Archive: Plato's Republic

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His sixth choice is Plato's Republic, an episode first released in June 2017. Is it always better to be just than unjust? That is the central question of Plato's Republic, written in c380BC. Plato applied this question both to the individual and the city-state, considering earlier and current forms of government in Athens and potential forms, in which the ideal city might be ruled by philosophers. The Republic is arguably Plato's best known and greatest work, a dialogue between Socrates and his companions, featuring the allegory of the cave and ideas about immortality of the soul, the value of poetry to society, and democracy's vulnerability to a clever demagogue seeking tyranny. With Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield MM McCabe Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College London and James Warren Fellow of Corpus Christi College and a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1998) Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan and Charles Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge University Press, 2012) G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Angela Hobbs, Plato's Republic (Ladybird Expert Book, to be published 2018) Thomas More (trans. Dominic Baker-Smith), Utopia 1516 (Penguin, 2012) Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: 18 (University of Utah Press, 1997), especially ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic’ by Myles Burnyeat Gerald A. Press (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Plato (Bloomsbury, 2012) Gerasimos Santas (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) Malcolm Schofield, Plato (Oxford University Press, 2006) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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• 1:40Speaker 05

  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. For this week's summer special from the great archive of In Our Time, I've chosen Plato's Republic, whose claim to be the foundation text of Western philosophy is arguably stronger than all its competitors. What I find extraordinary about the Republic is how it moves seamlessly from the concrete political conditions of Athens in the 4th century BCE to more abstract

• 2:22Speaker 05

  concepts regarding justice or truth, and then on to allegory, which touches upon perception, art, knowledge and belief. I found it particularly helpful in understanding the deep reservations which Plato expressed about democracy as a system, albeit one which took a rather different form from democracies of today. In his view, democracy teeters on the edge of tyranny, which struck me as similar to the thinking of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, one of the first In Our Times that I recorded, although I think Mill was more sceptical about the great wisdom of philosophers, which Plato seems to admire. It's the discussion on Plato's

• 3:05Speaker 05

  cave that I found most illuminating. Here, people are bound at the neck and the feet, only able to perceive shadows cast by objects which others are parading around behind them, a useful reminder of the vast areas of knowledge which elude us as individuals, but which In Our Time, in its own modest fashion, seeks to address.

• 3:26Speaker 06

  Hello. Plato's Republic, written around 380 B.C., explores whether it's always better to be just than unjust, and is seen as a cornerstone of Western philosophy. It takes the form of a dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and his companions, and is set around 430 B.C., since when Athens had teetered between tyranny and direct democracy, and as a democracy had put Socrates to death. One companion argues that we would all behave unjustly if we could get away with it. To address this, Socrates imagines what a perfectly just city would be like, and applies lessons from that to the individual soul. And if the soul is best ruled by reason, he argues, the city would be best ruled by philosophers. With me to discuss Plato's Republic are Angela Hobbs, Professor of the Public Understanding

• 4:10Speaker 06

  of Philosophy of the University of Sheffield, M.M. McCabe, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Emeritor at King's College London, and James Warren, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. James Warren, what was the political situation in Athens when Plato was writing the Republic?

• 4:29Speaker 07

  He's writing the Republic, as you said, in the first quarter of the 4th century B.C. Athens at this point is a direct democracy, which means every citizen is fully involved in directly

• 4:41Speaker 06

  Every male, free

• 4:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, citizens mean adult, freeborn males. So it's an independent city-state ruled in this direct democratic way. It hasn't always been so. In the period between the dramatic date of this dialogue and when it's written, Athens had gone through upheavals at the end of a long war, and had gone through a period of an oligarchic coup in around 404, quite a brutal regime, and then democracy was restored. And then also the important date to remember in the intervening period between the composition and dramatic date is the execution of Socrates, right at the end of the 5th century B.C.

• 5:24Speaker 06

  Let's just get down briefly. Why do I say briefly, please? The idea of Athenian democracy, it's male, it's free men, and then they're governed by lot. Can you just develop it a bit?

• 5:37Speaker 07

  Some of their offices are assigned by lot. That was thought to be a democratic way of doing it, because it prevents bribery, corruption and various things. It's democratic in the sense that every citizen has the ability to attend the assembly and vote on matters, can speak at the assembly, and also was then involved in various other democratic methods like mass juries and so on, like the one that convicted Socrates.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  And every citizen was supposed to take part in wars?

• 6:05Speaker 07

  That's right, yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 06

  So it's quite a developed idea of what they have to do, even though it seems to us a narrow idea of who they are?

• 6:11Speaker 07

  Oh, right. So there were quite a lot of obligations placed on a citizen, and that was recognised later on by giving people payment for attending these kinds of institutions.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  What use does Socrates make of, what use does Plato make of Socrates in this book?

• 6:28Speaker 07

  Well, Socrates has obviously was a well-known figure in Athens during his lifetime, and was known for being a difficult critic of various Athenian presumptions and ideas. So he stands in many ways for a searching philosophical critique of the status quo. He's also standing, I think, because of the way his life ended, as a symbol of what democracy can do to philosophy.

