Professor Steven Smith:
Today I have the impossible
task of finishing the parts of
the Republic that I have
assigned for the class.
And in the past sometimes,
I've assigned a full two weeks
to the Republic,
which would be four lectures,
but because I wanted to do some
other things with the course as
well,
I had to cut the
Republic by one lecture,
and now I'm paying for that
today.
So I'm going to try to rush
through, unfortunately,
a number of the major themes
regarding the creation of the
just city,
the creation of Kallipolis and
then try to end the class by
talking about,
as I like to do for every
thinker,
what does in this case,
what does Plato,
what are his views on modern
America.
What does Plato say to us today?
But I want to start with what
is one of the grand themes of
the Republic,
it is indicated in Book II by
Adeimantus' speech about
self-control.
It is introduced further by the
claims of Socrates to control,
to censor, to control the
poetry and the arts of the city.
And this is the big theme of
what one might call "the control
of the passions."
This is the theme of every
great moralist from Spinoza to
Kant to Freud.
How do we control the passions?
And it is certainly a large
theme of Plato's theory of
justice in the Republic.
Every great moral philosopher
has a strategy for helping us
submit our passions to some kind
of control, to some kind of
supervening moral power.
And again, recall this is the
theme raised at the beginning of
Book II by Adeimantus,
who puts forward an idea of
self-control,
or what he calls
self-guardianship as his goal.
How can we protect ourselves
from the passion for injustice?
And one of the things Socrates
emphasizes is that the most
powerful of those passions,
the most powerful passion is
that Socratic passion that he
calls thumos,
or what our translator has as
spiritedness,
anger, maybe what biblical
translators call heart,
having a big heart,
having thumos and all of
that implies.
This is for Plato,
the political passion par
excellence.
It is a kind of fiery love of
fame, love of distinction that
leads men and women of a certain
type to pursue their ambitions
in public life,
in the public space.
It is clearly connected this
notion of spiritedness or this
thumotic quality to our
capacities for heroism and for
self-sacrifice.
But it is also connected to our
desires for domination and the
desire to exercise tyranny over
others.
Thumos has a kind of
dual component to it.
It can lead us to a sense of
kind of righteous indignation
and anger at the sight of
injustice,
but it can also lead us in a
rather contradictory way to
desire to dominate and tyrannize
over others.
This is the quality that
Socrates regards as being
possessed by every great
political leader and statesman,
but it is also clearly a
quality possessed by every
tyrant.
And the question posed by the
Republic,
in many ways,
the question around which the
book as a whole gravitates,
is whether this thumotic
quality can be controlled.
Can it be re-directed,
can it be re-channeled in the
service of the public good?
Socrates introduces the problem
of thumos by a story,
a particularly vivid story that
I hope you all remember,
where in Book IV he tells the
story about Leontius at the
walls.
"Leontius," he writes,
"was proceeding from the
Piraeus outside the north wall
when he perceived corpses lying
near the public executioner.
At the same time,
he desired to see them.
He wanted to see this grotesque
sight, these dead bodies lying
there.
And to the contrary,
he felt disgust and turned
himself away and for a while he
battled with himself and hid his
face.
But eventually overpowered by
desire, he forced his eyes open
and rushing towards the corpses
said 'see you damn wretches,
take your fill of this
beautiful sight'" 439c.
That story that Socrates tells
here is not one of reason
controlling the passions,
but rather one of intense
internal conflict that Leontius
felt.
We see his conflicting emotions
both to see and not to see,
a sense that he wished to
observe and yet he is at,
in some ways,
at war with himself,
knowing to gawk,
to stare at this sight.
There's something shameful
about it and he felt shame.
One example I particularly like
of this was suggested last year,
I think, by Justin Zaremby who
said it's the emotion we all
feel when we're driving down the
highway,
right, and we see a car crash
or we go by a wreck and
everybody slows down,
right, they all want to see.
What are they hoping to see?
