E.R. Dodds’ essay on the ancient concept of progress, which found mention in a recent post, included an interesting comment on Plato’s Republic that worthy of further discussion, namely, that:
“Alternatively, the dream could be projected as a blueprint for the future, one of those ‘rational Utopias’ of which Plato’s Republic is only the most famous example. Utopias of this kind are less a sign of confidence in the future than of dissatisfaction with the present; their authors seldom have much to say about the practical steps by which Utopia is to be achieved.”[1]
This can be better highlighted with the way in which Plato thinks his utopic regimes, both in the Republic and the Laws, can be brought about, from which it will be clear that his discontentment with the present ought to be thought of in more reactionary terms. Plato, through Socrates in the Republic and the Athenian stranger in the Laws, reflects his discontentment with the present and his encouragement of means-end calculus to bring about the change. Dodds is, in broad strokes, right, but he only makes this critical comment in passing. The process through which Plato contrives to bring about his ideal regime is one that reeks of desperation: tyranny, lies, dictatorships, are all part and parcel of this process, and they must be told because the end warrants it. The passages that concern us are found in the Republic at 382a–386c and 414b–415e, and in the Laws at 709a–712a.
Whatever the Platonic premise may be — whether one considers Kallipolis and Magnesia to be nightmarish hell holes, like the philosopher Karl Popper does,[2] or some sort of lost paradise, as many a Platonist would aver, this is wholly immaterial — it cannot be denied that the world Plato tries to make rests on a fatal moral flaw: it requires the sacrifice of means to achieve a predetermined end, without thought for the moral consequences of that action. I would call it a fatal flaw: one cannot build an entire world based on a lie, because it is inevitable that the lie be exposed, and the consequences of one lie can be measured in more visceral terms. What precisely these terms are depends on the nature of the unravelling of this ‘noble lie’ or dictatorial origins.
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In the Republic, Socrates seeks to define “a true falsehood” (382a).[3] While Socrates accepts and argues for the premise that no one would like to have false knowledge, especially in the soul, “for everyone hates a falsehood in that place most of all” (382b). This is in the midst of Socrates’ pogrom against the poets, where alleged falsehoods and vice are excised from the gods and the literary and mythological foundations of Kallipolis are cleansed. This discussion is however interrupted by this brief sidebar, which is concerned with the nature of the truth, and the varying degrees of truth. Socrates posits a special kind of lie — a “falsehood in words” (382c).[4] It is not a complete lie — or as he puts it, “a true falsehood” (382a). If this all sounds awfully confusing, it is; and we ought to clarify this through illustration of Socrates’ own words:
“Falsehood in words is a kind of imitation of this affection in the soul, an image of it that comes into being after it and is not a pure falsehood.” (382b)
“What about falsehood in words? When and to whom is it useful and so not deserving of hatred? Isn’t it useful against one’s enemies? And when any of our so-called friends are attempting, through madness or ignorance, to do something bad, isn’t it a useful drug for preventing them? It is also useful in the case of those stories we were just talking about, the ones we tell because we don’t know the truth about those ancient events [d] involving the gods. By making a falsehood as much like the truth as we can, don’t we also make it useful?” (382c–d)
So, then, what is a lie? There are two sorts: the grievous sort that affects the soul, and the “falsehood in words” that is banal and trite, much like a white lie. It is a lie that has as its end some beneficial action, either to protect one against one’s enemies, or preventing one’s friends from harming themselves by doing something they ought not to do. It is, most strikingly, “useful” (382c), and holds no relation to an abstract understanding of the truth or of ethical action and conduct.
In this particular mention of the “falsehood in words,” Socrates denies its value to the gods, because “there is nothing of the false poet in a god” (382d). He emphasises that the gods do not “mislead us by falsehoods in words or deeds” (383a). But if Socrates chooses to censor and then ultimately expel all the poets from Kallipolis at the end, in Book X, then why does he resort to the same action as they do? Socrates’ entire system is founded upon that one noble lie.
