As we move past the midpoint of the Republic, Socarates seems to finally leave behind his description of the rules of the just city and move into more interesting territory. Book 5 finished the thought experiment by concluding that the most important rule for bringing the just city into existence was to put the philosophers in charge. Book 6 is mostly devoted to answering the obvious objection -- most folks don't think of philosophers as particularly useful people who would make good rulers. In fact, even Socrates agrees (487e) that most people who study philosophy end up somewhere between useless and downright bad. However, he explains that this happens because their noble natures are planted in the barren soil of the corrupted city. Philosophy's quest for truth can never thrive under pressure from the masses, it is an inherently aristocratic endeavor.
Towards the end of the chapter, this discussion of the rarity of the philosophic nature leads Socrates to describe the most stringent and important test for it -- the ability to understand the Form of the Good. Beyond possessing all the virtues like courage and wisdom and justice, the true philosopher needs above all else to understand how these virtues can benefit us. He needs to know why they are good for us. Is something good because it brings us pleasure or imparts knowledge (505b4) or is there some other explanation? The philosopher king needs to be able to pass beyond the many good virtues and understand what makes something Good in itself. The Form of the Good brings us to another level of abstraction, since the many goods it encompasses are themselves Forms. And since its definition takes us beyond pleasure and even knowledge, it introduces another power (477c) beyond both opinion and knowledge -- understanding. While Socrates isn't really able to describe the Good or 'understanding' very exactly, he tells us that it is like the sun -- not only a brilliant object in its own right, but the source of the natural light that lets us perceive all the others.
The initial part of this book simply recapitulates what we heard in book 5 about the many virtues of the philosopher.
Is there any objection you can find, then, to a pursuit that no one can adequately follow unless he's by nature good at remembering, quick to learn, high-minded, graceful, and a friend and relative of truth, justice, courage, and moderation?
Not even Momus could find one.
When such people have reached maturity in age and education, wouldn't you entrust the city to them and to them alone?
(487a2)
While Socrates may have convinced all his companions with his reasoning, this image of the philosopher, and the idea of putting him in charge of a city, runs so counter to popular opinion that Socrates is obliged to explain why the public so misunderstands philosophy. One part of the problem is that the masses don't know what they are talking about. Socrates likens them to the strong but not too bright owner of a ship who has to pick a captain (488). Many sailors clamor to be in charge, and the ones who succeed are the ones who are best at convincing the owner to put them in charge, not necessarily the ones who are best at sailing. By contrast, a truly good sailor, who would make a great captain, spends his time studying the water, the sky, and the craft of sailing, all of which appear completely beside the point both to the other sailors clamoring for the position, as well as to the dullard owner. The story parallels the description of politicians and orators as the pastry chefs of the soul we saw in Gorgias. So the reason the common man considers the philosopher so useless is because he has a bunch of opinions, but no real knowledge of what's good for himself. He is, to use a metaphor Plato is fond of, like a sick man who doesn't even realize that he needs a doctor (489c).
While the ignorance of the masses may explain the philosopher's image as a useless "stargazer, babbler, and good-for-nothing", it doesn't explain why so many who study philosophy end up downright mean. I don't know how mean we consider philosopher's today, especially given that our current image depicts them as mostly harmless academics. But we're certainly still familiar with the general problem of how 'high-minded' folks can often be more vicious than the common man. Just ask your local catholic priest. So what is it that corrupts these people who Socrates has argued begin with such a panoply of virtues? The problem turns out to be, again, the ignorant masses. In fact, the virtuous philosophic soul, when planted in the degenerate soil of the luxurious city, is the most easily corrupted thing of all. The greatest virtues are converted into the greatest vices because everyone wants to use the philosopher's strength to their own advantage; they praise him for his virtue only so long as he uses it to achieve things valuable in the opinion of the masses. This is actually kind of a clever argument that reminds me of Nozick's explanation for why so many academics dislike capitalism. Socrates observes that in the impure city that exists today, these talented philosophic souls receive consistent praise using those talents to get ahead in conventional ways, and consistent scorn for pursuing some supposed higher truth at odds with the common value placed on money, honor, and fame.
