Thoughts on Plato's Republic
- bobjones1516
- Aug 15, 2020
- 14 min read
Updated: Sep 13, 2020
I have finally completed Plato’s Republic and chose Robin Waterfield’s translation for Oxford World’s Classics. I really enjoyed his translation, notes, and introductory material for some of the other works I’ve been reading, and I’m having the same experience with this one. The introduction is excellent and helped lend context to the material without being overly long or pretentious. The translation is clear and understandable, but, of course, I can’t read ancient Greek so I have no real way of knowing if it’s actually accurate. There are extensive notes pointing out historical/cultural context or points over which there has been extensive scholarly debate. There’s also a great bibliography, and I’m very happy with the edition that I bought.
Intro:
The republic is traditionally divided into ten books, although his translation instead splits it up into fourteen chapters which are broken up into more logical portions than the original books, which sometimes end in the middle of arguments. I’m going to describe what I’m talking about by using the chapters and pages (for the sake of my own sanity), as well as, when I’m not too lazy, the cipher system (which I’ll refer to my line number) the book includes in the margins which Robin Waterfield tells us is traditionally used for referring to Plato’s passages, originally based on a 16th century translation. If by some miracle this website is viewed by someone other than me and webcrawlers, I’ll go back and make the references to the parts of the book that I was reading more clear.
The task Plato/Socrates sets for himself is to somehow convince us that morality is beneficial to its possessor independent of any external benefits which may result to the moral person or society at large. In Gorgias, he reached the conclusion that it’s better to be the innocent victim of a crime or torture than the one inflicting that crime or torture. I don’t know that I could personally refute Socrates’ arguments there easily, but I don’t believe his conclusion and doubt anyone else, deep down, does either without reference to external benefits/detriments through god or the afterlife. Here, Plato specifically removes after death benefits from consideration. Because it’s such a difficult task, Socrates will analogize the individual and his morality to a moral community and attempt to draw conclusions from his portrait of a well ordered and moral community that can be applied to an individual.
Robin Waterfield points out in a few footnotes throughout the book, and I would agree, that the strength of many of Plato’s argument for any particular reader rest on how convinced you are that we can draw reasonable conclusions through analogizing communities to individuals. Plato doesn’t give us a compelling reason that we ought to be able to do so, and I was not convinced that we can do so.
My Thoughts Throughout the Book:
In the first chapter, Socrates makes the same kind of argument that he made in Gorgias by treating a moral person as the same as a good carpenter or a good doctor. This is really more wordplay than real argument and relies on a false analogy that a moral person and someone being good at something like wood carving or doctoring are the same thing, when they aren’t. Finding morality is about searching for or striving for a behavioral standard, and the book’s opening ignores that and is a bit of a time waster. The intro explains this part was probably written earlier than the rest of the book.
In Chapter 2 the book starts to up its game. I particularly like the counterargument to Socrates position that morality is good for the person behaving morally—he is asked to really explain why it’s beneficial point blank. His interlocutors point out that the best situation would be to have a reputation for morality to accrue the external benefits but in fact behave immorally. The book also takes afterlife punishment out of the equation by arguing that our immoral person will get so rich they can buy their way out of punishment with plenty of sacrifices—an odd argument to the modern Christian ear, but I’m glad that it gets us out of the trap of having to rely only on post-mortem punishment.
In Chapters 3 and 4 (around line 397 when I noted this), as Plato starts to build up the picture of our ideal, moral state/society with its three parts between workers, auxiliaries (army) and guardians (rulers), we get an extended discussion of the sorts of myths and poetry that will and will not be permitted in our ideal community, as well as its education system. Think lots and lots of censorship and control, but, of course, every society features this. My main thought here was that this seems like an unnecessarily detailed discussion of these topics if the whole point of the ideal community is simply to use it as a metaphor for the individual and to compare morality in each.
