CHAPTER 14
‘If one type of character outweighs the rest, so to speak, then don’t you think it draws all the other types with it?’
‘Yes, that’s the only possible way in which political systems arise,’ he agreed. (VIII, 544e)
After chewing the heavy metaphysical and epistemological themes of Books V to VII, it is something of a relief to return to a diet of Plato-lite in Book VIII. It is not that the heavy themes are entirely forgotten. But for the moment the precise nature of the illumination or understanding obtained by the philosopher-kings is less important than the lovingly painted canvas of folly- and vice-displaying kings who are not philosophers. Nobody can read Book VIII without recognizing that Plato was a connoisseur of human flaws and failures, a worthy ancestor of Swift, Voltaire, Pope or Proust.
There is one interesting aspect of this book to notice before we come to the display itself. Plato makes it clear that he goes further than the analogy between the city and the soul or agent that has been important so far. He believes in a causal connection rather than a mere analogy. As the quotation above shows, he thinks that it is the nature of agents that determines the nature of the political collective that they form.
At first glance this might seem innocuous enough. We would expect, for instance, a warlike society to come about as a result of warlike individual members. Anything else might seem almost miraculous, as if a collective composed entirely of pacifists could in some other unnatural way itself be warlike. But in fact the matter is much more complex. Indeed, there exists no accepted taxonomy of the ways in which properties of collectives arise from (in philosopher’s jargon ‘supervene upon’) the properties of individual members. It is easy to think of exceptions to the simple model in which warlike individuals generate warlike society. One divergence arises when in public discourse certain kinds of interest become inadmissible. The individuals in a tribunal may then individually desire one kind of outcome, but by the constraints of their role be unable either to advocate it or to implement it. In the United States, for example, each member of a Supreme Court might be a devout Christian, but the Court itself may be unable to make a decision that would be welcome to people of that particular religion. Such an optimistic complication lies at the very heart of constitutional design, whereby through a suitable system of checks and balances the energies of people who are individually self-seeking and partisan can, it is hoped, be harnessed towards collective ends.
A similar role may be played by the culture of honour, or Locke’s law of fashion or Grote’s King Nomos from chapter 1. Here a set of individually self-seeking agents may find themselves constrained in their pursuit of their own interest by a sense of what is and what is not ‘done’, which is itself the creature of their collective interactions and expectations. So as well as warlike individuals making up a warlike society, we have to recognize the reverse direction of causation, where a warlike society makes warlike individuals.
A more pessimistic dissonance arises when individuals who are themselves perfectly rational become enmeshed in versions of the voting paradox first noticed by Condorcet in the eighteenth century. In the simplest version we have three people (A, B and C) ranking three upshots, X, Y and Z. A prefers X to Y to Z. B prefers Y to Z to X. Finally C prefers Z to X to Y. Then a majority of two out of three rank X above Y; a majority of two out of three rank Y above Z, and if X outranks Y and Y outranks Z, we would expect X to outrank Z. But alas, a majority of two out of three also rank Z above X. Taken together, these rankings are incoherent, and the collective may be paralysed in deciding what to do. Yet each individual agent is perfectly coherent, so once more the collective is only an impure mirror of the individuals who make it up.
Plato shows no awareness of the complexities of supervenience, and historically one cannot blame him. He clung to the simple model whereby the follies and vices of particular states would arise from, but also display, writ large as it were, the follies and vices of the individuals making them up. Given the indefinite but vast number of ways in which individuals can shake up their own cocktails of vice and folly, it might seem a long and dreary business to begin to catalogue them all. But Plato has a brisk set of categories, and a sprightly brush when it comes to painting the way they play out in politics and individuals alike.
The five systems that interest Plato are first, of course, the rule of the philosopher-kings: the particular kind of aristocratic system that he has been fashioning all along. Second there is the rule of the ‘spirited’ kind of aristocracy, a Spartan or heroic system marked by competition and determination. Plato calls this a ‘timocracy’, or ‘timarchy’, deriving from rule by ambition. Third there is oligarchy, by which Plato means plutocracy, or rule by the rich. Fourth there is democracy, or rule by the people, and fifth there is absolute dictatorship, rule by one tyrant. These systems form a descending staircase, and by showing us the descent Plato hopes to convince us to admire the rule of philosopher-kings, and the psychology of the philosophers themselves.
