Republic

"Yes, it’s a bit cheeky because obviously it’s common to every approach to philosophy. I guess, I’ve been writing on it recently; I’m writing a book on philosophy and tragedy at the moment that I’ve been working on for years and years. So, I’ve been looking at the Republic closely again and thinking about it. The first thing to say is that ‘philosophy’ as a term, as a term of art, is something that Plato coins. So, we’re justified in coming to Plato in order to answer that question. And there are literary aspects of the Republic that are really important and fascinating, and there’s the whole question of the form of the dialogue. There’s the idea that philosophy begins not with a treatise – an essay – it begins with a dialogue, a drama: a drama set at some point in the recent past with a hero, Socrates, who is killed by the city. “The Republic is something that we could do well to go back to and think about the value of democracy: why are we so committed to it?” The other thing to say is that the Republic is a perennial book in the sense in which it’s perennially read but also the ways that it shows up will be different at different points in history. If you think about the Republic right now, one’s eye is drawn to the critique of democracy. The main argument of the Republic is that democracy is a fine and ‘a many-coloured’ political form, but it leads ineluctably to tyranny. The key value in democracy for Socrates is freedom, and he says that freedom flips over into private licentiousness and that licentiousness gives rise to the licentiousness of the tyrant. So, democracy will lead to tyranny. That seems to be very germane to what’s happening in countries like the United States where freedom becomes a kind of licentiousness, a tyranny of private pleasure, and the country is now under the tyranny of the king of private pleasure, Donald Trump. So, to that extent, negatively, the Republic has a great deal to say to us at this point: there is something wrong with democracy. And then, positively, the argument that Socrates makes is that there must be guardians: people trained to govern the city. This would be an abomination for western societies to follow; it would be against the whole idea of the open society, going back to Karl Popper. But maybe Plato has a point. Maybe society should be governed by the people who actually know something, rather than tyrants. But going back to the Republic now opens that question about democracy. Philosophy has always had a very odd relationship to democracy, overwhelming negative up until about John Dewey really. So, the Republic is something that we could do well to go back to at this point in history and maybe think about the value of democracy: what is the value of democracy and why are we so committed to it? Because it is a rather peculiar way of governing society, if you think about it. I’m in favour of it, of course, but philosophy does raise some questions. Yes, for sure. Continental philosophy from Hegel onwards – and particularly in Nietzsche – is deeply deeply anti-Platonic, particularly on the question of the arts. Plato’s thought in the Republic is that if we admit theatre into the just city then we’ll end up with the tyranny of spectacle: people will just end up gawping at things that they are attracted to, that they like, because they’re excessive and wild and they don’t seem to directly involve them. So, there’s a kind of tyranny of aesthetic experience in place which needs to be controlled in his view. And we find that outrageous, but then maybe it’s a question that we need to think about. What is going on when we wake up listening to the sound of gunshots from the Mandalay hotel in Las Vegas on the television? Am I just concerned and shocked by that – or am I getting some pathetic aesthetic thrill out of that experience? Plato lets us question those things in ways which I think are unsettling. We think of art as just a good. Is it? Maybe it’s like feasting at a time of plague, something we shouldn’t necessarily be proud of. It’s a question that Plato reasons with, let’s put it that way."