Well, they want to see blood,
they want to see if there's a
body, they want to see how much
damage has been caused.
And we've all been in this,
where we know that it's
shameful to look at this,
just drive on,
as Socrates would say "mind
your own business," and yet at
the same time we feel,
even against our will,
compelled to look and think
about that.
And think about that and this
case of Leontius the next time
you, for those of you who have
driver's licenses,
are next driving on the highway
and see something like that.
It is the thumos that is
the cause of--that should be the
cause of your shame at slowing
down to look.
Sometimes we can't help but
slow down because everybody is
slowed down in front of us,
we have no choice.
But anyway, that incident,
that story that Socrates
relates is connected to the fact
that Leontius is a certain kind
of man.
He regards himself as proud,
independent,
someone who wants to be in
control of his emotions but
isn't.
He is a soul at war with
himself, and potentially
therefore, at war with others.
And what the Republic
tries to do is to offer us
strategies, maybe we might even
call it a therapy,
for dealing with thumos,
for submitting it to the
control of reason and helping us
to achieve some level of
balance,
of self-control and moderation.
And these are the qualities
taken together that Socrates
calls justice,
that can only be achieved when
reason is in control of the
appetites and desires.
Again, a question the book asks
is whether that ideal of justice
can be used as a model for
politics.
Can it serve as a model for
justice in the city?
This connection he has
established between justice in
the city and justice in the
soul,
what are the therapies or
strategies for solving injustice
in the soul or imbalance of some
kind in the soul?
Can those be transferred or
translated in some way to public
justice, to political justice,
justice in the polis?
Right?
You with me on that so far?
So, on the basis of this,
Socrates proposes how to
proceed with the construction of
Kallipolis, and he does so
through what he calls three
waves.
There are three waves,
three waves of reform,
so to speak,
that will contribute to the
creation of the city.
The first of these waves is,
you remember,
the restrictions on private
property, even the abolition of
private property.
The second, the abolition of
the family, and the third wave
being the establishment of the
philosopher kings.
Each of these waves is regarded
as in some way necessary for the
proper construction of a just
city.
And I'm not going to speak
about all of them,
but I do want to speak a little
bit about,
because it has particular
relevance for us,
his proposals for the
co-education of men and women
that is a great part of his
plan,
especially related to the
abolition of the family,
that men and women be educated
in the same way,
right.
The core of Socrates' proposal
for equal education is presented
in a context that he knows to be
or suggests will be laughable.
It will certainly be seen that
way, he suggests,
by Glaucon and Adeimantus.
There is no job,
he states, that cannot be
performed equally well by both
men and women.
Is Socrates a feminist?
Gender differences,
he says, are no more relevant
when it comes to positions of
political rule than is the
distinction between being bald
and being hairy.
Socrates is not saying that men
and women are the same in every
respect, he says,
but equal with respect to
competing for any job at all.
There will be no glass ceilings
in Kallipolis.
The first, in many ways,
great defender,
the first great champion of the
emancipation of women from the
household.
But this proposal comes at
certain costs,
he tells us.
The proposal for a level
playing field demands,
of course, equal education.
And here he says that men and
women, being submitted to the
same regime, will mean,
among other things,
that they will compete with one
another in co-educational
gymnasia.
They will compete with each
other in the nude because that
is the way Greeks exercised.
They will compete naked in
co-educational gymnasia,
think of that.
Furthermore,
their marriages and their
procreations will be,
he tells us,
for the sake of the city.
There is nothing like romantic
love among the members of the
guardian class.
Sexual relations will be
intended purely for the sake of
reproduction and unwanted
fetuses will be aborted.
The only exception to this
prohibition is for members of
the guardian class who are
beyond the age of reproduction,
he tells us,
and they, he says,
can have sex if they're still
able, with anyone they like.
A kind of version of
recreational sex as a reward for
a lifetime of self-control.
Child-bearing may be inevitable
for women but the rearing of the
child will be the responsibility
of the community or at least a
class of guardians and common
daycare centers.
