Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 2 Why do we read Plato’s Republic?

Why do we read Plato’s Republic? The question can point in more than one way. It could be asking for the point of reading this work – what we get out of it philosophically. Or it could be asking about the historical pressures of various kinds which bring it about that this, rather than some other, is the work we read. I might, for example, read it because it is part of a required course at university. Many people do just that. We do not read works of philosophy in a vacuum, and there are important, though far from completely understood, connections between the context of reading a work and what the reader will get out of it.

The first chapter introduced you to an issue in ancient philosophical debate which was (I hope) accessible without much adjustment. But not all issues in ancient philosophy are so easily available to a modern reader. In this chapter we will pull back the focus and look at some of the factors which separate us from ancient philosophical texts and issues. It is only when we confront these, as well as the factors making some ancient philosophy immediately engaging to us, that we will understand how we can read and argue with texts from such a distant and different culture.

Before turning to the Republic, we need to think about the whole tradition of ancient philosophy, how it has come down to us, some of the changes that have occurred in our reception of it, and the way in which such changes can, for example, shape our reading of Plato and of a work like the Republic.

Ancient philosophy is, to begin with, a very large and rich tradition. It begins in the sixth century BC, and ends in the West with the end of the Western Roman Empire and in the East with the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It arose and developed in Greek city-states, especially Athens, but continued to flourish as the Romans dominated the Mediterranean and beyond, and formed an important part of culture in most of the Roman empire, merging into Christian culture with varied success. It forms a huge and extremely diverse body of texts. It contains a number of very different kinds of philosophical movements, from those that prize mystical insight and dogma to those that favour rigorous argument; a number of different and opposed schools, such as Stoics and Epicureans; and a range of wildly different philosophical positions, including materialism, dualism, scepticism and relativism. More will be said about these differences in Chapter 6; here I shall focus on factors in our reception of this tradition which make a difference to the way that ancient philosophy is seen as forming a tradition or canon, and to the way in which certain philosophers are seen as important.

Firstly, the issue of which parts of a tradition are seen as important only arises when we have the tradition. Much of ancient philosophy was lost to Western Europe in the period of the break-up of the Western Roman Empire, for a variety of reasons to do with cultural changes and the breakdown of political stability. Apart from Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, for many hundreds of years the only ancient philosophical works which were known in depth were those of Aristotle, who dominated medieval philosophy. The period of the Renaissance saw the rediscovery, from a variety of sources, of a much wider range of ancient philosophers. But with the chances and fortunes of history, many ancient authors’ original works have been lost, leaving us with only second-hand accounts of their theories and fragments of their own words. This is the fate of all the ‘Presocratic’ philosophers and of many philosophers after Aristotle, in the so-called Hellenistic period. Discoveries continue to be made of ancient philosophical works, mainly on papyrus rolls discovered in the dry sands of Egypt – and one collection of Epicurean works preserved in charred form at the eruption of Vesuvius. But big gaps remain, and for some individuals and schools of philosophy we remain dependent on often inadequate later accounts.

In AD 79 the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius covered in molten lava many aristocrats’ country houses at Herculaneum, near Naples. This included one, which has been excavated since the eighteenth century, which turned out to contain a large library of books devoted to the works of the philosopher Epicurus and to later followers’ discussions of his ideas. They lift the curtain on a hitherto unknown community of philosophical debate among Epicureans and with other schools. The books are rolls of papyrus (ancient paper), the charred fragments of which have been carefully studied by scholars.

Much of our evidence for ancient philosophy has a similarly accidental quality, and has come down to us in fragments.

This situation opens up differences of approach. With authors whose work has to be studied in fragments and through later sources whose own approach has to be taken into account, historical and interpretative questions have to be faced before we can confidently assume that we actually have the philosophical position in question right. Wading right in with philosophical questions risks prematurely finding a position which turns out to reflect only our own philosophical concerns. It is more straightforward to approach authors whose own work we have as partners in a philosophical dialogue. It is not very surprising, then, that the authors whose philosophy is most prominently taught in philosophy departments are Plato and Aristotle, from whom we have complete works, rather than authors like Epicurus of whose original words we have only a small fraction.

