Ascent and descent: The Philosopher's regret

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 40-69

  Silverman, Allan ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34249815801     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052507070161     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Leo Strauss, City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), esp. 116-27. At a minimum, it seems plausible to think that there are times when things are so bad on the ground that despite what he understands about the Good the philosopher will not descend. The opening of Book VI of the Republic (493e-497a) culminates with the philosopher taking shelter behind a wall so as not to be tainted by the storm of evil around him (496c5-e2).
2. Translations are drawn from The Republic, ed. Giovanni Ferrari and Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3. Christopher Bobonich, Plato's Utopia Recast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Bobonich need not accept the antecedent of this conditional. His intricate argument requires more attention than I can provide in the present context. I gesture at our differences in the final section of this essay.
4. David Sedley, "The Ideal of Godlikeness," in Gail Fine, ed., Plato 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 309-28.
5. See also Myles Burnyeat, "Utopia and Fantasy: The Practicability of Plato's Ideally Just City," in Fine, ed., Plato 2, 297-308.
6. There is a skeptical reading that would deny that there are any embodied philosophers, because embodied souls cannot overcome the psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical obstacles. Others seem prepared to deny that there are philosophers on the grounds that the necessary education requires an ideal state, which in turn can only come about where there are philosophers. See Charles Griswold, "Longing for the Best," Arion 11, no. 2 (2003): 101-13;
7. and Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 407ff. I do not consider skeptical readings.
8. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss how pessimists conceive of the rhetorical strategy of the Republic. However, I think it is difficult, if not impossible, to offer an impersonal account of the Good while simultaneously thinking that it does not apply to the vast majority of individuals in the state, or to the vast majority of the readers of the Republic. Plato's ethical and political theory is Utopian or ideal, and his goal is to persuade each reader to aspire to knowledge of the Good, or, as Burnyeat writes: "It is a deliberate attempt to get us - all of us I think he means - a non-human, impersonal perspective on the human" ("Utopia and Fantasy," 307). And while I think Burnyeat overemphasizes fantasy as blue-print, he is right that Plato uses fantasy as a point of departure to encourage and allow any reader to adopt an absolute or impersonal viewpoint, a viewpoint that prompts us to regard each person impartially and equally as capable of being happy.
9. John Cooper, "The Psychology of Justice," American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 151-57, at 157.
10. Sarah Waterlow, "The Good of Others in Plato's Republic," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1972-73): 19-36, at 21-22.
11. Christine Korsgaard, "Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant," The Journal of Ethics 3 (1999): 1-29, esp. p. 15 and n. 10. A crucial difference between Korsgaard and Waterlow (and others) is that Korsgaard's agent identifies not with reason but "with her constitution, and it says that reason should rule" (15). Compare Waterlow: "For while Plato fully acknowledges the conceptual priority of agent to actions, there is for him something prior again to the agent, namely reason itself ..." ("The Good of Others," 36).
12. This must be some part other than reason, it seems, since it appears to be impossible to act in the interests of the rational part alone; for to act in its interests, Plato implies, is, eo ipso, to unify the three parts.
13. The soul explicitly becomes a topic of the discussion with the function argument at F.352d ff. In the preceding pages, the interlocutors assume that each of us acts selfinterestedly, and they evince no worries about the "self" in whose interest one acts. Each person aims at the satisfaction of as many of his desires as he can manage. Socrates' focus on the soul, apart from the peculiar beliefs, desires, and reasons of the individual, signals that the inquiry into the nature of justice begins from the nature of the human soul. The soul's function is to care, rule, deliberate, and such, and in general to live. Its virtue enables it to perform its function well, and this virtue or excellence is justice. To live well is to live happily. Before this account, Socrates has "refuted" three previous accounts of justice. In each of them, the proponent takes for granted that we are discussing the justice of a mature individual filled with beliefs and desires. This individual has a view of himself-he acts out of self-interest or apparent self-interest. The problem afflicting the three accounts of Book 1 is that each, in its own way, helps itself too easily and too soon to the mature self, in the light of whose interests justice is considered. The accounts answer the question "How ought I to live?" not "How ought one to live?"
