Plato's Republic by Simon Blackburn

Author:Simon Blackburn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857898548
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-05-21T08:07:47.548392+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The Myth of the Cave

So the sun is not to be identified with sight, but is responsible for sight and is itself within the visible realm... As goodness stands in the intelligible realm to intelligence and the things we know, so in the visible realm the sun stands to sight and the things we see. (VI, 508b–c)

Plato leaves the world of the senses with the doctrine that there is a permanent and unvarying reality, a divine and orderly world ‘where wronging and being wronged don’t exist, where all is orderly and rational’ (VI, 500c). This is obviously distinct from the shifting scenes of ‘plurality and variety’ (VI, 484b) which the senses show us, and in which normal life is lived. He holds the view that this reality is alone the subject of knowledge, and he is in no doubt that such knowledge is possible, although it is demanding, and only ever achieved by the elite few, the philosophers or lovers of knowledge who have undergone an arduous education before becoming capable of it. Finally, there is the view that this reality provides a foundation for ethics and right conduct. It somehow certifies, all by itself, what is virtue and what is not.

Within that framework, variation is possible. The key issue will be how to think of the relation between the ‘transcendental’ reality, and the world of the senses, which is after all the world in which the elite have to act, and which they are apparently qualified to rule. Plato is well aware of the problem: immediately after the passages we have been looking at, he confronts the objection that philosophers, or at least people who do not drop it after an initial dabbling education, ‘turn out to be pretty weird (not to say, rotten to the core)’ (VI, 487d). Socrates urges that philosophers are bound to be disrespected by the vulgar, precisely because they are vulgar, and therefore incapable of appreciating the true expertise that the philosopher brings to the civic community. But worse than that, in an imperfect state, the insidious corruptions of flattery and mass adulation will deflect any human being from the course of philosophy into the hurly-burly of unilluminated argument and politics. Finally, upstarts and pretenders will gatecrash philosophy, pretending themselves to possess the knowledge of the philosopher, and to the majority of people they are indistinguishable from the real thing.

All these are obstacles, serious if not entirely insuperable, to establishing the rule of the elite, the philosopher-kings. They boil down to a chicken-and-egg problem. The philosopher can only grow in the ideal community, but no community can be ideal unless already under the rule of the philosopher. To break the log-jam, it would take a ‘trembling hand’, a random generation of one of the necessary ingredients, after which, perhaps, both individual and community could lever themselves up the path to perfection. But by itself none of this gives us a model for the kind of Enlightenment which is needed for the philosopher-ruler.

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