Politics, Money, and Persuasion

Democracy and Opinion in Plato's Republic

John Russon

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253057686
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

In Politics, Money, and Persuasion, distinguished philosopher John Russon offers a new framework for interpreting Plato's The Republic. For Russon, Plato's work is about the distinctive nature of what it is to be a human being and, correspondingly, what is distinctive about the nature of human society. Russon focuses on the realities of our everyday experience to come to profoundly insightful assessments of our human realities: the nature of the city, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of human psychology.

Russon's argument concentrates on the ambivalence of logos, which includes reflections on politics and philosophy and their place in human life, how humans have shaped the environment, our interactions with money, the economy, and the pursuit of the good in social and political systems.

Politics, Money, and Persuasion offers a deeply personal but also practical kind of philosophical reading of Plato's classic text. It emphasizes the tight connection between the life of city and the life of the soul, demonstrating both the crucial role that human cognitive excellence and psychological health play in political and social life.

B.

THE VICISSITUDES OF OPINION

3

TRUE OPINION

IN CHAPTER 1, WE SAW THE AMBIVALENCE THAT is intrinsic to the phenomenon of knowledge: at a personal level, knowledge is both a powerful transformation within our experience and a platform for alienation from our experience. But knowledge is also a cultural matter, and here too it is ambivalent. It is a specific kind of culture within which the ideal of “knowledge” is cultivated: specifically, it is the democracy with its money-economy that we studied in chapter 2. Indeed, like tragedy and comedy, philosophy and sophistry are themselves phenomena of the democratic polis in that it is precisely within democratic poleis that the realities we now understand as philosophy and sophistry came into being. And democracy itself—which amounts, as we have seen, to rule by opinion—is uniquely defined by this opposition inasmuch as it is the regime whose reality changes shape accordingly as the opinions that drive it range from wisdom to foolishness, which means, roughly, the extent to which it is primarily informed by philosophy or sophistry. In this chapter and the next, we will explore why, precisely, these two forms of experience arise together within the environment in which one is licensed to “think for oneself.” In this chapter specifically, we will explore the conditions under which an opinion is true, and in our next, final chapter, we will consider how we become committed to false opinions.

The emergent intellectual culture within the Athenian polis is the defining context of the Platonic dialogues, and we will begin our study of knowledge here, in order to appreciate more fully why our nature as beings with logos implicates us simultaneously in the problems of philosophy and sophistry. The distinction between knowledge properly speaking and sophistry is a distinction in how we comport ourselves as beings with logos. For that reason, knowing is ultimately a matter of being self-responsible in our deployment of our logos-capacity. We will turn first to the Apology to clarify this notion of being self-responsible in logos, especially in relation to the culture of Athens in the time of Socrates.

We will then turn to the study of knowledge as such. The image that Socrates uses, in Book VI of the Republic, of knowledge as a “divided line” is a rich and powerful model for understanding what is involved in our experience of knowing, and the central study of this chapter will be the interpretation of this taking account of our taking account. Our study of this image (which will also involve us in reflections on the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Symposium) will clarify both how knowledge is possible and also how this matter of being self-responsible in our logos ultimately requires a deeper kind of self-responsibility: knowing in its fullest development ultimately requires moral transformation.

This rich interpretation of the intrinsic demands of knowing—as calling for the wholesale commitment of the soul to the pursuit of the good—will also allow us to identify the distinctive character of sophistry: the various forms of sophistry are so many ways of dishonestly abstracting from the existential concreteness of knowing, a theme that will guide us in our fuller study of human psychology in chapter 4. Before turning to the detailed study of the “divided line,” though, let us first return to the democratic poleis in which philosophy and sophistry arose.