14. From the outside, it appears that the child is being molded in someone's image, perhaps even that the child's desires are being subjugated and repressed. From the inside, the child, it seems, has little awareness of repression and little disenchantment with the imposition of another's viewpoint. See Jonathan Lear, "Inside and Outside the Republic," Phronesis 37 (1992): 184-215.
15. This is not widely accepted. There is no conclusive text on the question of whether the children of the lowest (i.e., craftsman's) class receive gymnastic and musical education. While it is clear that the purpose of the educational regimen is to produce guardian warriors - the "luxurious" city requires such guardians because its inhabitants, having given them-selves up to the pursuit of unlimited wealth, will find the city at war with its neighbors (Rep. II.373d9-10) - it is not the case that only guardians receive such an education. Not only is the regimen designed to find out who is most suited to be a warrior, but the various remarks about fairy tales, the sorts of stories that are appropriate for children to hear, and the noble lie itself all suggest that everyone in the state is liable to hear these tales. Note that the lie is to be believed by everybody in the city (III.414cl-2), and that the second half begins emphatically: "You are all brothers, all of you in the city" (415a2-3). It is true that the child-rearing practices described in Book V rely on a distinction between the children of the better-bred citizens and the children of parents who are not so gifted (V.460c), but this is balanced by the second half of the noble lie, i.e., that a philosophic child can come from any class. Given the role that musical education plays in helping to form and moderate desires, it is hard to see why Plato would not think such education appropriate for those who will eventually comprise the working class. The universality of education is set against the sortition of the students into classes or rankings. Most will "drop out" of school to pursue vocational training, as it begins to appear that they are not gifted enough for the military and when their "natural talent" is determined. (From V.456d10 it seems that those gifted to make shoes are educated in the cobbler's craft.) Little attention is given to the possibility that a person will not want to do what he does best, especially given that that determination again seems to be made not by the individual but by the state, or by its founders. Besides observing their performance in the various tests of raw intellect and physical prowess, Plato draws special attention to a child's capacity to care for and help others. This capacity, like all capacities, is at once inborn and nurtured from the outside. Cf. George Hourani, "The Education of the Third Class in Plato's Republic," Classical Quarterly 43 (1949): 58-60.
16. The literature on the tripartite soul is voluminous, but see most recently Terence Irwin, Plata's Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
17. Bobonich, Plata's Utopia Recast;
18. and Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plata and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
19. Reason does not, however, wantonly accede to any desire. The kinds of situations that require reason to look out after the good of the other parts are likely to fall into two groups. First, there are courses of action in which desire, spirit, and reason will all want the same thing. Into this group we place actions in which reason itself has a stake or announces, as it were, what it wants. Appetite and spirit echo its decision. The second group of actions are those wherein reason has no direct stake of its own (Rep. IV.437c).
20. See, among others, Rep. VI.499b-c, 500d4-5, VII.520a-d, 521b7, 539e2-3, as well as IV.421c and 347c. Compulsion and persuasion, separately and together, are leitmotifs in the Republic. There is no obvious (let alone predetermined) way to understand these notions in their many roles in the dialogue. They enter the discussion with the opening exchange between Polemarchus and Socrates (327c-d), along with the idea that some might not listen, even where persuasion seems (and is) possible.
21. See Section IV below on necessity and persuasion in the Timaeus.
22. On the role of the interlocutors and the dramatic aspects of the dialogue, see Ruby Blondell, Play Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
23. Some have tried to explain away the language of compulsion by treating it as the way in which the philosopher's knowledge of the Good drives him to descend. Fully reflective individuals who understand the Good are compelled by that understanding. I think that there are times when we and Plato might say knowledge compels one to act, especially when we might say that one has to be reminded of what one must do. But I have my doubts about this notion of the compulsion of reason, and I do not think that this is one of those times. One compelled by reason in this manner does not act unwillingly or reluctantly. See Christopher Shields, "Forcing Goodness in Plato's Republic" (elsewhere in this volume). While I concur with Shields's account of logical compulsion, and indeed think that something like logical or moral compulsion drives the philosopher who comes to know the Good to want to maximize the good, I think that there is more to the internal state of the philosopher in deciding to go down.
