The Unfeasibility of Plato’s Republic
Posted on | September 20, 2009 | No Comments
It’s seeming more and more to me that Plato was Socrates with bitterness in his heart.
All of his earlier work more likely attributable to the historical Socrates seems more forgiving, as though the teacher were aware of some kind of broader truth that put him at peace with the quarrels and flaws of his society.
But after his death, Plato’s characterization of Socrates became a kind of caricature of himself. He placed his beliefs into his mentor’s mouth as if he were assuming the man would speak this way if he were to look back on his own death and see his executors for what Plato saw them as. This is what scholars refer to as the “natural progression of the Socratic method,” but I wholeheartedly refute that the historical Socrates would have turned into anything like what Plato created.
After Socrates’ death, Plato’s works gradually became more about his own reflections on the failure of democracy (dealing with the sophists and his own formative years spent wholly during the Peloponnesian War) and the misfortunate annals of a philosopher living among what he saw as the intentionally ignorant masses.
He said of Socrates when his mentor died that he was the best, wisest, and most good. If that’s what he felt, then it wouldn’t be stretch to believe that, in his contempt, he created for himself an image of the humanity which killed his idol in which they were ignoble and self-destructive; that the many, given reign, would opt to kill the best example of their kind. And because of this, he saw the many as unfit to rule and the demos, or democracy, as a society of charlatans masquerading as rulers of that which they can’t begin to fathom.
It’s evident in even his chosen nomenclature for the caste system in his Republic. He calls the elite class of philosophers the guardians of his polis. The word “guardian” lends to the idea that there is something necessary not only to rule the city-state, but to protect it. And if he sees the state and the people as one without borders, then what would a guardian protect the people from but themselves? If he were truly trying to create an equal society, I don’t see why he would have to come up with a noble lie, as he named it, wherein every individual is taught a fundamental lie in order to keep them respectful of their place within the caste system. Just as a cobbler or a builder has the skill of cobbling or building, wouldn’t a guardian or an auxiliary have the respective skills of politicking or soldiering? Why treat them as entirely different classes instead of merely other trades?
What really gets me is that Plato never seems concerned with the fact that a man like Socrates wouldn’t make it out alive of his Republic. If he weren’t executed for relentlessly questioning the noble lie (which he absolutely would, given his concept of the examined life,) he would surely be killed or exiled for who he was: a poor man who transcended his given class in order to become one of the wisest philosophers to have existed. Under Plato’s system, his mentor would be forced to live his life in the class he was born to, lest he reveal his potential wisdom at a very early age. There is no room for intellectual late bloomers in Plato’s Republic. Think of all those men whose contributions to society occurred in their later years and think of all the lost potential.
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