Archive: Plato's Republic

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1:06This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. For this week's summer special from the Great Archive of In Our Time, I've chosen Plato's Republic, whose claim to be the foundation text of Western philosophy is arguably stronger than all its competitors. What I find extraordinary about the Republic is how it moves seamlessly from the concrete political conditions of Athens in the 4th century BCE to more abstract concepts regarding justice or truth, and then on to allegory, which touches upon perception, art, knowledge and belief.

1:57I found it particularly helpful in understanding the deep reservations which Plato expressed about democracy as a system, albeit one which took a rather different form from democracies of today. In his view, democracy teeters on the edge of tyranny, which struck me as similar to the thinking of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, one of the first in our times that I recorded. although I think Mill was more sceptical about the great wisdom of philosophers which Plato seems to admire. It's the discussion on Plato's cave that I found most illuminating. Here people are bound at the neck and the feet only able to perceive shadows cast by objects which others are parading around behind them.

2:43A useful reminder of the vast areas of knowledge which elude us as individuals but which in our time, in its own modest fashion seeks to address. Hello, Plato's Republic, written around 380 BC, explores whether it's always better to be just than unjust and is seen as a cornerstone of Western philosophy. It takes the form of a dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and his companions and is set around 430 BC since when Athens had teetered between tyranny and direct democracy and as a democracy had put Socrates to death. One companion argues that we would all behave unjustly if we could get away with it.

3:20To address this, Socrates imagines what a perfectly just city would be like and applies lessons from that to the individual soul. And if the soul is best ruled by reason, he argues the city would be best ruled by philosophers. With me to discuss Plato's Republic are Angela Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy of the University of Sheffield, M.M. McCabe, Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College London, and James Warren, a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a reader in ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge. James Warren, what was the political situation in Athens when Plato was writing the Republic?

3:55He's writing the Republic, as you said, in the first quarter of the 4th century BC. Athens at this point is a direct democracy, which means every citizen is fully involved in directly voting. Every male, free man. Yes, citizens mean adult, free-born males. so it's an independent city-state ruled in this direct democratic way it hasn't always been so in the period between the dramatic date of this dialogue and when it's written Athens had gone through upheavals at the end of a long war and had gone through a period of an oligarchic coup in around 404 quite a brutal regime and then the democracy was restored and then also the important date to remember in the intervening period between the composition and dramatic date is the execution of Socrates right at the end of the 5th century BC.

4:51Let's just cut down briefly, why do I say briefly? I've got plenty of time. The idea of Athenian democracy, it's male, it's free men and then they govern by lot. Can you just develop it a bit? Some of their offices are assigned by lot. That was thought to be a democratic way of doing it because it prevents bribery, corruption and various things. It's democratic in the sense that every citizen has the ability to attend the Assembly and vote on matters, can speak at the Assembly and also was then involved in various other democratic methods like mass juries and so on, like the one that convicted Socrates.

5:29And every citizen was supposed to take part in wars? That's right, yeah. So it's quite a developed idea of what they have to do even though it seems to us a narrow idea of who they are. Oh, right. So there were quite a lot of obligations placed on a citizen, and that was recognised later on by giving people payment for attending these kinds of institutions. What used Plato make of Socrates in this book? Well, Socrates obviously was a well-known figure in Athens during his lifetime and was known for being a difficult critic of various Athenian presumptions and ideas. So he stands in many ways for a searching philosophical critique of the status quo.

6:13He's also standing, I think, because of the way his life ended, as a symbol of what democracy can do to philosophy. In the end, he was put to death in 399 DC, and it was to the great grief of Plato. And others, yes. Yes. Can you just briefly say why he was put to death? Well, he was put to death after a trial which the indictment was on two counts. One was an indictment of corrupting the youth of Athens, and the other was introducing gods that the cities didn't believe in. So it was both that he was thought to be morally corrupting. Is that what corrupting meant, morally corrupting? It didn't mean corrupting their ideas, it meant corrupting their persons.

