For a classical educator, there are many educational goods to be achieved from reading Plato’s “Republic” with students because it is a dialogue that invites us to wonder about the most important questions humans can possibly ask: What is Reality? What is the Good? Does it exist? Can we know it? Why should we care?
Appearance vs Reality. Opinion vs Knowledge. The Relative vs. the Absolute. The Changeable vs. the Immutable. The Desirable vs the Good. These contrasts are intelligible and recognizable to all today, and have been since man’s earliest existence, though not necessarily expressed in these terms. But it was Plato who first gave them precise definitions, most profoundly plumbed their depths, and most comprehensively explored their ramifications, writing over 35 dialogues and 13 letters, totaling over 500,000 words, to do so. He was inspired to do so by the person of Socrates, who convinced Plato by his words, but most of all by his life, that there could be nothing more important than understanding and living out these distinctions, seeking and loving transcendent reality, knowledge, the absolute, the immutable, and the good in and through the immanent appearances, opinions, relativities, mutations, and desires of earthly life. And for Plato, Socrates did this as perfectly as any man could ever do it, up until his last breath after he drank the Hemlock.
For Plato, Socrates was a living icon of something higher, a higher level of existence, of consciousness, of being, of beauty, of goodness. Being in the presence of Socrates was mysteriously to be in the presence of these transcendent realities. The Plato scholar Catherine Pickstock described Socrates as a “walking liturgy.” Christianity teaches that only one man in history was an actual icon of the transcendent, being ontologically both God and man—“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. But as Jesus Christ was adumbrated religiously and morally by John the Baptist, “the greatest man born of women,” he was foreshadowed ontologically, as it were, by Socrates, who, one could say, was a preparatory icon of the Icon.
The primary insight of Plato and Socrates, which is at the root of the aforementioned contrasts, is that there is always something more to things than what is on the surface. In short, reality is symbolic. As physical icons represent physical realities, physical realities represent metaphysical realities. Of course, this is not an insight exclusive to Plato and Socrates, for it was known by the ancient Israelites, first and foremost, but also to all the ancient mystery cults as well as all the religions and cultures in the mytho-poetic stages of human consciousness preceding the axial age of Socrates’ classical Athens.
Homer knew it, as did the authors of the Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Indian Upanishads, and the Persian Avesta, and their audiences knew it as well. What Socrates embodied and spoke, and Plato created and wrote, was the first synthesis of this great religious insight, in all of its ramifications, with human rationality, that is, the intimate marriage of mythos with logos. According to Christians, a few centuries later, this marriage would be supernaturally incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, in which Reality itself became appearance, the Absolute became relative, Eternity became temporal, Infinity became finite, and the Good became a good—while paradoxically and mysteriously remaining absolute, eternal, infinite, and absolute.
“And Jesus answered, and said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon, the son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father Who is in Heaven’” (Matthew 16: 17). This to me is a very Platonic passage, a perfect instantiation and expression of Plato’s main and most paradoxical teaching. It is through Peter’s intimate contact with the invisible Father that he was able to accurately identify the visible Jesus. But was it not his intimate contact with the visible Jesus that first put him in intimate contact with the invisible Father? For Plato, everything we perceive with our senses, interpret with our imagination, and understand with our intellect is both what they are and more than what they are. But how do we know this to be the case? Is it not precisely by somehow being in contact with this suprasensible, unimaginable, and unthinkable reality that we are both able to recognize images as images, that is, as both expressions of and conduits of transcendent reality, and through this very recognition, to be taken up into this transcendent reality?
Plato cast 500,000 word-shadows on the cave wall in the hope that they were the sort of shadows that somehow, choreographed and rendered correctly, would enable the Athenian cave dwellers to recognize them as shadows, see through them, grasp their real objects, and ultimately the Real Object casting them, the agathon, the Good. Plato’s challenge and hope are now ours. The cave we are all now in is much darker, suffocating, and impregnable than anything Plato could have imagined. How do we cast life-giving shadows in it for our students? How can we read them rightly so they bring us and our students closer to the Good?
On teaching the Republic
The Republic is a dramatic work, and it is meant to be experienced as such. Therefore, we should not treat the dramatic aspects of it as so much window dressing to be ignored, so we can focus on abstract philosophical questions and principles. It’s perhaps easier to teach it this way, but it does a grave injustice to the work and thus to the students. Recognizing it as a complex drama also helps explain aspects it that seem confusing, incoherent, and even abhorrent, such as Socrates’ deceitful manipulation of Thrasymachus in Book I, his endorsement of the “noble lie” in Book IV and the famous “three waves” in Book V, and his banishment of the poets from the ideal city. Since it is dramatic, every episode of the book needs to be seen as a particular rhetorical situation and interpreted in light of the plot, characters, and setting. For example, if the climax of the plot is Socrates’ enigmatic description of the Good as “beyond being” near the end Book VI, and if an intimate encounter with the Good is required for truly knowing anything, as Socrates explains in this final section of Book VI, then the mode of discourse of the whole dialogue leading up to this climax is problematized, with the “conclusions” reached in the previous Books perhaps better understood as tentative, even ironic, with some of them perhaps even deliberately erroneous.
