Ruminations on Plato

Dish of the day:  Plato’s Republic, Books I-V.  (Ferrari (ed) and Griffith (trans).  Cambridge University Press).

 I would imagine that many regard books three and five of the Republic as appalling and repugnant.  In book three, Socrates lays out, in very specific detail, the sorts of forms of art that would be most optimal for a just society.  Forms that differ from the chosen ideals are swiftly outlawed. Myths and stories that portray the suffering and fallibility of Gods and heroes are discarded for the potential effects they may have on the worldview of the consumers.  Imitative dramas are discarded for their propensity to induce inauthenticity. In book five, the coherence and balance of society is shown to require that all private property and exclusive relations (e.g. marital or parental relations between individuals to the exclusion of others) be abolished in favor of communitarian living.  And the sheer practical difficulty of such social organization requires that the ruling power be a philosopher-king.

 These prescriptions for the ideally just state are likely to strike any contemporary reader as terribly illiberal and inappropriately restrictive.  Many of the features of the ideally state’s organization conjure up images of social engineering and outright eugenics.  Trying to make sense of these books of the Republic, I was struck by a passage in book V, where Socrates chastises Glaucon for regarding perfectly practical workability as a condition of success of the present enquiry.

 ‘Suppose a painter paints a picture which is a model of the outstandingly beautiful man.  Suppose he renders every detail of his painting perfectly, but is unable to show that it is possible for such a manto exist.  Do you think that makes him any the worse a painter?’

‘Good heavens, no.’

‘Then what about us? Aren’t we in the same position?  Can’t we claim to have been constructing a theoretical model of a good city?’

‘We certainly can.’

‘In which case, do you think our inability to show that it is possible to found a city in the way we have described makes what we have to say any less valid?

‘No,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s how things are.’ (472d-e)

 When I came across this passage I was doubly struck.  First, Glaucon lets Socrates off the hook too easily.  There is a disanalogy between a model of the ideal state and the drawing of an ideal man.  The painter, in being charged with painting the ideal man, is presumably not attempting to provide something that could guide the social engineer in creating such a man.  Thus, there needn’t be any relationship between the counters of the ideal and the potential of the actual.  The theoretical model of the ideal state, however, is only successful in either of the following two conditions:  (1) it is perfectly realizable given all the constraints of actuality, or (2) an actual state improves, all else being equal, to the extent that it comes to resemble the model.   There is little reason to think, however, that without completely shifting to resemble the Platonic communitarian paradise, an actual society would find itself that much more just, or that much better off, in virtue of being n-degrees more similar to the Socrates’s ideal.  Unlike the painting, a model for an ideal state should serve as a blue-print. Without demonstrating that the model can serve to increase the justness of a society by being partially implemented, Socrates owes Glaucon an account of the models practical realizability.

All of this is only the case if we take The Republic to be simultaneously outlining Plato’s recommendation for an ethical ideal and a political ideal.  That is,  the disanalogy is only a problem if we take the ideal state qua state in full seriousness, as its own theoretical accomplishment.  If we say instead that Plato’s Republic is most importantly an illustration of the just or excellent soul, then we can say that any illustration of an ideal state is only successful or not insofar as it does or doesn’t illuminate justice as it relates to the soul.  If we say this, then we can say that The Republic has no responsibility to provide a coherent or compelling political theory, and the impracticability of the model could be justified by an argument not all that different from the one that Socrates provides for Glaucon.  Socrates does indeed remind Glaucon that all of the present inquiry is aimed at discerning the just soul.  He could go further:  “Indeed, we don’t even care about the ideally just state. States will go on wallowing in imperfection, not even practically within reach of ideal justice.  The state I’m trying to model for you is one that would be the most just if one were to construct a complete state ex nihilo.  From such an illustration, we can construct a coherent theory of the ideally just soul.”  That is, instead of attempting to reassure Glaucon by saying he was constructing a model (which suggests that we’re still in the area of political theory, drawing models to which we attempt to bring extant societies in line) he is merely constructing an analogy.  The state, as manifest in the actual world, is of no interest whatsoever.

 I only bring out all of these possibilities because if we conceive of the Republic as constructing an analogy, rather than a model for political theory, then we can regard all of the strangely restrictive conclusions of the third and fifth books as far less statist in their implications.  By thinking of a fictional state, and asking ourselves “what sort of inculcation would make the individual parts function best” we are poised, not to figure out how we can eradicate the imperfect artifacts of our actual society, but rather to attempt to discern the relevant analogies for the soul.  For instance, if we take the dual-project view, according to which Plato is advancing moral and political theory, then we learn that the imitative arts have no place in Plato’s ideal society, our instinct is to come to the defense of theatre.  If we downplay The Republic’s apparent commintments to a particular political theory, we can ask the more productive question:  ‘What is the substantive claim about the soul that underlies this apparently sweeping and prima facie implausible value judgment about a particular social practice?.’

This helps me to make sense of book three, and it actually is somewhat friendly to a particular view of moral improvement that I’ve been informally refining for a few years now, and which I may have occasion to outline in some detail later on.  It helps me make sense of the form of book five, but not of its content.  It is extremely difficult for me to make sense of the moral analogy to the communal marriages and parenting that book five recommends.

This entry was posted on 23. March 2010 at 19:36 and is filed under DoD, The Republic, Plato, Moral Psych. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.