_{3. A papyrus fragment of a work on anger by the Epicurean Philodemus}

This contrast can be overstated, however. Plato is the only author for whom we can feel certain that we possess all the works he made public. None of Aristotle’s published works survive entire; what we have are his (very copious) research and teaching notes, which raise interpretative problems of their own. But even Plato is not a straightforward author to read; for one thing, the dialogue form distances the author from the ideas he puts forward, and interpretations of Plato are probably the most varied of any ancient philosopher. So it is just as possible to get Plato or Aristotle wrong by prematurely taking them to be engaged with our philosophical issues as it is with the Presocratics. And in any case authors and schools whose original work we have only in part can pose philosophical issues that engage us directly, despite the additional historical and interpretative work we have to do. The last twenty years has seen a huge shift in interest in research, publication and teaching in ancient philosophy, away from an almost exclusive focus on Plato and Aristotle to a concern with Hellenistic (post-Aristotelian) philosophers.

Why do we focus on one part of the many-faceted tradition of ancient philosophy rather than another? Apart from the vagaries of transmission, and the question of whether historical or philosophical interest is the driving one, there remains an ineliminable factor of philosophical interest, and this changes from period to period. Researchers and teachers are now interested in a wider range of issues and philosophers than they were twenty years ago, when Plato and Aristotle were more dominant; and similar shifts and changes have occurred many times in the past. Since there is no one single neutral way to take in, never mind discuss, the huge ancient tradition in full, this selectivity is not surprising. Nor should it surprise us that if we are introduced to one way of engaging with ancient philosophy, this should seem natural and inevitable, and that its limitations should become invisible, especially as it gets passed down from teacher to pupil and solidifies in books and journal articles.

We can, at least sometimes, trace an intellectual context to the way in which different parts of the ancient philosophical tradition are found interesting at different times. Some works of ancient philosophy seem dormant, as it were, at some times. They do not raise issues that people already find gripping, or ask questions to which people have competing answers. Then at other times they do do these things. Which parts of the ancient tradition that we engage with depends, at least to some extent, on our own philosophical interests. (How these, and changes in these, should be explained is another matter.) As we shall see, this is not a oneway street. Engaging with texts in ancient philosophy can help us to clarify and further our own thinking on some issues. (More on this in Chapter 3.) Because of their prominence in the teaching and development of Western philosophical thinking since the eighteenth century, some works of ancient philosophy form not just literally the ancient history of the subject, but part of the modern tradition too.

Plato’s Republic is a dramatic example of the way a work of ancient philosophy can become, or cease to be, interesting to think about in contemporary philosophical terms. It is probably the most dramatic example.

For most of the twentieth century, and some of the nineteenth, the Republic has been far and away the best-known work of ancient philosophy. It is probably the only work in ancient philosophy that a large number of people have read. In universities, colleges and schools in many countries it figures in courses in ancient philosophy, in introductory philosophy, in ‘Western Civilization’, in political philosophy and in humanities. If you have to touch on ancient philosophy, or Plato, in any of these courses, the Republic is seen as the obvious work to choose. In modern readings of Plato the Republic is the centrepiece and high point of Plato’s thought, the work which best presents the most important aspects of Plato’s thought.

There is another important point: the Republic is predominantly read in the light of its brief account of an ideal society. Plato there sketches an ideally just society, in which there would be complete division of labour between wealth on the one hand and political power on the other. The rulers would be ‘Guardians’, who would devote their lives to the public good and running the state. Those engaged in what we call economic activity would be excluded from political rule, on the grounds that their way of life narrows them to consider only their own self-interest and makes them unfit to take part in the public arena where what is at stake is the common good. The Guardian class, by contrast, is educated and trained to care primarily for the common good and to sacrifice their own interests to this.

It is often assumed that this ideal political construction is the organizing idea of the book; indeed often the book is introduced as though it were Plato’s chief response to what he thought were political questions of the time. The Republic contains a number of themes. However, commonly what is seen as holding all these together is Plato’s political vision, the idea that only in an ideal state, ruled in the interests of all, can people be virtuous and so happy. Sometimes this ideal of rule by the wise is seen as a reaction to the Athenian culture of democracy in which Plato grew up, and against which he reacted in what is assumed to be an élitist and reactionary spirit. So deeply ingrained is this way of reading the work that, at least in American libraries, the Republic and works about it are shelved in the political science section, rather than the history of philosophy section. The very way we have access to the book suggests the way we should read it. And it is often taken for granted that the book should be taught as a contribution to political thought, with its other aspects as extras.

Plato’s Republic

In the Republic, Plato tries to show that what makes a human life happy is to be found in being a good, virtuous person – something that the person has to achieve for herself, while wealth, status and other things commonly valued are irrelevant to happiness. This challenging thesis is defended by a claim that virtue consists in the proper ordering and structure of the person’s soul, one in which reason rules (see Chapter 1). A properly ordered and so virtuous soul, compared to a properly ordered and so healthy body, brings the person a happy life, while unhappiness results from the breakdown of the soul’s order. The framework of the book consists in Plato’s developing and defending this idea that, contrary to popular belief, happiness is to be found in virtue, the right ordering of the soul, even in the worst possible conditions of poverty and torture.