24. However, once one has achieved the well-ordering of one's soul, and provided there is no moral backsliding, there is no further good one can acquire for oneself through philosophizing. If one thinks Plato is an (extreme) epistemological holist, then there is nothing further to know once one has come to know the Good. The only gain to be had, then, for the individual would have to be the absence of commerce with the physical world, though it is hard to see why that absence has any moral benefit for the philosopher.
25. While it is no doubt true that there are unpleasant aspects to the job, they cannot account for the compulsion required to get the philosopher to rule. For he precisely does not consider these aspects of the job, nor the good of others or himself, but just the way in which he can maximize the good.
26. Cooper, "The Psychology of Justice," 155.
27. Ibid., 156; emphasis added.
28. Ibid., 1.57.
29. See also John Cooper, "Two Theories of Justice," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (2000): 5-27, esp. 22-24.
30. See, e.g., Burnyeat, "Utopia and Fantasy"; and Waterlow, "The Good of Others."
31. Someone's permanent attachment to one part of his own good implies that there are other parts which he recognizes, though he has no deep and permanent attachments to them.
32. For an "expressivist" account of this desire, see Irwin, Plato's Ethics, 308-17;
33. and Bobonich, Plato's Utopia 'Recast, 354-59.
34. The Plotinian reading is so-called because of its affinities to some of the remarks of Plotinus and other middle and neo-Platonic successors of Plato. While some may have thought that the true philosopher seeks to escape from this world, I do not think that Plotinus himself subscribed to this "flight." Here the base text for understanding what runs through the mind of the philosopher is the end of the digression of the Theaetetus, where Plato has just emphasized that in human life good and evil will always be mixed up, that it is useless to think that evil will ever be eliminated. God, in contrast, is never evil but always just virtuous. "That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming as like god as possible; and a man becomes like god when he becomes just and pure, with understanding" (Tht. 176a8-b2).
35. It is dangerous to read too much into the Phaedo's "flight from the body." Whatever else the Phaedo is, it is a eulogy to Socrates. Like many eulogies, it insists that the eulogized is not gone, he has simply gone to a better place, and that his whole life culminated in precisely what he had spent his life trying to achieve. It is equally dangerous to read too much into the digression of the Theaetetus, not least because it has so many echoes of the death of Socrates and the circumstances from which it resulted, and also because it is quite controversial how we are to make sense of its digressive nature in the course of the argument of the Theaetetus. Nonetheless, the circumstances mentioned in the Theaetetus resonate with some of the circumstances depicted in the Republic, and the remarks about the ineliminability of evil seem to be unconditionally true of the human condition, not just true of humans in less than optimal conditions.
36. In keeping with the notion of likeness to the divine, the Plotinian maintains that in identifying with reason, the philosopher seeks "purely intellectual assimilation to a higher being," "a release from the body's concerns and into the realm of pure intelligibles," and "a god-like state of the rational soul part taken in isolation." Sedley, "The Ideal of Godlikeness," 322-23.
37. Plotinus, Enneads, 6 vols., trans. Arthur Hilary Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
38. The three hypostases or principles of Plotinus's metaphysics are the One, the Intellect, and the Soul.
39. Plotinus can find, and maybe even derives, the nonaggregative and nondurational and absolute conception of happiness from the Stoics. There is controversy over whether happiness is an all-or-nothing affair in the Republic. (See, for instance, Rep. X.606d6 and VIII.544a7.) If it is all or nothing, one would need to decide whether there is the prospect that a nonphilosopher could be better or worse off. In the final section of this essay, I allow, without argument, that education can improve the lot of a nonphilosopher even if he falls short of becoming a philosopher.
40. "And plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on that, becoming like to that, living by that" (Plotinus 1.4.16). On the way up, as it were, the would-be philosopher/happy person is a rational eudaimonist.
41. Compare at the level of the Intellectual Principle and Soul, the third hypostasis: "Once more, then: the Intellectual-Principle is a self-intent activity, but Soul has the double phase, one inner, intent upon the Intellectual-Principle, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one, it holds the likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by virtue of its action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces forms-detached intellections, so to speak-with the result that all its creations are representations of the divine Intellection and of the divine Intellect, molded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images, the nearer more true, the very latest preserving some faint likeness of the source" (Plotinus, III.8.4.31-43).
