Revisiting Politeia

Being sufficiently arrogant to provide a list of all time favourite books on my website, it behooves me to pay some thought to the books included on it. Thus, I have recently revisited Plato’s Politeia, better known as The Republic. To fit more of the engagement into my holidays, I listened to an audiobook production of Politeia, while reading Julia Annas’ (1981) An Introduction to Plato’s Republic along with it.

It is certainly advisable to have a companion for this book, not least because many of Plato’s discussions are plain odd. Reading the commentary, it became apparent to me that some (though not all) of the arguments are a bit of an embarrassment to later philosophers. For example, why would Plato think that he can draw such a direct analogy between the structures of state and soul? At various points, and particularly in book VII of Politeia, Plato appears to put more weight on this analogy than it can bear.

Due to how underwhelming some of the arguments are, readers have always been tempted to seek a deeper meaning, a hidden esoteric path through the book. I’m very resistant to that, as with such a reading one can easily fool oneself into seeing whatever one wants to see. Usually, it is more productive to keep to the words of the philosophers and their arguments, as there is more than enough in them for us to engage with. I prefer a direct argument taken straight from the page.

My strategy for making sense of Plato’s more feeble arguments, or mutatis mutandis the lacking arguments of any other historical philosopher, tends to be one of two:

1. To acknowledge that philosophy is a truly challenging task and with the Politeia we are looking at very early work when many of conceptual and educational resources available to us had not been established.
2. To remind myself that that Plato wrote for a contemporary audience, whose expectations differed greatly from our modern expectations.

This strategy leads me to acknowledge weaknesses, while providing excuses for them. Julia Annas’ reading often makes similar moves and thereby reassures me that I’m not completely misguided. But this approach only gets you so far when the text tells you that there is more than what it says directly. For example, in passages where Socrates says something like this (435c-d):

But you should know, Glaucon, that, in my opinion, we will never get a precise answer using our present methods of argument— although there is another longer and fuller road that does lead to such an answer. But perhaps we can get an answer that’s up to the standard of our previous statements and inquiries.

But what, O Socrates, is this longer and fuller road? Is it the path of “dialectic” which you name but not develop much later in the dialogue? It isn’t clear, but Plato hints that there is more than what we can find directly in the text. Plato does not share my preference for direct argument taken straight from the page. Thus, my interpretive preferences are disappointed

Even worse, I’m quite confident that whatever Plato sought to express in an esoteric manner would disappoint me as well if I had access to it. Despite years in academia, I have yet to encounter an instance in which the ideas expressed through hints where more interesting or insightful than what you can find on a page of decent analytic philosophy. My understanding of language does not leave space for ineffable information and neither does my metaethics grant it any special value.

Given all these issues, I have wondered whether Plato’s Politeia is the right choice for my list of favourite books. It stands in for my general admiration of ancient Greek philosophy and sofar I cannot name a better to replace it. Aristotle’s Metaphysics would be a contender, if I had only read that work in its entirety, instead of pieces here and there. Julia Annas also appears to prefer Aristotle, whose arguments and positions she compares favourably to Plato’s Politeia in more than one place. The comparison to Aristotle also brings forward one of the reasons I gained intellectually from revisiting Politeia: It shed light on Hegel’s philosophy.

My former supervisor and eminent Hegel scholar Bob Stern, whom we have lost last year, put forward a rather Aristotelian reading of Hegel. Such a reading fit Bob’s approach to Hegel, which made his work seem rather reasonable while remaining close to the text. I, however, have been for years tempted by an interpretation that acknowledges the more Platonist and especially Neo-Platonist elements in Hegel — perhaps due to my encounter with Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Two ideas where I see alignment are reason realising itself through the universe and the solution to the problem of evil. I remember mentioning these Neo-Platonist connections up to Bob, who was always open to discussing such matters, but he couldn’t really see how it would help make sense of what Hegel said.

Revisiting Plato’s Politeia, the lines connecting its arguments to Hegel became once again apparent to me. The connections go beyond the obvious, e.g. that Plato uses the term “dialectic” for the highest form of gaining knowledge,¹ and include more subtle elements, such as an obsession with encompassing unity (totality) and belief in a connection between reality and being. Surely, a closer reading would reveal even more links. One day, I might pick up these threads and write about the Platonic Hegel. But given the immense literature around both of these figures, that is an endeavour better left for another time. For now, I rejoice in the intellectual engagement afforded by these texts and reaffirm my inclusion of Politeia in my list of all time favourite books.

References

• Annas, J. (1981). An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press.
• Griswold, C. L. (1988). Plato’s Metaphilosophy: Why Plato Wrote Dialogues. In C. L. Griswold (Ed.), Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. Pennsylvania State University Press.

Footnotes