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Published: June 15, 2018



The book in...
One sentence:
A dialog presented primarily through Plato's Socrates on how to construct the best city.

Five sentences:
It doesn't matter whether this work a serious, satire, or a warning because the take-away is that the ideal state (which looks communistic) is impossible in reality. Total control of the citizens of such a city would be necessary. From treating women and children as common goods of to men to maintain control of the family to the state sticktly censoring music, poetry, and theater to prevent individuals from being inspired by uncontrolled emotions and dreams, there would be little left but a robotic (slave) society. The lies (as in noble) and oppression of various kinds, like keeping people poor so they don't have time to plot, are probably the easiest, and thus common, way to rule. Ranking of the various regimes one might encounter, from best to worst, would look like: kingly, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, tyrannic; history seems to suggest that the lowest common denominator societies devolve to is tyranny.

designates my notes. / designates important.


Thoughts

Republic

The Republic is in essence a dialog where Plato’s Socrates lays out what it would take to construct a utopian city.

Where forced labor doesn’t destroy one’s body and may in fact make one stronger, forced learning will never take hold in the mind. One must want to learn to actually learn. While this is surely not completely true, imagine someone that throws themselves into learning something and another that is conscripted into learning. The former will certainly attain a much deeper understanding through their education. This is important in the context of city building, because the leader that wants to lead more than learn will be inferior.

To this end, the leader that wants to govern on a high level must have essentially total control of the people. Women will be held in common, children will be raised by the state. The leader (king) must be knowledgeable in war, peace, and philosophy. This sets up a conflict already. If the children are raised by the state to be easily controlled, they will never develop into a good leader.

Assuming you can start from the ideal regime, a monarchy, after each generation of deterioration in the stock of citizens, your city will fall first into an oligarchy. The leader of this regime will certainly be cunning, as their wealth is at least a sign that they are capable of business, but not a sign that they would make a good leader. This is likely the regime of most of the planet today.

From oligarchy the next arising order will be democracy. This is lauded today, but in reality such a system only arises when there are far and few men that could be counted as leaders. The decision making falls to the common man who, without an inkling of understanding and unrestrained freedom, makes decisions based on his narrow view. These decisions will ultimately lead to a degradation of society and a clamoring for a strong leader, a tyrant.

“Well, then,” I said, “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy, I suppose-the greatest and most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom.”

From tyranny, the best a city can hope for is a “good” tyrant. This could be construed as a good king, a philosopher king. Which brings us full circle. Interestingly the only difference between the best (monarchy) and worst (tyranny) regimes is lies in the heart and mind of the leader. The middle regimes (aristocracy, oligarchy, timocracy, democracy, etc) seem to be little more than the road between the extremes.

In all regimes but a monarchy with a philosopher king sitting on the throne, the leaders and would-be leaders will plot and scheme to advance their own interests and retard the advancement of all others’ interests.

The simplest form of this kind of oppression is easy to see in the system of taxation:

“And, also, so that, becoming poor from contributing money, they will be compelled to stick to their daily business and be less inclined to plot against him?”

A similar argument can be made by replacing time with money. Instead of stealing your productivity via taxation and forcing you to “stick to their daily business”, entertainment (Hollywood) and mindless communication (social media) steal your time. There is no difference to using your time to toil for taxes and using your time to entertain yourself; at the end of the day your would-be rulers have control over you.

Plato concludes that there are three classes of humans:

“Then that’s why we assert that the three primary classes of human beings are also three: wisdom-loving, victory-loving, gain-loving.”

These map generally onto all men as:

Interpretive Essay

The second half of this book contains an essay that I think adds much to the original work. If you are studying on your own, it certainly gives you more to think of, or at least another perspective to ponder. While I don’t agree with everything said from here on, I think it is completely worth the time to read.

On the point of justice, eros and youthful passions lead Cephalus to be torn between sinning and repenting. While driven by these things one will not end up with justice or philosophy of a gentleman, they will be lead by bodily satisfactions. Only by taming this part of our soul can we be in control of ourselves and have any chance at attaining the good. This thinking is mimicked by Plato and Aristotle in other stories likening emotions to a horse that left untamed will wander hither and thither, but once tamed will take you anywhere you want to go.

Moving our attention to the city, we find that a “city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties.” These parties or faction will compete with one another and whichever wins will be the dictator of law. This competition strengthens each faction. In the end, it really doesn’t even matter which faction wins because:

There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end.