I. Socrates and the New Intellectuals

As we noted in the introduction, a decisive feature of the ancient Greek cultural revolution was the emergence of “new intellectuals”—the “sophists.” Reading Homer, for example, one will find chieftains, bards, and priests (among others), and one will certainly find (putatively) wise speakers (such as Nestor), but one will not find itinerant intellectuals. In the time corresponding with the rise of democracy in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC, though, one does find such figures, and they precisely emerge within democratic cities.¹ Specifically, a movement grew up of thinkers who traveled between the Greek cities teaching the “art of speaking” [rhētorikē technē] and other related aspects of thinking and scientific learning.² This movement is generally believed to have been started by Protagoras (c. 490–420 BC) from Abdera, a democracy in Asia Minor, quickly followed by Gorgias (c. 485–373 BC) from Leontini, another democracy in Sicily.³ Socrates himself (c. 469–399 BC), the central figure of the Platonic dialogues and the exemplar—both for Plato and for us—of the distinctive practice of “philosophy” proper, is effectively a second-generation figure within this movement, like Prodicus (c. 465–395 BC) from Ceos and Hippias (c. 460–399 BC) from Elis. These figures and this movement are a prominent theme throughout the Platonic dialogues, especially in the Protagoras and the Gorgias, dialogues that portray Socrates in conversation with the great sophists.⁴

The Protagoras, a dialogue that portrays a conversation between Socrates and Protagoras in about 432 BC (i.e., about a dozen years before the conversation in the Republic, at a time when Plato was not yet born, when Socrates was roughly forty years old, and when the Peloponnesian War was on the verge of starting), explores the emergence of this new intellectual culture in some detail, especially focusing on the nature of logos and its relation to wisdom.⁵ The Gorgias, a dialogue that portrays a conversation of uncertain date between Socrates, Gorgias, and two younger men associated with Gorgias, explores the nature of rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy.⁶ We have already had occasion to refer to aspects of each of these dialogues in exploring other themes raised by the Republic, but they themselves especially thematize the relationship between philosophy and sophistry. What they alert us to is that the very powers and skills that are deployed in the pursuit of wisdom—philosophy—seem also to be those deployed in dishonest manipulation—sophistry, a practice that Protagoras and Gorgias are often accused of, as, indeed, is Socrates himself.⁷

The reasons for the criticism of sophistry should be clear to us. Throughout our study, we have been guided by the theme of the ambivalence of logos. Our ability to take account can carry us to a comprehensive grasp of the inner nature of things, but it can also leave us self-satisfied with a superficial “theory” that is reflective of our ignorance of and detachment from things rather than of an intimate engagement with them. This potential problem is familiar to us in the common, contemporary, cultural criticism of academics: students or teachers are often thought of as people “with their heads in the clouds,” more wrapped up in entertaining themselves with “mind-games” in their “ivory tower” than with a straightforward and sensible engagement with “the real world.” This, indeed, is exactly the perspective pointedly examined in Aristophanes’s Clouds.

The Clouds (initially produced in 423 BC) revolves around the figure of Socrates, and it portrays him as he appears in the eyes of ignorant and unsympathetic Athenians who experience the transformed world of the “new intellectuals” as a betrayal of traditional, down-to-earth values.⁸ The play follows the adventures of Strepsiades, who, caught up in problems of debt brought about by his son, attends Socrates’s phrontisterion—his “thinkery”—in order to learn argumentative tricks that he can take to the law-court in order to be absolved unjustly of the responsibility to pay his debts. At the phrontisterion, he finds Socrates and his students studying biology and meteorology (learning how the processes that produce flatulence are related to the processes that produce thunder), engaged in mathematical practices of measurement (calculating the distance a flea jumps), and studying the grammar and logic of language (contrasting masculine and feminine nouns with male and female animals). Strepsiades, who can see nothing in these studies except triviality and stupidity, nonetheless attends the school, hoping to learn logical tricks. Because of his complete failure at study and argument, he subsequently enrolls his son in the school. Though he then relies on the sophistical reasoning learned by his son to escape his debts, he nonetheless suffers from that very strategy as his son uses the same “new reasoning” to turn against Strepsiades himself. Ultimately, Strepsiades, blaming Socrates for his frustrations with his own situation, burns down the phrontisterion. Aristophanes’s portrayal here of the Athenian public as an ignorant body that violently turns against Socrates, whom they construe as a teacher who engages in inappropriate and trivial investigations into the natural world and who teaches people how to use argument dishonestly so as to pervert justice in their own favor, is remarkably prescient, as is made clear in Plato’s Apology of Socrates.

