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Nature and Convention in Book V of the Republic*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

James Nendza
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Abstract

In Book V of the Republic Socrates appears to abandon one of the most fundamental characteristics of Socratic philosophy, that is, the attempt to understand what makes human beings distinct, in favour of an understanding of human life in terms of the activity of animals. This suggests that the purpose of Book V is not to present the best political order as Socrates understands it but rather to illustrate the dangers of any attempt to understand political life from a perspective which, in simplifying the complexities of human life, distorts that life. As the drama of Book V indicates, such proposals are dangerous because of their appeal to those whose desire for control can lead them to embrace radical but simplistic reforms.

Résumé

Au Livre V de la République, Socrate semble abandonner une des caractéristiques fondamentales de la philosophie socratique, à savoir, l'effort de comprendre ce qui rend les humains distincts, en faveur d'une compréhension de la vie humaine en termes de l'activité animale. Ceci suggère que l'intention du Livre V n'est pas de présenter le meilleur ordre politique tel que l'entendait Socrate mais de montrer les dangers qui accompagnent toute tentative visant à comprendre la vie politique d'un point de vue qui, en simplifiant les complexités de la vie humaine, la déforme. Comme le drame du Livre V l'indique, de telles tentatives sont dangereuses à cause de leur attrait pour ceux qui, par désir de pouvoir, sont amenés à concevoir des réformes radicales mais simplistes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 331 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1988

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References

1 “But from antiquity down to Socrates who had listened to Archelaus the pupil of Anaxagoras, philosophy dealt with numbers and motions and whence all things arose and whither they returned, and zealously inquired about the size of the stars, the spaces between them, their courses and all celestial matters. Socrates, however, first called philosophy down from heaven and placed it in the cities and also introduced it into homes and compelled it to inquire about life and morals and good and bad” (Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.4); see also Phaedo 99D and Xenophon Memorabilia 1. 1. 16.

2 See Theages 128B, Symposium 177D, and Paul Friedlander, Plato: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans, by Meyerhoff, Hans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 44–58.Google Scholar

3 On the Aristophanic Socrates as a portrait of the young Socrates before his turn to political philosophy, see Strauss, Leo, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 3–8.Google Scholar

4 Compare Aristophanes Clouds 1399–1400, 1416–1424 where Socrates student Pheidippides shows contempt for the conventional.

5 Compare Saxonhouse, Arlene W., “Comedy in Callipolis: Animal Imagery in the Republic,” American Political Science Review 11 (1978), 892–98.Google Scholar

6 This same procedure—ignoring the difference between human beings and animals—is used by Socrates' student Pheidippides in the Clouds (1427–1432). Many pre-Socratic natural philosophers also used animals as a means for understanding human beings. See Fragments 136, 137, 139, 140, 172, 184, 185, 534, and 542 in Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E., The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).Google Scholar See also Havelock, Eric Alfred, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957)Google Scholar, chap. 5.

7 To some extent the argument of Book V may be seen as proceeding from the human concern with the common good. Yet, in so far as this concern forgets the individual's concern with personal advantage, it reflects the behaviour of communal animals like bees rather than of human beings whose political life is not simply a dedication to the community (compare Aristotle's comment: “That a human being is a much more political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear.… For… the human being alone among the animals has speech.… [which] serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the just and the unjust” [Politics I. 2. 10–11]).

8 The following account owes much to the interpretations of Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964)Google Scholar, and Bloom, Allan, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968)Google Scholar. Articles by Saxonhouse, Arlene W. (“Comedy in Callipolis,” and ”The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato,” Political Theory 4 [1976], 195–212)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by Nichols, Mary P. (“Glaucon's Adaptation of the Story of Gyges and Its Implications for Plato's Political Teaching,“ Polity 17 [1984], 30–39;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ”The Republic's Two Alternatives,” Political Theory 12 [1984], 252–74)CrossRefGoogle Scholar also develop themes complementary to those developed here.

9 On the dual focus of the moral education, see 407D-E, 408B, 410A, 413A, 417A.

10 Compare Saxonhouse, “Comedy in Callipolis,” 899.

11 Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 57–58Google Scholar, notes: “Given Plato's predominant stress on nurture [elsewhere], the argument he emphasizes in Book V… is extremely strange. Up to this point, he has very strongly emphasized the importance of both total environment and specific training for the development of ability of all kinds.“ Although noting the shift in the argument, Okin does not consider this as intentional but as a sign of Plato's failure “to apply his own environmentalism,” due to misogynist prejudice. I argue, on the contrary, that the shift from education to nature is a sign that nature in Book V is used primarily in the sense of that which humans share with other animals, whereas education in the best sense for Plato is a means for fully developing the peculiar qualities of human nature.

12 Animal imagery is absent from the discussion of the moral education proper (376D-4I2B) except for the reference at 404A, where in the discussion of gymnastics the guardians' bodies are compared to those of animals. The discussion of gymnastics, however, is concerned primarily not with the guardians' bodies but with their souls (410B-C).

13 See Strauss, The City and Man, 61; Saxonhouse, “Comedy in Callipolis,” 889–92; and Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 380–81.

14 See Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato,” 196–98.

15 Even if this is partly explicable as a difference in perspective—with the rulers seeing the ruled as animals, but the ruled understanding their own way of life as an imitation of the superhuman—this difference in perspective is bound to cause severe political problems.

16 In Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae a similar communist regime is introduced to correct natural inequality.

17 “The root of the beautiful is the fear of death, for the beautiful is whatever conceals our mortality” (Seth Benardete, , The Being of the Beautiful [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]Google Scholar, xxxiii); compare Nichols, “The Republic's Two Alternatives,” 266.

