CHAPTER 8
There’s nothing more disastrous for the community, then, than the intrusion of any of the three classes into either of the other two, and the interchange of roles among them, and there could be no more correct context for using the term ‘criminal’. (IV, 434b)
In Plato’s state the principle of specialization is the heart of morality. The well-ordered state requires that rulers rule, the auxiliaries do their military and policing duties, while the productive classes get on with their allotted jobs. It is a caste system, and the castes are ossified. Plato expresses nothing but a caustic aristocratic disdain for anyone who tries to get out of their own caste. He would allow no Working Men’s education, no Open University, no lifelong opportunities for bettering oneself. Those condemned to ‘tawdry commercial activities’ are under a life sentence. There is no parole. Like later aristocrats down through history, if there is one thing Plato cannot stand it is a nouveau riche, a parvenu.
We do not like caste systems, and hence rebel against this in the name of several values: individualism, humanitarianism, liberty, equality. So this is one of those places where Platonists do best to shelter behind the point of the analogy, which is to use the state to cast light on the nature of the well-ordered individual. Perhaps what strikes us as illiberal, and vilely so, about the proposed state is part of the negative analogy, but becomes harmless or even illuminating when we think of the well-ordered soul. Thought of politically, Plato is advocating the subservience of the individual to the collective, the very essence of totalitarianism. But thought of individually, he may only be advocating that the psychological harmony of the individual is a value that must suppress a lopsided development of one part at the expense of others: too much spirit, or unbridled appetites, for example. There is no room here for a charge of totalitarianism, since it is surely harmless to urge that it is well-being of the whole totality, the whole agent considered in all his or her mental aspects, that is the aim. Of course, if this is the way it works, then any results are achieved in spite of the comparison between the state and the soul rather than because of it. The state is not so much a magnification of the soul as an imperfect and unreliable guide to what we might hope for it.
But does the analogy work in any event? There are certainly points of weakness. For a start, while it is easy to imagine a badly-ordered self, it is impossible to imagine one in which desires do not do their own job. We can imagine someone qualified for shoemaking chucking it in and becoming a not-so-good soldier. But we cannot make sense of thirst ‘taking over’ the job of shame, or lust taking over the function of a desire to learn more about astronomy. Thirst is thirst, and lust is lust. Disorder in the state arises when individual people try to crawl out of the role to which they are fitted. But desires are defined by their objects, and cannot themselves take on different roles again (although they may be repressed, and substituted by other desires, of course).
When Plato explains what he means, it is not desires changing objects, but desires trying ‘to dominate and rule over things’ that bothers him (IV, 442b). So it looks as though morality in the individual is close to being equated with self-control or self-mastery, and this is a central part of Plato’s thinking. Perhaps all the elaborate analogy gives us is that he is for temperance, and against wantonness and excess. Fair enough, we might say, but did we have to go through such a palaver just to get here?
In any event, it seems strange to equate self-control with the whole of morality. After all, there are cool and collected villains. In Thucydides, the Athenian envoys seemed perfectly self-controlled. They did not froth or bite the carpet or gnash their teeth, and may not even have raised their voices. They did not have to. They had what they regarded as a perfectly satisfactory ordering of passion by reason, here operating as cool, calculated understanding of where Athenian interest lay. Thrasymachus, it seems, can nod through everything that has gone on so far. He need not present himself as a champion of excess, nor of military thumos, nor of disorderly appetite.
The worry here concerns what is included under the umbrella of reason. If the analogy with the ruling political elite is to hold, reason should have at least one desire of its own: concern for the well-being of the composite, which in this case means the whole individual. But that raises the question why just that concern and none other should be uniquely reasonable. In many people’s minds ethics is largely a matter of getting some altruism or genuine concern for others in amongst the dominant forces of egoism or selfish concern for one’s own well-being. Indeed, that is how the whole subject has been structured in many texts, including the magisterial Method of Ethics by the nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick.1 It would seem high-handed, to say the least, to set things up so that concern for the well-being of others is simply invisible, or perhaps downgraded to a mere appetite, due to be governed by rampant self-interest, from the very beginning. But if reason’s interest is confined to the well-being of the self, this is how it will be. We get the horrendous result that genuine altruism is not even desirable, but represents a fracture in the soul, a moment in which a passion, such as sympathy for another, escapes the proper government of reason. It is just this that must not happen in the well-ordered soul.
This worry cannot be laid to rest by taking all desires and concerns out of the domain of reason. Reason needs some concerns of its own. For, if it is cleansed of desire altogether, then it is left with no agenda, and what qualifies it to govern desires, pulling them in any particular direction, or restraining or encouraging them to any particular degree? So conceived, reason becomes no more than Hume said it was, the pure slave of the passions, able to advance truths that may guide us in pursuing what we want, but quite unable to mount forces of its own against any particular passion we happen to have.
Perhaps, then, it would be better to move in the other direction, allowing reason to have in its domain not only egoism, but some concern for the well-being of others. The Athenian envoys are not now paradigms of reason in action. Since they are immune to concern for the Melians, they must have amputated part of their reasoning selves, and therefore fail to be well ordered and just.
This can be said, certainly, but the question is whether Republic has earned the right to say it, and the suspicion must be that it has not. For we still have no inkling why having a well-ordered soul is going to lead to anything like a common point of view with others, the kind of tendency to take the other person’s needs or requirements into consideration that the Athenian envoys so obviously lacked when it came to the Melians. We do not know why, if they pursue their purely selfish course, this will undermine their own happiness or flourishing. We do not know why the envoys, if they are to be ‘reasonable’, must forgo or betray Athens’s apparent best interest. To put it another way, Plato may at first sight be on course to meeting Glaucon’s challenge, by pulling tight a connection between a well-ordered soul and a happy one. But the well-ordering of the soul is simply a structure designed for the soul’s own harmony, and can potentially coincide with letting others go hang. And so long as that is so, Thrasymachus, the Athenian envoys, and for that matter neo-conservatives and other exponents of realpolitik, have not been silenced, or even met on proper ground.
Even staunch Platonists have thrown up their hands here. Thus the great Victorian scholar George Grote thought that Plato was trying to square the circle, deriving the virtue of justice, which is in fact centrally a virtue that regards others and their interests in a balance with one’s own, from the basically self-regarding or prudential aim of safeguarding the harmony of one’s own soul. It would be like proving that someone who is concerned about his own health is therefore concerned, or would be concerned if he was rational, about everybody else’s. It simply can’t be done.2