6:56Well, you corrupt their persons by corrupting their ideas, by encouraging them to question what it meant to be virtuous or what it meant to be good or what it meant to be so on. And that was thought to have encouraged various people, including some of those who were involved in this oligarchic revolution at the end of the 5th century. Those were very heavily associated with Socrates and indeed with Plato. They were his relatives, some of them. But in Plato's life, Socrates was a massive, major, very important figure. Yeah, he's a bit of a celeb. And he blamed democracy for the death of Socrates.

7:29Yes, I should think so. You mean you should think so in both sides? Yeah, I think he was right. Angie Hobbes, there's a challenge laid down at the beginning of the book by Thrasymachus. He lays this challenge down to Socrates. What is it? Yes, so Thrasymachus is a sophist. He's a travelling professional teacher of rhetoric and philosophy who gives the sons of wealthy men the kind of skills they need to get on public life. And they're already having a debate about what is justice. They've already dismissed a couple of conventional notions that justice is telling the truth and returning what you've borrowed or it's helping your friends and harming your enemies.

8:10And Athrosimachus bursts in and says, oh, he says, you know, this justice, it is simply the interest of the stronger. And by that he means that whoever is in power in a state is the stronger party, whether the state is ruled by a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, a democracy, whoever is in power is de facto the stronger. And they make laws, thinks Thrasymachus, cynically in their own interest, and they then force the ruled to obey those laws, and they say that obeying the laws is justice. So if you are one of the ruled and you obey the laws, all you're doing, whether you know it or not, is simply serving the interests of the stronger party and you're a fool.

8:51You've been duped because this institution of justice is simply a cynical cover for the exploitation of the weak ruled by the stronger rulers. Now, Socrates says, well, hang on a minute. This ruling is an art. It's a skill. And all arts, don't they? They look to the interests of their subjects. So the art of ruling will look to the interest of the subjects who are being ruled. But Thrysumicus is having absolutely none of this. He says, no, no, no, it's rulers like shepherds. They fatten up their flock simply so they can get a better price for the market. And if rulers look after the ruled at all, it's simply because they can then exploit them more effectively.

9:36He then moves the discussion from the purely sort of political realm into the private realm as well. And he gives us what I think is his real definition. And he says, injustice is, in fact, simply serving your own interests as effectively and as ruthlessly as you can. Justice is treating other people decently and fairly. And justice is a mugs game. It's for naive simpletons. The real virtue, the virtue of common sense, is to be unjust. That's the prudent, admirable man, we would all be tyrants if we could. Injustice pays, justice doesn't. So this is the first of ten books, and it kicks off the whole argument, which goes into psychology and politics and art and the discussion of the soul and so on.

10:23What is the... Where is he speaking from? You've talked to him as a wandering teacher. Does he have a philosophy contrary to that of Socrates? Probably. So the interesting... Does he or doesn't he? I mean, you're the expert. Ooh. So the tone of Thrasymachus is difficult to gauge. So the content of what he says is certainly very opposed. He thinks that justice does not pay. You're an idiot. You've been duped. The best thing is to be as unjust as you possibly can whenever you can get away with it. And Socrates takes that on. He does. He's taking that on for the rest of the book, really. The reason I hesitated, because there is a big discussion about whether Thrasymachus really means what he says.

11:10Maybe he's a disillusioned moralist saying, oh, you know, justice, you know, look at the world around you, you can see where we've got to with justice now. But certainly in the terms of the content of what he says, never mind his intention, it is absolutely the opposite of where Socrates wants to end up. And what is so interesting and where Socrates is going to get a way in is that it's very clear that Thrasymachus thinks to thrive, to flourish, It's all about having power over others and having lots of material wealth and goodies. So he's got a very, as Socrates will see it, a very narrow conception of what the good life is.

