In Our Time - Plato's Republic

Episode Date: June 29, 2017

Is it always better to be just than unjust? That is the central question of Plato's Republic, discussed here by Melvyn Bragg and guests. Writing in c380BC, Plato applied this question both to the individual and the city-state, considering earlier and current forms of government in Athens and potential forms, in which the ideal city might be ruled by philosophers. The Republic is arguably Plato's best known and greatest work, a dialogue between Socrates and his companions, featuring the allegory of the cave and ideas about immortality of the soul, the value of poetry to society, and democracy's vulnerability to a clever demagogue seeking tyranny.With Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldMM McCabe Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College LondonandJames Warren Fellow of Corpus Christi College and a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Plato's Republic, written around 380 BC, explores whether it's always better to be just than unjust, and is seen as a cornerstone of Western philosophy.

It takes the form of a dialogue between Plato's teacher, Socrates, and his companions, and is said around 430 BC since when Athens had teetered between tyranny and direct democracy and as a democracy had put Socrates to death. One companion argues that we would all behave unjustly if we could get away with it. To address this, Socrates imagines what a perfectly just city would be like and applies lessons from that to the individual soul. And if the soul is best ruled by reason, he argues the city would be best ruled by philosophers. With me to discuss Plato's Republic are Angela Hobbes, Professor,

of the public understanding of philosophy of the University of Sheffield, M. M. McCabe, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Emerita at King's College London, and James Warren, a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a reader in ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge. James Warren, what was the political situation in Athens when Plato was writing the Republic? He's writing the Republic, as you said, in the first quarter of the 4th century BC. Athens at this point is a direct democracy, which means every citizen is fully involved in directly

voting. Every male, free men. Yeah, citizens mean adult, freeborn males. So it's an independent city state ruled in this direct democratic way. It hasn't always been so. In the period between

the dramatic date of this dialogue and when it's written, Athens had gone through upheavals at the end of a long war and had gone through a period of an oligarchic coup in around 404, quite a brutal regime, and then democracy was restored. And then also the important date to remember in the intervening period

between the composition and dramatic date is the execution of Socrates, right at the end of the 5th century BC. Let's just get down briefly, why do I say briefly? I've got plenty of time. The idea of Athenian democracy, it's male, it's free men, and then they govern by lot. Can you just develop it a bit? Some of their offices are assigned by lot.

That was thought to be a democratic way of doing it because it prevents bribery, corruption and various things. It's democratic in the sense that every citizen has the ability to attend the assembly and vote on matters, can speak at the assembly, and also was then involved in various other democratic methods like mass juries and so on, like the one that convicted Socrates. And every citizen was supposed to take part in wars?

That's right, yeah. So it's quite a developed, idea of what they have to do, even though it seems to us a narrow idea of who they are. Oh, right. So there are quite a lot of obligations placed on a citizen, and that was recognised later on by giving people payment for attending these kinds of institutions. What used to Socrates make of, what uses play to make of Socrates in this book? Well, Socrates has, obviously, was a well-known figure in Athens during his lifetime, and was known for being a difficult critic of various Athenian presumptions and ideas.

So he stands in many ways for a searching philosophical critique of the status quo. He's also standing, I think, because of the way his life ended, as a symbol of what democracy can do to philosophy. In the end, he was put to death in 399, you see, and it was to the great grief of Plato. And others, yes. Yes. Can you just briefly say why it was put to death? Well, he was put to death after a trial which the indictment was on two counts.

One was an indictment of corrupting the youth of Athens, and the other was introducing gods that the cities didn't believe in. So it was both that he was thought to be morally corrupting. It's not what corrupting meant morally corrupting. It didn't mean corrupting their ideas. It meant corrupting their persons. Well, you corrupt their persons by corrupting their ideas by encouraging them to question what it meant to be virtuous

or what it meant to be good or what it meant to be so on and that was thought to have encouraged various people including some of those who were involved in this oligarchic revolution at the end of the 5th century. Those were very heavily associated with Socrates and indeed with Plato. They were his relatives, some of them. But in Plato's life, Socrates was massive, major, very important figure

He's a bit of a celebrity. And he blamed democracy for the death of Socrates. Yes, I should think so. You mean you should think so in both sense? Yeah, I think he was right. Angie Hobbes, there's a challenge laid down at the beginning of the book by Thrasi Marcus. He lays these challenges down to Socrates. What is it?

