(Continued from The Education of the Guardians)
Part two concerned the role of the virtue of temperance in the education of the guardians. It remains to discuss more fully the role of eros, a factor in the life of the guardians that has more of less been taken for granted. eros, which may be translated as either desire or love, may be thought of as that principle in us whereby we find ourselves naturally disposed to strive after something. Although desire cannot be considered a virtue or excellence in itself, it is ordinarily, inasmuch as it is that which impels us to strive for something, an essential element of ethical and material excellence. As Gadamer noted, for Plato, “what a state can be depends upon the virtue of its citizens”1 and it is clear from the Symposium that Plato has an appreciation for eros as a vehicle that causes us to aspire to the highest heights of philosophical virtue and insight–in fact, the ultimate goal of the education of the guardians.
As part of Plato’s dialectical progress toward an ideal political order, eros happens to be a quality the luxurious city has to an immoderate, “feverish” degree, while in Socrates’ initial, moderate, simple city, the seeds of desire are deliberately left unwatered. In the feverish city, desire is ultimately the cause of war, strife, and injustice; in the moderate one, despite its health, it’s lack is the cause of undeveloped human potential, trading life in a state of justice and equity, for one lived out in a state of ignorance of the nature of goodness and justice as guides for human political life and character development. The objection presses itself forward that such a state must lack the stability of one in which more fully developed notions of justice have entered the consciousness of its inhabitants. As Gadamer writes in his article, “Plato’s Educational State,” “He who, in making this distinction, sees through current opinions to the idea is already a philosopher, and only he who penetrates in this way to that which endures is capable of politics on a grand scale, that is, of forming and maintaining a stable political reality.“2 The fact that mistaken ideas about such fundamental ideas may, alternatively, take root, is part of the search for that stability and the drama of the Republic as a composition.
Sophrosune and Phronesis
It is ultimately the virtue of sophrosune, often translated as “self control” or moderation” that enables eros to reach the heights or else, where it is lacking, to fall into the depths of despair. In Republic IV, 430E-431E, it becomes clear that Plato uses the term to describe a harmonious soul that has developed enough self-mastery so that wisdom may take the lead over the appetites in guiding itself (or the city) toward its ends. But the concept is functionally linked to the virtue of phronesis. Phronesis, translated as “prudence,” but also as “practical wisdom,” is that virtue which serves to orient eros, making moderation and self-control count for something. It is, furthermore, an intellectual virtue as well as an ethical one. It amounts to the capacity to deliberate wisely upon different courses of action and choose the best course of action. As such, it serves practical ends and cannot be conceived of except as developed through practical experience.
For example, in the Meno (at 88B) Socrates points out that without phronesis, the virtue of courage would not amount to much more than a kind of “boldness” or “rashness” that might serve to do harm rather than help:
οἷον ἀνδρεία, εἰ μὴ ἔστι φρόνησις ἡ ἀνδρεία ἀλλ᾽ οἷον θάρρος τι: οὐχ ὅταν μὲν ἄνευ νοῦ θαρρῇ ἄνθρωπoς, βλάπτεται, ὅταν δὲ σὺν νῷ, ὠφελεῖται;
For example, [I translate] consider courage as a virtue: what would courage without phronesis be but a kind of boldness? Isn’t it the case that when anyone acts foolishly [without intelligence] he does harm, but when he acts wisely [with intelligence] he contributes help?
The link between our capacity to reason our way to a desired end and the virtuousness of any particular action becomes clear in this passage. In order for any particular virtue to be the cause of greater good for ourselves and our community, to be a virtue at all, it must be rightly guided. The virtue of phronesis, considered apart from any particular action as “practical wisdom” might in turn, be thought of as that virtue or ability that allows for greater and greater consistency toward rightly guided action. At the same time, without sophrosune, without a sufficiently harmonious soul in which the thinking, considering element can take precedence, the otherwise virtuous soul would be hindered in following out and perhaps even clearly perceiving what should be done.
It is clear that the kind of eros that pushes to excess (such as the feverish eros of the luxurious city) cannot by itself stand as a foundation for excellence without the virtues of sophrosune and phronesis. These happen to be just the right sorts of virtue to guide or moderate a city tilting toward an eros that pushes further and further toward harmful excess. It is these guiding virtues above all (or so Plato’s argument appeart to dictate), that the guardians must possess if they are to act as physicians to the city’s fever.(See especially 430A-431E).