Socrates and Glaucon are in conversation, and the former is trying to devise a solution for the protection of the polis. The only solution Socrates approves of is the creation of a guardian class, which must “guard against external enemies and internal friends”(414b).[5] It is unclear who at home — especially “friends” of the polis — are a danger to Plato’s nascent ideal city. That they are considered to be security threats on the same level as external enemies, namely those who seek to invade the polis’ territory for plunder or annexation, is more troubling; the citizens of the polis are not to be trusted and must be insulated from the guardians who rule. This is most certainly troubling but is not our focus for the moment. We are more concerned with the question of the noble lie that Socrates intends to perpetrate, even though he has stated previously that it is wrong, and that the gods would never do something like that (414b–c):
[Socrates]: “How, then, could we devise one of those useful falsehoods we were talking about a whole ago, one noble falsehood that would, in the best [c] case, persuade even the rulers, but if that’s not possible, then the others in the city?”
[Glaucon]: “What sort of falsehood?”
[Socrates]: “Nothing new, but a Phoenician story which describes something that has happened in many places. At least, that’s what the poets say, and they’ve persuaded many people to believe it too.”
Here stands the edifice of Kallipolis. It is a crumbling edifice, one whose foundations are based on lies. The useful and the expedient are equated with that which is ethically appropriate, even though they are acknowledged to be human contrivances with no divine sanction. If the aim of the polis is to promote the common good, or virtue over vice, and provide fulfilment and flourishing, how can it be founded upon a lie? The explicit connotation of this noble lie is that all sorts of half-truths and untruths ought to be perpetrated if they can be redeemed by some greater good, or that the means of bringing about change and governance ought to be whatever one may conjure. This sort of double-dealing and lying is most certainly intentional, and it goes back to Dodds’ observation about Plato.
Plato is so thoroughly disenchanted with the present moment that he is willing to do that which Socrates tells Crito not to. “One must never in any way do wrong willingly,” Socrates tells Crito, adding that “to do wrong [is] never good or admirable, as we have agreed in the past.”[6] He has forgotten his own moral precept, the lesson of never doing wrong willingly. If Socrates, if we are to believe Plato, said these things — is the Socrates of Crito a different Socrates than that in the Republic? It is clear that to lie, mislead, and pose half-truths and white lies is fundamentally wrong. But what is a lie? The SEP’s “traditional definition of lying” is as follows: “to make a believed-false statement to another person with the intention that the other person believe that statement to be true.”[7] For our purposes, this is a sufficient definition of lying, and we must take that a lie is wrong because the intent behind it is fundamentally flawed, namely that it necessarily deceives, and not under the threat of life in this instance. Socrates does not advocate for a pardonable lie — the sort that one would tell a robber who threatens to murder you if you do not hand over all your valuables — but a lie that is a conscious, deliberate obfuscation of the truth. Even though it may merely be a lie in words, a spoken falsehood, or however else that one may choose to translate it as, is to do wrong willingly.
The sort of lie Plato intends to perpetrate — that of a foundational myth, intentionally conjured, is the sort of lie that dictates the totality of one’s existence and one’s identity. It is vicious because it affects the composition of the self: the Englishman takes pride in the monarchy and the common law because they are fundamental to his being English in the same way than an American takes pride in the Constitution as the foundational document of his nation. Both of those facets of political life are inalienable from the larger, general state of being of the political community; one may even argue that without them the community is no longer the same. The same applies for the vicious lie that Plato seeks to perpetrate, and it is vicious because it is a knowing lie. Those coming from outside can always threaten to expose it, and the foundation is rendered lonely. The threat to an indoctrinated peoples is always the threat of being exposed to the outside world, and totalitarian states built upon mythic lies, grossly untrue, are the sort of state that necessarily prohibit their subjects from being in contact with anything or anyone outside the tightly controlled world they inhabit. Plato’s world is based on the supposition that this lie is not to be exposed, and although it is cleansed of the sins and transgressions of the poets, it must necessarily resort to such a sin and transgression of moral responsibility to build itself up and maintain its socio-political existence.