Yes, so Thrasimachus is a sophist. He's a travelling professional teacher of rhetoric and philosophy who gives the sons of wealthy men the kind of skills they need to get on public life. And they've already having a debate about what is justice. They've already dismissed a couple of conventional notions that justice is telling the truth and returning what you've borrowed or it's helping your friends and harming your enemies. And the Thrasymachus bursts in and says,

ah, he says, you know, this justice, it is simply the interest of the stronger. And by that he means that whoever is in power, in a state is the stronger party, whether the state is ruled by a monarchy, an aristocracy, a democracy, whoever is in power is de facto the stronger. And they make laws, thinks Thrasimachus, cynically in their own interest, and they then force the ruled to obey those laws, and they say that obeying the laws is justice. So if you are one of the ruled and you obey the laws, all you're doing, whether you know it or not is simply serving the interests of the stronger party, and you're a fool you've been duped because this institution of justice is simply a cynical cover for the exploitation of the weak ruled by the stronger rulers.

Now, Socrates says, well, hang on a minute. This ruling, this ruling is an art, it's a skill. And the old arts, don't they? They look to the interests of their subjects. So the art of ruling will look to the interest of the subjects who are being ruled. but Thrismachus is having absolutely none of this. He says, no, no, no. It's rulers are like shepherds.

They fatten up their flock simply so they can get a better price for them at market. And if rulers look after the ruled at all, it's simply because they can then exploit them more effectively. He then moves the discussion from the purely sort of political realm into the private realm as well. And he gives us what I think is his real definition. And he says, injustice is in fact simply serving your own interests as effectively and as ruthlessly as you can.

Justice is treating other people decently and fairly. Justice is a mug's game. It's for naive simpletons. The real virtue, the virtue of common sense, is to be unjust. That's the prudent, admirable man. We would all be tyrants if we could. Injustice pays. Justice doesn't. So this is the first of ten books, and it kicks off the whole argument, which goes into psychology and politics and art and the discussion of the soul and so on.

What is the... Where is he speaking from? You've talked to him as a wandering teacher. Does he have a philosophy contrary to that of Socrates? Probably. So the interesting... Well, does he or doesn't he? I mean, you're the expert. Ooh.

So he... The tone of Thrasimachus is difficult to gauge. So the content of what he says is certainly very opposed. He thinks that justice does not pay. You're an idiot, you've been duped. The best thing is to be as unjust as you possibly can whenever you can get away with it. And Socrates takes that on. He does.

He does. I mean... The reason I hesitated because there is a big discussion about whether Thrysmachus really means what he says. Maybe he's a disillusioned moralist saying, oh, you know, justice, you know, look at the world around. you can see where we've got to with justice now. But certainly in the terms of the content of what he says, never mind his intention,

it is absolutely the opposite of where Socrates wants to end up. And what is so interesting and where Socrates is going to get a way in is that it's very clear that Thrasymachus thinks to thrive, to flourish, it's all about having power over others and having lots of material wealth and goods. So he's got a very, as Socrates will see it, a very narrow conception of what the good life is, and that's what's going to give Socrates his traction into the argument.

Emma McCabe, where does Plato's focus lie in this work, in the individual or on the state? How does he move between the two? So it's very interesting the way that Angie sets it up, because the picture of Thrasimachus presses on the ways in which you might think about justice as an institutional matter. Is it a question about the way the state is arranged or is it a question about what, is at stake here for the individual. And it's a huge issue in the whole of the Republic, whether what we're supposed to focus on

is the institutional question of justice or the individual question of justice. What happens after Thrasimachus bows out pretty much is that the question gets recast as a question about what it would be to be just if you're an individual. and the challenge is to show that no matter how successful the unjust person might be in his or her life, the just person is always going to be better off, is going to be just, it's going to be, justice for her is going to be good in itself.