42. Note the tradition's acceptance of the inevitability of evil. Plotinus, then, does not think that becoming like god renders the philosopher inert.
43. Given that Plotinus's metaphysics and physics, if you will, are predicated on a hierarchical conception of value, with each hypostasis looking toward the good and producing order at the level to which it is assigned, even the political virtues will be images of the divine transmitted to the level of the state and society.
44. The Demiurge, in the Timaeus, is the divine craftsman responsible for the creation of the cosmos. A host of issues surround the status of the Demiurge. E.g., does he differ from the world-soul? What are we to make of him, if we assume that the Timaean creation story is a myth, i.e., if we assume that Plato thinks that the cosmos is not created?
45. See Sedley, "The Ideal of Godlikeness";
46. and Wilfrid Sellars, "The Soul as Craftsman," in Sellars, Philosophical Perspectives (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1967), 5-22.
47. Compare James Lennox, "Plato's Unnatural Teleology," in Lennox, Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 280-302, especially Lennox's Principle P: "If intelligence bestows a certain order on something, that thing has that order because its having that order is best" (282).
48. I ignore the question of whether either the philosopher or the Demiurge really does, in fact, create. Consider them, therefore, to be hypothetically responsible for their creation. If nous acts, then it aims to bring about the best state on that upon which it acts. More vexing is the question of why they create. At bottom, this is to question how one gets from being good to doing good: why does being good or knowing the good lead one to act when, it would seem, there is no necessity that one act at all? (This is related to, but I think distinct from, the worry that one cannot get from the psychological justice of the soul to doing the sort of just actions that are at the root of Glaucon's challenge [Rep. II.358b1-367e5].)
49. See Irwin, Plato's Ethics, 308-10: "Plato seems to assume that the god will want to express his goodness, even when his self-expression does not require it" (309).
50. See also Bobonich, Plato's Utopia Recast, 454ff. (esp. 459).
51. The Demiurge also is said to make the world-soul and the rational part of soul. I do not distinguish the Demiurge and the world-soul, though this is not a universally shared opinion. Note that the "constructed" world-soul concerns itself with both Being and becoming (Tim. 37a-c).
52. This is not to say that there are no Forms beyond the Forms of living things. In the second telling of the creation (Tim. 47e ff.), the Demiurge creates the images of both the living things (the various plants and animals) and the nonliving things (gold, fire, etc.).
53. With the addition of soul or souls, the nonliving material serves as the bodies for the relevant souls which together comprise the instances of living things whose Forms/Models are the parts and kinds of the World Animal Itself.
54. Some interpretations of the philosopher's descent seem to assume that there is a Form of the State that is in some sense tripartite. But the central analogy of the soul and the state augurs against such a conception of the state's nature. To think that the Form of the State Itself has a tripartite nature is equivalent to thinking that the Form of the Soul has a tripartite nature. But nowhere in the Republic or in any other dialogue does Plato offer this as a definition of Soul Itself. If there is a Form of the Soul, its nature is to be a self-mover. It is, of course, controversial whether there is a Form of the Soul. Both the Phaedrus (246 ff.) and Republic X (610 ff.) suggest that the nature of the soul is unitary and its essence is to be self-moving. Since souls seem to be primitives in Plato's metaphysics, along with perhaps Forms, particulars, and the receptacle, and since Plato never explicitly postulates a Form of any of these kinds (i.e., there is no Form of Form, or Form of the Receptacle), there is reason to think that there is no Form of the Soul. Given that in the Republic the city is supposed to model the soul, this would be a reason to infer that there is no Form of the City. Moreover, if there is a Form of the Soul, since that Form is liable to be unitary and not tripartite, the likelihood is that the Form of the City would also be unitary and not tripartite. Finally, passages like Rep. VIII.543d1-544a1 suggest that perhaps there is a better city than the tripartite Kallipolis.
55. This is a controversial claim, requiring an interpretation of, among other passages, Rep. IX.592a-b. See especially Burnyeat, "Utopia and Fantasy," for reasons why one should not treat this "paradigm in heaven" (592b2) as a Form.
56. This is not to say that it cannot be grounded in other ways, e.g., in the Forms of the Good, Justice, and the other virtues.
