I. Back to the Political
In Book VIII, Socrates resumes the argument interrupted at the beginning of Book V. There the manly Polemarchus and the seeming-moderate Adeimantus raised the issue of women and children held in common. This turned out to be the problem of philosophy, the problem of Socrates in Athens. Having returned to the cave after glimpsing the philosopher, who glimpses the Good, Glaucon recalls the threat that dropped, Now that political philosophy has been inaugurated, Socrates is free to inaugurate political science.
There were four remaining regimes in addition to that of the philosopher-kings. Socrates describes their nature, including their genesis. Each regime honors a particular human type, characterized by a particular form of eros. The man of the aristocratic regime loves justice; the timocrat loves victory, ruling, and honor; the oligarch loves money; the democrat loves license; the tyrant is, so to speak, in love with love.
a. Aristocrats
Why do philosopher-kings, lovers of the best, lose track of the eugenics plan and thus lose rulership of the city? Perhaps because you can’t philosophize and rule at the same time? (It IS difficult to think and command at the same time.) Perhaps because you can drag the philosopher out of the sunshine, but not the sunshine out of the philosopher? That is to say: because the philosopher’s heartfelt opinion of the city is, ‘Let it slide’? Chance, not choice, rules the city, Publius to the contrary.
b. Timocrats
The eros of thumotic men depends too much upon unstable things. The children of the men who do not share in the city’s honors are corrupted by mothers who secretly deride decent but unsuccessful fathers. (Raskolnikov’s mother does that: Crime and Punishment is an Orthodox Christian rewrite of the Republic.) Honor itself is unstable, a kind of opinion; opinion, notoriously can shift from day to day. The love of money, the timocratic love that dares not speak its name, undermines timocracy in a thousand ways.
c. Oligarchs
Having dropped the mask of honor, men now openly love gain. Money being theoretically limitless, oligarchs finally cannot maintain the self-government necessary to discipline the quest. Rich kinds run riot, “gripped by the love of changer” (555d). (This is yet another illustration of the towering genius of Bill Clinton, who finished off the regime of the 1980s by crying “Change! Change!” to a bored and surfeited people. The man is a Platonist, when not an Epicurean.) The city splits between rich and poor. The many poor wrest the ruling offices from the few rich.
d. Democrats
Democracy is the most beautiful regime (557c) and “a sweet regime,” too (558c). It “dispens[es] a certain equality among equals and unequals alike” (558c)—and therefore is not very just. But, in its license, it permits a thousand flowers—some of the ragweed—to bloom in full luxuriance. It is therefore by far the most instructive regime for would-be founders (557d), and a fine subject for philosophic inquiry. In its license it tolerates philosophic inquiry, to a point. The democrat’s soul comes to believe that all desires are equal. It eagerly hears “false and boasting speeches” (560c). It does not want to hear a painful truth, which is why it will finally kill Socrates. It prefers to dream of a ‘Marxian’ utopia (561c-d), flattering itself as it reveals itself in daydreams. No wonder its teachers fear and imitate the young. Soon a demagogue will arise, purging the city of the ‘enemies’ of the many who are poor. Can equality and extreme liberty or license ever cohere for long?
e. Tyrants
The love the tyrant is in love with is eros in its most material form. The erotic tyrant takes the place once occupied by the philosopher-king. The tyrants lives the life democrats secretly want. He is the wish-fulfillment of the democrat, who was the wish-fulfillment of the oligarch, who was the wish-fulfillment of the timocrat, who was not the wish-fulfillment of the philosopher, whose wishes are fulfilled, or at least not frustrated in such a way as to contradict, destroy, himself. Because he loves only things, wants all of them for himself, and is therefore the enemy of all, the tyrant “never tastes freedom or true friendship” (576a). The tyrant is “in truth a real slave” of flatterers (579e). The tyrant’s soul is “forcibly drawn by a gadfly” (577e); elsewhere in the dialogues, Socrates compares himself to a gadfly, stinging the sleepy horse that is Athens; perhaps Athens, perhaps any city, is a sort of tyrant, now somnolent, now frenzied. All the citizens of the real cities (after the nowhere-regime of aristocracy or philosophic kingship) had material eros driving them.
