Plato - The Republic | Political Philosophy

European philosophy, it's been claimed, is just a series of retweets and replies to Plato. The questions he raised have dominated philosophical thought and discussion for centuries. In this sense, Plato remains the OG of political philosophy. His writings are an attempt to radically transform Athenian society by questioning their most cherished sources of authority and criticising their morality. Plato's The Republic is an examination of the notions of justice in an individual His main argument was that in both cases, justice consisted of an appropriate balance and harmony between different parts of the whole. In the individual, this means we should be guarded by our reason and not our passions or appetite. In the city, this means everyone should perform the social role to which they're most suited, either ruling, protecting or producing. His ideal political community was one in which the city would be ruled by an elite group of philosophers specifically trained to govern in the interests of the community. He advocated for a city in which philosophical knowledge would be able to tame and govern the tumultuous world of politics. I'm James Muldoon, I'm a lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter, and this is an introduction to Plato's The Republic. Ancient Athens Homer is the name given to the author or authors of two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Think Brad Pitt in the movie Troy. To see what Plato was doing in his dialogues, we need to first understand that Homer was the educator of the Greeks. His epic poems set out the cosmology, the moral framework, and the archetypes for how ordinary Greeks thought about and made sense of the world. The poems were written down at some point in the 8th or 7th century BC, and tell stories of a Greek heroic age of figures such as Agamemnon, Achilles and Odysseus. Greek heroes live for glory and want to be remembered in history for their excellence in battle and their great deeds and words. It's a world of aristocratic values, of the prestige of great individuals and families, and the importance of how one appears to others. Plato's philosophy is an attack on the authority of the poets like Homer and Hesiod. He wanted to redefine what it meant to live a good life. The Greek word arete means excellence or virtue. It had a sense of fulfilling a purpose, and in today's culture it would mean something like living your best life. Plato detached arete from a heroic ethic of power and glory, and reassigned it to moral and philosophical activity. To live a good life for Plato was to be virtuous and to be guided by wisdom. Philosophy for Plato digs beneath the world of appearances and sensations, and uncovers a world of real knowledge and truth. He often used visual metaphors and wanted us to properly see the world around us, not with our ordinary senses, but with our reason. To see what was eternal and constant. Poetry and drama was a terrible teacher for Plato, because it directed our attention away from true knowledge and encouraged a fascination with the visible world of appearances. He was also critical of the poets of Greek tragedy such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Plato both imitated and wanted to replace the poets as the civic educators of Athenians. He had completely different ideas from the tragic poets about how to live one's life, but at the same time Plato's The Republic can be seen as a kind of tragedy of the city. Its central arguments were supported by parables and images of the cave, a divided line and an analogy between the city and an individual. Like the poets, Plato appreciated that to convince someone you need to appeal to all parts of the soul, including their emotional side. Plato's dialogues can be read in the context of this culture war that was occurring with the emergence of Greek philosophy. Plato's second main target was the democracy of Athens, which he presented as a form of mob rule. He thought democracy rejected the idea that society should be governed by wisdom, and it encouraged people to see politics as a battle of opinions, power and interests. In ancient Greece, democracy was found within a polis or city state, which required institutions and laws for regulating social life. In Homeric epic poetry, a single person or a small aristocratic group would dominate, but a democratic city required balancing interests between rival groups and creating order and stability out of civil conflict. The reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC broke the tight-knit power structure of the aristocratic upper class of Athens and refounded it on new institutions which gave equal rights to all citizens. Athenian democracy was still a slave-owning society and only males could be citizens, but every citizen had a right to attend the main decision-making body. The development of the polis and of the democratic reforms in ancient Athens gave rise to the preeminence of speech as the primary political tool and instrument of power. It also created a public sphere of openness that extended beyond a narrow aristocracy and cultivated a sense of equality and likeness between citizens. Plato was an aristocrat who experienced the tyranny of the Thirty Tyrants installed in Athens in 404 BC. He also experienced the democracy that preceded and followed it. Plato didn't much like either. He thought that democratic Athens was a chaotic scrambling of competing voices and opinions, all trying to promote their own interests with no sense of the common good. It seemed to promote the most corrupt politicians and reward the most ruthless tactics. The citizens all participated in politics, but they were easily swayed by demagogues and were thus terrible decision-makers. In the Republic, he presented a new vision of how individual citizens should be educated and how political institutions should be organised to promote the good life. Socrates and Plato Plato was born in Athens in 427 BC to a wealthy family and went on to found his own school called the Academy. He wrote many dialogues which feature his old mentor Socrates as a character. Socrates never wrote anything himself, but appears as a character in a number of Plato's dialogues. There is a question of the extent to which Plato faithfully represented doctrines that Socrates held during his life, or whether his various dialogues represent criticisms of or a break with Socrates' thought. By all accounts, Socrates was a