for Ultimate Writer

Book IX

Plato is such a gifted writer that its easy to be carried away by the progress of the dialogue and not to notice some crucially important facts about it. The title of the Republic suggests that it’s a piece of political philosophy, and indeed, many scholars still treat it as such. But in what sense is it a piece of political philosophy? The city Socrates insists in Book II is truly just is discarded almost immediately in favor of a city Socrates refers to as “feverish” (φλεγμαινοσαν) with materialism. He takes a valiant stab, one might argue, at establishing order, or some semblance of justice, in this city, but admits, finally, in Book VIII that even at its best, the city is inherently unstable and will eventually give way to a dynamic of decline that will take if from and aristocratic community ruled by the best and finest elements within it, to a timocracy, or honor-loving (read “militaristic”) community, to an oligarchy, which is to say a community ruled by a wealthy few, to a democracy that places such a high value on freedom that it has no room for any other values, and finally, to a tyranny where it is not only the average citizens who are miserable, but where the tyrant is actually the most miserable of all.

Is Plato a cynic who is trying to show that the best we can ever hope for politically would be a brief period of communal human flourishing sandwiched between extended periods of misery and oppression, or does he have something else in mind? How much of The Republic actually focuses on politics? Not much if you think about it. The subject doesn’t even come up until Book II and then not for its own sake, but in the hope that it might throw light on the subject of what justice is in an individual and whether being just makes people happy. By the end of Book IV the discussion returns to the issue of justice at the level of the individual. That’s where Socrates suggests that justice is a harmonious relation between what he asserts are the three parts of the soul, or psyche: reason, desire, and spiritedness.

Books V-VII attempt to tackle the challenge of establishing justice in a city that has succumbed to the disease of materialism, but these books are also full of metaphysical and epistemological musings that have little obvious relation to politics. Plato’s famous “theory of forms” is introduced in Book V. Book VI presents an extended discourse on the difference between knowledge and belief. The famous “allegory of the cave” comes in Book VII. The city is once again the focus of Book VIII, but the emphasis there is on how even their carefully wrought city is inherently unstable and will thus inevitably give way to a series of increasingly unjust political regimes. Even in Book VIII, however, the emphasis is not merely on what one could call the logic of political decline. Each of the successively unjust political regimes is mirrored, according to Socrates, in a particular psychological type. Just as there are militaristic political regimes, so are there militaristic individuals. The same is true for mercenary regimes. That is, there is a specific personality type that cares for nothing but money. Democracies, according to Socrates, are mirrored in the psychology of spoiled, willful people who dislike any type of restraint, and tyrannies by people who are enslaved to their own desires and fears.

Socrates’ description of the etiology of these psychological types does not merely demonstrate profound insight into the nature of the human psyche, it has a political significance that is not immediately apparent. Each type is, in effect, the product of weaknesses inherent in the political system that precedes the one with which it is associated and this suggests that people are if not entirely, at least substantially, products of their environments. Aristotle takes up this insight more explicitly in the Nicomachean Ethics. But his source for the insight is undoubtedly here in The Republic. If you want people to behave well, and justly, you have to make sure that their environment, which in the context of the Republic is the state, encourages such behavior. The excessive value that, according to Socrates, is placed on freedom within a democracy does not encourage good and just behavior on the part of its citizens. On the contrary, it encourages licentiousness that leads, eventually, to social chaos. Order can be reestablished only through the agency of a charismatic leader.

Democracies are ideal breeding grounds, according to Socrates, for such charismatic leaders because they impose no constraints on ambition and because the unruly mobs that make them up are easier to control than would be the citizens in a more orderly society. The tyrant is a man in whom ambition is unconstrained by concerns of justice or rightness. He desires power and will use every means at his disposal to get it. But because he has never learned the virtue of restraint, he has no control over this desire, but is in fact controlled by it.

The tyrant comes the closest to the perfectly unjust man described in Book II as happier than the perfectly just man – and yet he is not happy. A tyrant, according to Socrates, lives his whole life without every having a real friend. He is “always one man’s master and another’s slave. The tyrannic nature never has a taste of freedom or true friendship” (576a 5). Everyone is just a means to the end of his ambition. Tyrants surround themselves with flatterers, or “if they have need of anything from anyone,” explains Socrates, “they themselves cringe and dare to assume any posture, acting as though they belonged to him” (575e 5-7).

The tyrant imagines enemies everywhere because he has indeed many enemies. His movements are so restricted by these fears that, according to Socrates, he is in effect imprisoned in his own castle. And all this because he is unable to tame his own desires. The real tyrant, asserts Socrates, is

in truth a real slave to the greatest fawning and slavery, and a flatterer of the most worthless men; and with his desires getting no kind of satisfaction, he shows that he is most in need of the most things and poor in truth, if one knows how to look at a soul as a whole. Throughout his entire life his is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains (579d 10-e 5.)

So now, finally, Socrates has offered what amounts to a proof that “the best and most just man is happiest.” He is most like the aristocratic ruler, ‘and is king of himself, while the worst and most unjust man,” continues Socrates, “is most wretched” (580b 7-c2).