Timarchy is the system found in Sparta. The timarchic individual resembles the man of too much thumos whom we met in section 7 – tough, brave, mettlesome and stupid. A system in which such individuals rule shares the military aspects of life in the ideal republic. Its militia will live the same communal life, and there is a similar emphasis on war as the proper employment of the ruling class. However, there will be overvaluation of military men, and because of the general loutishness of the society, there will be greed, and since displays of wealth are frowned upon, this greed will issue in miserliness. Individuals within the society will be supercilious, harsh but submissive to authority, ambitious but free from the controls offered by reason and culture. They will come about as a degeneration from philosopher-kings, largely because philosopher-kings will be undervalued by women and servants, inferior people, who will be unable to appreciate their reserve and unworldliness. They will set other values against them, and eventually these other values will triumph (one might think of the declining status of professors, and of academic virtues in general, in our own body politic).
The oligarchic system descends from timarchy rather as the values of professional sport change from those of sheer glory in competition to those accorded to unseemly displays of wealth. This in turn breeds envy, and once more a corresponding undervaluation of genuine virtue. The rulers of a timarchy then scheme to make wealth a necessary condition of participation in public office, as we see in the USA. Gradually their increasingly mercenary natures unfit them for martial pursuits, even making them unwilling to pay a tax so that others fight for them (which in any event breeds fear and conflict within the state). Furthermore the oligarch, by capitalizing on his wealth, can become a mere consumer, a drone without a purposeful role in his society.1 Finally, since society divides into the haves and the have-nots, we get antagonism and plots, beggars and criminals.
An oligarchic individual descends from a timarchic individual who has been ruined. He feels the sting of poverty, and installs his ‘desirous and mercenary’ side on the throne of his concerns (VIII, 553c). He is then led by greed and miserliness, although not so much by appetite. In fact, he is rather ascetic, since unnecessary desires cost money pointlessly. However, he will find criminal desires within himself, when opportunities for fraud or theft arise, and even if these are suppressed by fear of discovery or the remnants of decency, this itself will be a conflict within his soul, corresponding to the conflicts in the oligarchic city. His meanness is a faultline of weakness, interfering with his capacity to earn prestige or honour. He is a failure.
The transition to the penultimate system, democracy, happens when oligarchy has had its day. The oligarchs will breed indisciplined and intemperate children, spoiled, soft and lazy, many of whom will ruin themselves. These become resentful and envious, but this goes unnoticed by the rich who remain blind to the evil their pursuit of wealth creates. When a crisis comes, such as a war, the poor get a taste of their own power and become aware of the flaccid condition of the rich. The slightest excuse triggers conflict, and the poor take over, distributing political power and office at random.
Democratic communities are ‘informed by independence and freedom of speech, and everyone has the right to do as he chooses’ (VIII, 557b). They breed colourful variety, and are free to experiment with different laws and arrangements according to whim. This may be superficially attractive: it is the blueprint for an ‘enjoyable, lax, and variegated kind of political system, which treats everyone as equal, whether or not they are’ (VIII, 558c – one almost sees Plato wrinkling his nose here, although in fact no ancient democracy ever approximated to this egalitarian ideal).
Curiously Plato does not go on to detail the evils of this system directly, as he did in the other cases. Perhaps he thinks it is damned obviously enough by the mere fact of its egalitarianism, installing as guides those who know nothing just as readily as those who know their way about. Instead he goes immediately to the parallel in the individual agent, painting a wonderful picture of the disordered, lax, uninhibited hedonistic mind in which each passing fancy is given full rein:
‘So that’s how he lives,’ I said. ‘He indulges in every passing desire that each day brings. One day he gets drunk at a party, the next day he’s sipping water and trying to lose weight; then again, he sometimes takes exercise, sometimes takes things easy without a care in the world, and sometimes he’s apparently a student of philosophy. At frequent intervals, he gets involved in community affairs... His lifestyle has no rhyme or reason, but he thinks it enjoyable, free, and enviable and he never dispenses with it.’ (VIII, 561c–d)
Well, we have all been there. Again, Plato shows a curious unwillingness to press the issue of just what is wrong or even unhappy about the figure he has painted. His democratic individual sounds a bit like all of us, and a lot like P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful Bertie Wooster, a paid-up member of the Drones club, irresolute, weak-willed, rudderless, someone who by his own account ‘flits and sips’, but potentially attractive enough and certainly happy enough. Why should we side with the iron Victorian aunts who so deplore poor Bertie? Why should steely resolution and rectitude, perfect immunity to the carnival of the appetites, be so admirable? Perhaps in Plato’s mind the possibility of a variety of successive desires and appetites is conflated with the internal conflict which destroys harmony and well-being. But if this is so it is a mistake: if I take up the banjo one week and drop it the next, there need be no time at which I suffer any conflict. Overall I will tend to fail in my ambitions, but since by the time I fail they are no longer ambitions, all is well.