Whatever on earth that means. He has to prove that. That's what he sets out to show. Why does he move? Sorry. It's up to you. So the way. So the way that he does it is by suggesting that not so much that there's a kind of tangle between the institutional sense of justice and the individual sense of justice,

but that there's a straight analogy between the two, that if you imagine that you can call a state just, you can so equally call an individual just and that you mean the same thing when you say that one is just and the other is just. And Socrates says, oh, well, so if we're going to do that, then we can look at the, we can figure out the justice of the individual, which is, as he puts it, writ small by looking at it writ large in the state. And the question, this goes to answering your question. The question about the republic as a whole is whether that's actually the agenda that he really follows or whether the picture of the person. or whether the picture of the political justice that he develops in service to this analogy is in fact the focus of the discussion. For my money it's the individual and the analogy is always at the service of explaining the justice of some individual person.

But he does take great pains to enlarge it to the state. Yes. The person, the individual is represented. by the state. So let's look at this question and he says, not looking at individual, but looking at the state. First of all, let's get a good state. And this is a good state. And he tries to tell us what he does tell us, what he thinks a good state is. Can you give us the bare bones of that? Oh, yes. So the conception of justice that he offers,

and this follows on from trying to figure out how on earth you could explain what it would be to be for something to be good in itself, for a life for the individual to be worth living in itself. He takes it to be somehow or other a matter of structure. So he supposes that you can understand what justice is in the state. If everyone does their own, as he puts it, and if the different parts of the state are in good balance to each other,

so the parts of the state that are the ordinary, productive class, the defensive or warrior class and the philosopher class, those three parts of the state he supposes need to be in equilibrium. But when he says that, then it looks as though what he's trying to give us is an account of the way that a psyche or an individual might be well-organised and that we really only think about these. discussions of the state, extended though they are, as an account of how it might be that

we become better in the ways that the challenge has proposed. But before I go to the next question, he makes a match. The state is, as you said, in three parts, and each has to do its job and be kept in equilibrium. The guardians, as it were, the rulers, the philosophers, the auxiliaries, the police, the army and so on, and the

producers, the appetite. And similarly with the mind, there's the reason and then there's the spirit, and then there's the soul. So these three are supposed to be in balance inside. Would you go along with that? Well, yes, that's precisely what he says, that in both cases, when you consider the internal structure of both an individual soul and a city, he thinks the right thing to do is to consider each having three principal functional parts.

In the city, these are distinguished in terms of different roles that classes a person play in the city. in the individual these are distinguished between types of desire that you might have, desire for what's good, desire for what's noble, desire for what's pleasant and so on. And in both he says, the correct arrangement is one where

all of them are doing their own job under the guidance of the reasoning and governing part. He uses two or three very powerful stories in this and one of them is the story of the ring. Can you tell us

how that plays. Well, this goes back to this challenge that he's set at the end of book one, the beginning of book two. So he imagines a story of someone who discovers a ring. A shepherd. A shepherd discovers a ring and he puts it on and

he finds that when you turn it in a certain way it makes you invisible. And he uses this ring to seduce the queen and kill the king and take power in his city. And the idea that this presents is something like the following.

If it were possible, if you could imagine having this kind of ability, wouldn't it be the case that we would use it to get what we desire because we would no longer fear the consequences of acting unjustly? You could break promises with impunity, you could break the law with impunity, no one would castigate you and you wouldn't suffer as a result of that. Which is sort of what Andrew was saying in her remark, that if you're strong enough, you can get away with anything. That's right. So the challenges that Socrates is faced is, why wouldn't that be a good thing to do? Why wouldn't we prefer, nevertheless, to be just and lawful, even if the consequences of that would be in some ways worse than if we could get away with behaving unjustly?

Amen. There's a trap here, it seems to me, which goes back to the question about the relation between states and individuals, which is that it looks as though what he's doing is, shifting around between what the challenge is about. So some part of the challenge is about how we behave. Some of it's about how we restrain and constrain our actions. But the idea that we think that that's what justice and injustice is determined by, that is to say, a series of actions is actually a different sense of justice or a different construction of justice from the idea that justice is a steady state

set of laws or institutions. And one of the things that happens at this point, I think, is that that tension becomes very difficult to deal with because it doesn't look as though there's any way of figuring out why, for example, a state that is well-balanced and has the right institutions is going to do the equivalent of behaving well. Why will it have good foreign policy, for example? Can we take that state idea on a little because Plato and Socrates, through Socrates, makes a big thing of it.