18 Most guardians in seeing themselves as those who inflict rather than suffer death will of course avoid the sight of death as much as Leontius. Yet, this need to hide the truth of their own death from themselves may well lead to an intensification of spiritedness at odds with the earlier noble education, for as Bloom (The Republic of Plato, 354–55) writes of the argument in Book III: “It is not for a failure of courage that Socrates is reproaching the hero. What he objects to is the price such men, given their understanding of death, must pay in order to face it.… In order to overcome fear of death, spiritedness requires an almost fanatic fury.… [The hero] must overcome his reason in order to be a hero.” Others, however, will be led by the sight of death to reflect on the inevitability of their own death and thus beyond a spirited attachment to this world.

19 As Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 40–41, notes: “Plato is very careful to take into account those differences between the sexes that are palpably biological.… pregnancy, lactation and a degree of difference in physical strength.… [I]t is one of the very few instances in the history of thought when the biological implications of femaleness have been clearly separated out from all the conventional, institutional, and emotional baggage that has usually been identified with them.” While not denying the conventional aspect of sexual relations, I would argue that the “conventional, institutional and emotional baggage” may itself be a consequence, however dim, of natural biological differences. In other words, these conventions, properly interpreted, may be a better clue to human nature than the biological differences themselves.

20 Compare Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato.”

21 Compare Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato,” 199ff., and “Men, Women, War and Politics: Family and Polis in Aristophanes and Euripides,” Political Theory 8 (1980), 65–81;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Murnaghan, Sheila, “Antigone 904–920 and the Institution of Marriage,” American Journal of Philology 107 (1986), 192–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Compare Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 382–83.

23 Compare Ibid., 384.

24 Even if, as Okin argues, the tie between husband and wife in Classical Greece was not the “locus for the expression of the deepest human emotion,” Socrates may have believed the attachment between mother and child was. The strength of a mother's attachment to her child is evident in Socrates' description of the decline of regimes in Book VIII (compare Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 32–35).

25 Rousseau (Emile or On Education, trans, by Bloom, Allan [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 362)Google Scholar writes: “In his Republic, Plato gives women the same exercises as men. I can well believe it. Having removed private families from his regime and no longer knowing what to do with women, he found himself forced to make them men.” See Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato.”

26 A similar problem arises in the noble individual like Achilles whose concern for his own nobility leads him to sacrifice the good of the community to his own concern for excellence. The Iliad indicates the limits of such heroic self-sufficiency.

27 Jowett, Benjamin, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892)Google Scholar, clxxxi; see also Grube, G. M. A., Plato's Thought (London: Athlone, 1980), 270:Google ScholarTaylor, A. E., Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen. 1963), 278:Google Scholar and Strauss, The City and Man, 117. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 34–36, argues that this is not an insurmountable problem for women in Greece had always had “the claims of eros simply silenced.” Even if true, as long as such silencing is undesirable, depriving men of the claims of eros could only exacerbate the difficulty.

28 Socrates’ definition of eros in Book V as extending to all members of a class denies the importance of particular erotic attachments. Eros so defined is less a political problem (compare Nichols, “The Republic's Two Alternatives,” 254).

29 Aristotle Politics I. 2.

30 Compare Xenophon Cyropaedia I.1.

31 Incest is also a theme in the Clouds. See Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 43–44; Aristotle Politics II. 4.

32 Whereas the guardians in the Republic are to be bred to be as good as possible by uniting those who are best, in the Laws marriages are to aim at moderating citizen differences by uniting opposite natures (Laws 773A-E).

33 Compare Strauss, The City and Man, 115.

34 Compare Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 328.

35 Consider, for example, Laches, Gorgias, Laws and Apology.

36 See Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato,” 207; Seth Benardete, ”On Plato's Timaeus and Timaeus’ Science Fiction,” Interpretation 2 (1971), 25.Google Scholar

37 Words related to the Greek word “theoria” occur eight times in the section between 466E and 467 E.

38 Compare Aristotle Politics II. iv.

39 “It is apparent from the total context of the Platonic dialogues that the rational, not the natural, is their author's central standard” (Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 68). In Book V, Socrates indicates the error of attempting to separate the rational from the natural.

40 Annas, Compare Julia, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 175–76.Google Scholar

41 Compare Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 389.

42 Compare Nichols, “The Republic's Two Alterntives.”

43 In Plato's Laws, reference is made to the regime in Republic as one fit for gods or children of gods (739B-E), that is, such a regime is not fit for human beings who are between the divine and animals. As Book V has shown, the attempt to live like gods leads human beings to become like animals.

44 Compare Saxonhouse, “Comedy in Callipolis,” 898.

45 Note the similarity of accounts between Socrates’ “second sailing” (Pltaedo 99D-E) and that of one who exits the cave too quickly (Republic 5I5E-516A).

46 Compare Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato,” 203–05. For a somewhat different account of the depreciation of eros in the Republic, see Stanley Rosen, ”The Role of Eros in the Republic,” Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964), 452–75.Google Scholar

47 Compare Nichols, “The Republic's Two Alternatives.”

48 Aristophanes Clouds 227–232.

49 See especially the Cleitophon.

50 Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 314.

51 See Apology 23A-B.

52 See Strauss, The City and Man, 105–06.

53 Xenophon Memorabilia 1. 1. 11–16.

54 On the connection between natural philosophy and rhetoric, compare Apology 18B-C.

55 Compare Nichols, “The Republic's Two Alternatives.”

56 Note, for example, Glaucon's frequent appeals to nature as a standard (358E-359C).

57 On the desire for simplicity which underlies much of modern political ideology, consider Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 70.Google Scholar