A sort of variation of Hillary
Clinton's book that "it takes a
village to raise a child," comes
right out of Plato apparently.
No child should know their
biological parents and no parent
should know their child.
The purpose of this scheme
being to eliminate senses of
mine and me, to promote a kind
of common sense of esprit de
corps among the members of
the guardian class,
"a community of pleasure and
pain," Socrates calls it at
464a.
What we are creating is a
community of pleasure and pain.
I will feel your pains,
and of course you will feel
mine.
The objections to Socrates,
are of course,
you know, raised as early as by
Aristotle himself,
in the very next generation.
How can we care for things,
how can we truly care for
things that are common?
We learn to care for things
that are closest to us,
that are in some way our own.
We can only show proper love
and concern for things that are
ours, not things that are
common.
Common ownership,
Aristotle argues,
will mean a sort of common
neglect.
Children will not be raised
better by putting them under the
common care of guardians or in
daycares but they will be
equally neglected.
But it is in this,
and you can think about that,
about whether that's true or
not,
but it is in the same context
of his treatment of men and
women that something else often
goes unnoticed and that is
Socrates' efforts to rewrite the
laws of war,
because of course the guardians
are being trained and educated
to be guards,
to be warriors,
to be members of a military
class.
In the first place,
he tells us,
children must be taught the art
of war.
This must be the beginning of
their education,
Socrates says,
making the children spectators
of war.
Children will be taken,
he seems to suggest,
to battles and to sites of
where fighting is going on,
to be spectators for them to
become used to and habituated to
seeing war and what everything
that goes on.
Not only is expulsion from the
ranks of the guardians penalty
for cowardice,
but Socrates suggests there
should be, listen to this,
"erotic rewards for those who
excel in bravery."
Erotic rewards for excellence
in bravery.
Consider the following
remarkable proposal at 468c,
"and I add to the laws of war,"
Socrates writes,
"that as long as they,
the guardians,
are on campaign,
no one whom he wants to kiss
should be permitted to refuse.
So that if a man happens to
love someone,
either male of female,
he would be more eager to win
the rewards of valor."
That is to say as a reward for
bravery, exhibited bravery,
the hero should be allowed to
kiss anyone they like while they
are on patrol,
male or female.
A particularly puritanical
editor of Plato from the
twentieth century writes in a
footnote to that passage,
"this is almost the only
passage in Plato that one would
wish to blot out,"
his sensibilities were offended
by this notion.
But I wonder what kind of,
if this might even make a
powerful incentive for military
recruitment today.
What do you think?
Well, think about it.
I don't know.
So, at long last,
we move from the education of
the guards to justice.
What is justice,
we've been questioning asking
ourselves throughout this book
in which Plato has been,
Socrates has been teasing us
with.
At long last we come to this
thing.
The platonic idea of justice
concerns harmony,
he tells us,
both harmony in the city and
harmony in the soul.
We learn that the two are
actually homologous in some way.
Justice is defined as what
binds the city together and
makes it one.
Or he puts it another way,
consists of everyone and
everything performing those
functions for which they are
best equipped.
Each of the other citizens,
Socrates says,
must be brought to that which
naturally suits him,
which naturally suits him,
one man, one job,
he says.
So that each man practicing his
own which is one,
will not become many but one.
Thus you see,
he says, the whole city will
naturally grow up together.
Justice seems to mean adhering
to the principal,
justice in the city,
adhering to the principal of
division of labor.
One man, one job,
everyone doing or performing
the task that naturally fits or
suits them.
One can, of course,
as you've already imagined,
raise several objections to
this view and again Aristotle
seems to take the lead.
Plato's excessive emphasis on
unity would seem to destroy the
natural diversity of human
beings that make up a city.
Is there one and only one thing
that each person does best?
And if so, who could decide
this?
Would such a plan of justice
not be overly coercive in
forcing people into predefined
social roles?
Shouldn't individuals be free
to choose for themselves their
own plans of life wherever it
may take them?