Angie, Angie Hobbes, one of the things about the ideal state is that it's ruled by philosophers. I'm faced by three philosophers, so there's not much disagreement there, I expect. Still, anyway, that's a cheap jive. So how did he justify that and what's the point? So the rulers of the state, as we've been hearing, are analogous to reason in the psyche. And what legitimizes them and indeed compels them to rule is that they have knowledge. They have knowledge of true reality, which is the forms of these ideal perfect instantiations. That's what means that they have, they're not just rulers, their philosopher rulers.

now, but I think it's really important to look a bit at what Plato does to ensure that they can't be sort of corrupted or distracted. So the way he sets up this ideally just state is that the rulers and their auxiliaries, this executive police military class, together they form the guardian class. They live this extraordinary life. They live apart in camp,

communes. They're not allowed to own any property at all. They're not even allowed to touch gold or silver. They're not allowed nuclear families. Women and children are to be held in common, we're told. Babies are going to be taken away from guardian mothers at birth. The mothers don't even get to see their babies. So in the Guardian class, nobody really knows who's a relative, a blood relative or not, and the idea being they're going to all think of each other as a potential. family. And Plato's, and all their food and shelter and housing is provided for them by the producer class who have no power whatsoever, but they do have property, they do have wealth, and they do have nuclear families. So Plato completely divorces power from wealth. And he hopes that by doing this, he can remove the opportunities for corruption and nepotism and distraction and divided loyalties in the Guardian class. He's also very, very clear that women, because we were talking earlier about the, in the direct democracy of the Athens that he grew up in, it was only male citizens who got the vote.

Women are to be auxiliaries, there to fight. Women are to be their philosopher queens as well as philosopher kings. And he's also very clear that in the producer class where they are allowed some wealth, there are to be no extremes of wealth or poverty. So though I do agree with MM, that the other. ultimate goal of all this is how to live as a just individual and whether that pays. But I actually think that Plato's put a lot of thought into constructing this ideal state and really does sort of think that some of these ideas are really worth exploring.

Can I just come back to you for a moment, James? The philosopher is, I sort of, was a little bit of a bit of traction about talking about you three because he has, he or she has got to be, they can't become a ruling philosopher until they're about 50s, I understand it. They have to be specially trained, and they have to be especially trained in the rigid distinction between knowledge and belief, because most opinions are belief,

knowledge is greater than and behind and superior to belief. How does that go? How's that work? So he makes it very clear that when he means a philosophy, he doesn't actually mean people like M.M. and Angie and me. He means people who really know things. In particular, these are people with ethical knowledge. They know what's good. I mean, and he means that in the very strong sense that they're correct about it.

They're right. And what's more... Who judges that they're right? Well, they do. Because they eventually have this long training program and eventually they discover what's good and they then are able to use that knowledge to make the city as good as a city can be. what also is important is that this knowledge comes with a motivational aspect to it. So they don't merely know what's good but are, as it were, disinterested in applying that.

This is one way in which I think the politics and the psychology do interact quite directly with one another, in that he thinks knowing what's good will require you to want to make things as good as possible. So these philosopher rulers are both knowledgeable, they're experts, they're moral experts, but they're also paternalistic in their governance that they want to make the city for everybody as good as it can possibly be. In a sense, there's almost a comparison. I'm sure, one of you makes a comparison between them

and a doctor, you go to them for expert, disinterested advice and it is given to you and you go down with your place in the state. Would you say that anyway? Up to a point, I think there's a risk in thinking of them as merely experts. Of course, we've had enough of those. these days. I don't think so.

I quite like them too, but I think they're not quite, I think thinking of them as executives is a risk of misunderstanding what he thinks. If they're rulers, what are they with executive? If we go back to what James said

about there being an ethical component to their knowledge, it seems to me that what Plato wishes us to understand is that coming to know is rather like coming to understand rather than coming to deploy a body of knowledge. And that understanding is a complete, as he would put it, a turning of the soul. It has all the way through ethical development.

