Post by johnbc on Sept 18, 2020 8:55:12 GMT
The advice I have to give is simple and direct: do not read this book as if it were a “utopia”, the proposal for an ideal society to be built in the near or distant future, determined or indeterminate. Contrary to what happens with modern utopias, the “Republic” is definitely not a political proposal or a myth intended to stoke the ambitions of revolutionary parties. It is a philosophical investigation in the strict sense, and one of the most serious that anyone has ever undertaken. To take advantage of his study, it is necessary to place it in the exact place it occupies in the building of Platonic science. This science is made up of a very fine differentiation between the different levels, plans or layers of reality. When you divide a square diagonally and obtain two isosceles triangles, this result cannot be explained by examining the brain processes by which you obtained it. The properties of geometric figures and brain physiology remain irreducibly independent of each other, although in some mysterious way the two touch each other the instant you study geometry. They reside in different “reality plans”. In the whole of existence, Plato discerns a certain number of these plans, and in one of them he situates the human being — a specific reality that cannot be explained fully either by the general order of the cosmos (the divine law or “Supreme Good”), nor by the properties that it has in common with the other inhabitants of planet Earth, animals, plants or minerals. From this peculiar situation of man in the structure of the universe, Plato draws an analytical description of human nature as that of an intermediary being, who lives from simultaneous and unstable “participation” (metaxy) in two planes of reality, without being able to fully absorb himself in none of them: badly installed in the terrestrial environment, to which it seeks to adapt by means of ingenious devices, it is also unable to rise to the contemplation of the supreme order, of divine beatitude, but for fleeting moments that further emphasize its dependence on the immediate physical environment. Plato sums it up by saying that man is an intermediate type between animals and gods.
Once human nature was thus delineated, Plato then posed the question of what social and political conditions would be most appropriate for the development of man according to the requirements of that nature. It is to this investigation that he devotes “The Republic”. It is not, therefore, a political proposal, but the construction of a set of hypotheses. As these hypotheses are subject to critical evaluation according to the principles previously stated and according to the experience of each student (Plato himself will do a part of this critical examination later, in the book of “Laws”), it is clear that this is a scientific investigation in the most rigorous sense of the term.
This is how the “Republic” should be read
The beauty of the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is in the transparency with which it raises the principles of rational knowledge and then offers to be judged by them. At the entrance of modernity, which paradoxically boasts that it inaugurated the scientific study of human society, this transparency is lost and is replaced by a tangle of implicit, unconscious or poorly confessed premises, forcing the scholar to a complex and risky speculation of the author’s subjective intentions before he can be sure that he understood Machiavelli or Rousseau enough to be able to judge whether they are right.
The great task of political philosophy today is to recover the classic ideal of transparency and rationality, without which the name “science” becomes just an advertising label stuck on top of an obscure mass of barbaric prejudices and futile grudges.
Once human nature was thus delineated, Plato then posed the question of what social and political conditions would be most appropriate for the development of man according to the requirements of that nature. It is to this investigation that he devotes “The Republic”. It is not, therefore, a political proposal, but the construction of a set of hypotheses. As these hypotheses are subject to critical evaluation according to the principles previously stated and according to the experience of each student (Plato himself will do a part of this critical examination later, in the book of “Laws”), it is clear that this is a scientific investigation in the most rigorous sense of the term.
This is how the “Republic” should be read
The beauty of the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is in the transparency with which it raises the principles of rational knowledge and then offers to be judged by them. At the entrance of modernity, which paradoxically boasts that it inaugurated the scientific study of human society, this transparency is lost and is replaced by a tangle of implicit, unconscious or poorly confessed premises, forcing the scholar to a complex and risky speculation of the author’s subjective intentions before he can be sure that he understood Machiavelli or Rousseau enough to be able to judge whether they are right.
The great task of political philosophy today is to recover the classic ideal of transparency and rationality, without which the name “science” becomes just an advertising label stuck on top of an obscure mass of barbaric prejudices and futile grudges.