• 6:55Speaker 06

  In the end, he was put to death

• 6:57Speaker 07

  He was put to death.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  In 399 B.C., and it was to the great grief of Plato.

• 7:01Speaker 07

  And others, yes.

• 7:02Speaker 06

  Yes. Can you just briefly say why he was put to death?

• 7:05Speaker 07

  Well, he was put to death after a trial which, the indictment was on two counts. One was an indictment of corrupting the youth of Athens, and the other was introducing gods that the cities didn't believe in. So it was both that he was thought to be morally corrupting, and also

• 7:23Speaker 06

  Is that what corrupting meant, morally corrupting? It didn't mean corrupting their ideas, it meant corrupting their persons?

• 7:30Speaker 07

  Well, you corrupt their persons by corrupting their ideas, by encouraging them to question what it meant to be virtuous, or what it meant to be good, or what it meant to be so on. And that was thought to have encouraged various people, including some of those who were involved in this oligarchic revolution at the end of the 5th century. Those were very heavily associated with Socrates, and indeed with Plato. They were his relatives, some of them.

• 7:53Speaker 06

  But in Plato's life, Socrates was a massive, major, very important figure.

• 7:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, he was a bit of a celebre.

• 7:59Speaker 06

  And he blamed, he blamed democracy on, for the death of Socrates?

• 8:02Speaker 07

  Yes, I should think so.

• 8:03Speaker 06

  Yes. You mean, you should think so in both senses?

• 8:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think he was right.

• 8:09Speaker 06

  Angie Hobbs. There's a challenge laid down at the beginning by Thrasymachus. He relates this challenge down to Socrates. What is it?

• 8:18Speaker 07

  Yes, so Thrasymachus is a sophist. He's a travelling professional teacher of rhetoric and philosophy, who gives the sons of wealthy men the kind of skills they need to get on public life. And they're already having a debate about what is justice. They've already dismissed a couple of conventional notions that justice is telling the truth and returning what you've borrowed, or it's helping your friends and harming your enemies. And Thrasymachus bursts in and says, oh, he says, you know, this justice, it is simply the interest of the stronger. And by that, he means that whoever is in power in a state is the stronger party, whether the state is ruled by a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, a democracy,

• 9:01Speaker 07

  whoever is in power is de facto the stronger. And they make laws, thinks Thrasymachus, cynically in their own interest, and they then force the ruled to obey those laws, and they say that obeying the laws is justice. So if you are one of the ruled and you obey the laws, all you're doing, whether you know it or not, is simply serving the interests of the stronger party, and you're a fool, you've been duped, because this institution of justice is simply a cynical cover for the exploitation of the weak ruled by the stronger rulers. Now, Socrates says, well, hang on a minute, this ruling, this ruling is an art, it's a skill, and the, all the arts, don't they, they look to the interests

• 9:45Speaker 07

  of their subjects. So the art of ruling will look to the interest of the subject.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Who are being ruled, but Thrasymachus is having absolutely none of this. He says, no, no, no, it's rulers like shepherds. They fatten up their flock simply so they can get a better price from the market. And if rulers look after the ruled at all, it's simply because they can then exploit them

• 10:08Speaker 01

  more effectively. He then moves the discussion from the purely sort of political realm into the private realm as well. And he gives us what I think is his real definition. And he says, injustice is in fact simply serving your own interests as effectively and as ruthlessly as you can. Justice is treating other people decently and fairly. And justice is a mugs game. It's for naive simpletons. The real virtue, the virtue of common sense is to be unjust. That's the prudent, admirable man. We would all be tyrants if we could. Injustice pays, justice doesn't.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  So this is the first of 10 books and it kicks off the whole argument, which goes into psychology and politics and art and the discussion of the soul and so on. What is the, where is he speaking from? When you talk to him as a wandering teacher, does he have a philosophy contrary to that of Socrates?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Probably. So the, the, the interesting-

• 11:10Speaker 06

  Does he or doesn't he? I mean, you're the expert.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So he, the tone of Thrasymachus is difficult to gauge. So the, the content of what he says is certainly very opposed. He thinks that justice does not pay. You're an idiot, you've been duped. The best thing is to be as unjust as you possibly can, whenever you can get away with it.

• 11:32Speaker 06

  And Socrates takes that on for the rest, he's taking that on for the rest of the book, really.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  The reason I hesitated, because there is a big discussion about whether Thrasymachus really means what he says. Maybe he's a disillusioned moralist saying, oh, you know, justice, you know, look at the world around you, you can see where we've got to with justice now. But in certainly in the terms of the content of what he says, never mind his intention, it is absolutely the opposite of where Socrates wants to end up. And what is so interesting and where Socrates is going to get a way in is that it's very clear that Thrasymachus thinks to thrive, to flourish, it's all about having power over others and having lots of material wealth and goodies. So he's got a very, as Socrates will see it, a very narrow conception of what the good life is. And that's what's going to give Socrates his traction into the argument.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  Emma McCabe, where does Plato's focus lie in this work? In the individual or on the state? How does he move between the two?