11:45And that's what's going to give Socrates his traction into the argument. Emma McCabe, where does Plato's focus lie in this work? In the individual or on the state? How does he move between the two? So it's very interesting the way that Angie sets it up because the picture of Thrasymachus presses on the ways in which you might think about justice as an institutional matter. Is it a question about the way the state is arranged or is it a question about what is at stake here for the individual? and it's a huge issue in the whole of the Republic whether what we're supposed to focus on is the institutional question of justice or the individual question of justice.

12:30What happens after Thrasymachus bows out pretty much is that the question gets recast as a question about what it would be to be just if you're an individual and the challenge is to show that no matter how successful the unjust person might be in his or her life, the just person is always going to be better off, is going to be just... It's going to be... Justice for her is going to be good in itself, whatever on earth that means. He has to prove that. That's what he sets out to show. Why does he move... Sorry. It's up to you. So the way that he does it is by suggesting that not so much that there's a kind of tangle between the institutional sense of justice and the individual sense of justice, but that there's a straight analogy between the two, that if you imagine that you can call a state just, You can so equally call an individual just and that you mean the same thing when you say that one is just and the other is just.

13:43And Socrates says, oh, well, so if we're going to do that, then we can look at the end. We can figure out the justice of the individual, which is, as he puts it, writ small by looking at it writ large in the state. And the question, this goes to answering your question, the question about the republic as a whole is whether that's actually the agenda that he really follows or whether the picture of political justice that he develops in service to this analogy is in fact the focus of the discussion. For my money, it's the individual and the analogy is always at the service of explaining the justice of some individual person.

14:33But he does take great pains to enlarge it to the state. So the individual is represented by the state. So let's look at this question. He says, not looking at individual side, but looking at the state. First of all, let's get a good state. And this is a good state. And he tries to tell us what he does tell us, what he thinks a good state is. Can you give us the bare bones of that? Oh, yes. So the conception of justice that he offers, and this follows on from trying to figure out how on earth you could explain what it would be for something to be good in itself, for a life for the individual to be worth living in itself.

15:15He takes it to be somehow or other a matter of structure. so he supposes that you can understand what justice is in the state if everyone does their own as he puts it and if the different parts of the state are in good balance to each other so the parts of the state that are the ordinary productive class the defensive or warrior class and the philosopher class Those three parts of the state he supposes need to be in equilibrium. But when he says that, then it looks as though what he's trying to give us is an account of the way that a psyche or an individual might be well organised. and that we really only think about these discussions of the state, extended though they are, as an account of how it might be that we become better in the ways that the challenge has proposed.

16:21But before I go into the next question, he makes a match. The state is, as you said, in three parts and each has to do its job and be kept in equilibrium. The guardians, as it were, the rulers, the philosophers, the auxiliaries, the police, the army and so on, and the producers, the appetite. And similarly with the mind, there's the reason, and then there's the spirit, and then there's the soul. So these three are supposed to be in balance inside. Would you go along with that? Well, yes, that's precisely what he says, that in both cases, when you consider the internal structure of both an individual soul and a city, he thinks the right thing to do is to consider each having three principal functional parts.

16:59In the city, these are distinguished in terms of different roles that classes of person play in the city. In the individual, these are distinguished between types of desire that you might have, desire for what's good, desire for what's noble, desire for what's pleasant and so on. And in both, he says, the correct arrangement is one where all of them are doing their own job under the guidance of the reasoning and governing part. He uses two or three very powerful stories in this and one of them is the story of the ring Can you tell us how that plays? Well this goes back to this challenge that he set at the end of book one, the beginning of book two So he imagines a story of someone who discovers a ring A shepherd A shepherd discovers a ring and he puts it on and he finds that when you turn it in a certain way it makes you invisible.

