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Plato's Happy Philosopher and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Joseph Beatty
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Extract

Why should Plato's philosopher rule? A deceptively simple question, and one that many would contend Plato answered in a straightforward way in the Republic: because justice requires it and the philosopher is just (520a, 520e). Yet, if justice is defined as psychic harmony (443c-444a) and psychic harmony is eudaimonia, and if pure philosophizing makes the philosopher most eudaimon (as several texts indicate) it would seem that descent from the philosophic heights to rule is unjust. Glaucon makes this objection (519d) and Aristotle, dissatisfied with Plato's reply, repeats it. The charge implicit here and in many recent commentators is that Plato provides no satisfying philosophical account of the relation between justice (dikaiosune) and happiness (eudaimonia) and thus no philosophic justification for ruling. For Glaucon and Adeimantus ask that Socrates show that justice-—by which they mean “fair-dealing to others,” the restraint from pleonexia in sociopolitical affairs—makes the just man happy of itself apart from reputation or external reward. Socrates' reply identifies justice and psychic harmony, calling the latter “real” or inner justice. But this is only a relevant reply if some necessary connection can be shown between psychic harmony and justice in the ordinary, sociopolitical sense. Is it necessarily the case that the psychically harmonious or happy man deals fairly with others? For if justice is defined as psychic harmony (well-being or happiness) then the philosopher is most happy philosophizing, and his refusal to rule is not only justified, but justified by Socrates' own argument. The potential embarrassmentthen is that the philosopher in the Republic—the only individual skilled in justification by argument or dialectic—may be incapable of fulfilling the request of Glaucon and Adeimantus. His own unwillingness to rule seems to indicate he doesn't believe in the connection between justice and happiness. Moreover, if the philosopher's dialectical inquiries into the relation between (ordinary) justice and happiness end in failure, then Socrates in fact undermines belief in justice while trying to defend it. If then, as some have claimed,4 the Republic is the true apology of Socrates and of philosophy to the polis, it is surely a disastrous one.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , October 1976 , pp. 545 - 575
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1976

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References

1 Republic 517c-d; 519d; 520e-521a, b.

2 Politics 1264b 15ff.

3 For such criticism see especially Joseph, H.W.B., Essays in Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 1935), pp. 80–81, 154Google Scholar; Prichard, H. A., Moral Obligation (New York, 1968), pp. 106, 108Google Scholar; Sachs, D., “A Fallacy in Plato's Republic” Philosophical Review, 72 (1963), 141–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adkins, A. W. H., Merit and Responsibility (Oxford, 1960), pp. 291–292Google Scholar, and From the Many to the One (Ithaca, 1970), p. 149Google Scholar; Bloom, Allan, The Republic of Plato (New York, 1968), pp. 378–379Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), pp. 109–110Google Scholar; Rosen, Stanley, Nihilism (New Haven, 1969), p. 161Google Scholar.

4 Bloom, , Plato, pp.307–310Google Scholar.

5 However, if more philosophers are educated then more sharing of the political helm will occur and individual philosophers will spend more time philosophizing.

8 Aronson, Simon H. has maintained precisely this thesis in a paper entitled “The Happy Philosopher—A Counterexample to Plato's Proof” in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 10 (1972), 383–398Google Scholar. This has also been the implicit suggestion of Adkins, in Merit and Responsibility, p. 291–292Google Scholar; From the Many to the One, p. 149; and Strauss, LeoCity and Man, p. 109–110, 125, 127–128Google Scholar.

7 Cornford's translation of ta dikaia…lusitelein at 589a 6. See The Republic of Plato (New York, 1945), p. 317Google Scholar. More recently, Gregory Vlastos employs the phrase as a “capsule” for the central argument in the first of several papers on the subject entitled “The Argument in th Republic that ‘Justice Pays’” Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968), 665–674CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Bloom, , Plato, p.408Google Scholar.