When many of them [the masses] are sitting together in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps, or in some other public gathering of the crowd, they object very loudly and excessively to some of the things that are said or done and approve others in the same way, shouting and clapping, so that the very rocks and surroundings echo the din of their praise or blame and double it. In circumstances like that, what is the effect, as they say, on a young person's heart? What private training can hold out and not be swept away by that kind of praise or blame and be carried by the flood wherever it goes, so that he'll say that the same things are beautiful or ugly as the crowd does, follow the same pursuits as they do, and be the same sort of person as they are? (492b4)
Even Plato believed that incentives matter, it seems. Everything that makes the noble philosophic soul great simultaneously increases the pressure of this tyranny of expectations. Which goes a long way to explain why Socrates spent so much time discussing the education and upbringing of the guardians back in books 2 and 3.
Given this incentive structure, you might think that Socrates has worked himself into a corner. If a philosophic nature is inevitably corrupted by a degenerate society, how are we ever supposed to raise a philosopher king who would have the wisdom to institute the thoroughly contrarian constitution that Socrates has described? If there's no chicken, how do we get good eggs? In short, we don't. Unless, that is, we get lucky. Remember, Socrates only wants to establish that it's possible to create this best of cities, not that it is likely or easy. To establish this minimum he suggests a few lucky scenarios that might produce an uncorrupted philosophical soul -- an exiled noble, a great man living in a small city, a brilliant intellect with a sickly physique, or Socrates own case, where his daemon holds him back from getting embroiled in the affairs of other men (496b). Of course, if these accidents happen in the barren soil of the corrupt city, the philosopher produced will understand the pointlessness of entering public affairs and will follow Socrates example and lead a quiet life, "free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content" (496d9). It would take even a further miracle for a seed of this nature to be planted in a soil where it would thrive and reproduce itself, where it would be given power over a city, allowed to set its constitution and provide for the upbringing of future philosopher kings. This would truly be a moment of divine intervention (492e8).
If this rare flower of philosophy is to benefit the city despite the opposition between the public's beliefs and his knowledge, then the philosopher must truly know what's really good for the city, not merely what appears to be good to its masses. The inherently aristocratic nature of philosophy means that the philosopher must know the very Form of what makes something Good. This is the only way he can understand why some particular thing is truly good and who it is good for. At this point, the up to now fairly rationalist theory of the Forms seems to begin to shade into mysticism. Yet at the same time, we can clearly see the most concrete moral question that has animated Plato's theory from the very beginning -- how do we live the good life? The theory of Forms always had a moral dimension beneath its metaphysical one, but now this becomes explicit. The Good is a sort of meta-Form that illuminates and organizes all the others. After all, Plato came up with the theory primarily as a tool for selecting, not just describing, what we should consider truly Beautiful, or Courageous, or Just. If we were only to know those other Forms, without being able to act on that knowledge, how would we benefit from them?
And you also know that, if we don't know it, even the fullest possible knowledge of other things is of no benefit to us, any more than if we acquire any possession without the good of it. Or do you think that it is any advantage to have every kind of possession without the good of it? (505a)
What is the Form of the Good though? In keeping with his knowing nothing, it turns out that Socrates really isn't able to answer this question, and is forced to approach it only by analogy. First though, he dismisses the two most obvious candidates for the god -- pleasure and knowledge. Gorgias already provided an extended critique of the latter identification, so the argument is not reprised here. And Socrates immediately observes that while it sounds more sophisticated to equate the good with knowledge, this results in a circularity.
Furthermore, you certainly know that the majority believe that pleasure is the good, while the more sophisticated believe that it is knowledge.
Indeed I do.
And you know that those who believe this can't tell us what sort of knowledge it is, however, but in the end are forced to say that it is knowledge of the good. (505b)
Socrates insists that the best he can do (beyond clearing the field of false definitions) is to tell us what the good is like, to tell us about, "what is apparently an offspring of the good and most like it." (506e2). And the Good turns out to be like the sun. It is the light that illuminates the other intelligible objects in the same way that the sun illuminates visible objects.
