Plato’s Republic

John F. Wilson: The Politics of Moderation: An Interpretation of Plato’s Republic. Lanham: University Press of America, 1984.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 14, Number 1, January 1986. Republished with permission.

 

In Wilson’s opinion, commentators have overemphasized the Republic‘s central books. In order “to restore the wholeness of the Republic,” Wilson emphasizes Books VIII, IX, and X. Such emphasis, he argues, reflects the nature of dialectic, which “presents, argues, and aims at accommodating opposites or contenders.” Common sense suggests that we look for this culminating accommodation at the end of a dialogue; Wilson goes so far as to say that Books I-VII constitute a sort of introduction to the Republic‘s later books. Accommodation suggests compromise and compromise suggests moderation. “The fundamental problem of the work is the relationship between justice and moderation”; Wilson describes this as “the serious problem of a serious man.” Wilson writes as a serious man.

With gentlemanly care, Wilson challenges “the very interesting Strauss-Bloom interpretation,” the one found in the central chapter of Leo Strauss’s The City and Man and in Allan Bloom’s edition of the Republic. This interpretation rests on for assumptions,” all of them “questionable.” These are: that Plato is a philosopher, “or has primarily the interests of philosophy at heart”; that ‘body’ is separate from ‘soul’; that such permanent human types as rhetoricians and tyrants exist in actuality, but the just city is ideal, only; and that truth is (nonetheless) more real than honor, which is more real than physical pleasure. In considering Wilson’s interpretation, one should contrast it with that of Strauss and Bloom. Wilson makes this easy to do because, like Strauss and Bloom, he respects the order of the dialogue. He devotes one chapter to each Book, then adds an eleventh, concluding, chapter.

Wilson briefly discusses the first three Books. Whereas Strauss and Bloom extensively discuss the setting of the dialogue, Wilson moves quickly to the arguments. On the theme of poetry and the gods, he describes the Greek convictions “that there are gods, that men have souls, and that there is an afterlife” as “unquestioned premises” of Socrates. “Thus, his reform of the poets’ teaching will be one of details, albeit large details, rather than fundamentals”—an assertion Strauss and Bloom do not make. Wilson agrees with Strauss that Thrasymachus’ anger at Socrates is faked, but he does not mention, much less explain, Thrasymachus’ blush when Socrates catches him in a contradiction. Wilson observes that Thrasymachus’ definition of justice (“the advantage of the stronger”) undercuts its own conventionalism by its appeal to nature, to the strength of the artisan who does his job well. Unlike Strauss and Bloom, Wilson does not regard Socrates’ exploitation of this contradiction as logically problematic, saying only that Socrates’ argument contradicts “our experience.”

In describing the entrance of Glaucon and Adeimantus into the dialogue, Wilson at first melds the brothers’ voices into one, a disagreement with Strauss and Bloom that he retracts quickly enough. He contends that the simple “city of necessity,” so appealing to Adeimantus and so repellant to the erotic Glaucon, is abandoned by Socrates “with a mental sigh”—a sigh inaudible to Bloom and, probably, to Strauss. In discussing the complex city demanded by Glaucon, Wilson emphasizes the existence there not only of luxury but of leisure. Leisure brings freedom from necessity; choice in turn opens the mind to reason. “Now, Socrates and the brothers become something more than observers and chroniclers of the passing historical scene: they become legislators.” In becoming legislators, they discuss the lawgivers of Greece, the poets: “Only when the question of justice arises does the form of speaking become crucial.” Socrates in fact says, “A young thing can’t judge what is hidden sense and what is not; but what he takes into his opinions at that age has a tendency to become hard to eradicate and unchangeable” (378e). Not only justice but wisdom—more precisely, one’s future love of wisdom—depends in some way on the form of speaking. Be that as it may, Wilson tacitly acknowledges that Strauss and Bloom are at least partly right in arguing that Socrates separates body from soul and then pointedly neglects the body: “in the just city, everything cares for the soul.” Wilson contends that “the great genius of musical education is not its truth, but its power to conceal the truth, especially the truth about itself”; this education culminates in the “noble lie.” But Socrates asserts that rhythm and harmony, while not themselves rational, can incline one to reasonable speech. Unless this assertion proves ironical, music education must have a more complex and greater “genius” than Wilson suggests.

