. In The Republic, though, he’s more of an elitist. He says that society must maintain a “noble lie” that all people are born with some metal in the soul, and that this metal determines what sort of labor they can do and what sort of lifestyle they can have. Those with less precious metals live quite similarly to how commoners actually lived in Plato’s time, working in production and having traditional families with no participation in the government. However, those with precious metals like silver and gold live radically different lives. They compose a sort of hybrid military/aristocracy which Plato dubs the “Guardian class.” Guardians live according to the free love system I described in the last paragraph, and they are trained to live well, being virtuous, physically strong, and knowledgeable. This combination of traits allows them to most effectively lead and protect the state. It is not exactly clear how Plato determines which people have which metals, but he suggests that there are elements of social mobility and that children join the Guardian class through the expression of great virtue. In other words, the aristocracy is formed of the most virtuous and capable members of society, not the richest or the descendants of past Guardians (Plato does make the eugenicist argument that, because Guardians only reproduce with each other, their children will have the same positive traits that they do; I do not take this to mean that the children of Guardians automatically become Guardians themselves, or that this precludes anyone else from becoming a Guardian.)

The United States has its own noble lie: “All men are created equal.” In a democracy, all citizens hold the same political power, so all people must be capable of wielding that power responsibly. It would be very dangerous for there to be a great number of citizens who use their power poorly, either due to incompetence or malice. Thus, the people living in a democratic state must all be intelligent and virtuous. The founding fathers sold this idea by arguing that all men are, in fact, similar enough in their competency and virtuousness that they can all handle holding political power (interestingly, they did famously restrict power to only white male landowners, which suggests that they believed in aristocracy over democracy, despite claiming to be democrats.) This is, however, plainly untrue to any reasonable person. There is no doubt that some people are more intelligent than others; some more courageous; some have a stronger moral compass; and so on, and so forth. In reality, a great number of people do not have the capability to wield political power, and many of America’s real problems come from the fact that we permit irresponsible people to vote. There has never been a good president in my lifetime, and I attribute this partially to the fact that American voters do not vote intelligently. I make this digression because my personal experiences living in a democracy demonstrate that Plato is right about people’s roles; some ought to be political agents, and some shouldn’t. The power to influence others’ lives must be earned, not freely given.

The most famous element of The Republic, though, is the “Philosopher King.” This is the ultimate conclusion of the same argument that justifies the Guardian class. If the most competent and virtuous people ought to compose the political class because they are the ones most capable of running it well, then the ruler ought to be the person who holds these qualities to the absolute highest degree. Plato believed that such a person would necessarily be a philosopher — and before you scoff and point out that, OF COURSE Plato would feel philosophers are uniquely great because he was one himself, consider that in actual fact Philosopher Kings did exist and performed excellently as rulers. Marcus Aurelius is probably the most unambiguous example, and while stoicism is detestable, he was at least motivated by genuine good will and is remembered as one of the greatest Roman emperors. Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson, and Lee Kuan Yew are also Philosopher Kings and they are among the greatest rulers in human history. While I am personally not confident in autocracy — a singular person, no matter how great, has blind spots that a large group of people might not — because I accept that the state should be ruled by its best citizens, I must also agree that any ruler should be the person who is the absolute best in the state. To be the best, one must be intelligent and knowledgeable, curious and logical, and have some principled theory of ethics which determines his behavior. In other words, he should be a philosopher.

The Republic surprised me with its breadth. I’ve ignored a great number of political arguments Plato made here because this post is too long already. I expected it to be fully political; in fact, it addresses many other elements of Plato’s thought as well. When advocating for the Philosopher King, Plato takes time to discuss what a philosopher even is, and in so doing he invents his famous Allegory of the Cave. The story goes that some people are prisoners in a cave, who understand that the shadows they see on its wall constitute the entire world. If one were to leave that cave, though, he would find that there are many more things in the world, and that what they saw in the cave were merely impressions of reality. Only the man outside the cave sees things as they truly are, and he can use that information to teach those stuck in the cave. Similarly, the philosopher sees realities that are hidden from the average person, notably the true form of “the Good.” Socrates cannot define the Good, because it is so far beyond humanity that no one can properly ascertain it, but because it is the source of all human happiness and because only the philosopher can bring humans closer to understanding it, it follows that the philosopher’s duty is to guide others to the Good through teaching them. As a spoiler for my upcoming post on Politics, I found that book so technical and dry that it actually obfuscated my understanding; the Republic is so full of beautiful narratives that it is legitimately fun to read even if the reader fails to learn anything from it. Plato was a brilliant thinker in many realms, not just politics, and The Republic manages to sneak in thought from those disciplines as well.

Out of all the books I read in my first phase of this reading project, The Republic is my favorite. I love the entertaining way Socrates speaks. I love the creative stories he invents. I love how Plato hid lessons on metaphysics and personal ethics in a book ostensibly about politics. Most of all, though, I love that it offers the most effective and coherent form of government out of anything I’ve ever read. I already knew that aristocracy was the best form of government deductively. I have seen which societies fail and which thrive, and my own home country started its decline from prosperity to mediocrity when it opened up political agency to greater and greater numbers of people who failed to use it appropriately. Scientifically speaking, every government is an experiment that hypothesizes some form of state is best, and we can deduce from their performance whether the hypothesis was correct or incorrect. Thus far, the most prosperous ones are the ones in which political agency belongs only to that set of people who can wield it well, however large or small it may be. Thanks to The Republic, though, I can also support this position inductively. I now know not just that aristocratic states succeed, but also why they succeed, and for that I owe a great debt to Plato.