So a lot of the political discussion is in service to making us understand something about ethical and intellectual development taking place at the same. same time. How does the parable of the cave fit into that then? Well, I think the cave is one of the best exposés of that. So we're asked, one of the most brilliant pieces of platonic writing too. So Socrates and Glaucombe are having a little bit of a conversation, they've gone quite far into their discussion, and Socrates asks Glaucombe to envisage to see an image that he's about to elaborate. And we, the language is set up in ways that we are actually able to see it to vivid kind of description. And the way it works is that there's a, there's supposed to be a long, it goes back to the underground thing of Geigi's finding a dead body with a ring on it.

Yeah, we've got to go to the K. So there's a long cave going all the way down underground and at the bottom of the cave facing the wall at the bottom there are a collection of prisoners and the prisoners are tied up by their feet and their necks so they can't move their heads they can only look forwards and behind them there's a fire and between them and the fire

there's a little wall and a whole lot of people carrying around sort of plaster images of things, which cast shadows on the wall of the cave. All that the prisoners can see are the shadows. So their conception of the world in which they live is determined by and constituted by what those shadows are. So when they see a shadow of a hippopotamus, that's what hippopotamus is for them. When they see a shadow of themselves, that's who they are. for themselves and they live a complete life.

This is the whole of their life restricted by their shadow, to these shadows. And Socrates says, these men are like, Glock and says, well, they're peculiar prisoners. And Socrates says, no, no, they're like us. What this is meant to represent is the unenlightened life that we live.

Eventually some prisoner gets turned round and goes up out of the cave, works out the way that things are properly set up, goes outside the cave and then gets asked to come back inside again and explain everything to everybody else. The change is a change in understanding how things are best for them, but it's a change not only in the objects of what the release prisoner sees, but in the perspective of the released prisoner.

And where does that take us, James? Well, it takes us in two ways. Critically, it's part of his criticism of democracy because what's sad about these prisoners is a two-fold failure. First of all, they fail to recognise that these shadows are shadows, as MM says. They think they take those to be the actual things. And secondly, they don't recognise that they're prisoners. They don't recognise that they're restrained and held back.

And this is part of his criticism of democracy because he thinks, although Democrats proclaim that freedom is the great byword, for their state. In fact, these people are restrained and constrained by their cognitive impairments. It also gives him the idea of this returning person into the cave who actually knows what they're looking at. And he's the only, or he or she,

is the only person who can recognize that these are shadows because only they have seen the originals of which these are copies and understand them for what they are. And he's seen, he or she has seen two things. First of all, the objects that are going back as and forwards behind them, and which they're flashed on the screen. got out of the cave and seen the sun and the stars, and there's another, there's in a sense the truth. That's right.

Angie, can you just tell us how that, which is very well explained, fits in to the development of the argument? Sorry, the cave? Yeah. Well, we have that argument. It's been very well laid out. It's been developed. Does it take us any further? Does he build on that? Well, I mean, after that, it's sort of the pinnacle of why we need philosophers. to liberate us and, you know, we're staggering,

we're stumbling through our lives with closed eyes and closed ears and, you know, we think we're free and we're not. So it leads on to, you know, more details about the education of the philosopher rulers in higher mathematics. But it also fits in beautifully with what I think is one of the strongest parts of the Republic, which is the account of the degeneration of the ideal state in books eight and nine through a state

which values honor and ambition through a state which values money, oligarchy, down through democracy and into tyranny. And he gives this brilliant account of how democracy can degenerate into tyranny when it's exploited by an unscrupulous demagogue.

But the way for that has been paved by the image of the cave because we kind of see just how vulnerable democracy is and just how lacking in knowledge and freedom we really are. You want to talk? Yeah, I just thought it might be worth emphasising that Socrates doesn't, I think, believe that we can all be liberated from the cave. That this is very much a minority capacity and only a few will be able in the ideal city. They put a lot of resources and there's a lot of care in selecting the right people and making sure they're trained appropriately.