Whomever wins will use laws to maintain their dominance and restrict their competition. Education is the source of all control:

The instrument for controlling the warriors is education and, therefore, from this point forward education is the central theme of the Republic. The city’s way of life depends on the character and hence the education of the rulers.

You can indoctrinate your warriors to kill and die for you. You can leave the masses uneducated and unable to compete with you. You can give your heirs the utmost proper education so that they might maintain your legacy. Control of education is control of society.

Next we move our attention to what today we might call entertainment. On one hand entertainment can be used to sap the precious time of any would-be challengers to the leadership, but on the other it can also inspire champions of change.

Plato argues that the poet can enchant the audience and make them believe his stories. This is again a double edged sword where one can spin a tale that make you forget your woes from the unjust world you actually live in or one can lead you by inspiration to take up arms against the unjust world.

Finally, one can not talk about Plato’s Republic without mentioning the cave. In the essay Bloom argues that there are “two fatal temptations” put forth in the allegory of the cave:

The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.

The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas.

The liberation, once effected, results in great happiness; the soul carries on its proper activity with its proper objects. And, as a result, the freed man has a great contempt for the cave, its shadows and its inhabitants. He wants always to live out in the light; the others do not know they are slaves, so they are content; but he knows it and cannot bear to live among them. Nothing in the city contributes to his specific pleasures, and he wants nothing from it; he is not, as are all others, a potential exploiter of the city.

In closing Bloom reminds us that political science should help us understand regimes much like a doctor understands the body:

Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its over- simplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.

How true it rings when he speaks of our modern oversimplifications. What must Bloom think of the latest fad of forced truncation in communication - Twitter.

Further Reading


Exceptional Excerpts

the only guardian of the guardians is a proper education(It is this theme to which the reader’s attention must be brought.

love of honor and love of money are said to be, and are, reproaches?

to getting away with it, we’ll organize secret societies and clubs; and there are teachers of persuasion who offer the wisdom of the public assembly and the court. On this basis, in some things we’ll persuade and in others use force; thus we’ll get the better and not pay the penalty.’

“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give to it."

“First, as it seems, we must supervise the makers of tales; and if they make 37 a fine tale, it must be approved, but if it’s not, it must be rejected. We’ll persuade nurses and mothers to tell the approved tales to their children and to shape their souls with tales more than their bodies with hands. Most of those they now tell must be thrown out."

“Now I, for one, would assert that some god gave two arts to human beings for these two things, as it seems-music and ‘gymnastic for the spirited and the philosophic-not for soul and body, except incidentally, but rather for these two. He did so in order that they might be harmonized with one another by being tuned to the proper degree of tension and relaxation."

“But in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort; however, not with respect to a man’s minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself; he arranges himself, becomes his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts, exactly like three notes in a harmonic scale, lowest, highest and middle. And if there are some other parts in between, he binds them together and becomes entirely one from many, moderate and harmonized. Then, and only then, he acts,

“I say that one type of regime would be the one we’ve described, but it could be named in two ways,” I said. “If one exceptional man rose among the rulers, it would be called a kingship, if more, an aristocracy."

“All these women [educated as guardians] are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their tum, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent."

“It’s likely that our rulers will have to use a throng of lies and deceptions for the benefit of the ruled.

if a foolish adolescent opinion about happiness gets hold of him, it will drive him to appropriate everything in the city . with his power, and he’ll learn that Hesiod was really wise when he said that somehow ‘the half is more than the whole.’" 26

“Such a man [a true philosopher, seeker of only truth] is, further, moderate and in no way a lover of money. Money and the great expense that accompanies it are pursued for the sake of things that any other man rather than this one is likely to take seriously."

“Don’t you also share my supposition that the blame for the many’s being harshly disposed toward philosophy is on those men from outside who don’t belong and have burst in like drunken revelers, abusing one another and indulging a taste for quarreling, and who always make their arguments about persons,25 doing what is least seemly in philosophy?"

“such a man must go the longer way around and labor no less at study than at gymnastic, or else, as we were just saying, he’ll never come to the end of the greatest and most fitting study."

“Haven’t you noticed that all opinions without knowledge are ugly? The best of them are blind. Or do men who opine something true without intelligence seem to you any different from blind men who travel the right road?"