17:57And he uses this ring to seduce the queen and kill the king and take power in his city. And the idea that this presents is something like the following. If it were possible, if you could imagine having this kind of ability, wouldn't it be the case that we would use it to get what we desire because we would no longer fear the consequences of acting unjustly? You You could break promises with impunity. You could break the law with impunity. No one would castigate you and you wouldn't suffer as a result of that. Which is sort of what Andrew was saying in Harry Marks, that if you're strong enough, you can get away with anything.

18:38That's right. So the challenges that Socrates has faced is, why wouldn't that be a good thing to do? Why wouldn't we prefer, nevertheless, to be just and lawful, even if the consequences of that would be in some ways worse than if we could get away with behaving unjustly? Amen. There's a trap here, it seems to me, which goes back to the question about the relation between states and individuals, which is that it looks as though what he's doing is shifting around between what the challenge is about. So some part of the challenge is about how we behave. Some of it's about how we restrain and constrain our actions.

19:19But the idea that we think that that's what justice and injustice is determined by, that is to say a series of actions, is actually a different sense of justice or a different construction of justice from the idea that justice is a steady state set of laws or institutions. And one of the things that happens at this point, I think, is that that tension becomes very difficult to deal with because it doesn't look as though there's any way of figuring out why, for example, a state that is well balanced and has the right institutions is going to do the equivalent of behaving well. Why will it have good foreign policy, for example?

20:05Can we take that state idea on a little? Because Plato and Socrates, through Socrates, makes a big thing of it. Angie Hobbes, one of the things about the ideal state is that he's ruled by philosophers. I'm faced by three philosophers, so there's not much disagreement there, I expect. Still, anyway, that's a cheap jive. So how does he justify that and what's the point? so the rulers of the state as we've been hearing are analogous to reason in the psyche and what legitimizes them and indeed compels them to rule is that they have knowledge they have knowledge of true reality which is the forms of these ideal perfect instantiations that's what means that they They're not just rulers, they're philosopher rulers.

20:59Now, but I think it's really important to look a bit at what Plato does to ensure that they can't be sort of corrupted or distracted. So the way he sets up this ideally just state is that the rulers and the auxiliaries, this executive, police, military class, together they form the guardian class. They live this extraordinary life. They live apart in camp communes. They're not allowed to own any property at all. They're not even allowed to touch gold or silver. They're not allowed nuclear families. Women and children are to be held in common, we're told. Babies are going to be taken away from guardian mothers at birth.

21:46The mothers don't even get to see their babies. So in the guardian class, nobody really knows who's a relative, a blood relative or not, and the idea being they're going to all think of each other as a potential family. And Plato's, all their food and shelter and housing is provided for them by the producer class, who have no power whatsoever, but they do have property, they do have wealth, and they do have nuclear families. So Plato completely divorces power from wealth. And he hopes that by doing this, he can remove the opportunities for corruption and nepotism and distraction and divided loyalties in the Guardian class.

22:28He's also very, very clear that women, because we were talking earlier about the in the direct democracy of the Athens that he grew up in, it was only male citizens who got the vote. Women are to be auxiliaries, they're to fight. Women are to be philosopher queens as well as philosopher kings. And he's also very clear that in the producer class, where they are allowed some wealth, there are to be no extremes of wealth or poverty. So though I do agree with M.M. that the ultimate goal of all this is how to live as a just individual and whether that pays, but I actually think that Plato's put a lot of thought into constructing this ideal state and really does sort of think that some of these ideas are really worth exploring.

23:15Can I just come back to you for a moment, James? The philosopher is... I sort of was a little bit of attraction by talking about you three because he or she has got to be... They can't become a ruling philosopher until they're about 50, as I understand it. They have to be specially trained and they have to be especially trained in the rigid distinction between knowledge and belief because most opinions are belief, knowledge is greater than and behind and superior to belief. How does that go? How does that work? So he makes it very clear that when he means a philosopher, he doesn't actually mean people like M.M.