So the best most of us can hope for is not to become philosophers ourselves, but that philosophers should be the ones who are directing important parts of our lives. Could you develop that, O'Amain? Yes, I mean, I think there are two ways of thinking about this. One of them is to imagine that this is a genuine proposal for the way that philosophy works. A different way of thinking about it would be that this is an illustration of how actually it doesn't. might read it as a much more pessimistic view than an optimistic one. So one of the important things I think about setting these images,

as you've asked about all these images, setting these images up this way, is to make us see how remote they are. And then to make us see that even if they're remote, actually there's something to think with. And part of what's going on here is a way of using these kinds of conceptions of philosophy to get us to do some philosophy in ways which are much more tentative and progressive. So I think this runs all the way through because I think the representation of the Republic in optimistic ways as something that is a proposal for. political structures and a proposal for individual lives

can be seen pessimistically but still as a philosophical weapon. Andrew? And the cave also kind of gives us an insight into Plato's critique of art in the Republic. So in terms of the education of the philosopher rulers, early on, they have very censored artistic education and all sorts of things in poetry which are deemed to mislems. represent God or to encourage moral vices are cut out. But by the time we get to the final book of the Republic,

almost all art is censored. Because not only does Socrates say that art originates from and appeals to and fosters the non-rational and dangerous elements in our psyche, he also says that it deals with objects. he puts it at three removes from reality. It's easier for us, I think, to think of it as two removes from reality, that the objects of art are described as sort of shadows and with the same kind of language as the shadows on the walls of the cave.

So what the artist does, as Socrates says in book 10, is simply give a representation of the outward appearance of an object in the phenomenal world, which is itself only at best a representation of the perfect form. So the artist is not just dealing with very dangerous irrational impulses. The artist is giving us shadows and not realities and doesn't know what he or she is talking about. Yes, please.

It's more difficult than that, though, isn't it? Because all of the descriptions of art in the Republic are also self-referentials. So when he talks about the way that poetry is written, he gives us an example that applies to the Republic itself. Equally in book 10, when he's talking about representing images of this, that and the other, he's talking about exactly what he's doing. And some part of that, it seems to me, is to pull the rug out from any straightforward interpretation.

of what he said. So any straightforward view that says that he's shutting down on poetry, because actually he recognises at the same time that some of the means that he uses to get the reader to be shocked into reflecting about how these things are done, are themselves poetry or the equivalent? I completely agree, because one of the most beautiful ironists of the Republic is that Plato has written a dialogue, which later generations called the Republic, which would, I think, be banned from the ideally just state that it describes because it does not meet the censorship criteria,

because it describes bad characters like Thrasymachus and so on. So Plato has written a work which includes all sorts of elements which would be censored according to the theories of art in the Republic. And I don't believe that he's not aware of that. It's a beautiful irony. but that's a sort of an extra sophistication. The basic point is that there is this worry that what is the status of artistic objects and artistic creations. Are they real or not?

And I think Plato does think that's a genuine problem and question. Can I come to you, James, to ask about this business of the distinction between knowledge and belief, that most things when we say that's good, that's a belief. and it is difficult to prove that that's good through knowledge but philosophers train themselves to be able to do that sort of thing that's a very simple example on my part you can give more complicated examples but that's an important distinction

can you develop that please yes the distinction he draws between knowledge and belief is quite an unusual one and it's actually quite unusual even within Plato's own corpus I think the Republic has quite an unusual way of doing it The way he does it in the Republic is to insist that there are certain sorts of things that you can have knowledge of and you can't have belief about those things, whereas there are other things that you can have beliefs about and you can't have knowledge about those things. So, for example, it maps onto some of the distinctions we've already been drawing between these what he's calls forms, which are intelligible, perfect objects. Those are the objects of knowledge. You can know what's just, you can know what's good. Whereas belief is the cognitive state that's appropriate for things like particular instances.

A law or a person or a statue, you can believe that it's beautiful. But that's only a belief because the statue isn't perfectly beautiful. It's beautiful lit in a certain way, but it might be ugly compared with a goddess or something like this. So that's what disqualifies that object as an appropriate object of knowledge. So the philosophers have been trained to the age of 50 to know what is true, what is not just a belief. That's right. They distinguish from everybody else by knowing what real knowledge is. And they can use that real knowledge to rule the ideal state, if everybody keeps in their place, that is.