Travelling outside is dangerous: an encounter with a Phoenician may unravel the myth, or chancing upon a skilled poet may endanger the unity of the noble lie, which is anything but noble. It is upon this — and not, as Socrates would argue later in the Republic, the immorality of the poets’ imitative practices — that results in their expulsion from the Kallipolis. Socrates hints at this in book X, where there is a return to the subject of poetry; he warns Glaucon that “anyone who is anxious about the constitution within him must be careful when he hears it and must continue to believe what we have said about it” (608a–b). The population must be warned against the poets because they quarrel against philosophy. Socrates even taunts Glaucon for his love of Homer: “What about you, Glaucon, don’t you feel the charm of the pleasure-giving Muse, especially when you study her through the eyes of Homer?” (607c). Socrates admits the existence of the “ancient quarrel between it [poetry] and philosophy” (607b), and threatens Glaucon with impiety for falling to the Muses. He thinks — rather crudely, if you ask this onetime student of the history of art — that philosophy and poetry are incompatible, but this is emphatically untrue, a grievous wrong that must be corrected, and was by Plato’s spurned disciple, Aristotle, whose understanding of most things is hard to fault.
At any rate, this means-ends argument above shows that Plato felt strongly enough about the present discontentment that he was willing to perpetrate an inexcusable wrong, and even though it may be some form of a ‘rational utopia’, it is a dystopia for most. It is a world where the falò delle vanità is encouraged, where the enemy is within and outside and must be protected against, where secretive police and a wholly unaccountable state rip away any resemblance of private life. There is no distinction between public and private, between the house and the agora. It is crude and brutish. The polis is, if we are to borrow from another thinker of some (dis)repute, in a state of bellum omnium contra omnes.
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The analogous text to the Republic, and one of the few in the Platonic corpus that does not feature Socrates as a speaker, the Laws, does not tell a better story.[8] If there can be a development in the noble lie, the spoken falsehood, it must be found in the Laws, which has been read by Cicero as Plato’s own position.[9] If we take the conversation at the conclusion of the Laws at 968e–969d seriously[10] — that these rules are not the rules of rational utopias such as Kallipolis but the laws of an actual city that they fully intend to found — then the ‘noble lie’ must be treated seriously in all its permutations and combinations. Fortunately, both Plato’s discontentment with the present and a rather ‘practical’ articulation of this can be found in the text.
Plato’s discontentment is visible in the following passage at 709a:
“I was going to say that no man ever legislates at all. Accidents and calamities occur in a thousand different ways, and it is they that are the universal legislators of the world. If it isn’t pressures of war that overturn a constitution and rewrite the laws, it’s the distress of grinding poverty; and disease too forces us to make a great many innovations, when plagues beset us for years on end and bad weather is frequent and prolonged.”[11]
Although the Athenian stranger qualifies this statement, it is dramatic and full of emotion. Plato is writing at the end of the Peloponnesian War, a war that was unlike anything the Greek world had seen before.[12] The Laws shows the scar of this great rupture. It is willing to countenance anything, even the most horrid form of government — a dictatorial regime[13] — which is essentially unfettered by law: “the ideal starting point is dictatorship, the next best is constitutional kingship” (710e). Plato expects the tyrant to have be some sort of human philosopher king, “with a good memory, quick to learn, courageous, and with a character of natural elevation” (710a), and moderation, in which lies the entirety of virtue (668a–b). The Athenian stranger then adds: “You see, there is no quicker or better method of establishing a political system than this one, nor could there ever be” (710c).