Or perhaps such changeability excites his general fear of change and valuation of what is permanent, or perhaps this is just one of those grumpy old men moments.
Plato gets on to firmer ground with the final, most debased form of government: dictatorship. In democracy the overvaluation of freedom naturally degenerates into licence and lawlessness, a process feared in our own times as it was in his, moralized about by innumerable newspaper editors and right-wing commentators. Indeed, Plato’s whole description of the process sounds surprisingly modern:
In these circumstances, for example, teachers are afraid of their pupils and curry favour with them, while pupils despise their teachers and their attendants as well. In short, the younger generation starts to look like the older generation, and they turn any conversation or action into a trial of strength with their elders; meanwhile, the oldermembers of the community adapt themselves to the younger ones, ooze frivolity and charm, and model their behaviour on that of the young, because they don’t want to be thought disagreeable tyrants. (VIII, 563a–b)
A world in which democratic leaders like to spend their energy on facelifts, cosmetics and suntans while simultaneously mourning for lost respect would have held no surprises for Plato.
Licence, however, quickly turns to slavery. This happens because the class of ‘drones’ includes vigorous, criminal natures. These form factions and begin to dominate the democratic assemblies. They silence dissent, and pay off the have-nots with whatever they can steal from those who offend the populace. Dissent and lawsuits break out, heralding the arrival of a demagogue, a self-styled ‘champion of the people’. But once such a champion has tasted blood, the road to dictatorship is inevitable and steep. One crime leads to more, practice makes perfect, and the way opens for the Robespierres and Stalins to become our most familiar embodiments of evil and power.
In Books VIII and IX Plato gives a marvellous account of the worms that gnaw at dictatorships: reliance on mercenaries, the resentment of those inevitably victimized on the way to power, the ascendancy of flatterers and suppression of merit, the need to invent foreign enemies, the pervasive atmosphere of fear, and so on. Corresponding to this, the worst form of government, there is the dictatorial personality: ‘Oppression and servitude must pervade his mind, with the truly good parts of it being oppressed, and an evil, crazed minority doing the oppressing’ (IX, 577d). The fickle appetites and lusts that tyrannize the dictator can never be fulfilled, while his enslavement to them pervades his whole life: ‘resentful, unreliable, immoral, friendless, and unjust... he gives room and board to every vice’ (IX, 580a).
It is all very squalid, and history shows plenty of examples of tyrants conforming to the picture. We cannot doubt that Plato’s loathing of dictatorship was profound and heartfelt. On the other hand, the actual argument is somewhat more flimsy. The question is which psychological type is actually modelled by political dictatorship? On the face of it, one of the dreadful things about a political dictatorship would be the permeating fear. But the libertine that Plato gives us has no particular reason for fear. Plato gives us plenty of reasons for not aspiring to be an actual dictator – the impossibility of friendship as well as the insecurity and fear. But when we get away from politics and back to psychology, the correspondence is at best unclear. One might even ask why the philosopher-king does not model dictatorship, for one part of his mind clearly rules absolutely. They may not be found so often in history, but we can certainly imagine benevolent dictators, or dictators who rule in the firm apprehension of where their subjects’ well-being lies. Even among the highly imperfect succession of Roman emperors, some were better than others. Catherine the Great was a learned woman with both friends and lovers, who worked hard for the good of Russia with diligence and constancy.
Plato does not pause over this kind of subtlety. Instead, the drama is that we have a descending order of political systems, and of corresponding personalities. Plato clearly envisaged the degeneration he talks about as a process in time, with democracy nearly the worst and dictatorship the worst and last. He was not familiar with the characteristic processes of our own time whereby in a democracy whoever controls the wealth controls the media, and whoever controls the media controls the ballot – the process that has led us to a new kind of oligarchy. But that is because ancient Athenian democracy was not representative: it was one of direct participation by qualified citizens. The modern twists and turns of the spiral downwards was not so much of a threat.
At the pinnacle is the system, and thence the character, of the philosopher-king, who rules himself and others in the light of his understanding of the good. Below we have mettlesome men, those of mere spirit, and then people in thrall to wealth; these are succeded by the anarchic and irresolute democrat, and worst of all the vicious, friendless dictator, whose power is only a mirror image of his own enslavement to ‘terrible desires with prodigious appetites’ (IX, 573d).
