CHAPTER 6
Isn’t it the case... that when each of these three classes – the one that works for a living, the auxiliaries, and the guardians – performs its proper function and does its own job in the community, then this is morality and makes the community a moral one? (IV, 434c)
The ruling elite are the trustees of the community’s happiness. Plato has an entirely realistic sense of the causes of dissent and fragmentation within communities, which are centrally located in disparities of wealth and sexual success. Hence the Spartan communism of the guardians’ lives. The principle of specialization means that nothing must distract from their single-minded dedication to the good of the society, and since nothing is more distracting than concern for possessions and for sex, these must be stripped away. So the guardians are not allowed any possessions, and couplings are managed perfectly clinically, without room for private passion and private possessiveness. Again, there is a precise parallel with the later Christian ideal of sainthood, except that Plato realistically accepts that celibacy is not for everyone, even among the elite.
Once the ruling elite is educated properly, various good things accrue to the collective, at any rate so long as they are ruling. They embody genuine wisdom. They can also guarantee courage, for in Plato courage is an exercise of wisdom: ‘the retention of the notion, which has been inculcated by law through the agency of education, about what things and what kinds of things are to be feared’ (IV, 429c). Their rule is equivalent to self-discipline, the control of the lower by the higher, which is also the mastery of pleasure and desire. Finally, the morality of the state consists in this order and discipline, the embodiment of the principle that everyone should keep their place, the principle of specialization.
This last claim and the way it is unveiled particularly irritated Sir Karl Popper. Plato only reveals it after a fair amount of tedious dramatic build-up by Socrates, in which he presents himself as a hunter, first daunted by the fugitive quarry, then getting a glimpse of it, finally leaping on the principle in triumph (IV, 432c–434c). Popper sees fiendish literary cunning in this, a plot whereby the reader is lulled into thinking that Socrates is being carefully watched by Glaucon, so that the reader need not be on guard at all: ‘I cannot interpret it as anything but an attempt – it proved to be highly successful – to lull the reader’s critical faculties, and, by means of a dramatic display of verbal fireworks, to divert his attention from the intellectual poverty of this masterly piece of dialogue.’1 There may be something to Popper’s suspicion, but it is equally possible that Plato has other reasons for presenting the philosopher as a kind of hunter. He is well aware that other people are apt to regard the philosopher as a kind of wimp (V, 549e–550b), so the contrary implication of courage and skill in the philosophical quest is unlikely to be accidental.2
It is true that there is much to dislike in the idea that the principle of specialization is the key to morality, either in a collective or in an individual. In its political application it seems, as it did to Popper, little more than a principle for denying the bulk of the population any say in how they are governed. Evidently, for Plato, there is nothing particularly valuable in people having a say in their own affairs, or in being able to register dissent even from those who know better than they do. It is important, of course, that the ruling elite does know better than the shoemakers and the rest (although there is a serious problem about how the rabble are supposed to recognize this). But even so, we value individuality. The tyranny of those who know is still a tyranny. Parents with teenagers may genuinely know better what is in their children’s best interest. But it does not follow and is not true that the best regulated family is one in which the teenager has no choice over how to live and no space to experiment. Making our own mistakes has a value of its own. It is a corollary of the value we place on freedom and individuality, closely connected, obviously, to the value we have already stressed of thinking for oneself, embodied by the liberal Socrates of other dialogues.
Here, then, is a point at which defence of Republic best takes the tack of insisting that the political is only an analogy with the individual moral self. This is textually justified, for Socrates immediately turns to the individual to see how the match goes:
What we have to do now is apply the results we found in the case of the community to an individual. If there is a match, that will be fine; but if we find something different in the case of an individual, then we’ll return to the community to test the new result. With luck, the friction of comparing the two cases will enable morality to flare up from these fire-sticks, so to speak, and once it’s become visible we’ll make it more of a force in our own lives. (IV, 434e–435a).
So how does the idea stand up when we confine it to the individual?
The analogy is supposed to work because the ruling elite is parallel to reason, the auxiliaries or military is parallel to the ‘spirited’ part of the self, and the artisans are parallel to particular appetites and passions, of which Plato’s favourite examples are lust, hunger and thirst. The principle on which the self is divided into these ‘parts’ is not obvious, and Plato takes his time over it. The central fact from which he starts is the possibility of conflict within the individual: the conflict, for instance, between calm self-interest and raging appetite, or disgust and curiosity (IV, 439e). Once there is the possibility of conflict, it is to be approached by thinking of parties to the conflict ‘as if they were different things’ (IV, 440a). And this does indeed seem inevitable. Conflict is bound to be represented in terms of hypothesized traits: shame versus desire, temperance versus greed, prudence versus pleasure. It is the same train of thought that was later magnified by Freud, when he takes the simultaneous presence of contradictory impulses in a person to suggest the existence of a whole unconscious mind, a set of desires and beliefs with their own coherence whose occupants are hidden from the subject. Plato does not need this extravagance, but only the presence of individual desires and tendencies, bundled together under the tripartite heading of reason, ‘spirit’ and desire.3