But however that may be,
Plato believes he has found in
the formula of one man,
one job, a certain foundation
for political justice.
That is to say,
the three parts of the cities,
workers, auxiliaries,
guardians,
each of them all work together
and each by minding their own
business, that is doing their
own job,
out of this a certain kind of
peace and harmony will prevail.
And since the city,
you remember,
is simply the soul at large,
the three classes of the city
merely express the three parts
of the soul.
The soul is just,
he tells us,
when the appetites,
spiritedness,
and reason cooperate with
reason,
ruling, spirit and appetite,
just as in the polis,
the philosopher-king rules the
warriors and the workers.
The result, he tells us,
is a kind of balance of the
parts of the whole,
right.
Justice is a kind of harmony in
which the three parts of the
city and the three parts of the
soul are direct expressions of
one another.
But that formula forces us to
return to the original Socratic
question about the harmony of
the soul and the city.
Is the structure of a city
identical to the structure of a
soul?
Are they really identical?
Well, maybe, maybe not.
For example,
every individual consists of
three parts, of appetite,
spirit, and reason.
Yet each of us will be confined
it seems to only one task in the
social hierarchy.
I assume what Socrates means by
that is though each individual
will, each of us,
embody all three features of
soul, appetite,
spirit, and reason,
only one of these will be the
dominate trait in each of us.
Some of us will be dominantly
appetitive personalities,
others will be dominantly
spirited and so on.
But even still when we think of
it, if I am a member of the
money making class,
I am still more than simply a
bundle of desires and appetites,
just as a member of the warrior
class would be clearly more than
mere thumos or mere
spiritedness.
So, to confine the individual,
it seems, to one and only one
sphere of life would seem to do
an injustice to the internal
psychological complexity that
makes each of us who we are.
Let's examine that problem from
a slightly different point of
view.
Socrates tells us repeatedly
that justice in the city
consists of each member,
each citizen fulfilling his
task in the social division of
labor, in the social hierarchy.
But this seems to be a very far
cry, does it not,
from the kind of justice he
talks about in the soul that
consists in what we might think
of as sort of rational autonomy
or self-control where reason
controls the passions and the
appetites.
In fact, the vast majority of
citizens in even the
platonically just city will not
necessarily have platonically
just souls.
The harmony and self-discipline
of the city will not be due,
it seems, to each and every
member of the city but rather
will rely on the guardian class,
that special class of
philosopher kings who will rule,
let it be recalled,
through selective lies,
myths, and other various kinds
of deception.
So how can it be the case if at
all, that you could have a just
city, that is to say a city
where everyone is performing
their own task,
they're following the division
of labor, and yet very few of
those members will have,
so to speak,
platonically just souls,
that is to say,
souls dominated by a kind of
self-control or
self-guardianship?
That would certainly not be
true of the members of the
artisan class or the military
class for that reason.
So the question,
that question is posed,
that objection is posed by
Adeimantus, you remember,
at the beginning of Book IV.
"What would your apology be
Socrates," Adeimantus says,
"if it were objected that
you're hardly making these men
happy,
these people just," he says at
419a.
Adeimantus is concerned that
Socrates is being unfair to the
auxiliaries and the guardians,
giving them all the
responsibilities but none of the
rewards, none of the pleasures
that would seem to be the reward
of responsibility.
How can a citizen of Kallipolis
live a just or happy life if he
or she is deprived of most of
the goods or pleasures that we
seek?
Socrates gives a rather lame
response.
In founding the city,
he says, we are not looking to
the exceptional happiness of any
one individual or any group but
rather to the city as a whole.
And Adeimantus appears to
accept that response,
oh yes, I forgot we are
concerned with the happiness,
the justice of the whole.
But his question is still one
that lingers and one that Plato
includes for a purpose.
What about, how can you have a
platonically just city if most
people in it,
certainly most people of the
auxiliary class are deprived of
the pleasures and the goods that
we desire?