"It’s obviously a foundational book in the history of Western philosophy and of political thinking as well. It’s written as a dialogue, but it doesn’t feel much like a dialogue, at times. In the book Plato , the author, includes Socrates as a character, and we assume—because Socrates was Plato’s teacher—that it gives a reasonably accurate picture of the kind of thing that Socrates said. But, at a certain point, the views are very much Platonic, rather than Socratic. It begins with a discussion about a fundamental question about ethics, basically why anybody should behave well. Anyone who had a magical ring which he or she could put on that made them invisible, surely they would just take advantage of other people? It’s only because of the risk of punishment or because powerful people stop us doing things that we don’t behave immorally most of the time, one of the characters suggests. The overall arch of the book is to suggest No, that there is a reward of acting well, there’s a psychological health which is achieved when the three parts of the soul, or as we would say mind, are in good balance. Now, that doesn’t give you any idea of why it’s called Republic. But, actually, the way that Plato develops the argument is by likening the well-balanced mind to a well-balanced city-state, in which you have philosopher kings or queens at the top, trained in a particular way so as to be unbiased. This is the rational part of the soul. You have workers at the bottom, doing the dirty work, and a kind of drone/ guardian/soldier class in the middle. This is supposed to reflect the well-balanced mind, but actually is a model of the state. And, so, Plato presents in this book a theory about an ideal state, an ideal way of organizing society, where because power corrupts, you have a special kind of incorruptible class at the top, a class of people who can see more deeply into the nature of things and aren’t sidetracked by mere appearances. “I’ve chosen books that I think are incredibly important and not too threatening to read if you haven’t studied philosophy formally” It’s at this point that Plato presents one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of philosophy, the analogy of the cave. The cave is where people are chained facing a wall and they see flickering shadows on the wall. But they don’t realize these are shadows, they take the shadows for reality. In fact, they’re shadows cast by objects being held in front of a fire behind them. And then one of these chained people escapes and goes outside and sees the real world outside and the sun and realizes that everything else is a mere representation at several removes from reality because it’s a shadow of a silhouette—and tells people about the reality that’s out there. This image is supposed to show us how philosophers, by the power of thought, reason about the abstract ‘Forms’ and not just the appearances of things. Most of us are like the people chained facing the wall, taking appearances for reality. But philosophers reason about the perfect versions of things. So, if you think of a circle, any circle that you look at is an imperfect circle. But we have this idea in our minds of a perfect circle, where every bit of the perimeter is precisely equidistant from the center. That ideal doesn’t just exist for circles but for things like tables: there is, for Plato, an ideal table, or an ideal person. Everything has an ideal Form. And, according to Plato—in this metaphysics that he presents—the role of the philosopher is to think about those abstract ideas. The Republic is a mixture of metaphysics, political philosophy, and a kind of psychology about the balance of the different parts of the soul. Many of its ideas have subsequently resonated throughout the history of philosophy. Certainly that’s true of the opening of the book. There are some very challenging ideas in there. Karl Popper famously described Plato as a totalitarian thinker, because his ideal society is heavily censored, for instance. Plato says you shouldn’t have the arts because the arts deal in fictions which are prone to make us have the wrong kinds of emotions and give us a false picture of reality. So turn away the artists at the borders of your state, because they’re going to corrupt society. You also have this fundamental lie at the heart of society where you tell people that the reason they occupy a particular stratum in society is because they have a certain kind of metal in their soul. If you have the right metal, you get to be higher ranking, if you have the wrong metal, you’re lower. These are kind of lies which keep society in place. It’s awful. There’s a famous critique of democracy there as well, where Plato famously likens democracy to a ship being steered by all the passengers, rather than having a skilled pilot at the helm, which is what you need in a storm. There are, then, lots of things about the content of the Republic which are controversial or wrong—including the idea at its heart, the metaphysical approach which suggests that there are these discoverable forms for everything, and that appearances are fundamentally deceptive about the things that matter. Nevertheless, the book is really stimulating for all kinds of reasons, not least because of something I strongly believe – that the best philosophy books are the ones with which you can disagree, and which it is easy to disagree with. They stimulate you to thought. Also, there’s the importance in the history of ideas of these idealized versions. If you think of painting, in the Renaissance there’s a kind of Neoplatonic view about beauty where some artists are trying to represent the Form of beauty, not a particular beautiful person. That’s got a fairly direct link back to Plato’s ideas about the Forms, that we can abstract from some particular beautiful person and get to this perfect circle version of them, as it were."