• 12:31Speaker 07

  So it's very interesting, the way that Angie sets it up, because the picture of Thrasymachus presses on the ways in which you might think about justice as a, as an institutional matter. Is it a question about the way the state is arranged? Or is it a question about what is at stake here for the individual? And it's a, it's a huge issue in the whole of the republic, whether what we're supposed to focus on is the institutional question of justice or the individual question of justice. What happens after Thrasymachus bows out, pretty much, is that the question gets recast

• 13:12Speaker 07

  as a question about what it would be to be just if you're an individual. And the challenge is to show that no matter how successful the unjust person might be in, in his or her life, the just person is always going to be better off, is going to be just, it's going to be, justice for her is going to be good in itself, whatever on earth that means.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  He has to prove that.

• 13:42Speaker 07

  That's what he sets out to show.

• 13:44Speaker 06

  Why does he move, sorry?

• 13:45Speaker 07

  Sorry.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  It's up to you.

• 13:46Speaker 07

  So the, the way that he does it is by suggesting that not so much that there's a kind of tangle between the institutional sense of justice and the individual sense of justice, but that there's a straight analogy between the two, that if you imagine that you can call a state just, you can so equally call an individual just, and that you mean the same thing when you say that one is just and the other is just. And Socrates says, oh, well, so if we're going to do that, then we can look at the, we can figure out the justice of the individual, which is, as he puts it, writ small, by looking at it writ large in the state.

• 14:32Speaker 07

  And the question, this goes to answering your question, the question about the republic as a whole, is whether that's actually the agenda that he really follows, or whether the picture of the political, of political justice that he develops in service to this analogy, is in fact the focus of the, of the discussion. For my money, it's the individual and the analogy is always at, at the service of explaining the justice of some individual person.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  But he does take great pains to enlarge it to the state. So the person, the individual is represented by the state. So let's, let's, let's look at this question, he says, not looking at the individual side, but looking at the state. First of all, let's get a good state. And this is a good state. And he tries to tell us what, he does tell us what he thinks a good state is. Can you give us the bare bones of that?

• 15:27Speaker 07

  Oh, yes. So the, the conception of justice that he offers, and this follows on with, from trying to figure out how on earth you could explain what it would be to be, for something to be good in itself, for a life for the individual to be worth living in itself. He takes it to be somehow or other, a matter of structure. So he supposes that you can understand what justice is in, is in the state, if everyone does their own, as he puts it. And if the different parts of the state are in good balance to each other, so the

• 16:07Speaker 07

  parts of the state that are the, the, the ordinary productive class, the, the defensive or warrior class and the philosopher class, those three parts of the state, he supposes need to be in equilibrium. But when he says that, then it looks as though what he's trying to give us is an account of the way that a psyche or an individual might be well organized. And that we really only think about these discussions of the state, extended though they are, as an account of how it might be that we become better in the ways that the

• 16:52Speaker 07

  challenge is proposed.

• 16:54Speaker 06

  But before I go to the next question, he makes a match. The state is, as you said, in three parts, and each has to do its job and be kept in equilibrium. The guardians, as it were, the rulers, the philosophers, the auxiliary, the police, the army and so on, and the producers, the appetite. And similarly with the mind, there's the reason, and then there's the spirit, and then there's the soul. So these three are supposed to be in balance inside. Would you go along with that?

• 17:15Speaker 07

  Well, yes, that's precisely what he says, that in both cases, when you consider the internal structure of both an individual soul and a city, he thinks the right thing to do is to consider each having three principal functional parts. In the city, these are distinguished in terms of different roles that classes of person play in the city. In the individual, these are distinguished between types of desire that you might have, desire for what's good, desire for what's noble, desire for what's pleasant and so on. And in both, he says, the correct arrangement is one where all of them are doing their own job under the guiding, the guidance of the reasoning and governing part.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  He uses the two or three very powerful stories in this. And one of them is the story of the ring. Can you tell us how that plays?

• 18:12Speaker 07

  Well, this goes back to this challenge that he set at the, at the end of book one, the beginning of book two. So he imagines a story of someone who discovers a ring.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  A shepherd.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  A shepherd discovers a ring and he puts it on, and he finds that when you turn it in a certain way, it makes you invisible. And he uses this ring to seduce the queen and kill the king and take power in his city. And the idea that this presents is something like the following. If, if it were possible, if you could imagine having this kind of ability, wouldn't it be the case that we would use it to get what we desire? Because we would no longer fear the consequences of acting unjustly. You could break promises with impunity, you could break the law with impunity, no one would, would, would castigate you and you wouldn't suffer as a result of that.

