Guardians in Utopia: Book V of Plato’s Republic
The discipline of bearing Socrates’s analogy in mind is now under its greatest strain as one moves through the fifth book. There are three places where Plato takes pains, through his mouthpiece and mentor, to help us recall.
Then good and upright I call such a city and constitution, and such a man; bad and blundering the others, if this one is right, both in the management of cities, and their manner of furnishing the soul of individual citizens; they are classable in four conditions of wickedness.1
that we agreed ... was the highest good for the city, and we compared a well-managed city to the body as to how the parts and the whole were connected in pain and pleasure.2
First it must be remembered that our quest was for justice, if we could find out what it is, and injustice also; and that has brought us to this stage.3
Although not an utter rabbit trail, risking a “hornet’s nest of words,”4 as Socrates put it, still, there is evidence in the way the subject ends that he does not believe such a program is practical.5 It is part of the analogy. On the other hand, if the end is granted, the means of educating both the best men and best women to be guardians in the same way is somehow best.6 Some lines seem to take things to the extreme of an Orwellian parody.7 It is taken for granted that several vices will easily disappear or be easily curtailed.
All Things in Common for Unity
The identification of the common good as “Mine” is characteristic of unity and the greatest good of the city.8 This functions as an ethical axiom. The aforementioned “friend-enemy” distinction now plays out in a division between faction and war.9 When hostilities are introduced to the former, what is by nature one becomes a “diseased” body.
Now it is important to note that Socrates is only speaking of the guardian class in this place about all things being held in common. I do not say that to water down one’s abhorrence to it, but only to be most accurate. The parallel between these temporal guardians and those sacred watchmen called monks is not an unreasonable one to draw. At any rate, Socrates wants to make an allowance for the women to give birth, but also wants to keep the guardian class’s women in the same line of work. This reminds us of the failed experiment to thrust women out of homes and into cubicles today.
Glaucon, following the argument, adds, with Socrates’ approval: “They ought to do everything together … except that we treat the males as stronger and the females as weaker.”10 Several follow up questions may be asked. For example, in what areas does such inequality of strength manifest itself? If none, is there really any? If some, is there universal equality? If in the very main task—guardianship—then, what exactly are we talking about? Further down, the contradiction is put more formally:
We agreed, you know, that a different nature ought to practice a different work, and that man and woman have different natures; now we say that these different natures must do the same work.11
Indecency is joined to inconsistency. Socrates treats it as a mark of rational progress, that various cities had moved beyond shuddering and laughing at nudity in the gymnasium. This is spoken of in a way similar to those who speak of nudity in art, marginalizing those who laugh, not to mention those who condemn, as barbaric.12
An Excursus on the Nature of the Sexes
Socrates does recognize that a superior question has been begged: “let them discuss whether the female nature in mankind allows women to share the same work with men in everything, or in nothing, or only in some things, and if in some, to which class war belongs.”13 The proper distinction is to see in what sense their natures differ. Where natures differ according to different calling, so be it. Yet at this point our agreement ends again. In the first place, calling presupposes a personal agent who calls.
He first minimizes the differences: “Thus we meant that a man and a woman who have a physician’s mind have the same nature, didn’t we? … But a man physician and a man carpenter different natures?”14 Now who is equivocating! “But if we find,” he continues, “that they differ only in one thing, that the male begets and the female bears the child, we shall not take that difference as having proved any more clearly that a woman differs from a man for what we are speaking of.”15 What if natures and callings are teleologically fit across the board? If we are not willing that the data could bear that out, then we are not in fact “finding” but confirming our egalitarian biases.
They know better, and they say so.
“Well, do you know anything at all practiced among mankind, in which in all these respects the male sex is not far better than the female? Or should we make a long story of it—take weaving, and the careful tending of cakes and boiling pots, in which women think themselves somebody and would be most laughed at if beaten?” “You are right,” he said, “that one sex is much better than the other in almost everything. Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things, but generally it is as you say.”16
The urge for the guardian class to be separated from ordinary society tears them away from common sense. The distinction between the strengths of men and women become confused with the relative strengths of some women from other women in various relevant fields and dispositions touching on war.17
What was gained by women and children held in common? One aim appears to be unity: “These will all have dwellings and messes in common, and no one will have any private property of that kind at all … they will mingle in union with one another.”18 It is also assumed that it is by such artificial selection that these rulers will be the best, just as in the breeding of dogs or birds or horses.19 For maximal excellence, in a reverse order as in the movie Idiocracy, where the human race bred down to the worst having more:
the best men must mingle most often with the best women, but the opposite, the worst with the worst, least often; and the children of the best must be brought up but not the others, if the flock is to be tiptop. And none must know this to be going on except the rulers alone, if the herd of guardians is also to be as free as possible from quarrels.20
A more urgent matter presses in on the attentive reader: How exactly justice may truly be seen if the analogy for it is not possible. We should first distinguish what must be meant by “possible” here. A unicorn is possible. The perfect circle is possible. Virtue is possible. These do not exist in the phenomenal world, or else, as phenomena, for somewhat different reasons in each case. Socrates says, “Take the painter now: if he should paint a pattern of the ideally beautiful man, and put into the painting all the details properly, but if he could not prove that such a man is possible, do you think he would be the worse painter for that?”21 The response is No. But why not? The man who knows and cares presses in to discover the sense in which he could paint something real, yet which cannot exist “in reality.” In fact, the man who knows begins to know that what makes sense on the surface does not make the most sense at all.