What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things. (508c)
This may seem fairly straightforward at first, but it raises a host of interesting questions about the role of the Good. For one, while Plato isn't explicit that he's referring to their earlier definition (477c), he has introduced some new power that is neither opinion nor knowledge. He's going to name this new power, that operates like a mental sun, "understanding". This is the power by which we are able to come to know. Since knowledge was already a power, this makes understanding a kind of meta-power.
So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. (508e)
At the same time, the Good not only provides for the possibility of knowledge, but is also itself an object of knowledge, just as the sun is itself also a visual object. So the Good even has a sort of self-illuminating quality to it. Socrates pushes the metaphor even further by noting that the sun doesn't just illuminate things, but also nourishes them and makes everything grow. Analogously, the Good is responsible for our knowledge of things, but also for the very being of the things themselves.
Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power. (509b)
The Good has a Form, and constitutes a power, but it is beyond the other Forms, and beyond even being itself (note this latter fact in relation to Parmenides). Basically, it's the power to understand the other Forms.
Finally, Socrates concludes the chapter by formalizing the analogy between the visible and the intelligible. He describes a line divided into four unequal pieces. First, in keeping with the analogy between the Good and the sun, the whole line is divided unequally between visible and intelligible. Next, each of these parts is again divided unequally (though in the same proportions to one another and to the division between visible and intelligible) into images and the originals which produced these images.
1) Imagination: The lowest rung, so to speak, will be occupied by images of visible objects.
"And by images I mean, first, shadows, then reflections in water and in all close-packed, smooth, and shiny materials, and everything of that sort" (509e)
2) Belief: Next will come the real visible objects that produce these images.
In the other subsection of the visible, put the originals of these images, namely, the animals around us, all the plants, and the whole class of manufactured things. (510a)
So far, so good. Things take an interesting twist though, with the second section of the line, the intelligible.
3) Thought: The images that occupy the lower subsection of the intelligible turn out to be mathematical objects like circles and triangles. Socrates makes clear that he does not mean visible drawings or representations of those objects (which would be classified in 2), but the actual triangle as an object of thought, a 'mental image' (510c). So while subsection 3 is filled with intelligible images, these images serve as originals with respect to the visible images of them (eg. a circle drawn in the sand) that were in subsection 2. Like the definitions of geometric figures, the intelligible objects of subsection 3 serve as hypotheses. They are first principles that the mind takes as given, and that allow it to deduce other conclusions.
In one subsection, the soul, using as images the things that were imitated before, is forced to investigate from hypotheses, proceeding not to a first principle but to a conclusion. (510b)
...
I think you know that students of geometry, calculation, and the like hypothesize the odd and the even, the various figures, the three kinds of angles, and other things akin to these in each of their investigations, as if they knew them. They make these their hypotheses and don't think it necessary to give any account of them, either to themselves or to others, as if they were clear to everyone. And going from these first principles through the remaining steps, they arrive in full agreement.
I certainly know that much.
Then you also know that, although they use visible figures and make claims about them, their thought isn't directed to them but to those other things that they are like. They make their claims for the sake of the square itself and the diagonal itself, not the diagonal they draw, and similarly with the others. These figures that they make and draw, of which shadows and reflections in water are images, they now in turn use as images, in seeking to see those others themselves that one cannot see except by means of thought.
That's true.
This, then, is the kind of thing that, on the one hand, I said is intelligible, and, on the other, is such that the soul is forced to use hypotheses in the investigation of it, not travelling up to a first principle, since it cannot reach beyond its hypotheses, but using as images those very things of which images were made in the section below, and which, by comparison to their images, were thought to be clear and to be valued as such. (510c-511a)
4) Understanding: Finally, subsection 4 contains ... well, it's not completely clear. By analogy, it should contain the originals, of which the contents of subsection 3 are just mental images. However, it's not totally clear what that would mean in terms of the mathematical example, and this isn't quite how Plato describes it anyhow. Instead, it may contain only the first principle that allows one to deduce the things that were acceptable as provisional hypotheses in subsection 3. In the present context, this is obviously the Good, which is like a meta-Form that illuminates all the others.