• 19:07Speaker 06

  Which is sort of what Angie was saying in her remarks, that if you're strong enough, you can get away with anything.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  That's right. So the challenge is that Socrates is faced is, why wouldn't that be a good thing to do? Why wouldn't it, or why wouldn't we prefer nevertheless to be just and lawful, even if the consequences of that would be in some ways worse than if we could get away with behaving unjustly?

• 19:27Speaker 06

  Emma.

• 19:28Speaker 07

  There's a, there's a trap here, it seems to me, which goes back to the question about the relation between states and individuals, which is that it looks as though what he's doing is shifting around between what the challenge is about. So some part of, of the challenge is about how we behave. Some of it's about how we restrain and constrain our actions. But the idea that we think that that's what justice and injustice is determined by, that is to say, a series of actions, is actually a different sense of justice or a different construction of justice from the idea that justice is a steady state, set of laws. Or institutions.

• 20:12Speaker 07

  And one of the things that happens at this point, I think, is that that tension becomes very uh uh difficult to deal with because it doesn't look as though there's any way of figuring out why, for example, a state that is well balanced and has the right institutions is going to do the equivalent of behaving well. Why will it have good foreign policy, for example?

• 20:38Speaker 06

  Can we take that state idea on a little bit? Because um um Plato and Socrates, through Socrates makes a big thing of it. Angie, Angie Hobbs. One of the things about the ideal state is that it's ruled by philosophers. I'm faced by three philosophers, so there's not much disagreement there, I expect. Still, anyway, that's a cheap jibe. Um um the, so how does he justify that and what's the point?

• 21:04Speaker 07

  So, the rulers of the state, as we've been hearing, are analogous to reason in the psyche. And what legitimizes them and indeed compels them to rule is that they have knowledge. They have knowledge of true reality, which is the forms of these ideal, perfect instantiations. That's what means that they have, they're not just rulers, they're philosopher rulers. Um now, but I think it's really important to look a bit at what Plato does to ensure that they can't be sort of corrupted or distracted.

• 21:42Speaker 07

  So the way he sets up this ideally ideally just state is that the rulers and the auxiliaries, this executive, police, military class, who together they form the guardian class. They live this extraordinary life. They live apart in camp communes. They're not allowed to own any property at all. They're not even allowed to touch gold or silver. They're not allowed nuclear families. Women and children are to be held in common, we're told. Babies are going to be taken away from guardian mothers at birth. They're not, the mothers don't even get to see their babies. So in the guardian class, nobody really knows who's a relative, a blood relative or not,

• 22:27Speaker 07

  and the idea being that kind of all think of each other as a potential family. And Plato's, and all their food and shelter and housing is provided for them by the producer class, who have no power whatsoever, but they do have property, they do have wealth, and they do have nuclear families. So Plato completely divorces power from wealth. And he hopes that by doing this, he can remove the opportunities for corruption and nepotism and distraction and divided loyalties in the in the guardian class. He's also very, very clear that women, because we were talking earlier about the, in the direct democracy that of the Athens that he grew up in, it was only male citizens who

• 23:12Speaker 07

  got the vote. Women are to be auxiliaries, they're to fight, women are to be, they're philosopher queens as well as philosopher kings. And he's also very clear that in the producer class, where they are allowed some wealth, there are to be no extremes of wealth or poverty. So though I I do agree with M M that the the ultimate goal of all this is how to live as a just individual and whether that pays, but I actually think that Plato's put a lot of thought into constructing this ideal state and is, and really does sort of think that some of these ideas are really worth exploring.

• 23:48Speaker 06

  Can I just come back to you for a moment, James? The philosopher is, is, I I sort of was a little bit of attraction by talking about you three, because he has, he or she has got to be, they can't become a ruling philosopher until they're about 50, as I understand it. They have to be specially trained and they have to be especially trained in the rigid distinction between knowledge and belief, because most opinions are belief, knowledge is greater than and behind and superior to belief. How's that go? How's that work?

• 24:17Speaker 07

  So he makes it very clear that when he means a philosopher, he doesn't actually mean people like M M and Angie and and me. He means people who really know things. In particular, these are people with ethical knowledge. They know what's good. I mean, and and he means that in the very strong sense that they're correct about it. They they're right. And what's more-

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Who judges that they're right?

• 24:39Speaker 07

  Well, they do. Because they eventually have the have this, they have this long training program and then eventually they discover what's good and they then are able to use that knowledge to make the city as as as as good as a city can be. What also is important is that this knowledge comes with a motivational aspect to it. So they don't merely know what's good but are, as it were, disinterested in applying that. He, this is one way in which I think the politics and the psychology do interact quite directly with one another, in that he thinks knowing what's good will require you to want to make things as good as possible.

• 25:23Speaker 07

  So these philosopher rulers are both knowledgeable, they're experts, they're moral experts, but they're also paternalistic in their governance, that they want to make the city for everybody as good as it can possibly be.

• 25:36Speaker 06

  In a sense, there's almost a comparison, I think, one of you, I'm sure, one of you makes a comparison between them and a doctor. You go to them for expert disinterested advice and it is given to you and you go down with your place in the state. Would you say that, M M?