Wilson agrees with Strauss and Bloom that Socrates’ procedure for searching for justice—arbitrarily positing four virtues and ‘assuming’ that one can find justice by a process of elimination—is highly suspect. He agrees that Socrates gives all these virtues a distinctly political cast. He sees the problematic character of Socrates’ analogy between the individual soul and the city, a problem Socrates himself points out. Wilson correctly observes that Socrates’ statement of the principle of non-contradiction (at 436c) comes during this discussion of the soul’s nature, specifically, during an attempt to distinguish its parts. Wilson calls this principle a “law,” likens the dialogue at this point to a trial, and claims that “political philosophy, especially when it is closest to philosophy, must respect the law.” This edifying interpretation does not quite reflect the passage, which concerns justice more than it concerns law, principle rather than convention. To say that “the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing” is to allude to the definition of justice as each doing his/its own proper task. Moreover, the formulation gives the basis for making distinctions, for classification. Language itself—another meaning of the word logos—depends upon the truth of this principle.

Strauss and Bloom emphasize the danger of the spirited part of the soul, the part that will serve appetites instead of reason if improperly trained. Wilson emphasizes the tension between moderation, which holds the parts of both soul and city together, and justice, which differentiates, “makes each thing what it is.” Untempered by moderation, political justice requires the radical changes set down in Book V, changes sufficiently spectacular to cause Glaucon to forget he earlier agreed that souls’ moderation, not the community of bodily pleasures and pains, binds the city. But a city/body analogy would be even more suspect than the analogy of city and soul, as “there is no such thing as common sensation.” Wilson claims that this new, just city’s immoderate politics “are the politics of the most unholy war,” a war “understood as a quest for justice.” The textual support for this assertion is weak; Wilson ignores the relative humaneness of the just city’s defensive warmaking. This suggests that justice and moderation are not at such severe tension as Wilson claims. Wilson does not discuss the much more interesting questions concerning the tension between justice and philosophy, questions raised by Strauss and Bloom. None of these commentators adequately discusses the relation of Book VI’s four-part division of the soul’s activities (imagination, believing, thinking, understanding) to the tripartite division of the soul (reason, spirit, and appetites Wilson suggests that the image of the philosopher’s ascent from the cave contains, implicitly, a defense of moderation. Eyes narrow in the sun’s bright light; ergo, the soul “is most shy and distrustful of pure truth, making itself quite closed and admitting only very small amounts of it at any one time.” This charming variation of Socrates’ image prepares the way for Wilson’s claim that Socrates would send the young guardian-philosopher back to the cave in order to gain knowledge of “our own ignorance”—a clever application of a famous Socratic phrase. Thus, in Wilson’s readings, the first seven books of the Republic constitute an introduction because they show the dangers of immoderation, including immoderate quests for justice and truth, in preparation for a political science of moderation presented in the final three books.

The “true cause of the decline” of the Beautiful City ruled by philosophers is not the failure of eugenics but “the fact that the rulers—theoretical and not practical men—are allowed to vary the basic education in music and gymnastic.” The “essence” of philosophy “is that it remains partially ignorant”; therefore, the regime of philosophers is “always subject to change and decline.” The tyrant also “has lost his practical wisdom,” but to the eros of the appetites, not to the eros of reason. The eros of reason would behold the Good, after sacrificing many goods; tyrannic eros achieves the opposite sort of unity, “the mindlessness of non-differentiation,” after sacrificing the many goods.

Wilson’s Socrates prefers “the just and moderate person, a complex whole integrated by practical wisdom,” not theoretical wisdom. By the end of the Republic, his Socrates has made justice and moderation “no longer very distinct.” (This suggests that Adeimantus, not Glaucon, is more likely the future philosopher, although Wilson may also mean—as he suggested at the outset—that Plato isn’t a philosopher at all, or at least not a philosopher in the Strauss-Bloom sense.) Book X contains a discussion of imitation (poetic imitation in particular) because both “virtue and vice are somehow associated with imitation, and perhaps even caused by it”; “each thing in a chain of reality of being imitates—or is a more evident manifestation of—the thing directly above it which is more real.” This contrasts with Strauss’s and Bloom’s interpretation, distinguishing even the best imitation of the truth. Here Wilson differs most sharply from his predecessors. Rightly describing the noble lie as particular and political, the image of the cave as general and human, and the myth of Er as cosmic, he believes the latter not only most authoritative but most true. Philosophy is all too human. Tyranny is inhuman. True humanity inheres neither in logos nor in eros but in choice. Choice is “the soul of the soul.” “Necessity and fate… are put in their place by the science of the soul,” a practical, not a theoretical, knowledge. Remarking that in the later Books Socrates shifts from a tripartite to a bipartite division of the soul, Wilson contends that spiritedness has merged with practical wisdom, “a blending” that enables spiritedness to become “the heart of moderation.” The “politics of moderation” results in “the open community”—a phrase Wilson does not intend as an oxymoron. The open community’s bases are wealth, privacy, tolerance, good moral upbringing, “subdued but evident strength,” and “an accurate sense of one’s own interests.” These, “coupled with the spark of philosophy,” “make the search for the good possible” as long as moderation prevails. At the end of the Republic, Wilson’s Plato emerges as an ancestor of Karl Popper.