As a model for the structure of the soul, Plato sketches the structure of an ideal society, with different kinds of people ordered in mutually beneficial ways, ruled by ‘Guardians’ who are devoted to the common good in the way that reason is devoted to the good of the whole person. Plato develops this devotion to the common good to extremes: Guardians will have no family life or private property, and much of their life will be devoted to training in the abstract metaphysical theory of ‘Forms’ (on this see below p. 82). Strikingly, women as well as men will be Guardians – or, as they are sometimes called in view of their exacting philosophical education, ‘philosopher-kings’ (and philosopher-queens, of course).

This imaginative picture of an ideal society is developed further in narrative form in Plato’s story of Atlantis, found in his Timaeus and unfinished Critias. The ideal society, projected back into history, is ranged against the exotic, romantic but corrupt society of Atlantis, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and later sunk there. This story, which Plato never finished, is probably his most influential contribution to literature outside the philosophical tradition.

But should we read the work this way? How else might it be read?

In the ancient world the Republic was read as one of Plato’s dialogues, but by no means as the most important or as central for his thought. When philosophers began to study Plato’s thought systematically, the dialogue they privileged was the Timaeus, a poetically written cosmology. What the Republic was mainly famous for was the idea that ideal rulers would have no private family life, but ‘women and children would be in common’, which was notorious, but was seen as eccentric rather than profound. Plato’s political ideas in the work, while criticized by Aristotle, did not enter the mainstream of ancient political thought, although political ideas in other dialogues, the Statesman and Laws, did.

In the streams of medieval transmission of Plato’s works the Republic was studied in the Islamic tradition, in which it was seen as suggestive of the idea of unified spiritual and secular power in ideal religious leaders. This idea did not develop in the Christian West; a tendency to think in terms of separation of church and state was aided by ignorance of the work until quite late. The work came into prominence at the Renaissance, and Italian thinkers who saw themselves as Platonists thought of it as an ideal Utopian fantasy. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Plato fell into philosophical neglect, and the Republic was regarded as a mere oddity, if it was regarded at all. (See box, p. 82).

Then, in the nineteenth century, Plato had a dramatic change of fortune, rising to the pre-eminence in study of ancient philosophy which he has kept ever since. The story of the rise of Plato in England is especially interesting, since there were three phases, each in response to a different philosophical approach.

The first English translation of the whole of Plato’s works was made in 1804 by Thomas Taylor. Taylor was a self-educated man for whom Plato was a labour of love in a difficult life, so it is painful to have to say that the translations are awful. Taylor saw Plato’s ideas in the framework of Neoplatonism, a later mystical elaboration of some of Plato’s metaphysical ideas, and the result appealed to Romantic writers, but had influence on Wordsworth’s poems rather than on philosophers.

The first concerted attempt to see Plato as a philosopher to whom argument matters was produced by the philosophers of the early nineteenth century that we call Utilitarians. This is quite surprising, since Utilitarian ideas about ethics and metaphysics are almost totally opposed to Plato’s. Nevertheless, it was the circle of John Stuart Mill which revived the idea of Plato as a philosopher for whom arguments are what matter. The Utilitarian philosopher George Grote’s Plato (1865), the first account based on solid scholarship, discussed every dialogue separately with its own theme and purpose, presenting Plato as engaged in an open-ended philosophical search, sometimes dogmatic and sometimes arguing against others without coming to a conclusion himself. Grote disagrees with Plato’s ideas, but sympathetically presents him as following different arguments and directions. In this picture of Plato as essentially an argumentative searcher for truth the Republic appears as just one dialogue among many, containing some political ideas which are not seen as its centrepiece.

The Plato that won out, however, was a third Plato, the Plato of the Idealist philosopher Benjamin Jowett. Jowett translated all Plato’s works (published in 1871) in a readable way that for the first time made Plato accessible to the general public. (We take translations for granted, but the Republic has been translated into languages such as Korean and Icelandic only in the last few years; when readers need to read Greek or to go through another language, Plato is accessible only to an educated élite.) Jowett saw Plato as a systematic thinker who points towards Idealism, and for him the Republic is central for the way in which he sees Plato bringing ethics and metaphysics together with politics. Moreover, he saw the political ideal as central, and in this he was followed by nearly everyone who has read the work since.