super annoying person to be around. The reason why people wanted to kill him was because he had a tendency of publicly humiliating them by revealing how little they actually knew about the world. If he was alive today, there would be dozens of YouTube clips of Socrates destroying people with logos or reason. In 399 BC, he was tried and convicted to death in an Athenian court for corrupting the youth. In Plato's account, in his dialogue The Apology of Socrates, Socrates was so virtuous that he could have escaped and saved his life, but he didn't because it wouldn't have been the right thing to do. Despite how annoying he was, Socrates was actually a really great guy, and he wanted to do what was right regardless of whether it made people feel uncomfortable. He was a reformer who put up a mirror to Athenian society and wanted to show them how to be the best versions of themselves. In many ways, Plato holds Socrates up as a new paradigm of critical citizenship, of someone who both lives up to the ideal of citizenship better than the Athenians, but who also reformulates traditional ideas through an alternative vision of political action. The trial and death of Socrates made Plato despair about politics. The Republic can be read as an attempt to reconcile politics and philosophy. The Republic Is the Republic really a work of political philosophy? It appears to be a dialogue about what it means for an individual to be just. The example of a just city is only brought up as an analogy for a just individual, but if this were the case and the discussion of politics was only a metaphor and nothing more, then it would be a work of moral rather than political philosophy. But Plato included extensive details of social reforms to education, property rights, and political institutions that seem to go well beyond anything that could find a direct analogy in an individual. People disagree on this, but it's likely that Plato was trying to contribute to both moral and political philosophy, even if some of his specific political proposals seem quite far-fetched. Let's start with the text then. The book begins with some banter between Socrates and Glaucon, and soon the topic of justice is introduced. Plato has characters recount a number of traditional ideas about justice that Socrates will reject in favour of his own conception. We start with some suggestions that justice is telling the truth and returning what you borrowed. A character called Polemarchus then suggests that justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies. But Socrates points out that we can't truly know who are our real friends. It's only philosophy that allows us to make the distinction between appearance and reality. If we try to enact this rule, we might end up harming good people. Another objection is that even bad people might be deserving of good things, because if they have more bad things done to them, this might make them even worse than before. At this point, Thrasymachus jumps in and suggests that there is no real justice in the world and that what we call justice is simply the interest or the advantage of the powerful. What does he mean by this? People in charge of society make laws which they call justice, but they're just a self-serving elite looking to exploit everyone else. Socrates replies that the best rulers are those that rule not in their own interests, but in the interests of society. He also thinks there's something intrinsically good about being a just person and that your main aim shouldn't be about getting wealthy or some kind of external benefits that come from your actions. He introduces a thing that he'll further develop later, that a just individual lives a happier and more fulfilling life because they benefit from an internal harmony and balance that comes from acting justly. Justice results in the proper functioning of the human soul. Arete, or virtue for Plato, is the excellence that enables a thing to fulfill its functions most effectively. In the case of human beings, it involves the rational harmony of different parts of the soul. Socrates proposes that to better understand a just individual, they should examine a just city. The argument is that the two are analogous, and to see an individual writ large across an entire city will enable the group to better understand it. Now there's a question as to whether this is an appropriate analogy and whether the structure and characteristics of a city necessarily tell us anything about an individual's psychology, but let's just leave that to one side for the time being and see what he has to say. The City of Beauty Plato's ideal city is introduced by Socrates, who calls it a kalipolis, or city of beauty. Before I say anything about it, I'm going to warn you, a lot of it sounds a little crazy. You could definitely imagine it as a teen dystopian movie where a bunch of plucky kids rebel from the system and try and break out of kalipolis. The city, Plato argues, is divided into three classes of people. The philosopher rulers or guardians who govern, the auxiliaries who are the soldiers and protectors, and the producers who do all the actual work. The rulers would learn how to correctly perceive the world through philosophical training and could therefore judge what was in the best interest of the community. The rulers have a very strict upbringing. They might be in charge but they don't necessarily have the best lives. They're trained in mathematics and philosophy for 15 years. They're not allowed nuclear families or to own property or touch money and they have to live communally in camps. Plato thought that women could also be rulers because any natural differences between the sexes weren't relevant to the task of governance. He also suggested that children would be taken away from rulers to be raised communally, and that all their food, shelter and housing would be provided by the producer class. The idea was to separate the rulers from any corrupting influences of wealth and property. The producing class, in contrast, was able to own property and have nuclear families. All military and police matters should be left to the auxiliaries who would be trained specifically for this task. The purpose of the city was to promote the happiness of all individuals. Justice consisted in each class performing their proper role. Art and Education Plato saw that citizens were socialised in part through art and culture. To date, we stream TV, watch films and music videos, but in his time there