23:49and Angie and me. He means people who really know things. In particular, these are people with ethical knowledge. They know what's good. And he means that in the very strong sense that they're correct about it. They're right. And what's more... Who judges that they're right? Well, they do, because they eventually have this long training programme and eventually they discover what's good and they then are able to use that knowledge to make the city as good as a city can be. What also is important is that this knowledge comes with a motivational aspect to it. So they don't merely know what's good but are, as it were, disinterested in applying that.

24:38This is one way in which I think the politics and the psychology do interact quite directly with one another, in that he thinks knowing what's good will require you to want to make things as good as possible. So these philosopher rulers are both knowledgeable, they're experts, they're moral experts, but they're also paternalistic in their governance, that they want to make the city for everybody as good as it can possibly be. In a sense, there's almost a comparison. I'm sure one of you makes a comparison between them and a doctor. You go to them for expert, disinterested advice and it is given to you and you go down with your place in the state.

25:14Would you say that, Emma? Up to a point, I think there's a risk in thinking of them as merely experts. Of course, we've had enough of those these days. I don't think so. I like them. I quite like them too. I'm not like the three of you. You're experts. I think they're not quite... I think thinking of them as executives is a risk of misunderstanding what he thinks. Well, if they're rulers, what are they but executives? If we go back to what James said about there being an ethical component to their knowledge, It seems to me that what Plato wishes us to understand is that coming to know is rather like coming to understand rather than coming to deploy a body of knowledge.

26:02And that understanding is a complete, as he would put it, a turning of the soul. It has all the way through ethical development. So a lot of the political discussion is in service to making us understand something about ethical and intellectual development taking place at the same time. How does the parable of the cave fit into that then? Well, I think the cave is one of the best exposés of that. So we're asked... One of the most brilliant pieces of platonic writing too, so Socrates and Glaucon are having a little bit of a conversation. We've gone quite far into their discussion. And Socrates asks Glaucone to envisage, to see an image that he's about to elaborate.

26:56And the language is set up in ways that we are actually able to see it, to vivid kind of description. And the way it works is that there's supposed to be a long, it goes back to the underground thing of Gyges finding a dead body with a ring on it. So there's a long cave going all the way down underground, and at the bottom of the cave, facing the wall at the bottom, there are a collection of prisoners. And the prisoners are tied up by their feet and their necks, so they can't move their heads, they can only look forwards. And behind them, there's a fire. And between them and the fire, there's a little wall and a whole lot of people carrying around sort of plaster images of things which cast shadows on the wall of the cave.

27:51All that the prisoners can see are the shadows. So their conception of the world in which they live is determined by and constituted by what those shadows are. So when they see a shadow of a hippopotamus, that's what hippopotamus is for them. when they see a shadow of themselves that's who they are for themselves and they live a complete life this is the whole of their life restricted by their shadow by these to these shadows and socrates says these men are like glauco says well they're peculiar prisoners and socrates says no no they're like us what this is meant to represent is the unenlightened life that we live eventually some prisoner gets turned round and goes up out of the cave, works out the way that things are properly set up, goes outside the cave and then gets asked to come back inside again and explain everything to everybody else.

28:54The change is a change in understanding how things are best for them. But it's a change not only in the objects of what the released prisoner sees, but in the perspective of the released prisoner. And where does that take us, James? Well, it takes us in two ways. Politically, it's part of his criticism of democracy, because what's sad about these prisoners is a twofold failure. First of all, they fail to recognise that these shadows are shadows, as MM says. They think they take those to be the actual things. And secondly, they don't recognise that they're prisoners. They don't recognise that they're restrained and held back.

29:35And this is part of his criticism of democracy, because he thinks although Democrats proclaim that freedom is the great byword for their state, in fact, these people are restrained and constrained by their cognitive impairments. It also gives him the idea of this returning person into the cave who actually knows what they're looking at. And he or she is the only person who can recognise that these are shadows because only they have seen the originals of which these are copies and understand them for what they are. He or she has seen two things. First of all, the objects that are going backwards and forwards behind them, which they flash on the screen.