9 Throughout, I have used Allan Bloom's translation of the Republic.

10 Barker, Ernest, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York, 1959), p. 137Google Scholar.

11 Festugière, A. J., Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon (Paris, 1967), p. 402Google Scholar; Jaeger, says of the philosopher, “Despite his reluctance, he would be impelled by his feeling of gratitude [to society for his paideia] to take the office assigned to him” (Paideia, trans. Highet, Gilbert [New York, 1943], II: 300Google Scholar. In The Unwritten Philosophy (London, 1950), Cornford comments that “they [the philosophers] will undertake the direction of society as a duty” (p. 65)Google Scholar; Greene, W. C. in “The Paradoxes of The Republic,” Harvard Classical Studies 63 (1958), p. 214Google Scholar, refers to the philosopher-ruler as a compassionate “self-denying ruler”; Cassirer, E. in The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1961) holds that Plato “became a political thinker and a statesman not by inclination but from duty. And he inculcated this duty in the minds of his philosophers” (p. 63)Google Scholar; Grube, G. M. A., in a note on his translation of 519d in Plato's Republic (Indianapolis, 1974) remarks that “Plato does indeed require his philosopher to go back into the cave to help those less fortunate than himself, but only as a duty, not because he loves his neighbor or gets any emotional satisfaction from helping him” (p. 172)Google Scholar; “When all is said and done,” EvaBrann maintains, “the true rulers of the Republic enter politics only out of pity, gratitude, and simple decency” (“The Music of the Republic,” AΓΩN, 1 (1967), 18Google Scholar; Cross, R. C. and Woozley, A. D., referring to what they call Plato's “organic view of the state”—the service of members to the whole—regard Plato's reputation as “the first totalitarian” not unmerited in Plato's Republic: A Philosophical Commentary (New York, 1964), pp.131–132Google Scholar.

12 Nettleship, Richard Lewis, Lectures on the Republic of Plato (New York, 1968), esp. pp.222, 226, 234Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 227.

14 For two more recent comparable accounts see Schipper, E. W.'s paper “Motives and Virtues in the Platonic Ethics,” Ratio, 13 (1971), 67–75Google Scholar, and Kraut's, Richard paper, “Egoism Love and Political Office in Plato,” Philosophical Review, 82 (1973), 330–344. See also my rejoinder to Kraut and Aronson in a paper forthcoming in The Personalist, “Why Should Plato's Philosopher Be Moral and, Hence, Rule?”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See Foster's, M. B. “Some Implications of a Passage in Plato's Republic” Philosophy, 11 (1936), 301–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Murphy, N. R., The Interpretation of Plato's Republic (Oxford, 1960), pp. 53–54Google Scholar; Sparshott, F. E., “Socrates and Thrasymachus,” Monist, 50 (1966), 440, 456CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Plato As Anti-Political Thinker,” in Plato, ed, Vlastos, Gregory (Garden City, 1971), II: 177Google Scholar.

17 This is Wolin's, Sheldon descriptive term for Plato's philosopher in Politics and Vision (Boston, 1960), pp. 51–55Google Scholar.

18 Cross, and Woozley, , Plato's Republic: A Commentary, p. 192Google Scholar. See also Wolin, , Politics and Vision, pp. 56–7Google Scholar.

19 Adkins, , Merit and Responsibility p. 291, points out that while the desires of the other parts of the soul can become excessive and disturb the psychic harmony, nowhere is it suggested that the desire for philosophy or contemplation can become too strong or tyrannicalGoogle Scholar.

20 See Vlastos', Gregory paper “A Metaphysical Paradox,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 39 (1966), 14Google Scholar; Jaeger, , Paideia, II: 300Google Scholar; Weingartner, Rudolph, “Vulgar Justice and Platonic Justice,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 25 (1964), 250–251CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Grene, David, Greek Political Theory (Chicago, 1965), p. 119Google Scholar. See also Friedländer, Paul, Plato, trans. Meyerhoff, Hans (Princeton, 1969), I: 3–11 and 20Google Scholar, where he speaks of the “experienced necessity” between eidos and polis which always existed for Plato; and Plato, II: 117. Robert Joly holds that “dans L'Etat idéal, contemplation et autorité politique sont liées obligatoirement par un lien de cause à effet; c'est parce qu'on est philosophe qu'on doit diriger l'éfitat” (Le Thème philosophique des genres de vie dans I'antiquité classique [Brussels, 1955], p. 101)Google Scholar.