What is the Republic about? Everything. Yes, on the surface, it is a thought experiment about the “perfect city,” and so a work of idealist political philosophy, but it is so much more than this. It is, like its poetic predecessors, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a profound and comprehensive inquiry into the nature of Reality itself, including not just incredible insights into ethics and politics, but economics, sociology, mathematics, metaphysics, logic, epistemology, semiotics, aesthetics, psychology, religion, and culture. But most of all, in my view, it is a religious and spiritual work. Plato encountered the Good, the ultimate cause and source of being and truth, in the person of Socrates, and he wrote all his dialogues, but especially this one, as dramatic religious texts meant to be personally encountered and experienced in the heart, not merely read with the mind as intellectual exercises. Just as Christians read the New Testament on their knees in prayer and devotion to encounter the living and eternal God Himself, not just read words about Him, Plato wanted his readers to encounter the living and eternal Good that he mystically encountered in the person of Socrates, and he choreographed every word of the Republic with this spiritual end in mind.
For a classical educator, there are many educational goods to be achieved from reading Plato’s Republic with students, the same goods achieved from reading and discussing any Great Book (though I think it is among the very greatest of the Great Books). Above all, we want our students to grow in their knowledge and love of reality, and reading and discussing every Great Book with them is a fruitful occasion for this. But Plato’s Republic is especially fruitful towards this end because it is a dialogue that invites us—indeed, compels us (if taught well!)—to wonder about the most important questions humans can possibly ask: What is Reality? What is the Good? Does it exist? Can we know it? Why should we care?
On Book II
“Tell me, is there in your opinion a kind of good that we would choose to have not because we desire its consequences, but because we delight in it for its own sake—such as enjoyment and all the pleasures which are harmless and leave no after effects Other than the enjoyment in having them?” (357b–c).
The ultimate teaching of the book. There is such a thing as intrinsic goodness that is always and everywhere desirable, period, not just desirable sometimes and from our perspective. In Books VI and VII, the Good will be shown to be just this eminently desirable object, and justice itself will be shown as a direct participation in the Good and thus worth choosing for its own sake, even at the expense of the loss of all other goods.
In the next section, we get a threefold division of goods. This is wonderful to teach and gets the students thinking critically about their own desires. Ask the students to think of examples of each of the three categories of goods.
“Well, that’s not the opinion of the many,” he said, “rather it seems to belong to the form of drudgery, which should be practiced for the sake of wages and the reputation that comes from opinion; but all by itself it should be fled from as something hard” (358a–b).
This section is great for contrasting classical and modern ethics. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, all modern ethical philosophy is either Encyclopedic or Genealogical. If the former, it is either deontology or utilitarian, that is, some version of Kant or Mill. If the latter, it is either Nietzschean or Nietzschean lite, the former taking the form of an explicit nihilistic will-to-power along with a neo-pagan, Aristocratic value system, the latter being some version of egalitarian and therapeutic emotivism—still the will to power, but now with softer, bourgeois values. In all of these, justice is not sought for its own sake as a desirable good. In deontology, there is an absoluteness and oughtness about acting justly, but it is not because it is a desirable good. In utilitarianism, the just act is only instrumentally good, for both the person and the community, and only because it leads to other non-moral goods, such as pleasure or security. In lite or heavy Nietzscheanism (of which Thrasymachus was the Original G), “justice” doesn’t exist at all, for a real Good with intrinsic ontological and moral authority doesn’t exist at all, and is only a purely rhetorical ploy to mask the will to power of some people over others, or a person over himself.
“They say that doing injustice is naturally good, and suffering injustice bad, but that the bad in suffering injustice far exceeds the good in doing it; so that, when they do injustice to one another and suffer it and taste of both, it seems profitable—to those who are not able to escape the one and choose the other—to set down a compact among a themselves neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. And from there they began to set down their own laws and compacts and to name what the law commands lawful and just” (358e–359a).
It is amazing to me to see both how closely this resembles the social contract theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and how much this describes how just about all of us think about politics when we are honest. Here we can begin to ask the students what they think about the nature and purpose of law and political order in general, and to bring up the all-important question whether this is the truth about politics. Is it ultimately just a self-serving, pragmatic social contract? If so, what does this mean about justice? Doesn’t a social contract model of politics presuppose a Thrasymachean/Nietzschean denial of the existence of the Good and hence the Just?
“They’ll say that the just man who has such a disposition will be whipped; he’ll be racked; he’ll be bound; he’ll have both his eyes burned out; and, at the end, when he has undergone every sort of evil, he’ll be crucified and know that one shouldn’t wish to be, but to seem to be, just. After all, Aeschylus’ saying applies far more correctly to the unjust man. For really, they will say, it is the unjust man, because he pursues a thing dependent on truth and does not live in the light of opinion, who does not wish to seem unjust but to be unjust” (361e–362a).
Ask students to give an answer to the following simplified defense (or something like it) of the position Socrates will argue against for the rest of the dialogue: According to this passage and the Ring of Gyges story, people want to get what they desire. This seems self-evident. But then no one desires to be just, because being just means you can’t get everything you want. So, people pretend to act justly only because by doing so they get more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. We all wink at the word justice, knowing it isn’t real, but we need to pretend it is so people will follow the rules and not kill or steal from each other.
What is the key idea here? Life is, after all, about getting what we most want, but only if it is what we should want! This is Plato’s whole point. The main teaching of Socrates is that we don’t know what we should want until we sincerely ask the questions: “Do I want what I should want?” “Do I have good reasons for wanting what I now want?” And these questions either presuppose or lead to the questions: “What is my good?” “What is the Good?” “Is there such a thing as the Good?” If students start asking themselves these questions, and continue to do so throughout life, we have taught the Republic well.
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