• 25:48Speaker 07

  Well, I think, up to a point, I think there's a risk in thinking of them as merely experts. Of course, we've had enough of those these days, but-

• 25:58Speaker 06

  Oh, I don't think so. I like-

• 26:00Speaker 07

  I don't, I quite like them too, but I think they should-

• 26:02Speaker 06

  I like the three of you, you're experts.

• 26:03Speaker 07

  I think they're not quite, I think thinking of them as executives is a risk of misunderstanding what he thinks.

• 26:13Speaker 06

  Well, if they're rulers, what are they but executives?

• 26:14Speaker 07

  If we go back to what James said about there being an ethical component to their knowledge, it it seems to me that what Plato wishes us to understand is that coming to know is rather like coming to understand rather than coming to be, coming to deploy a body of knowledge. And that understanding is a complete, as he would put it, a turning of the soul. It's, it has all the way through ethical development. So the, a lot of the political discussion is in service to making us understand something about ethical and intellectual development taking place at the same time.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  How does the parable of the cave fit into that then?

• 27:01Speaker 07

  Well, I think the the cave is one of the best exposes of that. So that we're asked, one of the most brilliant pieces of Platonic writing too. So Socrates and Glaucon are having a little bit of a conversation, they've gone quite far into their discussion, and Socrates asks Glaucon to envisage, to to see an image that he's about to elaborate. And we, we, the the language is set up in ways that we are actually able to see it too, vivid kind of description. And the way it works is that there's a, there's supposed to be a long, it goes back to the

• 27:44Speaker 07

  underground thing of Gaiji's finding a dead body with a ring on it underground.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, we've got to go to the cave, yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 07

  So the cave, there's a long cave going all the way down underground and at the bottom of the cave, facing the wall at the bottom, there are a collection of prisoners. And the prisoners are tied up by their feet and their necks, so they can't move their heads, they can only look forwards. And they, behind them, there's a fire. And between them and the fire, there are, there's a little wall and a whole lot of people carrying around sort of plaster images of things, which cast shadows on the wall of the cave. All that the prisoners can see are the shadows. So their conception of the world in which they live is determined by and constituted

• 28:35Speaker 07

  by what those shadows are. So when they see a shadow of Hippopotamus, that's what Hippopotamus is for them. When they see a shadow of themselves, that's who they are for themselves. And they live a complete life, this is the whole of their life, restricted by their shadow, by these, to these shadows. And Socrates says, these men are like, Glaucon says, well, they're peculiar prisoners. And Socrates says, no, no, they're like us.

• 29:07Speaker 06

  This is meant to represent is the unenlightened life that we live. Eventually, some prisoner gets turned around and goes up out of the cave, works out what the the way that things are properly set up, goes outside the cave and then gets asked to come back inside again and explain everything to everybody else. The change is a change in understanding how things are best for them. But it's a change not only in the objects of what the prisoner, released prisoner sees, but in the perspective of the released prisoner. And where does that take us, James?

• 29:44Speaker 07

  Well, it takes us in two ways. Politically, it's part of his criticism of democracy. Because what's sad about these prisoners is a twofold failure. First of all, they fail to recognize that these shadows are shadows, as M M says. They think they take those to be the actual things. And secondly, they don't recognize that they're prisoners. They don't recognize that they're restrained and held back. And this is part of his criticism of democracy. Because he thinks although Democrats proclaim that freedom is the great byword for their state, in fact, these people are restrained and constrained by their cognitive impairments. It also gives him the idea of this returning person into the cave who actually knows what

• 30:29Speaker 07

  they're looking at. And he's the only, or he or she is the only person who can recognize that these are shadows because only they have seen the originals of which these are copies and understand them for what they are.

• 30:40Speaker 06

  And see, he's seen, and he or she has seen two things. First of all, the objects that are going backwards and forwards behind them, in which they're flashing, and also got out of the cave and seen the sun and the stars and there's another, there's a, there's a sense of the truth there, the knowledge. Angie, can you just tell us how that, that which is very well explained, fits in to the development of the argument?

• 31:02Speaker 07

  Sorry, the cave?

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  Well, we have that argument. It's been very well laid out. It's been developed by James. Does it take us any further? Does he build on that?

• 31:13Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, after that, it's sort of the pinnacle of why we need philosophers to liberate us and, you know, we're staggering, we're stumbling through our lives with closed eyes and closed ears and, you know, we think we're free and we're not. So it leads on to, you know, more details about the education of the philosopher rulers in higher mathematics. But it also fits in beautifully with what I think is one of the strongest parts of the Republic, which is the account of the degeneration of the ideal state in Books eight and nine, through a state which values honor and ambition, through a state which

• 31:54Speaker 07

  values money, oligarchy, down through democracy and into tyranny. And he gives this brilliant account of how democracy can degenerate into tyranny when it's exploited by an unscrupulous demagogue. But the way for that has been paved by the image of the cave because we, we kind of see just how vulnerable democracy is and just how lacking in knowledge and freedom we really are.