It's a question that lingers
and one might wonder whether
Socrates ever successfully
answers that question.
He silences Adeimantus in some
way as he silences Thrasymachus
earlier;
that is not always to say that
their objections have been
answered.
And that leads,
as it were, to the third and
final wave of paradox of the
Kallipolis which is the famous
proposal for the
philosopher-king.
What is Plato without the
philosopher-king?
What is the Republic
without the philosopher-king?
Unless the philosophers rule as
kings or those now called kings,
genuinely philosophize,
there will be no rest from the
ills for the cities,
he says, right?
Socrates presents this
proposal, again,
as outlandish.
He says he expects to be
drowned in laughter.
And this has led some readers
to suggest that the proposal for
philosophers' kings is ironical.
That it is intended as a kind
of joke to, in many ways,
discredit the idea of the just
city or at least to indicate its
extreme implausibility.
The question is why does
Socrates regard philosophic
kingship as required for
Kallipolis, for the just city?
Let me say, I am by no means
convinced that the idea for the
philosopher-king is an
impossibility or is intended as
a kind of absurdity.
Plato himself,
remember, made a number of
trips to Sicily to serve as the
advisor to a king there,
Dionysius, and all of these
missions failed and left him
deeply dispirited.
The ambition in some ways to
unite philosophy and politics
has been a recurring dream of
political philosophy ever since
Plato.
Socrates says he will be
drowned in laughter but many
other people have taken this
dream or this aspiration very
seriously.
Consider one thinker,
and I will, I'm going to read
you a short passage and I'm
going to come back to this again
later in the semester,
from Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan,
chapter 31 of Leviathan,
where Hobbes gives us a very
personal statement about his
intention in writing this book.
Hobbes wrote,
"I am at the point of believing
that my labors will be as
useless as the commonwealth of
Plato."
He seems to be rather
despairing about whether this
book is actually going to have
any affect.
"I'm in the point of believing
it will be as useless as the
commonwealth of Plato,"
for he also is of the opinion
that it is impossible for the
disorders of state and change of
government by civil war ever to
be taken away until sovereigns
be philosophers.
But after admitting his despair
about the possibility of
realizing his ideas and
practice,
Hobbes continues as follows,
"I recover some hope," he says,
"that one time or other,
this writing of mine may still
fall into the hands of a
sovereign who will consider
himself without the help of any
interested or envious
interpreter.
And by the exercise of entire
sovereignty in protecting the
public teaching of it,
convert this truth of
speculation into the utility of
practice."
So there you have Hobbes
talking about his own book,
expecting or at least hoping it
will fall into the hands of a
sovereign who one day,
again, without envious or
self-interested interpreters
may, may one day become a
practical source of guidance for
statecraft.
Here it is Hobbes taking
Plato's suggestion very
seriously, and we see this again
very much in the history of
political philosophy in thinkers
like Rousseau,
or Marx, or Nietzsche,
or Machiavelli all of whom
sought to gain the ear of
political leaders and convert
their ideas into some kind of
practice.
But most of the objections to
Plato's particular form of the
philosophic kingship really are
centered on the practicality of
his idea.
And beyond this,
there is the problem with the
very cogency of the idea itself.
Consider the following,
can philosophy and politics
actually be united?
It would seem that the needs of
philosophy are quite different
from the demands or requirements
of political rule.
Can you imagine Socrates
willingly giving up one of his
conversations for the tedious
business of legislation and
public administration?
Can one imagine that?
The philosopher is described by
Plato as someone with knowledge
of the eternal forms,
lying behind or beyond the many
particulars.
But just how does that kind of
knowledge help us deal with the
constant ebb and flow of
political life?
It seems not enough that the
philosopher have knowledge of
the forms but this knowledge has
to be supplemented by
experience,
by judgment and by a kind of
practical rationality.
Was Plato simply unaware of
this, I can't believe that.
I don't believe that.
So the question is,
what kind of unity was he
expecting of philosophy and
politics?