57. Cf. Harold Chemiss, "The Sources of Evil According to Plato," in Cherniss, Selected Papers, ed. Leonardo Taran (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 258.
58. I do not believe that there is a Form of the Demiurge. By "image of reason" I do not mean to suggest that there is some paradigm or Form to which a rational soul stands as an image or a participating particular.
59. "Now why did he who framed this whole universe of becoming frame it? Let us state the reason why: He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible.... The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible" (Tim. 29d7-30a2).
60. The first imperfection is due to their being creations, i.e., imperfect in comparison to Forms. I assume that soul is the primary source of motion and thus ultimately responsible for the motions of matter.
61. See Tim. 48a2-5, 56c3-7, 57d-58c, 68e;
62. Laws 896e8 ff.;
63. and Statesman 273b-c.
64. See Thomas Hurka, "Monism, Pluralism, and Rational Regret," Ethics 106 (1999): 555-75. Note that while the Demiurge works with material that is amenable to persuasion, at least to a certain extent, the inhabitants of all cities will include some who refuse to listen and are thus unwilling to be persuaded.
65. See Republic I.327e,
66. and Strauss, City and Man, esp. 124.
67. The manner in which he does this is by "copying" the Forms that are parts of the World Animal Itself and the other Forms that are appropriate for the bodies of these animals and the component parts of these bodies. There is no alternative cosmos in part because there is only one model. Still, one might think that there could be alternative raw materials with which the Demiurge could work. Some theorists seem led to this belief owing to their familiarity with the (early) modern doctrines concerning God's (unlimited) powers to create matter, not to mention necessary truths. But Plato never hints that the Demiurge works with anything but what he finds. Nor, I think, could one reasonably argue that he could have worked up this raw material into better archai, i.e., imposed upon it better shapes. To want other material is to think that one can determine what the true archai are or to fail to recall that the Demiurge has a model which determines the appropriateness of the chosen shapes.
68. See Allan Silverman, The Dialectic of Essence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 7;
69. and Sedley, "The Ideal of Godlikeness," esp. 321. Investigation of the presuppositions underlying the claims in this paragraph would require discussion of, among other issues, whether the creation is fictional. I think it is.
70. There is no single word in the Republic that "regret" translates. Besides its utility for capturing the sentiments conveyed by the crucial passages in Book VII and the refrain of compulsion, the closest Greek expression is epitalaiporeu-to bear some additional hardship or suffering (talas). According to the Liddell-Scott-Jones Creek-English Lexicon, before its occurrence at 'Rep. 540b2, this word is only found toward the end of Book I of Thucydides (section 123) in the Corinthians' speech to the allies: "As for the future, you must look to that by safeguarding what you have now and by being willing to face sacrifices. It is in your blood to regard all kinds of excellences (aretas) as the prizes of toil and sweat (ponoi), and you ought not to change that way of looking at things even if you have at the moment some advantages in wealth and power" (Warner translation). I find it more than plausible to think that Plato knew this text. Given its place in the account of how Sparta finally thinks of the decision to go to war with Athens, and given Plato's interest in Sparta (and Athens), the idea that the philosopher-rulers are likened to Spartan rulers has appeal. Much more would have to be said to justify this notion.
71. See Fred D. Miller, Jr., "The Rule of Reason in Plato's Statesman and the American Federalist" (elsewhere in this volume), for a "nation of philosophers" in The Federalist.
72. I assert, without argument, that to think a philosopher could be free of all false beliefs would be not to make him like a god, but to make him divine.
73. See Rachana Kamtekar, "Imperfect Virtue," Ancient Philosophy 18 (1998): 315-39, on the prospect of virtue for the warrior class.
74. See Lorenz, The Brute Within, for a defense of "simple" parts.
75. See Cooper, "Two Theories of Justice," for an account of how the nonphilosophers can be led to value justice.
76. The noble lie is the myth that Socrates contrives at the end of Book III (414b-416d), containing the myths that all in the city are brothers born of the same mother-earth and that each is born with a certain kind of soul: bronze, silver, or gold. The city will collapse, according to the myth, if one lacking a golden soul should ever come to power.
77. See note 1 above.
78. Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 344-48.
79. Cooper, "Two Theories of Justice," 12-15.
80. Cf. Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 344: "There is no need for governance here."