And with that Socrates finally answers Glaucon’s challenge from Book II, of showing that morality, in and of itself and regardless of its consequences, benefits the possessor, and that immorality similarly harms him. Real happiness does coincide with government by virtue and wisdom, the well-ordering of the soul. It is not found either in the pursuit of glory, or of wealth, or in the licence of the democrat, and still less in the slavery hidden behind the unbridled will of the dictator.
To reinforce this message, Plato offers further thoughts, of which the most interesting returns to the threefold division of the mind, now described as the intellectual part directed towards the truth of things, the passionate part directed towards power, success and fame, and the desirous or mercenary part. The philosopher, in whom the first predominates, is then presented as at least acquainted with the pleasures of the other two, while they in turn remain ignorant of the pleasures of philosophy. The point was later repeated by John Stuart Mill in his prim Victorian attempt to show that those who knew both types of pleasure would always choose the ‘higher’ over the ‘lower’ – as if philosophers could never enjoy cowboy films or detective stories. The asymmetry, that the philosopher knows a wider spectrum of pleasures, is then transmuted into the philosopher’s life being more enjoyable, although the transformation remains something of a conjuring trick. It is very well to talk of the joyous contemplation of the eternal, whether in the shape of mathematics or the form of the good, or God himself, but it is much harder to show that the ecstasy is ‘more pleasurable’ than, say, that which accompanies the despised pleasures that involve the body. Even saints have been driven to describe their raptures in sexual terms.2
Throughout Plato’s discussion there is a lurking ambiguity about the role of the highest part of the mind, the philosophical or intellectual part. Sometimes, it seems that this is the part that delivers knowledge and truth. But more often it is a part which values only knowledge and truth. ‘[It] is directed at every moment towards knowing the truth of things, and isn’t interested in the slightest in money and reputation’ (IX, 581b). But these are two very different things. It is one thing to suggest that we ought to pursue our lives as far as possible in the light of what we know and what we take to be true. Perhaps that is obvious enough, although one might test it by wondering whether sometimes illusions are necessary for us to preserve our sanity. But it is an entirely different thing to give thedesire for knowledge and truth a monopoly amongst human desires, so that in the best form of life it is the only desire on which the agent acts. Only sleight of hand gets us from the one, quite ordinary thought, to the other almost insane thought. For only a little reflection shows that a psychology in which the desire for knowledge and truth is the only desire is incapable of most of what makes human life recognizable, let alone enjoyable. Furthermore, it is likely to be crippled in its own terms, having no compass, for example, to distinguish between important and unimportant truths, useful and useless knowledge, and relevant and irrelevant facts.
This is certainly so if we think of everyday truths, which may or may not bear upon anything of interest. A trainspotter may know a lot about the subject of his hobby, and have a desire, even an obsessive singleminded desire, to know more. But this hardly puts him at the pinnacle of human virtue and felicity. However, the political discussion so far has been free from the elaborate metaphysics of Books V to VII. That makes its reappearance in a rearguard action at this point. Platonists do not have in mind a life spent in the promiscuous collection of useless and disconnected scraps of truth. They want us to think of a life devoted to Higher Thought, to achieving the wisdom available only to the philosophical elite. Plato argues that because of the superior reality of the objects of this contemplation, by comparison more earthly pleasures are in effect false pleasures, the tinsel and shadows of appearance in place of the solid rock of reality. Some earthly pleasures are necessary, since it is essential to satisfy hunger and thirst. But the rest can and should be ignored. Here the levels of reality established by the Line and the Cave do real work (perhaps real damage), since without them there is no reason for thinking that worldly concerns result only in false pleasures. Pleasures are notoriously fleeting, no sooner enjoyed than lost, but this does not mean that they are not real. It can be pleasurable to watch a cricket match, and even one that lasts five days. It would not be better to watch one that lasted for ever. For one thing, it is integral to the pleasure that the match will have a conclusion.
At this point as well, the original comparison between the sovereign place of philosophy in the soul, and the job of kingship, is stretched beyond breaking point. For philosopher-kings are to rule on behalf of the whole collective: the military and the commercial sectors included. They were to be trustees for the well-ordering and happiness of the whole state. They did not have an agenda of their own which included suppressing or destroying the other classes in the state. They would and could govern the other classes, and this is their proper function, but there is no impression that their government would proceed by telling people that they could not pursue the various jobs to which they were adapted – a policy which would itself trespass against the principle of specialization. Yet by installing the desire for knowledge and truth in its monopoly or near-monopoly position, accompanied only by few ‘necessary’ desires, Plato induces exactly this bias or distortion in the soul.