That's part of it. Their training has been such as they alone are able to access this particular group of objects, these forms, that guarantee this understanding of what's good and so on, that then they can use. So it's like seeing the original of which these other things are mere shadows or copies, and that equips them to understand the things that they see as the copies that they are.

I think the notion of understanding is the fundamental one. One of the difficulties about contemporary conceptions of knowledge is that we might think that knowledge comes in little chunks. So if you've got a truth, then you know that truth. But in fact, what we're looking at here is what he calls a synoptic view

of everything. So it's a complete change in state of mind. It's not some piecemeal facts or truths. It's a transformation of the whole soul, this cognitive state. So it's tricky when we think about it as knowledge to unpick. the contemporary assumptions that go with epistemologies since Descartes?

And you, in your notes, express yourself, as he's been quite clear in this programme, I was an enormous admirer and understander of pleasure. Yet you say he failed, and you point out, I have got your notes here, you say, you do say it's a great failure, and he fails because, I do, I do, I'm going to mayor. You say he failed because he encouraged or laid the way for what could be totalitarian state and authoritarian state and that sort of thing. Have I got this completely wrong? Or should I read from your notes? I don't think he fails.

What I think he does, I think he asks the right questions. I think the answers he gives to them are often too extreme and have formed the basis of ideas which have gone on to lead to totalitarian ideas. is both on the far right and on the far left. But I don't think it's a failure if you're asking the right questions. And some of the answers he gives, they contain nuggets within them, which are still very useful to us. So, for example, I think that the community of wives and children where babies are taken away from their mothers at birth is repellent. I think that's appalling. However, it's entirely the right question to ask to say, if women are going to go,

to have these top jobs in the state. If women are going to rule, if women are going to be in the army, how do we arrange domestic life to make that possible for women to do? Now, that's a question that we're still struggling with. So he's asking the right questions. He's coming up with some interesting ideas. A lot of his solutions, I think, are too extreme, but I don't regard that as a failure.

You, it is, his ideas have been taken up enthusiastically by fascist regimes totalitarian regimes of all sorts. Is that because of the ideas or because people are just misusing them? Gosh. Well, what he offers you is a picture of an extremely authoritarian kind of arrangement where freedom of choice or freedom to make, participate in the affairs of the state, is extremely restricted only on certain criteria. and the rest of us mostly will just get on with doing what we're told

because we assume we're being told to do what we're being told to do in our own interests. So in that respect, it's a wonderful sort of blueprint for those people who would like to wield that kind of overall power. He does also, as we've already mentioned, grant to these philosophers the ability to censor material again in the interests of everybody and so on. And if you think Plato's are kind of named a conjure with, then you might think, well, it's good to have him on my side. What would you say is his greatest legacy, Emma?

We're still talking about him today. Yeah. What is the legacy that we're really talking about? So it seems to me that one of the... The legacy is partly that he puts up for our discussion ideas that really needs. that really force us to reflect. So the nature of the document itself is one that says, look, really?

Are you really convinced that this is the way that things should go? Are you really think that knowledge generates this kind of politics? And the legacy seems to me to be reading. Thank you very much, Chairman McCabe, Angie Hobbes and James Warren. And next week we'll be discussing bird migration, why they do it, how they survive, and thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I don't think there's even time to go to all the things we didn't say, but some of the things we didn't say. Well, I was going to suggest another answer to your final question to MM.

So what does it have to offer? I think one of the things it has to offer is precisely what makes it do. difficult to untangle, which is an awareness that I think sometimes we've forgotten now in modern philosophy that to do politics or to do psychology is very difficult to do those discreetly from one another. That if you're going to think seriously about politics, you have to think about psychology. And if you want to think about psychology, you might have to think about knowledge and you might have to think about ethics and so on. And that's what the Republic does. It gives you, that's how Plato does philosophy. He doesn't do discreeto. He doesn't

do discrete, I'll do metaphysics in this work and then I'll do some epistemology. It's all of, it all comes as a package. And I think that's something that we would do well to remember, actually. I think that is connected with what you said about the psychology, that the psychology

is all the time about ethical orientation. So you can't think about knowledge or understanding without thinking about its ethical orientation. And I again, I think that goes to the nature of the work, rather other than the nature of the theories that are offered in the work.