II. Back (briefly) to the Philosophic
The king now replaces the aristocrat in Socrates’ enumeration of rulers (580b). The philosopher enjoys the purer and more self-sufficient pleasures than the tyrants, Glaucon now agrees. He had been the one who had more or less openly disbelieved that the philosopher could have any advantage over the tyrant with respect to happiness. The philosopher attends to the truth (581e), “lays hold of the truth” (572b), and experiences the “truest pleasures” (586d-e). The philosophic life is 729 times more pleasant—that is, more pleasant every day and night of the year—than the tyrant’s. For the philosopher, “the regime within him” (591e) far surpasses any regime outside him. Political men keep hoping, ‘If only this candidate, that reform, those new laws could be had, then I should be happy.’ Glaucon now sees that happiness in the cave is impossible in cave-terms, no matter who rules the cave—even himself.
III. Back to the Poetic
Socrates tells Glaucon: Homer, the man, must not be honored before the truth (595c). He has persuaded Glaucon of the forms, which may or may not be real, in order to dissuade him of the love of any person, particularly a poet. Tragic poets extol tyrants, like Oedipus, because they take passions too seriously. Their music is mere fury. Like the semi-redundant solecism, “New School University,” they represent the triumph of sound over sense, image over substance. They make a democratic audience weep over the woes of a tyrant; they teach the democrat how to grieve for his own insatiable, material eros, rejecting the true good for the false. The audience for tragedy looks at its own tyrannical self and pities without self-knowledge.
(The similarities and differences between Athenian and American democracy give useful instruction in the application of Platonic political science. At first sight, Socrates’ critique of democracy seems off the mark in contemporary America. The founders of commercial republicanism intended to make tragedy—in both the classical and the Christian senses–a much more remote experience than it had been. Heroes and martyrs had spilled too much blood. Thumoerotic passion needed moderation and redirection. Nobility became a casualty. As Allan Bloom remarked, the modern tragic hero is an anti-hero: Willie Low-man. But thumoetotic passion can hardly die off; it remains a human possibility. The commercial democrtat instead thrills to the current Swollen-Ego instead of Swollen-Foot—Elvis, Mick, Madonna—or whatever inflated thumoerotic ‘image’ gyrates on the walls of the cave, strings pulled by commercial puppet-masters. Tragedy becomes melodrama; Erica Kane is a thumoerotic type, all right, even if no one confuses her with Medea.)
Poets practice the third, and most dubious kind of art. Some arts are useful (political science aspires to be that); some are productive (‘applied science’ can be that). some arts are neither useful nor productive but imitative. Unfortunately, “imitation keeps company with the part [of the soul] that is far from prudence” (603b); when it produces anything, it “produces a bad regime in the soul of each private man” (605b) by “making phantoms that are very far removed from the truth” (605b). Poetic imitation flatters its audience, watering passions instead of drying them, making pleasure and pain the rulers, not law and argument. Philosophers do not fight over Helen of Troy, or her image (586c); poets encourage such shadow-boxing, leading men to spill real blood for the sake of shadows.
Like any art, poetry is finally neutral, as Socrates finally admits by admitting poets to the city on condition of good behavior. Socrates concludes the dialogue with a poem, the myth of Er. To teach Glaucon that the soul is immortal may be a lie, but it is an inducement to encourage him to think about which life is best chosen—that is, best deliberated about, in a state of moderation, free of the passions of the law court and the marketplace. wily, lying Odysseus replaces ‘sincere,’ ‘authentic,’ but mad-running Achilles, and the Homeric gods are nowhere to be seen. Here is a myth without tragedy, and therefore with no inducement to self-pity. It is not so much a noble as a useful, good, and potentially productive lie. Socrates now speaks of the soul “as it is in truth” (611c)
Recent Comments