Why would Plato’s ideal state seem like a serious contribution to political thought (as opposed to a Utopian fantasy)? By the middle of the nineteenth century political thinking was concerned with issues to which the Republic seemed relevant. Democracy and universal voting, long scorned as undisciplined mob-rule, had come to be a real political option, and the democratic city-states of ancient Greece came to replace the ancient Roman republic as a model in terms of which English and American politicians and political thinkers thought about their own states. Histories of ancient Greece began to present ancient democracy in a positive light for the first time. If the Republic could be seen as Plato’s response to democracy then there were a number of contributions, negative and positive, that it could make to nineteenth-century political debate. And it was so seen.

Jowett made the Republic central to classical studies (a place it has retained ever since) and this idea of it as a serious, challenging and idealistic political text has spread all over the academic world. The nineteenth-century male élite who read the Republic at university were supposed to be inspired by it to adopt an ideal of selfless devotion to the public good, an ideal which was to serve as an antidote to economic ambition, which was seen as selfish. The idea of Guardians was seen as meritocratic: political rule should be earned by education and hard work, not inherited as an aristocratic privilege. Plato’s idea of women Guardians was useful as the expression of an ideal, reflection on which would enable men to absorb the idea of women as political equals in society, entitled to the vote and to education. (Here we And Victorian anxiety about sex entering: Jowett goes to great lengths to separate female Guardians from Plato’s ideas about ‘women and children in common’.) Plato’s insistence on a common system of public education for citizens was seen as an inspiration for the growing movement to democratize and spread education, and to see it as the state’s task to provide it. Plato’s complaints about democracy and his view that governing requires specialized knowledge were taken up in the ongoing debates about modern representative democracy and extensions of voting rights. The Republic provided materials for thinking about contemporary issues, and nineteenth-century concerns lit up Plato’s ideal state as the controlling idea of the book.

Jowett’s interpretation of the Republic has had an astonishingly long life. In English-speaking countries, it has long outlived the vogue for Idealist philosophy, and the political debates, that produced it. Even today it is often assumed that the obvious way to read the book is as an idealist political statement, in which questions of metaphysics and ethics are developed within the framework of the ideal state. Scholars have differed on how ‘practical’ the ideas are meant to be: some have seen them as merely an ideal to inspire, others as a blueprint to put directly into practice. And during the twentieth century the general reaction to the work has changed around completely from respectful to hostile. The political battles of the Victorian era being over, the Republic has been brought into relation with darker, more modern ideas. From the 1930s, the Guardians have been seen as a totalitarian, sometimes fascist idea, and Plato’s insistence on common public education and culture has been claimed to be propaganda and brainwashing. (This idea was introduced to taint Plato by association with pre-war Nazi Germany, but has proved just as serviceable in associating him with post-war Communist régimes. See box, p. 31).

Nowadays, although the wilder and sillier accusations of fascism have been discredited, few teachers put forward the Republic as containing positive ideas to emulate and inspire. It is far more often put forward as an objectionable, élitist and exclusionary set of political ideas which students who are brought up to be tolerant and inclusive can easily criticize without exerting themselves. Still, the underlying assumption remains unchanged, that the main thing the book is doing is putting forward an account of an ideal political community whose structure and organization provide an answer to genuine questions of political debate.

Is the Republic a political blueprint?

It has been so useful in this role, and productive of so much philosophical engagement, that it is easy to overlook the point that the interpretation of the Republic as centrally political theory is a Victorian one, and that we no longer share the Victorians’ reasons for finding the work an evocative political model. We can see this by reflecting on the wide variety of mutually conflicting interpretations of the book that have been produced since the nineteenth century. The political interpretation has carried on, now partly because, as a work of political philosophy, the work is easy to criticize. Hence it has been treated as a teaching tool, providing an easy target for effortless demolition. But now that evaluations of the work have run the gamut, increasingly many scholars are looking at the foundations of the interpretation itself.

The political ideal of the Republic

Is the Republic a political work? This is too complex a question for a quick answer, but, now that you have seen that the political interpretation has a very recent particular source, you may well want to ask yourself how (if you have read the book) you were encouraged to read it, and why. You may want to go back to the text and ask for yourself whether the way you were encouraged to read it was the best way.

One very obvious point about the Republic is that the description of the ideal state takes up only a small part of the work. It is far too brief and sketchy to be a ‘blueprint’ for political action, and it does not give the work its framework. The main argument of the book is posed at the beginning of the second book and answered at the end of the ninth, and it consists of Plato’s attempt to answer the question, ‘Why should I be moral?’ Morality, it seems, benefits others rather than myself; would it not be better for me to live a kind of life in which I pursue my own ends in a way which ignores or exploits others? Plato thinks that a life in which morality is supreme can be rationally defended as the best life for an individual, even in the worst possible circumstances of the actual world. To make out his case, he introduces the ideal state as a parallel for the structure of the moral person’s soul; as he says at the end of the argument, the ideal state shows us the abstract structure which the moral person takes as an ideal to internalize in his aspiration to live a good life. But the ideal state is not the idea which structures the Republic, and the questions Plato asks about the actual world cannot be answered by reference to an ideal state without breaking the back of the work’s argument.