"As I said near the beginning of this interview, I strongly believe we have been doing the philosophy of information without knowing it. Plato is a great philosopher of information without the word being there. When it comes to the classic image of the myth of the cave, you can reinterpret the whole thing today in terms of the channel of communication and information theory: who gets access to which information. The people chained in front of the wall are effectively watching television, or glued to some social media. You can read it that way without doing any violence to the text. That shows two things. First, why it is a classic. A classic can be read and re-read, and re-interepreted. It never gets old, it just gets richer in consequences. It’s like old wine, it gets better with time. You can also see what I mean when I say we’ve been doing the philosophy of information since day one, because really the whole discussion of the cave is just a specific chapter in the philosophy of information. The point I try to glean from that particular feature in the great architecture of the Republic is the following: some people have their attention captured constantly by social media – it could be by cats on Facebook. They are chained to that particular social media – television yesterday, digital technology today. Some of these people can actually unchain themselves and acquire a better sense of what reality is, what the world really is about. What is the responsibility of those who have, as it were, unchained themselves from the constant flow, the constant grab of attention of everyday media, and are able to step back, literally step out of the cave? Are they supposed to go back and violently force the people inside to get away, as the text says? Updated that would mean, for example, implementing legislation. We would have to ban social media, we could forbid people from having mobile phones, we’d put some kind of back doors into social media because we want control. Or do we have to exercise toleration? If so, it would be a matter of education. We’d have to go back and talk to them. In essence here Plato, by addressing these questions, is giving us a lesson in the philosophy of information."

"The only philosophy book I am choosing. It contains a tremendous amount of nonsense about what the ideal society would be like. But it is an unmissable book because of Socrates . He invented the method of doing and teaching philosophy that has never been improved on. His persistent questions forced people to spell out their beliefs more fully and precisely, often unearthing beliefs they hardly knew they had. He would then challenge them with counter-examples, putting pressure on beliefs by pointing out unwelcome consequences they had. This questioning is often both intimidating and liberating. Those of us who teach philosophy aim, not always successfully, for the liberation without the intimidation. Some of Socrates’ opponents in The Republic challenge him as to whether there is any reason to be moral, apart from social pressures. They use a simple but brilliant thought experiment. Would you have any reason to avoid wrongdoing if you had a ring that made you invisible, so there was no chance of getting caught? It is not the answers given to this and the other questions in the book, but the absolutely fundamental challenges of the questions themselves."

"In Greek it’s Politeia , which we translate as ‘constitution.’ ‘Republic’ is actually the English translation from the Latin title, Res Publica, which means ‘the people’s thing/concern/affair.’ In English, ‘republic’ has come to mean a certain kind of constitution – a republic as opposed, say, to a tyranny. But in Greek , the constitution that is outlined in the Republic is presented by Plato as the only one that really has a claim to count as a constitution at all; any other kind of constitution is only a kind of factious device that will lead to division and alienation. Only the ideal constitution that the Republic describes is a constitution worthy of the name. Yes. The Republic is really exploring what it would be to have good political rule. There are two desiderata: you want to have people who have the right moral character, who aren’t wanting to get power in order to feather their own nests or to execute their enemies. That’s very fundamental. You want people who are reluctant to rule. You also want people who understand the good, who understand the goals of rule, because if you’re ruling, you’re ruling for some purpose. If people are ignorant — again as Plato posited the democratic decision makers were — they wouldn’t be able to know the right aims of rule, or to implement them. So these two desiderata actually come together in the people whom he calls philosophers. They’re described as people who love learning so they don’t love greed, they’re not greedy for other things, they don’t love bodily appetites. That makes them of good moral character, at least potentially, and in loving learning they’re capable of actually coming to understand the true nature of reality as a synthetic whole. Only if such people could rule could there be an end to evils for cities. That’s the idea. You could say it’s never really been tried. You’ve had lots of people who are tyrants, but they don’t necessarily know the nature of reality. In a way, it is a very radical empirical claim because it’s saying there never has been a good society. None of the societies we see around us are. Some are better than others, but on the whole, no society has ever really been oriented to the good as Plato understood it. One simplistic idea would be he’s just writing this to give us a blueprint, that what we should do is go out and find these people and set up this society. The problem is we can’t force these people into existence. If they don’t really exist, then anything you do to try to make the society happen just wouldn’t work. A more sophisticated way to look at it is that in writing this dialogue, just by getting people to believe this would be the best regime, that itself could potentially change the nature of existing politics. You don’t necessarily have to have the ideal philosophers for the book, the Republic, to have an effect in changing political culture. Exactly. Then there’s a spectrum of possibilities: you might think, “Well, even in the democracy, if people had more self-control, if people were more able to govern themselves with justice and moderation — which are some of the virtues that the philosophers would ideally have — that would still make democracy better.” Even in democracy it would be better if more people read the Republic . There’s a question about how far he wants to go with that, how radical he is."