“Shall we not then,” I said, “set down as a study necessary for a warrior the ability to calculate and to number?"

“In the first place,” I said, “the man who is to take it [philosophy] up must not be lame in his love of labor, loving half the labor while having no taste for the other half This is the case when a man is a lover of gymnastic and the hunt and loves all the labor done by the body, while he isn’t a lover of learning or of listening and isn’t an inquirer, but hates the labor involved in all that. Lame as well is the man whose love of labor is directed exclusively to the other extreme."

“Because,” I said, “the free man ought not to learn any study slavishly. Forced labors performed by the body don’t make the body any worse, but no forced study abides in a soul."

“All those in the city who happen to be older than ten they will send out to the country; and taking over their children, they will rear them-far away from those dispositions they now have from their parents-in their own manners and laws that are such as we described before. And, with the city and the regime of which we were speaking thus established most quickly and easily, it will itself be happy and most profit the nation in which it comes to be."

“All right, This much has been agreed, Glaucon: for a city that is going to be governed on a high level, women must be in common, children and their entire education must be in common, and similarly the practices in war and peace must be in common, and their kings must be those among them who have proved best in philosophy and with respect to war."

[the 4 regimes are:] “the one that is praised by the many, that Cretan and Laconian regime; and second in place and second in praise, the one called oligarchy, a regime filled with throngs of evils; and this regime’s adversary, arising next in order, democracy; and then the noble tyranny at last, excelling all of these, the fourth and extreme illness of a city."

“Well, then,” I said, “from there they progress in money-making, and the more honorable they consider it, the less honorable they con- sider virtue. Or isn’t virtue in tension with wealth, as though each were lying in the scale of a balance, always inclining in opposite directions?"

“And this regime’s sympathy and total lack of pettiness in despising what we were saying so solemnly when we were founding the city-that unless a man has a transcendent nature he would never become good if from earliest childhood his play isn’t noble and all his practices aren’t such-how magnificently it tramples all this underfoot and doesn’t care at all from what kinds of practices a man goes to political action, but honors him if only he says he’s well disposed toward the multitude?"

“Then, “I said, “he [democratic man] also lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing; now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it’s money-makers, in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed he follows it throughout.“22

“That a father,” I said, “habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shall before or fear of his parents - that’s so he may be free;

“Then, summing up all of these things together,” 1 said, do you notice how tender they make the citizens’ soul, so that if someone proposes anything that smacks in any way of slavery, they are irritated and can’t stand it? And they end up, as you well know, by paying no attention to the laws, written or unwritten, in order that they may avoid having any master at all."

“Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city."

“Well, then,” I said, “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy, I suppose-the greatest a;nd most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom."

“But I suppose that when he is reconciled with some of his enemies outside and has destroyed the others, and there is rest from concern with them, as his first step he is always setting some war in motion, so that the people will be in need of a leader."

“And, also, so that, becoming poor from contributing money, they will be compelled to stick to their daily business and be less inclined to plot against him?"

kingly, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, tyrannic.

it’s plain to everyone that the part with which we learn is always entirely directed toward knowing the truth as it is; and of the parts, it cares least for money and opinion."

“Then that’s why we assert that the three primary classes of human beings are also three: wisdom-loving, victory-loving, gain-loving."

the kind of pleasure connected with the vision of what is cannot be tasted by anyone except the lover of wisdom."

Interpretive Essay

“For the contest is great, my dear Glaucon,” I said, “greater than it seems-this contest that Concerns becoming good or bad-so we mustn’t be tempted by honor or money or any ruling office or, for that matter, poetry, into thinking that it’s worthwhile to neglect justice and the rest of virtue."

Cephalus’ youthful passions, however appealing, seem to have led him into activities that are contrary to justice, and his old age is spent worrying about them and atoning for them. Thus, from the point of view of justice, eros is a terrible thing, a savage beast. For a man like Cephalus, life is always split between sinning and repenting. Only by the death of eros and its charms can such a gentleman become fully reliable, for his eros leads neither to justice nor philosophy but to intense, private bodily satisfaction.

Socrates, as the Republic reveals, is not averse to lies and is certainly no respecter of private property.

Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.

The city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties, and the party which wins out over the others is the source of the law. There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end.