This is obviously only the beginning of an account of the work’s overall plan. You may want to ask yourself just what work the ideal state does in illuminating the structure of the individual’s soul. How serious are the political ideas, by comparison with those in Plato’s political discussions in the dialogues Statesman and Laws? Most radically, you may want to ask whether introducing an ideal state into an argument about individual morality was one of Plato’s better ideas. It has certainly been one of his more suggestive ones.

Why has the Republic been seen so often since the mid-nineteenth century as primarily a work of political theory? It is obvious that to some extent the Victorians, and subsequent generations, have used the Republic to develop their own ideas, and have read into the work what was necessary to do this. Plato’s Guardians have been seen as meritocratic officials by Victorians worried about creating a more just society. They have been seen as fascist Big Brothers by twentieth century thinkers worried about totalitarian states. But if the Republic can be used to come to such opposed conclusions, can we find a single political philosophy in it at all?

This can be a depressing thought. It can encourage the reflection that there is no real basis for an objective interpretation and assessment of the book, that each generation, or perhaps each reader, invents their own Republic, or at least the political philosophy in it. Outside academic postmodern circles, this is seen as a pessimistic conclusion to draw. The book certainly seems to be saying something which different readers with diverse concerns can argue about. It presents itself as a work of philosophy, encouraging us to make use of rational arguments and discussion as a way of arriving at the truth.

We can see the wild divergence of interpretations of the Republic not as a reason for lapsing into relativism about interpreting it, but as a sign of the richness and depth of the work. Even if, from Jowett onwards, the political content of the work has been grossly inflated, the result has been a lively and creative engagement with the text, at the end of which we can look back and see how much or little there is to the development of various lines of thought in the text. We can admire the way that the Republic has entered into, and been used to further, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century political discussions. It is the best example of the way in which engaging with a work of ancient philosophy can be a two-way street; bringing it into a discussion can enrich that discussion, while also encouraging us to see the work in the light of that discussion.

It is easy to see the changing fortunes of the Republic as a cautionary tale: what happens when a work of ancient philosophy is used as something ‘good to think with’ in a way that cuts it from its moorings, namely Plato’s work as a whole, and the way it was received and studied until recently. But we can also more open-mindedly draw the lesson that we should be aware of at least three things when we study a work of ancient philosophy. One is our interest in seeing and engaging with the work in its own intellectual context. Secondly, our own assumptions as to what is philosophically salient and interesting, what we are likely to find intellectually rewarding. And thirdly, the potential of the work we study to engender creative philosophical thinking on our part. These factors may be of different strengths and come into play in different ways. One thing we can certainly learn from the history of reading the Republic is that lack of awareness of these factors can lead to fruitless wrangling over which of various mutually contradictory interpretations is the correct one.

If we think of the results of Chapter 1, we can see that sometimes an issue in ancient philosophy is part of an argument that we can immediately relate to. But we can now also see that there are potential dangers in this attitude. We should also be on the lookout for ways in which our own changing philosophical interests play a role in establishing what we find philosophically interesting in the ancient tradition. The Republic is the most extreme example of how a work can be moved from marginal to central, and from being an ethical work to being a political one, under the pressure of changed interests in the audience. The moral is not that we should think that our own interpretations of the Republic are nothing but reflections of our own prejudices. Rather, we should be aware of our own philosophical interests and the role they play, in order to lessen the extent to which they influence us unconsciously. While some parts of ancient philosophy seem extremely alien to our interests, others are too familiar. Sometimes we need to distance them from present concerns and ask about our traditions of interpreting them.

Engaging with ancient philosophical thinking may in Chapter 1 have sounded easy; now it may sound more difficult. With many texts, particularly the most famous ones, like Plato’s Republic, the right approach is surely to think of them both as available to read and argue with, and as being in their own right the subject of a long tradition of engagement that we stand at the end of. It is, after all, what we would expect. When we begin to read ancient philosophers we feel like the first discoverers, but we soon find out that we are separated from them not merely by two thousand years but by many traditions of reading and writing about them. In recognizing the factors that separate us from the ancients, and that make the ‘canon’ of texts that we engage with so changeable, we bring philosophical discussion with them closer, rather than further away.