... by the other subsection of the intelligible, I mean that which reason itself grasps by the power of dialectic. It does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses—but as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms, and ending in forms. (511b)
A drawing should help clarify all this. I think my version improves on the one given by the translators. While Plato doesn't explicitly say that the 'lower' or image side of the division is larger than the 'higher' or original side, the fact that the One-Good belongs in the top subsection suggests to me that this should be the smallest and the base of the ratio R used in the divisions. My diagram also makes clear that the math implies the size of subsection 2 must equal subsection 3, which implies that every real thing in the world will have a corresponding mental image.
The most interesting question here is how Plato conceives of the individual Forms as hypotheses. He introduced them in exactly this way back in Phaedo (100b). And as we've pointed out many times, in that case as well as any other, the Forms are introduced as a tool to help us figure out how to live the good life. In this sense they have always been hypotheses about "things that are" that would help to guide our actions. Now, however, he wants us to move in the opposite direction, from the Forms as hypotheses to some central moral principle that would be self evident and certain, not merely hypothetical. As if even to be able to entertain the truth or falsity of the hypothesis would require a certain presupposition that would be necessarily true. The Good seems to fulfill this role by being the natural light that allows us to see and understand anything at all. If we can even think of the Forms as a hypothesis, we must be able to understand the Good. But I don't think this idea is clear yet, so we'll have to see how Socrates develops it.
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As an aside, this is certainly the passage that Deleueze must be thinking of when he characterizes the unity of philosophy as the movement for the hypothetical to the apodictic.
From Plato to the post-Kantians, philosophy has defined the movement of thought as a certain type of passage from the hypothetical to the apodictic. Even the Cartesian movement from doubt to certainty is a variant of the passage. Another is the passage from hypothetical necessity to metaphysical necessity in the On the Ultimate Origination of Things. Already with Plato the dialectic was defined in this manner: depart from hypotheses, use hypotheses as springboards or 'problems' in order to attain the an-hypothetical principle which determines the solution to the problems as well as the truth of the hypotheses. The whole structure of the Parmenides follows from this, under conditions such that it is no longer possible to see therein a propaedeutics, a gymnastics, a game or a formal exercise, as has nevertheless been done ever so delicately. Kant himself is more Platonic than he thinks when he passes from the Critique of Pure Reason, entirely subordinated to the hypothetical form of possible experience, to the Critique of Practical Reason in which, with the aid of problems, he discovers the pure necessity of a categorical principle. Even more so the post-Kantians when they wish to transform hypothetical judgement into thetic judgement immediately, without changing 'critiques,. It is not illegitimate, therefore, to summarise in this way the movement of philosophy from Plato to Fichte or Hegel by way of Descartes, whatever the diversity of the initial hypotheses or the final apodicticities. There is at least something in common: namely, the point of departure found in a 'hypothesis' or proposition of consciousness affected by a coefficient of uncertainty (as with Cartesian doubt) and the point of arrival found in an eminently moral apodicticity or imperative (Plato's One-Good, the non-deceiving God of the Cartesian Cogito, Leibniz's principle of the best of all possible worlds, Kant's categorical imperative, Fichte's Self, Hegel's 'Science'). (D&R 196)
I don't yet grasp the full implications this idea has for interpreting Parmenides. But it does seem to go in the direction I vaguely foresaw -- the One and the Many refer to the Forms, not things. The question in Parmenides then is not the binary existential one of whether the One is or is not. The One-Good is beyond being and not being. That the One is and that it is not are two complementary hypotheses that are meant to lead us beyond themselves and into the realm of apodictic certainty. This casts the final line of the dialog in a new light.
... whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other. (Parmenides 166c)
What if we substitute, "Whether the Good is or is not, the other Forms both are and are not, etc ..."? The hypothesis of the being and the hypothesis of the non-being of the Good together allow us to reach the certainty that ... ??? This is the problem. The conclusion of that sentence should tell us something about the self-evident nature of the Good, that powerful sun beyond the other Forms and beyond even being. Yet it just seems to say, "everything". And it doesn't even say that very clearly. So whatever apodictic principle Parmenides has shown us is still a mystery to me.
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