The carpenter’s, bricklayer’s, and plasterer’s alts are not sufficient unto themselves; they must be guided by the architect’s art. Money, or what we would call the economic system, is a sort of architectonic principle; for in ordinary cities the amount of money paid for the products of the arts determines what arts are practiced, how they are practiced, and what kind of men practice them. Money is the common denominator running through all the arts;

Money cannot discern the nature of each of the arts nor evaluate the contribution their products make to happiness; the price paid for the services of the arts is merely the reflection of the untutored tastes of the many or the rich. Money constitutes an artificial system which subordinates the higher to the lower. And the man who serves for money becomes the slave of the most authoritative voices of his own time and place, while renouncing the attempt to know, and live according to, the natural hierarchy of value. He is always torn between the demands of his art and the needs of the marketplace.

The warriors’ art, however, is really different, and its services cannot be measured by money, for money is a standard for evaluating the contributions made toward the satisfaction of desire or the” preservation of life. Spiritedness is beyond the economic system. The founders of modem economic science, who wanted it to be a universal political science, could do so only by denying the existence of spiritedness or understanding it as merely a means to self-preservation. Only men who pursue self-preservation and the gratification of bodily desire can be counted on to act according to the principles of economic “rationality."

Sheep dogs require shepherds. The warrior class would then be the link between the highest and lowest class, gaining its meaning from its service to the higher.

The instrument for controlling the warriors is education and, therefore, from this point forward education is the central theme of the Republic. The city’s way of life depends on the character and hence the education of the rulers.

The poets are taken most seriously as the makers of the horizon which constitutes the limit of men’s desire and aspiration; they form the various kinds of men, who make nations various.

He forces the poetically inclined Adeimantus to give up the greatest challenge of poetry-imitation. These are his reasons: the poet can make men believe that they see and hear his characters. This constitutes his real power-he enchants men so that they live the experiences he wishes to present. The poet hides himself behind his work, and the audience forgets, for the moment, that the world into which they enter is not the real one. The spectators have the sense of the reality of men and events which are more interesting and more beautiful than any they know in their own lives: This is what makes poetry so peculiarly attractive.

Adeimantus’ objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli’s: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities.

The Enlightenment teaches that the cave can be transformed; Socrates teaches that it must be transcended and that this transcendence can be accomplished only by a few.

The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.

The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas.

The liberation, once effected, results in great happiness; the soul carries on its proper activity with its proper objects. And, as a result, the freed man has a great contempt for the cave, its shadows and its inhabitants. He wants always to live out in the light; the others do not know they are slaves, so they are content; but he knows it and cannot bear to live among them. Nothing in the city contributes to his specific pleasures, and he wants nothing from it; he is not, as are all others, a potential exploiter of the city.

Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its over- simplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.

Socrates’ political science, paradoxically, is meant to show the superiority of the private life. The most important point made in this section is that while the best city exists only in myth, the best man exists actually.


Table of Contents


· Preface 2E

page 6:
page 7:
page 8:

· Preface

page 13:
page 15:

· Book 01

page 38:
page 48:
page 49:

· Book 02

page 62:
page 66:

page 78:

page 79:

· Book 03

page 88:
page 89:
page 90:
page 104:
page 114:

page 117:
page 120:

· Book 04

page 124:
page 137:
page 145:
page 147:

page 149:

· Book 05

page 154:
page 160:

page 162:

page 164:
page 166:
page 170:

page 171:
page 178:
page 179:

· Book 06

page 189:

page 195:
page 199:
page 203:

page 208:

page 210:

· Book 07

page 225:

page 128:
page 238:

page 239:
page 240:

page 244:

“…when the true philosophers, either one or more, come to power in a city, they will despise the current honors and believe them to be illiberal and worth nothing. Putting what is right and the honors coming from it above all, while taking what is just as the greatest and the most necessary, and serving and fostering it, they will provide for their own city.”

· Book 08

page 245:

page 246:

page 247:
page 252:

page 255:
page 256:
page 259:
page 260:

page 264:

<a name=democratic_man”">

page 265:

page 266:

page 269:
page 270:

· Book 09

page 281:
page 285:

page 286:

page 287:

page 288:
page 292:

· Book 10

page 308:
page 309:
page 313:
page 315:

page 323:

· Interpretive Essay

page 341:

page 344:
page 347:
page 349:

page 350:
page 352:

_ Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.

page 356:

page 361:

page 369:
page 377:

page 378:

page 379:

page 387:

page 399:

page 408:
page 411:
page 413:
page 431:

page 433:

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