• 32:20Speaker 06

  You want to talk?

• 32:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, I just, I just thought it might be worth emphasizing then that Socrates doesn't, I think, believe that we can all be liberated from the cave, that this is very much a minority capacity and only a few will be able, in, in the, the ideal city, they put a lot of resources and there's a lot of care in selecting the right people and making sure they're trained appropriately. So the best most of us can hope for is not to become philosophers ourselves, but that philosophers should be the ones who are directing important parts of our lives.

• 32:54Speaker 06

  Could you develop that, Omen?

• 32:57Speaker 06

  Yes, I, I mean, I think there are two ways of thinking about this. One of them is to imagine that this is a genuine proposal for the way that philosophy works.

• 33:08Speaker 06

  A different way of thinking about it would be that this is an illustration of how actually it doesn't. You might read it as a, a much more pessimistic view than an optimistic one. So one of the, one of the important things I think about setting these images, as you've asked about all these images, setting these images up this way is to make us see how remote they are. And then to make us see that even if they're remote, actually they're something to think with. And part of what's going on here is a way of using these kinds of conceptions of philosophy

• 33:50Speaker 06

  to get us to do some philosophy, which in, in ways which are much more tentative and progressive. So I think, I mean, I think this runs all the way through because I think the, the representation of the Republic in optimistic ways as something that is a proposal for political structures and a proposal for individual lives can be seen pessimistically, but still as a philosophical weapon. Andrew?

• 34:23Speaker 07

  And the cave also kind of gives us an insight into Plato's critique of art in the Republic. So in terms of the education of the philosopher rulers, early on, they have very censored artistic education and all sorts of things in poetry which are deemed to misrepresent God or to encourage moral vices are cut out. But by the time we get to the final book of the Republic, almost all art is censored because not only does Socrates say that art originates from and appeals to and fosters

• 35:03Speaker 07

  the very, the non rational and dangerous elements in our psyche, he also says that it deals with objects. He, he puts it at three removes from reality. It's easier, it's for us, I think, to think of it as two removes from reality, that the objects of art are described as sort of shadows and with the same kind of language as the shadows on the walls of the cave. So what the artist does, Socrates says in Book ten, is simply give a representation of the outward appearance of an object in the phenomenal world, which is itself only at best a representation of the perfect form.

• 35:45Speaker 07

  So the artist is not just dealing with very dangerous irrational impulses. The artist is, is giving us shadows and not realities and doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

• 35:57Speaker 06

  Omen, can I, yes, please. It's, it's more difficult than that though, isn't it? Because all of the descriptions of art in the Republic are also self referential. So when he talks about the way that we, the way that poetry is written, he gives us an example that applies to the Republic itself. Well, equally in the, in Book ten, when he's talking about representing images of this, that and the other, he's talking about exactly what he's doing. And some part of that, it seems to me, is to pull the rug out from any, any straightforward interpretation of what he said.

• 36:39Speaker 06

  So any straightforward view that says that he's shutting down on poetry, because actually he recognizes at the same time that some of the means that he uses to get the reader to be shocked into reflecting about how these things are done are themselves poetry or the equivalent.

• 37:04Speaker 07

  I completely agree because one of the, the most beautiful ironies of the Republic is that Plato has written a dialogue, which later generations called the Republic, which would, I think, be banned from the ideally just state that it describes because it does not meet the censorship criteria because it describes bad characters like Thrasymachus and so on. So Plato has written a work which includes all sorts of elements which would be censored according to the theories of art in the Republic. And I, I don't believe that he's not aware of that. It's a beautiful irony. But that, that's a sort of an extra sophistication that the basic point is that he, there is

• 37:43Speaker 07

  this worry that what is the status of artistic objects and artistic creations? Are they real or not? And I think Plato does think that's a genuine.

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• 40:23Speaker 07

  And problem and question.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  Can I come to you, James, to ask about this business of the distinction between knowledge and belief, that most things, when we say that's good, that's a belief. And it is difficult to prove that that's good through knowledge. But philosophers train themselves to be able to do that sort of thing. That's a very simple example on my part. You can give more complicated examples. But that's an important distinction. Can you develop that, please?

• 40:49Speaker 07

  Yes, the distinction he draws between knowledge and belief is quite an unusual one. And it's actually quite unusual even within Plato's own corpus, I think. The Republic has quite an unusual way of doing it. The way he does it in the Republic is to insist that there are certain sorts of things that you can have knowledge of, and you can't have belief about those things. Whereas there are other things that you can have beliefs about, and you can't have knowledge about those things.

• 41:14Speaker 06

  Could you give us an example?