22 As Davies, J. claims in “A Note on the Philosopher's Descent Into the Cave,” Philologies, 112 (1968), 124–125Google Scholar. See a comparable account in Friedländer, , Plato, I: 19–20Google Scholar.

23 Kraut, Both, “Political Office in Plato,” p. 332Google Scholar, and Aronson, , “Happy Philosopher,” p. 397, point this outGoogle Scholar.

24 See Strauss, , City and Man, pp. 112, 125Google Scholar; Bloom, , Plato, pp. 391, 408Google Scholar; Grene, David, Greek Political Theory, pp. 117, 124Google Scholar; Cross, R. C. and Woozley, A. D., Plato's Republic: A Commentary, p. 136Google Scholar.

25 Adkins, , From the Many to the One, p. 149Google Scholar.

26 See Sparshott, , “Socrates and Thrasymachus,” p. 441Google Scholar.

27 Thus Festugière: “Ce qui fait…le tragique de cet ouvrage [The Republic], c'est que Platon a goûté à la contemplation et qu'il n'en quitte plus sans regret les joies pures” (Contemplation, p. 407).

28 485b, and back reference to 475b; 486a; 531a-d; 537c.

29 This is reminiscent of Democritus' Fragment, “The Mind is accustomed to getting pleasures from itself” (Diels, B 146). Arendt, Hannah speculatively completes this thought: “The Mind (logos),” he said, makes abstinence easy because “it is used to getting joys out of itself (auton ex heautou)” (“Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research, 38 [1971], 441)Google Scholar.

30 See Adkins, , Merit and Responsibility, p. 291Google Scholar.

31 Santas has argued in an account of Plato's earlier dialogues that in order to establish the truth of Socrates' claim that if one has knowledge of virtue one is a (morally) virtuous man it must be shown that moral virtue is good for oneself. For Plato, according to Santas, is assuming an egoist theory of motivation according to which the moral rests on the prudential. See Santas, Gerasimos, “The Socratic Paradoxes” reprinted in Plato's Meno, ed. Sesonske, A. and Fleming, N. (Belmont, California, 1967), p.49–64Google Scholar.

32 Kraut, Richard suggests this also in “Reason and Justice in Plato's Republic,” in Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos (Assen, the Netherlands, 1973), p. 213Google Scholar.

33 For an excellent discussion of Plato's teleological theory see Nettleship, , Lectures, pp. 217 ff.Google Scholar; and also Versényi, Laszlo, “Plato and His Liberal Opponents,” Philosophy, 46 (1971), esp. 225–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Virtue as a Self-Directed Art,” The Personalist, 53 (1972), 279–281Google Scholar.

34 See Foster's, M. B.The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford, 1935), esp. pp. 1–71Google Scholar; and Renford Bambrough's papers “Plato's Modern Friends And Enemies,” and “Plato's Political Analogies,” reprinted in Plato Popper and Politics, ed. R. Bambrough (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 3–19; 152–169. See also the rejoinder to Bambrough in Versé'nyi's “Plato and His Liberal Opponents.”

35 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (New York, 1971), p. 84Google Scholar. See also Morris's, C. R. comparable account in “Plato's Theory of the Good Man's Motive,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 34 (1933–1934), 142Google Scholar.

36 See Murdoch, , The Sovereignty of Good, pp. 88–89Google Scholar; Sparshott, , “Socrates and Thrasymachus,” 440–441Google Scholar, and “Plato as Anti-Political Thinker,” p. 178; Woodbridge, F. J. E., “Education” in Plato's Meno, ed. Sesonske, and Fleming, , p. 48Google Scholar.

