39
Western philosophy has famously been described as a series of footnotes to Plato. The Republic, his masterpiece, written around 375 BC, is as relevant today as it was then.
In the voice of his teacher, Socrates, Plato tells us that what is at stake is how we are to live. Concretely, this comes out in his confrontations with two kinds of opponent. One is represented by complacent, conventional "men of business." The other is the doctrine that might is right, that wisdom consists in being the dog that eats rather than the dog that is eaten, a view represented by the cynical, sarcastic Thrasymachus.
Socrates tries to show that conventional morality means going along with the herd, but has nothing to say when the air the herd breathes is itself corrupted by false ideology or false ideals. Socrates tries to show, too, that the might is right doctrine will not do either. It must reflect disorder in the soul. A contemporary example might be the way neo-conservatism in U.S. foreign policy is reflected in that society's inability to deal with its own poor and sick. Socrates insists that to avoid this disharmony, we need to discard illusions about where our own good lies. We must ascend from the darkness of the Cave.
Modern liberal thinkers have often criticized The Republic on the grounds that Plato is too much in love with order to make a place for the freedoms a liberal democracy prizes. There is some truth in this, but not the whole truth. Rather, he forces us to confront the sources of self-control, whether in a body politic or an individual, sources without which the society and the individual within it fracture and fall apart.
Related Articles
The Republic is astonishingly prescient. Plato well understood that democracy by itself is not a recipe for harmony in the state. He understood the false allure of military heroics: One of his objections to the artists of his time is the glamorization of violence they inspire. He understood the corruptions of wealth, and the characteristic vices of tyranny. A Saddam Hussein or a Robert Mugabe would have held no surprises for him, but neither would democratic leaders who spend on cosmetics and facelifts.
The confrontation with Thrasymachus is one every age has to make. The contemptuous men of realpolitik are always with us, as are the complacent figures of convention. False pleasure and false goals are reinforced in popular entertainment and shape the minds of our children.
We are emerging from an era in which political philosophy was silent, since democracy and science were held to give all the answers. When things are going well, we do not think too much about the questions Plato raises. They were urgent for him, because he lived in a time of stress and decline. They may yet become so for us.
The paradigm Platonic experience is not now otherworldly, but this-worldly, only this world appreciated as it should be, when the banquet of the senses is enlarged with imagination and insight. The connection with ethics is made because the experience of love takes us outside ourselves, making possible an appreciation of the beloved that is itself an "unselfing."
This view makes excellent sense of the evident connection for Plato among beauty, goodness and truth. For us, perhaps, these three have little to do with one another. Beauty is relegated to the peripheral, weightless and unserious. Goodness is a matter of ethics, and we become nervous if it intrudes too far into people's minds. Our paradigm of truth is scientific truth, which has nothing much to do with either beauty or goodness. We tend to think that knowledge is one thing, and how you choose to use it is another thing altogether.
Part of the charm of Plato is the sense of being in a world in which these fractures did not exist. Our world may make a division between fact and value. But his is an enchanted world, in which ideas like proportion and harmony efface any such division.
Cambridge University philosopher Simon Blackburn is author of Plato's Republic: A Biography.
Next week: Don Quixote.