• 41:15Speaker 07

  So, for example, it maps on to some of the distinctions we've already been drawing between these, what he calls forms, which are intelligible, perfect objects. Those are the objects of knowledge. You can know what's just, you can know what's good. Whereas belief is the cognitive state that's appropriate for things like particular instances. You might a law, or a person, or a statue. You can believe that it's beautiful, but that's only a belief because the statue isn't perfectly beautiful. It's beautiful lit in a certain way, but it might be ugly compared with a goddess or something like this. So that's what disqualifies that object as an appropriate object of knowledge.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  So the philosophers have been trained to the age of 50 to know what is true, what is...

• 42:07Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 42:08Speaker 06

  What is not just a belief.

• 42:09Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 42:10Speaker 06

  They distinguish from everybody else by knowing what real knowledge is. And they can use that real knowledge to rule the ideal state, if everybody keeps in their place, that is.

• 42:21Speaker 07

  That's part of it. Their training has been such as they alone are able to access this particular group of objects, these forms, that guarantee this understanding of what's good and so on, that then they can use. So it's like seeing the original, of which these other things are mere shadows or copies. And that equips them to understand the things that they see as the copies that they are.

• 42:48Speaker 06

  Emma.

• 42:48Speaker 07

  So I think the notion of understanding is the fundamental one. One of the difficulties about contemporary conceptions of knowledge is that we might think that knowledge comes in little chunks. So if you've got a truth, then you know that truth. But in fact, what we're looking at here is what he calls a synoptic view of everything. So it's a complete change in state of mind. It's not some piecemeal facts or truths. It's a transformation of the whole soul, this cognitive state. So it's tricky, when we think about it as knowledge, to unpick the contemporary assumptions

• 43:30Speaker 07

  that go with epistemology since Descartes.

• 43:35Speaker 06

  Angie, in your notes, express yourself, as has been quite clear in this program. I was an enormous admirer and understander of Plato. Yet you say he failed. And you point out, I have got your notes here. You do say it's a great failure, and he fails because... I did, I've got them here. You say he failed because he encouraged or laid the way for what could be totalitarian states and authoritarian states and that sort of thing. Have I got this completely wrong, or should I read from your notes?

• 44:06Speaker 07

  I don't think he fails. What I think he does, I think he asks the right questions. I think the answers he gives to them are often too extreme and have formed the basis of ideas which have gone on to lead to totalitarian ideas, both on the far right and on the far left. But I don't think it's a failure if you're asking the right questions. And some of the answers he gives, they contain nuggets within them, which are still very useful to us. So, for example, I think that the community of wives and children where babies are taken away from their mothers at birth is repellent. I think that's appalling.

• 44:50Speaker 07

  However, it's entirely the right question to ask, to say, if women are going to have these top jobs in the state, if women are going to rule, if women are going to be in the army, how do we arrange domestic life to make that possible for women to do? Now, that's a question that we're still struggling with. So he's asking the right questions. He's coming up with some interesting ideas. A lot of his solutions, I think, are too extreme, but I don't regard that as a failure.

• 45:18Speaker 06

  His ideas have been taken up enthusiastically by fascist regimes and totalitarian regimes of all sorts. Is that because of the ideas, or because people are just misusing them?

• 45:32Speaker 07

  Gosh. Well, what he offers you is a picture of an extremely authoritarian kind of arrangement, where freedom of choice or freedom to participate in the affairs of the state is extremely restricted, only on certain criteria. And the rest of us mostly will just get on with doing what we're told, because we assume we're being told to do what we're being told to do in our own interests. So in that respect, it's a wonderful sort of blueprint for those people who would like to wield that kind of overall power. He does also, as we've already mentioned, grant to these philosophers the ability to

• 46:16Speaker 07

  censor material, again, in the interests of everybody and so on. And if you think Plato's a kind of named a conjure with, then you might think, well, it's good to have him on my side.

• 46:27Speaker 06

  What would you say is his greatest legacy, Emma?

• 46:32Speaker 07

  So...

• 46:33Speaker 06

  We're still talking about him today.

• 46:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 06

  So what is the legacy that we're really talking about?

• 46:38Speaker 07

  So it seems to me that the legacy is partly that he puts up for our discussion ideas that really need to... that really force us to reflect. So the nature of the document itself is one that says, look, really? Are you really convinced that this is the way that things should go? Are you really think that knowledge generates this kind of politics? And the legacy seems to me to be reading.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  Thank you very much, Emma McCabe, Angie Hobbs, and James Warren. Next week, we will be discussing bird migration, why they do it, how they survive, and thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I don't think they've even time to go to all the things we didn't say, but some of the things we didn't say.

• 47:39Speaker 07

  Well, I was going to suggest another answer to your final question to Emma. So what does it have to offer? I think one of the things it has to offer is precisely what makes it difficult to untangle, which is an awareness that I think sometimes we've forgotten now in modern philosophy, that to do politics or to do psychology, it's very difficult to do those discreetly from one another. That if you're going to think seriously about politics, you have to think about psychology. And if you want to think about psychology, you might have to think about knowledge, and you might have to think about ethics and so on. And that's what the Republic does. It gives you... that's how Plato does philosophy. He doesn't do discreet, I'll do metaphysics in this work, and then I'll do some epistemology.