37 See Demos, Raphael, “A Fallacy in Plato's Republic,” In Plato, ed. by Vlastos, , II: 55Google Scholar; Waterlow, Sarah, “The Good of Others in Plato's Republic,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 73 (1972–1973), esp. 27–35Google Scholar.

38 Murdoch, , Sovereignty of Good, p. 97Google Scholar.

39 Yeats, W. B., “The Choice,” The Collected Poems (New York, 1959), 242Google Scholar.

40 Waterlow, , “Good of Others in Plato,” pp. 33–36Google Scholar. But if, metaphysically speaking, apparent individuals are only really theoretic and impartial reason (and not “practical reason” which aims at its own good as a whole) then those who lack “theoretic reason”—i.e., most of those in Plato's ideal polls —would seem to be in metaphysical limbo. Plato suggests within and without the Republic that everyone aims at and does what he does desiring his own good but nowhere does he suggest that we all aim at the impartial, impersonal good. For a similar argument against Aristotle's identification of man's good with theoretic reason see Hardie's, W. F. R. paper, “The Final Good in Aristotle's Ethics,” in Aristotle: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Moravcsik, J. M. E. (Garden City, 1967), p. 302Google Scholar.

41 Compare Sophist, 233a.

42 Indeed, as the Liddell, Scott, Jones Lexicon testifies, the etymological roots of theoria are in seeing and, more specifically, in the kind of seeing done by spectators at the Olympic Games. See also the “parable of the festival” attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Pythagoras: “Life, he said, is like a festival (panegerei); just as some come to the festivals to compete, some to ply their trade, but the best people come as spectators (theatai) so in life the slavish men go hunting for fame or gain, the philosophers for the truth” (Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1963), p. 228)Google Scholar.

43 See “Rules for the Direction of the Mind” in Philosophical Works of Descartes, I, eds. Haldane, and Ross, (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

44 Brumbaugh, R. S., Plato for the Modern Age (New York, 1964), p. 102Google Scholar.

45 Ibid.

46 See Grene's, MarjorieAristotle (Chicago, 1967), p. 182Google Scholar.

47 Robinson, Richard, Plato's Earlier Dialectic (Ithaca, 1941), p. 234Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., p. 190.

49 Shorey, Paul, “The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic,” Studies in Classical Philology, 1 (1895), 232–33Google Scholar.

50 This is the term Shorey uses to refer to the good in “Plato's Ethics” in Plato, ed. by Vlastos, , II: 19Google Scholar.

51 See Kojève's, Alexandre “Tyranny and Wisdom,” trans. Michael Gold in On Tyranny, ed. Strauss, Leo (Ithaca), pp. 172–173Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., p. 173. Kojève calls these “the prejudices of the cloister.”

53 I owe this point to Laszlo Versényi, who pointed out to me that for Plato, as for Hegel, any account must employ logoi, intelligible formal features.

54 For Popper, Karl R., Plato is the “enemy” of the “open society” (The Open Society and Its Enemies [Princeton, 1950/, esp. pp. 37–57, 143–144)Google Scholar. See also Gouldner, Alvin W., Enter Plato (New York, 1965), pp. 206–211Google Scholar; Diamond, Stanley, “Plato and the Definition, of the Primitive,” in Primitive Views of the World, ed. Diamond, Stanley (New York, 1964), pp. 170–193Google Scholar.

55 By Sparshott in “Plato As Anti-Political Thinker.”

56 I make this objection against Kraut's “Egoism, Love, and Political Office in Plato” in my paper “Why Should Plato's Philosopher Be Moral and, Hence, Rule?”

57 See Sparshott's, F. E. “Socrates and Thrasymachus,” pp. 456–457Google Scholar, for an account of how the logoi of Rep. I are rescued by a more coherent specification of their meaning; see also Desjardins', Paul careful study of Platonic method in “The Form of Platonic Inquiry” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1959)Google Scholar.