Why do we need to go to such great lengths to set up the various aspects of the community? I assumed there would be a payoff later once we got into the metaphor itself, and there really wasn’t much of one in the end. I don’t agree with the translator when he argues that this is not really a book about an ideal community or about politics and that it’s really about morality with some metaphysical insights thrown in. Yes, the main goal is exploring morality, but Plato spends much more time on the ideal community that he would need to just to build up a metaphor between it and the individual psyche. He clearly is interested in this ideal community in itself and I don’t buy the argument that “It’s really not a book about the community, so there’s no reason for us to clutch our pearls over the things we don’t like about the community Plato describes.” I don’t clutch pearls, so I don’t really care if it’s nothing like a western liberal democracy, but apparently many people have been bothered by what Plato describes (e.g. a lot of censorship, no private property for rulers, no marriages for rulers, children in common, etc.)
In Chapter 6, in which Plato starts to dig into how “good” the community/mind is, I’m not clear on why we only care about whether our community/mind is self-disciplined, courageous, wise, and moral to the exclusion of all other possible qualities that we might explore, but these four qualities are as good as any and I suppose they are simply being postulated. They do seem to cover the main things we would want our community or ourselves to be if we are to be moral. I guess that’s fine since the book, according to the translator (and I was convinced on this point), really isn’t about defining moral behavior but about arguing that what Greeks already consider moral or proper behavior is beneficial to the person behaving morally.
The biggest issue in this section of the book is Plato’s conclusion out of nowhere that the principal of specialization is what makes our ideal community moral (the idea that everyone in it and each class in it sticks to the job for which they are best suited). He doesn’t seem to have any real rationale for that conclusion outside of efficiency, but I do like the analogy he creates to the mind that a moral mind, or at least one that we’d like to have, is one in which all of the faculties are controlled by the rational faculty and we don’t have things like the passionate or desiring part of our mind trying to reason. Plato also in this section gives us his tripartite theory of the mind. I can buy his three part theory of the mind and like the idea of rational vs. passionate vs. desire parts of the mind.
Around line 465, Socrates is arguing that the guardians of his ideal community should share their women and children in common. This is interesting, but I am again wondering how this will be tied up overall morality. I do think it’s important for us as modern westerners not to reject out of hand Plato’s conclusion that this sort of sharing of possessions, women, and children could work in a small community. The Spartan way of life is utterly foreign to anything we would think of as normal for human nature yet endured and preserved their state for generations—and it’s not THAT different from the ideal community. We should not be too quick to dismiss Plato’s political program here as an impossibility simply because we don’t live this way now and value things like private property so highly. Interestingly the ideal community is a Greek one and it intends to avoid all out war with other Greeks. Makes a lot of sense given that this was written a few decades after the brutal Peloponnesian War.
In Chapter 8, I like Plato’s argument that he doesn’t have to prove his ideal community could exist to examine conclusions about it anymore than he has to prove a perfectly moral person exists. IF we can create an archetype (I guess this would be a platonic ideal), then we can still examine what characteristics make the community more or less well ordered/moral or make a person more or less moral without needing the real thing to exist. He also makes a good argument that his ideal society is not completely implausible—it just needs a philosopher to stumble into power to implement.
Page 219/line 496(e) has great quote that is applicable to any mass democratic political system: “When the few members of this band have glimpsed the joy and happiness to be found in mastering philosophy and have also gained a clear enough impression of the madness of the masses; when they’ve realized that more or less every political action is pernicious and that if someone tries to assist morality there will be no one to back him up and see that he comes out unscathed, but it would be like an encounter between a human being and wild beasts; since he isn’t prepared to join others in their immorality and isn’t capable, all alone, of standing up to all those ferocious beasts, but would die before doing his community or his friends any good, and so would be useless to himself and to everyone else—once he has grasped all this with his rational mind, he lies low and does only what he’s meant to do.”
Page 224—Plato makes an interesting argument that a philosopher will live an orderly life because of his connection to a divine and orderly ultimate reality. I was surprised that he postulates that the ultimate reality or what we might call the platonic reality that the true philosopher is able to comprehend is a) connected with the godhead and b) is divine and orderly. That’s quite a postulate!