• 48:24Speaker 07

  It all comes as a package. And I think that's something that we would do well to remember, actually. I think that is connected with what you said about the psychology, that the psychology is all the time about ethical orientation. So you can't think about knowledge or understanding without thinking about its ethical orientation. And again, I think that goes to the nature of the work, rather than the nature of the theories that are offered in the work. If we thought that this was a work that just presents theories to us in a little, nice little wrapped up package, that would be one thing. But I think that's not what happens.

• 49:07Speaker 07

  I think that the great thing about the work is that the philosophy shouts to the person who gets to work on it, rather than... Giving us these theories to wave around, that's how it seems to me. I still think the greatest thing it does is to, is the way it answers Thrasymachus's challenge by saying that justice is not a matter of external actions, but about your internal psychic harmony. And that your state of flourishing as an individual is the same psychic state as your state of virtue as an individual. That's a strange answer though, I mean if you've got to swallow his psychology to, to, to get an answer to why should I be just? Well, no, but you don't have to, you don't have to swallow it in exactly that form, so Freud takes up that idea and does it, and does different things with it.

• 49:51Speaker 07

  So the notion of psychic harmony doesn't have to be cashed out entirely in terms of the rule of the logistical and support by the Thumos and or sublimation of the appetites.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  But one of Plato's brothers asks him, gives him a challenge, gives Socrates a challenge, and does he answer it, he said, if, if a just man ends up by being considered to be an unjust man and branded an unjust man, is that a better life than an unjust man who ends up being thought of as a just man and is branded as a just man?

• 50:21Speaker 07

  And he says it's seven hundred and twenty-nine times happier, he says in Book Nine.

• 50:25Speaker 06

  No, no, it's more pleasant.

• 50:26Speaker 07

  Okay, more pleasant.

• 50:27Speaker 06

  He says it's more pleasant.

• 50:29Speaker 07

  He says seven hundred and twenty-nine times more pleasant. But he also says it's happy, he also says it's, he also uses the language of eudaimonia in that passage. But it, but it does beg the question whether somebody who's in that state of justice in the sense of being psychically harmonious or whether, whatever, whether that person is going to be the person who behaves in the moral ways that we're interested in is extremely dubious. I mean, doesn't, so exactly the same way that you might think that a successfully orientated, successfully structured state, you can't rely on their foreign policy, equally, somebody with a jolly good psyche, how, how is it that we can be sure that they will actually behave in the ways that we were worried about in Republic of One?

• 51:14Speaker 07

  But he, you know, but if you look at the motivations, why would somebody murder or rape or steal? It's because, they would do that because their psyche is dominated by their desire for honour or worldly success or material goods or physical pleasures. So, you know, how many, how many crimes are you going to commit if reason as he conceives it is in, is ruling in your soul? He's taken away the motivations for crimes. But if you're a philosopher ruler and on the basis of your understanding of what's good and just, you decide, actually, we as a state need to march out and, and rape and pillage our neighbours, that doesn't look like conventionally just behaviour for a city, but if it's, as it were, deduced from the first principles of good and just, and

• 51:59Speaker 07

  I'd see no reason why he can rule that out. I think he can, you see, oh well. And I think then the, the worry is that, so either the question is that he begs the question against the challenge and supposes that by redefining it like this, he's actually home and dry, or it's another challenge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, why would you think that somebody who's got their psyche in good order is well behaved in the ways that we need?

• 52:28Speaker 06

  This, this ad on is really valued by people, massively around, there was one question I really, really burned into us, I couldn't, do you think that the neat division of our minds into the three parts he puts it so convincingly is convincing?

• 52:44Speaker 07

  No. No.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Neither do I.

• 52:48Speaker 07

  And it look, and it looks as though, I mean, one of the things it might generate, the argument might generate hundreds of parts of the soul, or only two. Well, the, the arguments don't work. I mean, so.

• 52:58Speaker 06

  Oh, well, I don't mind.

• 53:00Speaker 07

  Move to three is really problematic. But, but, but, well, you see, well, no, I, I want to defend. And that's where, that's where you start to see the creakiness, but then you start to see, again, I mean, to go back to what I've been insisting on, you start to see it in ways that he himself exposes to us. You see, I, I want to put in a defence of the tripartition, the, the arguments for it are poor, I accept that, but I think what he's done, which is so interesting, is to move away from, in his, in other dialogues, he's just sort of had reason versus the appetites, which is also what you get in later philosophers like Hume and Kant and so on, by bringing

• 53:40Speaker 07

  in this, this need for respect and self-respect, I think that's hugely important, I think the Thumos is absolutely vital and it partly becomes Freud's super ego. I think there's a reason why Freud thinks the tripartite psyche is, is so interesting because it's, we, we don't just need sort of ratio sensitive activity and appetitive activity, we need to feel that we can and we matter in the world. And, and sure, you know, look around at the world at the moment, look at the things going on at the moment, a lot of people feel that they're not being given respect.

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