was theatre, poetry and music. He believed that culture played a central role in forming good character. The Athenians, in his eyes, were corrupted through their poetry and their drama. Traditional Greek stories about the gods involved a lot of killing, jealousy and deception. It's basically the same thing you can watch today, but only with more incest. But Plato thought that stories should only be of the gods and individuals performing noble actions and being consistent and honest with each other. So if you think Netflix is bad right now, just imagine what the stories would be like in Plato's ideal city. He proposed an authoritarian system of controlling which stories would be suitable for the city. Stories should promote respect for authority, social harmony, courage, truth and self-discipline. He wasn't concerned about the cultural impoverishment of the city because he was most interested in the virtuous character of its citizens. Plato didn't trust the performance of imitative poetry, anything where an actor was pretending to be somebody else. He thought that plays manipulate you and weaken your sense of control over your emotions. In Plato's ideal city, theatre would be banned in favour of more austere styles of art. He was particularly concerned about the effects of music because he thought music had a way of speaking directly to the soul without language. His rules about music were that there could be nothing written in a minor key, no complex harmonies or rhythm, only instruments that played single notes and everything written in simple 2-4 timing. So say goodbye to your entire music collection. There's a deeper point here because really what Plato is challenging is the wisdom and authority of the poets as the traditional educators of the Greeks. Poetry can't give you true knowledge, only opinion and beliefs. It tricks you, manipulates you and aims to stir an emotional and irrational side of your soul. Plato wanted to replace the unruliness of democratic politics and the deception of imitative poetry with a more certain foundation in true knowledge and wisdom. Justice in the state and the individual. Plato argued that justice arises in the ideal city through everyone playing their role and not trying to do the work of others. A well-functioning city was based on a division of labour based upon your natural abilities. But how do you know what you're naturally suited for? Well, after the big song and dance Plato has just given us about how important the truth is and how bad poetry and theatre are for deceiving us, he says that the entire caste system of three different types of jobs will all be based on one big patriotic lie. In order for people to believe in their role in the system they should be educated to believe a myth that those who are rulers have souls of gold, those who are auxiliaries have souls of silver and those who are producers have souls of bronze or iron. Teachers in the city would keep track of children's natural abilities and direct them to the education best suited to those traits. All this from someone who doesn't even want a theatre in a city. With people sorted into these three different groups like a bad Harry Potter film, justice would follow from the natural harmony and balance of every class performing their proper role. If this occurred, the state would have the four necessary cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, discipline and justice. Wisdom is represented by the rational leadership of the philosopher rulers. Courage is displayed by the auxiliaries who act as soldiers and police to keep the city safe. Self-discipline is demonstrated by the producer class who should learn to control their desires and master themselves. Justice is the fourth virtue and is the result of the proper functioning of the three previous virtues. The result then is that more plentiful and better quality goods are more easily produced if each person does one thing for which he is naturally suited, does it the right time and is released from having to do any other duties. So that's justice in the city, everybody doing what they're told and minding their own business. Some interpreters believe that the whole discussion of the city is really just a way of talking about ethics and the constitution of an individual. Just as the city is divided into three classes, Plato claimed we have three parts of our soul corresponding to reason, passion and desire. Justice in an individual means that reason leads while desire and passion follow. In Plato's eyes, this is how to achieve happiness. People who are just in this way have a harmonious and healthy life. They can control themselves, exercise discipline and feel satisfied and free. The key for Plato is that we keep wisdom in the driving seat and always maintain a good mental equilibrium and harmony in our soul. We can do this with intellectual and physical training to exercise our reason and to soothe the more spirited elements of our psyche, the rule of knowledge. Plato admitted that it would be difficult to bring about his ideal city in practice because it would depend on rulers becoming philosophers or philosophers becoming rulers. The philosopher is in love with truth and not with the changing world of sensation. This is where Plato brings out his big guns. In books six and seven, he put forth his main defense of why philosophers should rule. Through their training of 10 years of mathematics and five years of philosophy, philosophers learn how to separate true knowledge or epistemic from mere beliefs or opinion, which is doxa in Greek. They could see an objective world of what is good and bad and this allowed them to apply this knowledge to politics. He favored a kind of technocracy in which experts rule through a superior claim to knowledge. There's a slight twist on it for Plato because philosophers have a special type of knowledge which isn't just a kind of technical know-how but an ethical and practical wisdom about how to live a good life. For Plato, knowledge is virtue and there's a fundamental relationship between epistemology and ethics. It would be hard for many of us today to accept this because most of us don't think that there are natural facts of what is good and bad that exist objectively in the world that are accessible through philosophy. But Plato thought that there was such a realm of certainty and objectivity that was beyond the world of our senses. Philosophers were the best suited to governing politics because in Plato's