We may find Plato’s project elevated and sublime, or we may find it self-deceived and fantastical, even before the triumphant calculation that a philosopher’s life is 729 times more pleasurable than that of a dictator (IX, 587e). Impressed by the wonderful rhetoric, we may think that Thrasymachus and Glaucon have been answered, that the well-ordered soul is indeed the happiest, and that the injustice or greed, the licentious desires of the immoral person, inevitably fracture and destroy the internal harmony without which happiness is impossible. Or, we may more coolly remember the brutal Athenian envoys, and wonder whether the connection between the injustice they are bent upon, and disharmony within Athens itself, is really so very convincing. But if we think that, then at least Plato will have paved the way for the next thought, which is that a city that could send envoys on such a mission is hardly likely itself to be an earthly paradise. The realpolitik in its foreign affairs will predictably resurface in its internal government, and historically it did. The Athens that sent the Melian envoys was unstable and torn by internal dissent. Nobody can look to today’s USA of neo-conservatives as a model of proportion and harmony. Here is Thomas Hobbes’s presentation of the decay of the Athenian democracy. This stunning, and chilling, passage was written in 1628, summarizing the account in Thucydides written around 400 BC:
In those days it was impossible for any man to give good and profitable counsel for the commonwealth, and not incur the displeasure of the people.
For their opinion was such of their own power, and of the facility of achieving whatsoever action they undertook, that such men only swayed the assemblies, and were esteemed wise and good commonwealths men, as did put them upon the most dangerous and desperate enterprizes.
Whereas he that gave them temperate and discreet advice, was thought a coward, or not to understand, or else to malign their power. And no marvel: for much prosperity (to which they had now for many years been accustomed) maketh men in love with themselves; and it is hard for any man to love that counsel which maketh him love himself the less.
And it holdeth much more in a multitude, than in one man. For a man that reasoneth with himself, will not be ashamed to admit of timorous suggestions in his business, that he may the stronglier provide; but in public deliberations before a multitude, fear (which for the most part adviseth well, though it execute not so) seldom or never sheweth itself or is admitted.
By this means it came to pass amongst the Athenians, who thought they were able to do anything, that wicked men and flatterers drave them headlong into those actions that were to ruin them; and the good men either durst not oppose, or if they did, undid themselves.3
Surely it is impossible to read this without reflecting on the parallels in our own time, whether in Washington or London, when the war drums beat and the governments falsify the information, conspire with the proprietors of the press, bully the judiciary, employ known criminals, lie about the results, destroy civil liberties, and of course are deaf to any source of counsel that ‘maketh them love themselves the less’.
The evils Hobbes depicts are rather different from those that Plato saw dragging democracy down into dictatorship. But they are equally disorders of the body politic. They infect representative democracy, with its dependency on the ballot box, as badly as they infected the direct democracy of Athens. And they form the most effective riposte to Thrasymachus that exists, thrusting home the point that disorder in pursuit of self-interest, power and licence will be a reflection of internal disorder, of complacency, lack of imagination, rashness and inability to listen to benevolence and prudence, let alone justice.
Book IX ends with more reflections on the state of the virtuous man, and his concern for things of the mind and the harmony of his soul. It is also an explicit statement that the whole thought-experiment has been just that: the presentation of an ideal of life and society, not as a practical proposal, but as a template against which to gauge our own shortcomings:
‘If that’s what’s important to him,’ he said, ‘he’s unlikely to have anything to do with government.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘he certainly will, in his own community. But I agree that he probably won’t in the country of his birth, short of divine intervention.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You mean that he will in the community we’ve just been founding and describing, which can’t be accommodated anywhere in the world, and therefore rests at the level of ideas.’
‘It may be, however,’ I replied, ‘that it is retained in heaven as a paradigm for those who desire to see it and, through seeing it, to return from exile. In fact, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether it exists or will exist anywhere: it’s still the only community in whose government he could play a part.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he said. (IX, 592, a–b)
In many ways this, the end of Book IX marks the climax of Republic. Its historical importance is hard to overstate. Of course, many moral traditions – perhaps all – stress moderation, the mastery of desire, the suppression of those aspects that make man the wolf of man, as the key to the well-ordered mind. Plato cannot be singlehandedly credited for all subsequent voicings of that idea. Nor is his idea of renunciation the same as that of the roughly contemporary movement of Buddhism, or the developments of Stoicism some fifty years after Plato’s death, and Christianity three centuries later, with their even more insistent otherworldliness, and opposition to desire. On the other hand, the bare truth is that as far as the West is concerned, Plato came first. Other movements of this kind fall into step behind him.