What Plato is trying to posit here is nothing sort of radical change. Regardless of the contents of his Seventh Letter, which may or may not be of spurious origin or the result of a later interpolation or an early attempt at epistolary fiction, it leaves no doubt that Plato was increasingly ready to cavort with tyrants and dictators, less than respectable individuals, in his quest to found ideal regimes. He tried — and tried he did — to make these dictatorial regimes just, moderate, wise, and courageous, but he only succeeded in the latter. Plutarch’s life of Dion, the Syracusan tyrant, has a remarkable account of Plato cavorting with one such regime, but also this nugget of wisdom: “But he seems to have been of a temper naturally averse to graciousness, and, besides, he was ambitious to curb the Syracusans…” (Dion, LIII).[14] This is not an ad hominem argument but the extension of Plato’s own principles to explain the actions he took in his life. That Plato thought that the means of good governance could be subverted for an end, however noble it may be, shows that the foundations upon which he imposes virtue upon the citizens of Magnesia are fickle and fleeting.
Added to this is my own aversion to any sort of revolutionary change. Laws — like the best regimes — establish and propagate themselves organically, not without human agency or solely with a single agent of change, but the collective wisdom of a community. Law, like politics, is an inherently social activity. But my objections to Plato’s process are more important here.
What sort of person would cavort with tyrant after tyrant, hoping to establish the best regime? The stranger adds: “The next best thing would be a pair of such dictators; the third best would be several of them” (710d). The premise here — unspoken but writ large across the desire to make the world anew — is a fundamental dissatisfaction with the present, such that anything is better. For Plato, the outside world was so rotten and depressing that anything could seem better than what was in front of him. This is what Dodds pointed out in a handful of words.
[1] E.R. Dodds, ‘The Ancient Concept of Progress’, in The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1–25, at 13.
[2] Melissa Lane, ‘Introduction’, in The Republic, by Plato, 2nd ed., Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2007), xi–xl, at xi.
[3] The translation here is somewhat obscure and was clarified by means of reference to Desmond Lee’s and C.D.C. Reeve’s translations. Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004); Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed., Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2007). However, quotations in the text follow the translations contained in Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997).
[4] Lee translates this as “spoken falsehood”; Reeve renders it as “a lie in words.”
[5] Lee: “their function being to see that friends at home shall not wish, nor foes abroad be able, to harm our state” (414b).
[6] Crito, 49a.
[7] “…there are at least four necessary conditions for lying. First, lying requires that a person make a statement (statement condition). Second, lying requires that the person believe the statement to be false; that is, lying requires that the statement be untruthful (untruthfulness condition). Third, lying requires that the untruthful statement be made to another person (addressee condition). Fourth, lying requires that the person intend that that other person believe the untruthful statement to be true (intention to deceive the addressee condition).” James Edwin Mahon, ‘The Definition of Lying and Deception’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2016 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/lying-definition/.
[8] In addition to the translation quoted in the text, which is included with John Cooper’s Hackett edition of Plato’s dialogues, I have also referred to: Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
[9] See De Legibus 1.15. Atticus tells Marcus, “it seems logical that you should also write about the laws. I know that your beloved Plato did just that …”, to which Marcus replies, “Just as with the Cretan Clinias and the Lacedaemonian Megillus, as he describes it, he spent a summer day in the cypress groves and forest paths of Cnossos … discoursing on public institutions and the best laws …”. Cicero is precise and conscious in his identification of Plato with the Athenian Stranger. Such an intelligent thinker could not have made so trite an error in so important a text.
[10] Megellius tells Clinias: “My dear Clinias, judging from what we’ve heard said, either we’ll have to abandon the project of founding the state or refuse to let our visitor leave us, and by entreaties and every ruse we can think of enroll him as a partner in the foundation of the state” (969c).
[11] In 709b–c, he admits God and skill as two other factors, but we are more concerned with the prioritization of pure chance and even bad luck.
[12] The Republic is set during the Peloponnesian War. Lane, ‘Introduction’, xvii.
[13] Pangle translates it as tyrant: “‘Give me a tyrannized city,’ he will declare, ‘and let the tyrant be young …” (710a). Trevor J. Saunders’ translation, included in the Hackett edition, puts this as: “Give me a state under the absolute control of a dictator, and let the dictator be young…”.
[14] Loeb translation.