End of chapter 8—whatever you make think of Plato’s ideal society, its censorship, and its ideas about shared property, he makes a compelling argument at the end of Chapter 8 that the best sort of government would be a dictatorship of sages who have no personal interest and who know human nature and the nature of reality best. Many people have objected to Plato’s rule by philosopher kings, but he argues convincingly that it’s exactly who we’d want to be ruled by, e.g. line 484-487. After all, if a true philosopher has the characteristics of intelligence, self-discipline, elegance, love of truth, and broadness of vision, they are ideally suited to rule, and they also don’t really want to rule.
Setting aside what it might take to get them there, this may not be wrong. Of course, the same idea has inspired the idea we now have of government by technocrat or government by computer—ideas which most people find a bit horrifying. But Plato’s vision is different because the true philosophers are almost holy beings—they have divine knowledge and understand ultimate reality in a way that goes beyond anything a technocrat or computer could muster.
Chapter 9, with Plato’s three analogies—the sun, the line, and the cave, is a brilliant piece of metaphysical work. In fact, so many of the ideas of the book are just fantastically argued. I think anyone examining these metaphysical issues hereafter has to grapple with Plato’s framework and his analogies, and I suspect that’s exactly what has would up happening in the history of philosophy. Frankly, this chapter could probably stand on its own without even reading anything else and would be worth reading for anyone who is interested in philosophy.
Interestingly, the whole point of these allegories was as it related to the education of the rulers of our ideal community and Plato saying that we want our education program to turn people toward leaving the cave and toward understanding ultimate reality and touching “the Good.” Plato throws out these brilliant metaphysical ideas almost as an aside to his main argument here! Plato seems to essentially equate the good with the godhead—he doesn’t really explain what it is or what good is, but to approach it and knowledge of it you must approach the divine. For a Christian you could replace this with God, which I suspect is what St. Augustine is going to do when I get to him, but I guess I’ll find out.
Around line 516, during the allegory of the cave, I really like Plato’s idea that someone who has come out of the cave and seen the true nature of reality would never agree to go back in the cave for anything. Not amount of prestige or money would make someone who has touched the divine or understood the nature of reality put blinders back on. But of course we have to entice our true philosophers back to the cave to take political power, and apparently the only reason they come back is because being ruled by anyone else is worse.
Around page 264 (line 530ish) when Plato is talking about the education program for his ideal community, it’s interesting that he’s discounting empiricism in favor of dialectic and mathematics as the path to ultimate truth. We live in such an empirical society that it’s interesting to see the other view. It is worth bearing in mind that empiricism and the scientific method are good at making us nicer stuff or understanding the physical reality of our world. But is it really that good at telling us anything about ultimate meaning and morality? On a similar topic, on page 266 Plato is arguing that dialectic is beyond geometry (at least if I understand his argument) because it questions everything and has no postulates that it builds on the way that geometry does. I suspect that later philosophers wind up with some postulates—and of course Plato has some of his own here in this book. Surely you must have some postulates or you can’t build a system that can withstand nihilist attacks, right?
In Chapter 11, Plato compares different types of political systems to different types of people and how each system is dominated by one or more components of the psyche that he set out earlier. E.g. a dictatorship is one that is ruled by passions like a dictator. There’s no reason to accept that these analogies are useful or will lead us to real knowledge and this is, for me, one of the least convincing chapters. The portrait of the dictator as a maniac indulging his whims instead of a rational evil person (like Stalin) is particularly off the mark. Also, Plato could not anticipate the sort of dictatorship by bureaucrats that we currently endure. Although his state is powerful and has a high degree of control, so does ours, and I assume that Plato is thinking in terms of the possibility of easy emigration/exile to a different Greek city state to people who didn't buy in or were simply forced out.
Plato in his portrait of a dictator and throughout the book still fails to address the possibility of someone who is not a maniac ruled by passions, someone like a lawful evil dungeons and dragons character. Someone who knows and gets what he wants by evil behavior but is still moderate and intelligent in their tastes and desires. You might even include someone amoral entirely. Plato assumes that anyone hyper rational will also touch the godhead and be divine / know the good, but this simple isn’t true. A Mao or Stalin are not like what Plato describes here under the dictator heading. This hurts his analogy between the state of the community and the state of the person, which I continue to not see why we should accept as really having any utility.