Plato as an Architect of Arguments
We might pause here to consider that despite the interrogatory tone of the dialogue and despite Socrates’ reputation as the philosopher who claimed not to know anything but to be a searcher for truth, Plato is here using Socrates’ method of interrogation to make what amounts to a well-structured argument about the dependency of one virtue upon another and their necessity, given the particular way each one has been defined, for moderating the excesses of social, political, and economic life in a city. Given that it is mutual need that initially brings people together, the refinement of the ability to rightly guide and direct our needs becomes the key political virtue and excellence. The whole discussion falls together with a deductive accuracy that can be glimpsed behind the appearance of open-ended questioning as soon as the structure of the reasoning in the text itself is made an object of our own interrogation.
Hence, Plato’s argument includes a dialectic of opposites as well as a few basic principles, the most fundamental of which is the idea that while necessity brings people together, inordinate desire serves to bring about disharmony and injustice. In other words, we are brought together by our need for an better and easier way of life and drawn apart once that basic desire begins to become excessive. The forerunner of Aristotle’s discussion of virtue as a mean between two extremes, brought out with explicit clarity in the Nicomachean Ethics, is implicit in the dialectic of the Republic.
The “extremes” might be said to arrange themselves there as follows: while we are initially brought together by one extreme, our desire to satisfy our basic needs, another extreme arises when desire is added to desire in the feverish state until it leads to disharmony and disorder. In the process, a just society becomes an unjust one, paralleling Socrates’ conclusion reached in Book I, at 353E that the excellence or virtue of the soul is justice and its defect is injustice because, in the latter case, it would work against itself and not be able to accomplish anything. It is the virtue of sophrosune that helps maintain justice, understood as a kind of harmony in which each element fulfills a particular role and does attempt to take unto itself what should properly belong to another, as when the appetitive part of the soul takes over the function of the rational part.
Critique
It is when Plato relates the idea of taking more than one’s proper lot is applied to social roles that the door opens to criticism of Plato’s ideal city. When his view of the soul as having parts with different functions is applied to a social order in which people with different and not necessarily role-ready natures are thought of as naturally suited to conform to certain roles, it invites an often inappropriately mechanistic way of looking at the relationship between individual and society and what each owes to the other.
For Plato, the good of the state comes first, just as would be the case in a well-functioning assembly of parts in which the good of the whole depends upon the functioning of the parts. Although he makes allowances for social mobility, ultimately Plato’s way of looking at people as having natures of a certain kind so as to be given different functions to perform might very well lead to a great deal of lost human potential. Unless human nature itself can be thought of in broader terms that are more affirmative of human potential in general within each individual, many individuals who might otherwise accomplish better or greater things with their lives might well be constrained to accept an inauthentic, unsatisfying life of mediocrity.
These may perhaps seem like the reflections of a 21st century humanist looking back upon the industrial revolution, but if the goal is to create an ideal society, the principle that the state ought to serve the interests of its citizens rather than the citizens the interest of the state offers more for its citizens in terms of a clear directive toward the fulfillment of human potential, and therefore, the possibility of more fulfilling lives for its citizens. This type of argument invites a question about what the priorities of citizens toward the state should be. Consider the question in the context of the Vietnam War and the inter-generational conversations that took place in many families. Many people who grew up as part of the World War II generation found it very difficult to understand the lack of support for the stated goals of the United States and many members of the younger generation came more and more to distrust and question them. This type of conflict might be reduced to the assumption that either the individual citizen should exist for the good of the state or the state for the good of the individual. Both points of view have been a part of the American experience, the former represented by Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you..,” the latter by moments in American history such as the emancipation of slaves and the entrepreneurial spirit that helped make the idea of an American Dream a reality for many people in the second half of the 20th Century. It is the possibility of fulfilling one’s dreams that drives each generation forward.
Despite the appeal of the power of collective action, individuals should sacrifice their happiness and their lives for the good of the state in exceptional cases, not as a way of life. The good of “the state” should become the foremost consideration in times when collective action is needed, but otherwise, individual liberty, for better of worse, ought to be our guiding light in the interest of the development of human potential and its fulfillment. The good of the state should not be viewed as though it’s greatness, however measured, were an end in itself; rather, collective action should rightly be viewed as a temporary suspension of the individual liberty and therefore a sacrifice, that allows for a return to the exercise or our individual freedom.
References
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato’s Educational State,” in Dialogue and Dialectic, translated with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press 1980), 83.
- Gadamer, 83.