If we thought that this was a work that just presents theories to us in a nice little wrapped up package, that would be one thing. But I think that's not what happened. I think that the great thing about the work is that the philosophy shouts to the person who gets to work on it rather than giving us these theories to wave around. And that's how it seems to me. I still think the greatest thing it does is the way it answers Thurzumachus' challenge by saying that justice is not a matter of external actions,

but about your internal psychic harmony and that your state of flourishing as an individual is the same psychic state as your state of virtue as an individual. I mean, if you've got to swallow his psychology to get an answer to why should I be just. Well, no, but you don't have to swallow it in exactly that form. So Freud takes up that idea and does it and does different things with it. So the notion of psychic harmony doesn't have to be cashed out entirely in terms of the rule of the logistic and support by the Fumoths

or sublimation of the appetites. But one of Plato's brothers asks him, gives him a challenge, gives Socrates a challenge. And does he answer? He said if a just man ends up by being considered to be an unjust man and branded an unjust man, He's had a better life than an unjust man who ends up being thought of as a just man

and he's branded a just man. And he says it's 729 times happier. He says it more pleasant. He says it's more pleasant. He says it's more pleasant. He says 729 times more pleasant. He also says it's, he also uses the language of Eudai Mania in that passage.

It does beg the question whether somebody who's in that state, justice in the sense of being psychically harmonious or whatever, whether that person is going to, to be the person who behaves in the moral ways that we're interested in is extremely dubious. I mean, it doesn't, so exactly the same way that you might think that a successfully oriented, successfully structured state,

you can't rely on their foreign policy. Equally, somebody with a jolly good psyche, how is it that we can be sure that they will actually behave in the ways that we were worried about in Republic of 1? But he, you know, but if you look at the most, Motivations, why would somebody murder or rape or steal? They would do that because their psyche is dominated by their desire for honour or worldly success or material goods or physical pleasures.

So, you know, how many crimes you're going to commit if reason is he conceives it is ruling in your soul? He's taken away the motivations for crimes. But if you're a philosopher ruler and on the basis of your understanding of what's good and just, you decide actually we as a sense. state need to march out and rape and pillage our neighbours, that doesn't look like conventionally just behaviour for a city, but if it's, as it were, deduced from the first principles of good and just. And I'd see no reason why he can rule that out. I think he can, you see.

And I think then the worry is that either the question is that he begs the question against the challenge and supposes that by redefining it like this, he's actually home and dry. Or it's another challenge. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, why would you think that somebody who's got their psyche in good order is well behaved in the ways that we need? This had on is really valued by people, massively around there.

There's one question I really, really burn into us. Do you think that the neat division of our minds into the three parts, he puts it so convincingly is convincing? No. No. neither I And it looks as though I mean one of the things it might generate

The argument might generate Hundreds of parts of the soul Or only two Well the arguments don't work I mean So Well I take my choice Move to three

It's driven by the analogy But what do you say Well No I want to defend And that's where That's where You start to see the creakiness But then you start to see

Again I mean to go back to what I've been insisting on, you start to see it in ways that he himself exposes to us. You see, I want to put in a defence of the tri-partition. The arguments for it are poor, I accept that. But I think what he's done, which is so interesting, is to move away from, in other dialogues, he's just sort of had reason versus the appetites,

which is also what you get in later philosophers like human, Kant and so on, by bringing in this need for respect and self-respect, I think that's hugely important. I think the thumos is absolutely vital and it partly becomes Freud's super eager. I think there's a reason why Freud thinks the tripartite psyche is so interesting because we don't just need

sort of ratiocinative activity and appetitive activity. We need to feel that we count and we matter in the world. And sure, you know, look around to the world at the moment, look at the things going on at the moment. A lot of people feel that they're not being given respect. There are many more philosophy and discussion programs from Radio 4 to download for

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