The Apology, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates’s defense before the court against charges of impiety in 399 BC, is both an autobiography of Socrates as a philosopher and a study of the nature of wisdom.⁹ This connection between the story of Socrates and the story of wisdom emerges from the decisive event in his autobiography: Chaerophon, a friend of Socrates’s, reportedly asked the Delphic oracle who was the wisest and received the answer that no one was wiser than Socrates (Apology 21a). According to Socrates, his subsequent life was spent grappling with this claim: specifically, it led him to test the wisdom of others whom one might have imagined to have a better claim than he to the title of “wisest.”¹⁰ His questioning of others characteristically revealed that they confidently held beliefs they could not justify, leading Socrates ultimately to conclude that his superiority in wisdom was his recognition of his own ignorance (Apology 23a–b). It was this practice of questioning others that ultimately led to Socrates’s being accused of impiety: not recognizing the gods of Athens, introducing new gods, and corrupting the youth (Apology 24b). Socrates’s story is important, both for what it reveals about the nature of wisdom and, indeed, for what it reveals about the nature of the city.

What is most distinctive about Socrates is his expectation that people should “think for themselves,” so to speak. In his encounters with the putatively wise—politicians, poets, and expert craftsmen [tous cheirotechnas] are the groups he identifies (Apology 21b–22e)—Socrates first seeks to establish with each individual what that individual’s view is, and then seeks, with that person, to determine whether that view is justified. He investigates, in other words, what reasons that individual has for holding the view that he has (“he” because, with the exception of his conversation with Diotima reported in the Symposium, there is no record in Plato’s writings of Socrates holding these conversations with women, and in the case of Diotima it is she, not he, who does the questioning).¹¹ Through prompting that individual to defend his views, Socrates precisely challenges that individual to think for himself. This simple structure reveals quite a lot about our human nature.

Socrates’s practice of questioning draws attention to a crucial, twofold aspect to our experience. First, we have “views,” that is, we live within an interpretation of things: a “perspective,” an “account” of things. In other words, as we have seen all along, it is our nature to “take account” of things. Unlike other natural beings, whose instinctive “take” on the world is part and parcel of their natural form, our perspective on things is not something that is given to us by nature, but is a function of how we, individually and collectively, have “made sense” of things. But, precisely because it is thus up to us to determine how we take account, we are accountable for our views; that is, we must also “take account” of this account. Socrates’s questioning, then, is precisely an identification of our distinctive human nature as beings with logos, and the recognition of the demand for self-accountability intrinsically incumbent upon it.

In thus calling others to account through his questioning, Socrates refers to himself as a “gadfly” [muōps] (Apology 30e); that is, he functions like a constant irritant, waking people up to the ways in which they are irresponsibly taking things for granted.¹² His challenge to others is ultimately to call them honestly to address “what matters”: people, he claims, generally treat “the good” as if it were money or immediate pleasure; he encourages them, on the contrary, to care for their souls, to care for their very powers of honoring, of taking account. In their practices, both individual and collective, each makes it clear that he has adopted an interpretation—an account of—the good, but each is taking this account for granted as if it were something obvious or natural. Socrates thus enjoins his fellow citizens to attend to the good as such, and thereby give an account of the account they have been presuming. In thus calling people to care for the good on its own terms, rather than thinking in terms of what seems to them to be—but ultimately is not actually—in their immediate self-interest, Socrates requires them to be self-critical. This practice makes him a “gadfly,” because people find it challenging to be confronted with their own ignorance and to be called out of their comfortable habits of thinking and acting.¹³

We should notice that Socrates’s philosophizing all takes place within logos—within the process of giving accounts. As Nikias says in the Laches,

You don’t seem to realize that whoever meets up with Socrates and enters into conversation with him will inevitably be shifted around by what the man says, no matter what topic the conversation started on, until he finds himself giving an account of himself [to didonai peri hautou logon]—the manner in which he is living now and how he lived his life in the past—and once he finds himself doing that, Socrates will not let him off until he puts the...