Category Archives: Greek Philosophy

What is the “Nature” of the Philosopher in the Republic?

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In Book VI of the Republic a grocery list of the desirable traits to be found in a philosopher are described by Socrates.  The list of virtues is long and encompassing: a love of learning of things that are (485b), no taste for falsehood (485c), a concern with the pleasures of the soul, not the body (485d), being moderate and not a lover of money (485e), not given to petty speech (smikrologia) (486a), believing that death is no great evil (486b), being “just and tame not hard to get along with and savage” (486b), learning easily (486c), has a good memory (486c), has measure and charm (486d).

Equally prominent in this discussion of what the virtues are is the continual emphasis that  Socrates places on nature.  We are left to puzzle about what the definition of “nature” is here, a term frequently and problematically employed in philosophical contexts.  The traits listed above are somehow desirable in the philosopher only if they are present by nature.  However, there is little discussion of what nature is, and what we are left with is a view of nature that consists in little more than whatever inborn proclivities one happens to have, as is exemplified in this statement about a man erotic by nature, “It’s not only likely, my friend, but also entirely necessary that a man who is by nature erotically disposed toward someone care for everything related and akin to his boy” (485c). 

This explanation of nature is further corroborated by the foreshadowing of the philosopher first seen in Book II.  There, Socrates and Glaucon agreed that they were looking for a chimerical kind of guardian, one who is, “at the same time gentle and great-spirited.  Surely a gentle nature is opposed to a spirited one”  (375c).  When they deliberate further upon this discovery, Socrates and Glaucon despair, since the combination of two opposed traits would appear to be a contradiction.  However, soon Socrates realizes that, “You know, of course, that by nature the disposition of noble dogs is to be as gentle as can be with their familiars and people they know and the opposite with those they don’t know”  (373d).  The explication of this “noble dog,” analogous to the philosopher, is telling, because it will inform us not only about Plato’s conception of nature here, but by extension the nature of the philosopher.  Socrates explanation of the dog’s behavior is not in terms of training, but something rather more inborn: “When it sees someone it doesn’t know, it’s angry, although it never had any bad experience with him.  And when it sees someone it knows, it greets him warmly, even if it never had a good experience with him”  (376a).  Thus it is not by training that the dog has learned to embody a composite of two opposed traits, for this would be impossible.  Furthermore, as Socrates analysis makes clear, the dog’s nature makes it immune to any training by experience which it could have undergone.  It is friendly to its owner by nature, and hateful to strangers by nature despite any exposure intentional or unintentional which could train the dog to behave in exactly the opposite way.  Thus when we are told that the philosopher is to hold certain traits by nature, this is to say that he should be possessed of these traits from birth, which manifest themselves in a disposition that easily expresses them.

Note: All translations from Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato.

If Images are Inferior, Why is the Allegory of the Cave an Image?

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The Platonic vocabulary is often skeptical and even antagonistic toward the uses of images.  This denigration is attributed to the mutability of images, so that we could really apply this criticism to anything that changes, which would apply to all of the visible world.  Among many other places in the Republic, Socrates makes the distinction clear by explaining how what we think about determines the very certainty of that thought:   

Well then, consider that the truth of the soul is thus: Whenever truth and what is shine upon something, the mind attaches to this, it intellects and knows and appears to have intelligence.  But whenever it attaches to that which is mixed with obscurity, that which comes to be and passes away, it has opinions and sees dimly, changing opinions here and there, and seems not to have intelligence (Republic 508d3-8). (1)

These two sides of opinion and knowledge, perishability and persistence, are, as Socrates will shortly explain, the sensible and intelligible realms.  Socrates says there are two kinds of objects of the sensible realm, shadows, appearances and reflections, but then also those things of which these are the shadows, appearances and reflections.  It is obvious that these mere reflections are inferior to the objects which they represent: animals, people, etc.  It goes without saying, moreover, that everything in the sensible realm is inferior to anything in the intelligible realm.