Rulers Who Know and Not Only Opine
The last section begins with the assertion: “The philosophers must become kings in our cities.”22 The reason is that he must paint with the sword what that painter brought into matter from forms with his paintbrush. Let us not move too fast. We have not yet arrived at the forms. Socrates says that people will call our rulers “Saviors” and “helpers.” Two questions must be asked: First, why does Socrates call them this? Second, for a Christian, how might this map out with the role of the Judges in the Old Testament book after that name? Why should the most stable form of government need a constant office under such a name? At the very least, it is assumed that natural hierarchy does not go away once things turn from war to peace, or from poverty to prosperity. Without those who see the form of law always seeing and always ruling on that basis, the whole fabric of society will sink again into barbarism.
When Socrates gets back to the question of the just man, he gives a clear hint at the relationship between participation in being (that is, the being of any form) and analogical predication. He says that “if we do find what sort of thing justice is, shall we claim that the just man must in no way differ from perfect justice, but must in all respects be such as justice is? Or shall we be content if he gets as near as possible to it and has more justice in him than any other man?”23 This not only shows that an analogy is necessary in knowledge because there is an analogy of being—imperfect justice to perfect justice—but that a form admits of degrees and thus also improvement and degradation.
Whereas in Books II and III, the question was how to train those who would rule, with only slight attention to identifying such specimens in their early years. Now the problem is given more clarity: How do we tell the philosopher from the non-philosopher? If the philosophers would rule, then they must tell them from those who seem to be but are not. The answer lies in the name: love (phileo) of wisdom (sophia).
When we speak of one who has a desire for something, does he desire the whole thing, whatever it may be, and not only a part? … Then we may say the philosopher, the wisdom-lover, desires wisdom so, not merely parts but the whole.24
Likewise, many who are “fanciers” of this or that talk, or attending lectures like entertainment. These are not either. Socrates must make it concrete with examples. Of the beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, good and bad, etc., “each of these by itself is one, but each appears to be many because each shows itself everywhere in community with the others and with actions and bodies.”25 This inches closer to actually introducing the forms. The context is still separating philosophers from non-philosophers, the latter are mere fanciers, stimulated by the externals of the beautiful and good and true; whereas the philosopher will see with their mind beauty itself, goodness itself, truth itself.
The difference between the philosopher and non-philosopher turns on the difference between the realist and the non-realist. Although he does not use such words, a realist is one who sees the form of things and so sees things as they are, and a non-realist who might as well be asleep.
Then if a man believes things to be beautiful, but does not believe in beauty by itself, and cannot follow when he is led towards the knowledge of it, what is his life? Is he awake, or is his life a dream? … Take the opposite case. The man who believes in beauty itself, and can distinguish it from things which partake of it, who does not believe the things with beauty to be beauty, or beauty to be those things: do you think that his life is a dream, or is he awake? … Then could we not call this man’s state of mind knowledge, as of one who knows, and the other’s opinion, as of one who opines?26
Glaucon offers that the man with opinion must at least know something, to which Socrates queries: “Something which is or which is not?” Glaucon responds: “how could he know what is not?” Initially the resolution seems imbalanced: “that which wholly is, is wholly knowable, and that which in no way is, is in every way unknowable.”27 They land on something “in between.” The problem should be clear: How can something “be and not be”? What follows is the assignment of knowledge to objects proper to it and likewise with opinion. “Will the same thing be both knowable and opinable, or is that impossible?”28 It is impossible, they resolve. “Opinion then would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.” More than that, “opinion is darker than knowledge and brighter than ignorance.” But “that which partakes of both being and not-being.”29
While there are other dialogues that go deeper into Plato’s theory of knowledge, such as the Meno and Theaetetus, the importance of this foundational distinction between knowledge and opinion is that it begins to set up what is called an important Divided Line that remains, in one form or another, throughout the whole history of philosophy, and, more immediately, the theory of the forms.
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1. Republic, V:449a
2. Republic, V:464b
3. Republic, V:472b
4. Republic, V:450b
5. Republic, V:472d
6. Republic, V:456c
7. Republic, V:463e
8. Republic, V:462a-d
9. Republic, V:470b-e
10. Republic, V:451e
11. Republic, V:453e
12. Republic, V:452c-e
13. Republic, V:453a
14. Republic, V:454c-d
15. Republic, V:454d-e
16. Republic, V:455c-d
17. Republic, V:455e-456a
18. Republic, V:458d
19. Republic, V:459a-b
20. Republic, V:459d-e
21. Republic, V:472d
22. Republic, V:473c
23. Republic, V:472b-c
24. Republic, V:475b
25. Republic, V:476a
26. Republic, V:476c-d
27. Republic, V:477a
28. Republic, V:478a
29. Republic, V:478c