Anyway, philosophers are not
purely thinking machines but
they are also human beings
composed of reason,
spiritedness,
and appetite.
Will not even philosophers,
one might ask,
given the possibility of
absolute power be tempted to
abuse their positions?
Maybe, maybe not, who knows.
So these are the questions,
these are at least among the
questions that Socrates or
Plato,
the author of the book,
deliberately poses for us to
consider.
So what is the doctrine of the
philosopher-king intended to
prove?
Must the massive effort to
construct the city in speech in
order to understand justice in
the soul?
Is it a philosophical
possibility?
Does he hold it out as a real
possibility or must it be
considered a failure in some way
or that if the dialogue does end
in failure what can we learn
from that?
Those are questions I want you
to consider.
But for now,
what I want to do is talk about
Plato's democracy and ours.
What does Plato teach us about
our own regime?
Could Plato have imagined such
a regime?
I think in many ways he can and
he did.
In one sense,
the Republic,
and I've given some indications
of this today,
seems to be the most
anti-democratic book ever
written.
Its defense of philosophic
kingship is itself a direct
repudiation of Athenian
democracy.
Its conception of justice,
minding one's own business,
is a rejection of the
democratic belief that citizens
have sufficient knowledge to
participate in the offices of
government.
To be sure, Athenian democracy
is not American democracy.
Plato thought of democracy as a
kind of rule by the many that he
associated with the unrestricted
freedom to do everything that
one likes.
This seems in many ways to be
quite far from the American
democracy based on
constitutional government,
systems of checks and balances,
protection of individual
rights, and so on.
The differences between Athens
and Washington seem to be very
far.
And yet, in many ways,
Socrates diagnoses very
powerfully an important
condition of modern democratic
life with which we are all
familiar.
Consider this passage in Book
VIII of the Republic that
I encourage you to read but is
not on your assigned list.
Socrates writes in Book VIII,
561c, "speaking of the
democratic soul,
the democratic man,
he also lives along day by day
gratifying the desire that
occurs to him,
at one time,
drinking and listening to the
flute."
Today we have different kinds
of music to substitute for the
flute but you get the point.
Drinking and listening to the
flute, at another time downing
water and dieting,
now practicing gymnastics and
again idling and neglecting
everything, and sometimes
spending his time as though he
were occupied with
philosophizing.
Often, he engages in politics
and jumping up,
says and does whatever chances
to come to his mind.
And if he ever admires any
soldiers, he turns in that
direction.
And if money-makers in that one
and there is neither order nor
necessity in this life but
calling this life sweet,
free, and blessed,
he follows it throughout.
Is that image of life at all
familiar to us?
Doing anything you like,
it seems to be the opposite of
the platonic understanding of
justice as each one doing a
special function or fulfilling
or doing a special craft.
Just doing whatever you like
and calling that sweet,
free, and blessed throughout.
This account should be
instantly recognizable as the
state of modern democracy in
some ways.
There exists,
as Plato and Socrates clearly
understand, a very real tendency
within democracy to identify the
good human being,
the good man with,
you might say,
the good sport,
the regular guy,
the cooperative fellow,
you know, someone who goes
along and gets along with
others.
By educating citizens to
cooperate with each other in a
friendly manner,
democracy seems,
so Plato is suggesting,
they stand in danger of
devaluing people who are
prepared to stand alone,
of rugged individualists who
will go down with the ship if
need be.
It is precisely this kind of
creeping conformism,
this kind of easy going
toleration,
this sort of soft nihilism that
democracies tend to foster in
which not only Plato,
but modern thinkers like
Emmerson, and Tocqueville,
and Mill, John Stewart Mill,
very much warned about.
What bothers Socrates most
about our democracy is a certain
kind of instability,
its tendency to be pulled
between extremes of anarchy,
between lawlessness and
tyranny.
It is in this section of the
Republic,
Adeimantus asks,
won't we with Aeschylus say
whatever comes to our lips?