Now here is the part I take particular interest in.  Socrates says that all of the shadows, appearances and reflections in the sensible realm are images (τὰς εἰκόνας) of other things in the sensible realm.  Because of this, they obviously have the least substantive mode of existence, and along with this, the lowest level of cognitive certainty.  Yet image-language is precisely what Socrates employs, and is his own self-characterization of what he does, in the allegory of the cave.  He tells us at the beginning of Book VII, as he is about to explain the cave allegory, “make an image [ἀπείκασον] of our nature in such a condition concerning education and lack of education” (514a1-2). (2) (3)

The question arises then, why are we using an image to describe a program of education the goal of which is to lead one away from images?  This is especially curious because it comes right before Socrates exposition of philosophical education, beginning with arithmetic.  Perhaps the allegory of the cave is a necessary propaedeutic before one begins— not to undertake such an education— but to even understand its purport and goal.  Or perhaps because the uninitiated reader has not yet taken the first step to a philosophical education, he must be accommodated where he is at, in this case at the lowly level of understanding mere images, so that he can be taken where he needs to go.             

REFERENCES: 

(1) οὕτω τοίνυν καὶ τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ὧδε νόει· ὅταν μὲν οὗ καταλάμπει ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν, εἰς τοῦτο ἀπερείσηται, ἐνόησέν τε καὶ ἔγνω αὐτὸ καὶ νοῦν ἔχειν φαίνεται· ὅταν δὲ εἰς τὸ τῷ σκότῳ κεκραμένον, τὸ γιγνόμενόν τε καὶ ἀπολλύμενον, δοξάζει τε καὶ ἀμβλυώττει ἄνω καὶ κάτω τὰς δόξας μεταβάλλον, καὶ ἔοικεν αὖ νοῦν οὐκ ἔχοντι.

(2) ἀπείκασον τοιούτῳ πάθει τὴν ἡμετέραν φύσιν παιδείας τε πέρι καὶ ἀπαιδευσίας.

(3) Similarly in Book VI Socrates explicitly states that the ship of state metaphor, wherein the pilot is the true philosopher, gazing outside of the ship to guide the craft, is an image [εἰκών] (487e5).

Plato’s Theory of Forms as the Object of All “Lovers”

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Plato is a notorious indulger of etymology.  Not only in the Cratylus, the most famous and lengthy application of that science, but everywhere in the Platonic corpus there are appeals to the source and the sense of words.  Often these etymologies strike the reader as ludicrous, not necessarily because we know better through linguistic rigor, though we do, but because surely some of the explanations offered had to have been absurd to even the Greeks of the time.  It is frustrating then to determine the purpose of these etymologies: are they mini-myths guiding us to some moral end? are they jokes? are they (improbably) earnest explanations on Plato’s part, shockingly ignorant of the actual derivation of the word?

Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the most helpful method of exposition will be to unravel the etymology following Plato’s own announced method of explanation.  When we come to the Republic, Book V, we meet with one of the most famous explanations in all of Plato, etymological or otherwise (474c).  Here Socrates embarks on the task of explaining who the real philosopher is.  He begins by reminding Glaucon that it was agreed that “lovers” of something love all of it, not one part.  He continues to give examples of these lovers, literally “philo-” prefixed to an adjective or noun, coining what we can straightforwardly translate as, “lovers of X” or “X lovers.”  His examples include lovers of boys, lovers of honor, lovers of wine and lovers of food.

Socrates, I offer, is under the conviction that when we say that when someone is a lover of X, he loves each particular manifestation of that X.  If one fails to do so, he is not a lover of X.  This is odd reasoning, one might say, because if I am a car-lover, meaning that I, a rich man, collect cars, but nevertheless do not have a penchant for Chevrolets, then somehow I am disqualified from the title of car-lover.  This appears out of sorts.  However, let us look at this from another extreme.  If someone were to be a donut-lover in this sense, that he only loved sprinkled, chocolate eclairs, would we be right to call him a lover of donuts?  In this case it is much more suspect; we would prefer to call such a man a lover-of-sprinkled-chocolate-eclairs. 

It is perhaps in this later sense that Socrates is appealing to our everyday use of language.  When we say we are a lover of wine, to use one of his examples, we are implicitly going over and above a confession for any particular instance of wine.  This is simply what the term means.  If I had simply been after this or that cup of wine, why then, after having imbibed it, I should no longer have a need for that moniker.  Yet the name sticks. I say I am a wine-lover, not was a wine-lover, because there is something compelling me, a desire for wine which transcends instances of wine, and goes further yet. 

This then is what Socrates is after.  So the lover of wisdom, literally the philosophos, is he who determinately seeks after all and every kind of wisdom that there is.  Not the wisdom here or there, but the true Form of wisdom.  He seeks after that which does not pass away, and precisely because he is never satisfied having learned this or that, it is shown that this or that is not what he was looking for.  He yearns for a glimpse of what is, for he hastens after knowledge, not opinion.