"The natural place to begin, in considering reason’s ambitions, is with the ancient Greek philosophers, and particularly with Plato. Plato wrote dialogues, which happen to be not only great works of philosophy but also of art. They should be read as a kind of theater (theater, of course, having been another of the ancient Greeks’ inventions), a theater of reason. Some scholars believe they really were performed as plays at Plato’s Academy. His Republic is the most famous of his dialogues, and it’s the first work I recommend to understand the origins of the project of applying reason—our ability to perceive logical connections, explore the implications of our beliefs—to the problems of knowing how best to live. Plato put his full faith in reason while simultaneously not having much faith in most people’s capacity for reason. The extent to which he felt this dilemma led him to propose radical political solutions in the Republic , causing future thinkers, including no less a figure than the twentieth-century’s Karl Popper, to charge him with being a proto-fascist. What he proposed was to concentrate societal power in the hands of those who are themselves, both by nature and training, rigorously governed by reason—his so-called philosopher-kings. “Plato put his full faith in reason while simultaneously not having much faith in most people’s capacity for reason.” And yet, though you may not like the solutions he proposed in the Republic— I largely don’t—still, living today in Trump’s America, I am constantly reminded of specific passages in the Republic , most saliently his warnings of how a demagogue might arise in the midst of a democracy by fanning up resentments and fears. The American Founders had closely studied the Republic and tried to create a democracy that, with its checks and balances, could withstand the destructive forces of irrationality that Plato warned were constantly threatening our collective well-being. So much in the Republic feels starkly, even horrifyingly, relevant today."

"I tried to pick five books from across at least three different traditions. I came up with two books from the European tradition, one from the Indian tradition, and two from the Chinese tradition. They’re books with very different philosophical perspectives. Why don’t we start with Plato ’s Republic, which was composed in the 4th century BCE. Like the other books on this list, it’s very readable even if you aren’t a professional philosopher. Take the story of ‘The Ring of Gyges,’ which raises the question of whether you would continue to act like a good person if you had a ring of invisibility that let you get away with doing whatever you wanted to do. That’s a fascinating thought experiment that anybody can appreciate. I’ve also noticed that whomever I’ve explained Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ to, their eyes have brightened and they’ve been intrigued by it—even people who don’t think they’re interested in philosophy. As you know, the Allegory of the Cave suggests that we’re all just like prisoners in a cave looking at shadows on the wall, mistaking them for reality, and we need to be released from the chains of conventional knowledge so that we can turn around, go out into the sun, and see what the world is actually like. This very powerful image has inspired a surprisingly wide range of people. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to it in his political and philosophical writings, and George Lucas was clearly influenced by it in his early science-fiction movie THX 1138 . I think it was, yes. The Republic is a work that combines a political philosophy, a view of the virtues, a philosophical psychology, and an epistemology (a theory of knowledge), which emphasises our ability to understand the world through a rational critique of common sense. That’s a very distinctive way of looking at the world that’s had an immense influence on many people, including religious thinkers in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, as well as the originators of modern science. People often forget that Galileo was deeply influenced by Platonic ideas. Absolutely. There’s just so much going on in the Republic . We have a critique of democracy and how it decays, which some people have said is very relevant to understanding contemporary political events in the United States. Andrew Sullivan wrote a fascinating piece in New York Magazine looking at what Plato would say about the 2016 presidential election, and how Plato might diagnose the rise of Trump. Whether you agree with the exact analysis or not, Plato does raise serious questions about the nature of democratic governments and the weaknesses that a democratic form of government is prone to. Even if, like me, you are still a fan of democracy, we should listen carefully to Plato’s critiques, which after all are based on his actual experience of the abuses of a democratic government in Athens. Exactly. Plato also presented an image of how a society can decay from a timocracy, a society based on a conception of honour, into a more slavish society dedicated to the satisfaction of material desires, in which the successful businessperson is the model for the kind of person you want to be. From there society decays to a tyranny as a strongman promises to come in and to fix all of the problems that have been left by the competing factions in previous governments — that’s frighteningly prescient in some ways."