ideal city, they have a clear picture of the objective good and could apply this to understanding political institutions. They didn't get trained in the art of politics or things like rhetoric, persuasion, or clever speech-making. Plato equated ruling a state with captaining a ship. A ship requires a true navigator with an intimate knowledge of the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, and the winds to be an effective navigator. You might wonder what he meant by this realm of an objective good that was beyond our senses. How do we access it and how do we know it's even there? This all rests on Plato's famous theory of the forms in which he offered three analogies to help illustrate what he meant. Theory of the forms. Plato continued to offer an account of his ontology and his epistemology. In other words, his theory of what there is in the world and how we can know it. He introduced his concept through a visual metaphor as well as vocabulary which draws on the arts and crafts. So you might describe particular things in the world as beautiful. Things like a painting, a building, or a landscape, for example. But Plato asked, what do all of these things have in common? They're beautiful, but what is beauty? Not just a particular example of a beautiful object, but beauty itself as an idea. The form of something, or eidos in Greek, comes from the word eida, to see. The form is the abstract concept or true being of which every particular object is merely an imperfect copy. The forms of things are not accessible to our ordinary senses. We can't see beauty itself. But Plato suggested that through our reason we might be able to have a different kind of knowledge. Knowledge of the eternal and the unchanging. The first analogy he used was the sun. The sun represented the highest possible form, which for Plato was the form of the good. Understanding how to live a good life is the most important knowledge one can obtain. Therefore, the form of the good is that from which everything else derives its usefulness and value. Just as the sun is the source of light, which gives visibility to objects and allows us to see them, so too is the form of the good the source of reality and truth, which allows us to know things. The second analogy he used was to imagine a dividing line between the world of the senses and the deeper world of certain knowledge and truth. In our everyday life, we encounter the world through our ordinary senses. But Plato thought that this is just one level of reality. We're actually either ignorant of most things or just have opinions or beliefs about the world which aren't real knowledge. We live our entire lives on one side of the line in the always-changing visible world of conjecture and beliefs. It's this idea that the world as we know it is a lie that inspired films like The Matrix, which asks the question of whether we really know what reality is. On the other side of the divided line for Plato was true knowledge. We can access this world through philosophy and focusing on the unchanging world of the forms. The final analogy in his theory of the forms is perhaps the most famous image in Western philosophy, which is Plato's metaphor of the cave. Imagine a bunch of people sitting in a dark cave watching a play of shadows on a wall from a puppet show illuminated by a fire burning behind them. This is how he imagined us living in the ordinary world. We think we see things with our senses, but they're just images. Not of how things really are, but just copies or reflections. The human condition is one of imprisonment to a world of fleeting sensation. Plato believed that philosophers could liberate themselves from this condition by first turning to face the fire and secondly by exiting the cave and seeing things in the real world illuminated by the sun. At first, they would be momentarily blinded by the brightness of the real world, but eventually they would become accustomed to this world and understand its truth. One big question is why would a philosopher, after understanding the truth of reality, want to return into the cave? Plato thought that having understood the good, philosophers would be motivated to share it and create a society which was organized based on this knowledge. It's important for Plato that the philosophers don't seek any personal pleasure from being rulers. They do it more out of a sense of duty than lust for power. He thought we should be very distrustful of people who are eager to rule. Philosophers would prefer a life of contemplation, but would begrudgingly become rulers to fulfill a sense of civic duty. Democracy and Tyranny In books 8 and 9, Plato described five types of regime and returned to his comparison between an individual and a city. For the purposes of political philosophy, we're most concerned with these five regime types and how they differ from what will later become the standard typology of rule. Aristotle developed a more influential account where regimes were divided into rule by one, the few, and the many, or monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. I'll come back to this in my video on Aristotle, but for Plato, there are five types of regimes as follows. First, aristocracy, which would be rule of the best and should be ruled by philosopher kings and grounded in wisdom and reason. Second, timocracy, which is a military dictatorship where glory motivates and leads to individuals with too much spirit and internal conflict over how to act. Third, oligarchy, which is the control of a wealthy few in which human action is motivated by making money and an excess of appetites. Fourth, democracy, where the people rule, but the people are enslaved by their own desires and appetites. Finally, tyranny, which was oppression and privileged criminal characteristics and inequality. Plato thought that the best form of regime would be a kind of aristocracy in which philosophers would rule the city based on their rational insight. He hoped that through his writings and his education of students at the academy, he could influence the reform of Athens and direct its citizens away from the false claims of the poets and towards the study of philosophy. One of his students would go on to write about politics in a way that would be even more significant than Plato himself. That student was Aristotle, whose account of political philosophy has been the most influential over future writers. For an analysis of Aristotle's book politics, check out my next video.