Plato’s overall conclusion that the good moral life is essentially moderation of our selves under the control of our rational part of our mind—I agree with that, but not because he’s convincing, just because I like the idea. Plato never really convincingly argues why this is moral except by analogy to the principal of specialization in his ideal community, which is a very tenuous connection. I don’t even accept his argument that the principal of specialization is moral for the ideal community. Likewise page 330—he thinks that rule by the rational part of the mind automatically equals morality, but lots of evil people are ruled by the rational part. Probably the most dangerous and most evil people of all are hyper rational types.
Around page 335, Plato argues that the pleasures of the mind are greater than he pleasures of the flesh because they related to eternal and unperishable objects rather than perishable things like food or other things of this world. In his assault on art in Chapter 13, by the way, he totally misses that art can be a pathway to the divine or to the eternal and imperishable. For a Christian, you could likely insert God, which I imagine is what St. Augustine is going to do if he discusses this. Pleasures of the flesh are not truly enough to satisfy us—both Plato and Christians can agree with that.
Chapter 13 is this bizarre chapter where Plato argues that representational poetry and painting often lead to immorality because they are two steps removed from the platonic idea. That is, they are representing an example of a platonic ideal and are far removed from the rational realm, and it is doubly harmful because it plays on the emotions. I do see how modern propaganda plays on emotions and things like campaign posters can cause social or individual immorality. I also think that practically every society exercises some level of censorship in education and what you are allowed to say or express, whether it's legal or de factor, so I don't object to the idea of control and censorship on its own. But I think Plato is missing that emotions, art, and poetry can also lead us to the divine and inspire us to goodness.
In Chapter 14, Plato makes of one the weakest arguments of the entire book for the immortality of the soul. Basically he says that the only thing that harms the mind/soul is immorality, but unlike, say, the way rust acts on iron, the mind/soul is not destroyed. I don’t understand how that leads to the soul being immortal and he also seems to miss that the aging of the body can certainly have an impact on the mind. Apparently, according to the notes, the immortality of the soul would have been assumed for Plato’s readers so he didn’t feel the need to really prove it. Even still—not one of the book’s strong points.
In an oft-repeated theme of the book, I like Plato’s argument on page 368 that the rational part of the mind is linked to the divine and the body is sort of dragging us down away from the divine. This is definitely something that is applicable to Christianity as well.
Final Thoughts:
In the introduction to the book and in the notes, Robin Waterfield, as well as other commentators, have suggested that this isn’t really a book about the ideal society, and it’s really a book about metaphysics and morality. To some extent I buy that, but Plato spends a huge amount of time on the details of his ideal society, and I don’t think he considers it to be unworkable. He believes it is very unlikely to actually arise, but he does consider it to be theoretically possible and, I believe, workable in the real world if it could ever be created. He considers it to be as real or workable as any platonic ideal like a triangle or the perfect form of a table, but he’s also not advocating for some sort of revolution to create it.
In general, I think it’s wrong to argue that the Republic is a systematic book about any one topic. It’s more a wide-ranging conversation touching on many things that the voracious intellect that is Plato wants to talk about. My impression thus far is that Plato’s philosophy is not as systematic as I suspect later, more modern philosophers will be. I’m not saying it’s completely random either, but it’s certainly not a system like geometry or mathematics. Overall, I think the book fails at the stated goal of showing that the moral life is good for the person who behaves morally, but that doesn’t make it a bad book or make Plato stupid. The famous metaphysical metaphors and all of the other ideas Plato explores in it are fascinating and worth thinking about. In particular, I think modern readers can gain something by taking the ideal society seriously, which my impression is that most modern commentators fail to do. I agreed with many of Plato’s arguments, and even when I didn’t I couldn’t see a counterargument until I looked one up from someone smarter than me.
After this book, I am planning on reading some secondary sources I have on Plato which I think will help me retain the information from the Republic and also understand the new few dialogues on my list better. I may also have to consider rereading a few of the earlier dialogues. I felt I got more out of this one than some of the other material I’ve read because of examining secondary sources first.