Won't we say with Aeschylus
whatever comes to our lips?
The idea of having the liberty
to say whatever comes to our
lips sounds to Plato like a kind
of blasphemy.
The view that nothing is
shameful, that everything should
be permitted,
to say whatever comes to our
lips… There is a kind of
license that comes from the
denial of any restraints on our
desires or a kind of
relativistic belief that all
desires are equal and all should
be permitted.
Plato's views on democracy were
not all negative,
to be sure.
He wasn't only a critic of
democracy.
It was, after all,
a democracy that produced
Socrates and allowed him to
philosophize freely until his
seventieth year.
Would this have been permitted
in any other city of the ancient
world?
And he surely would not be
allowed to philosophize in many
cities and countries today.
Remember the letter that Plato
wrote near the end of his life,
when he compares the democracy
to a golden age,
at least in comparison to what
went after.
Plato here seems to agree with
Winston Churchill that democracy
is the worst regime except for
all the others.
It's the worst that's been
tried except for everything
else.
So what is the function of
Kallipolis, this perfect,
this beautiful city?
What purpose does it serve?
The philosopher-king,
he tells us,
may be an object of hope or
wish but Plato realizes that
this possibility is not really
to be expected.
The philosophic city is
introduced as a metaphor to help
us understand the education of
the soul.
The reform of politics may not
be within our power but the
exercise of self-control always
is.
The first responsibility of the
individual who wishes to engage
in political reform is to reform
themselves.
All reform seems to begin at
home.
And we see this very vividly
when we look at so many
politicians today in public
scolds who teach us and who are
hectoring us about living a
certain way of life,
living a certain,
living according to their likes
and then we will find out of
course something very shameful
about them.
I'm thinking of a couple of
people in particular,
I won't mention any names in
the public sphere.
Plato's judgment seems to be
"you need to reform yourself
before you can think about
reforming others."
This is a point that is often
lost in the Republic,
that it is first of all a work
on the reform of the soul.
That is not to say at all that
it teaches withdrawal from
political responsibilities,
it does not.
Philosophy and certainly
Socratic philosophy requires
friends, comrades,
conversations.
It is not something that can
simply be pursued in isolation.
Socrates understands that those
who want to reform others must
reform themselves,
but many who've tried to
imitate him have been less
careful.
It is easy to confuse,
as many people have done,
the Republic, with a
recipe for tyranny.
The twentieth century,
and even the beginnings of our
own, is littered with the
corpses of those who have set
themselves up as
philosopher-kings,
Lenin, Stalin,
Hitler, Mao,
Khamenei, to name just some of
the most obvious.
But these men are not
philosophers.
Their professions to justice
are just that,
they are professions or
pretensions expressing their
vanity and their ambition.
For Plato, philosophy was in
the first instance,
a therapy for our passions in a
way of setting limits to our
desires.
And this is precisely the
opposite of the tyrant who Plato
describes as a person of
limitless desires who lacks the
most rudimentary kind of
governance,
namely self-control.
The difference between the
philosopher and the tyrant
illustrate two very different
conceptions of philosophy.
For some, philosophy represents
a form of liberation from
confusion, from unruly passions
and prejudices,
from incoherence.
Again, a therapy of the soul
that brings peace and
contentment and a kind of
justice.
And yet for others,
philosophy is the source of the
desire to dominate.
It is the basis of tyranny in
the great age of ideologies
through which we are still
passing.
The question is that both
tendencies are at work within
philosophy and how do we
encourage one side but not the
other.
As that great philosopher Karl
Marx once asked,
"Who will educate the
educators?"
It's the wisest thing he ever
said.
Who will educate the educators,
who do we turn to for help?
There is obviously no magic
solution to this question but
the best answer I know of is
Socrates.
He showed people how to live,
and just as importantly,
he showed them how to die.
He lived and died not like most
people but better,
and even his most vehement
critics will admit to that.
Thank you very much.
I'll see you next Wednesday,
and we'll start Aristotle.
 
