Category Archives: republic

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

Posted on by

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.

Two Sexes, True Superiority in the Republic

Posted on by

At 374e Socrates narrows the scope of his inquiry for suitable guardians for the republic to what nature these candidate guardians ought to have.  In a metaphor that he is to employ at least 5 times by my count before Book 6,  Socrates says the guardians will be like good guard dogs.  His idea is explicit at 376a where he tells us that we are looking for a natural admixture, as in a good dog, that is both gentle and vicious.  Gentle towards its owners, those it knows; vicious against strangers, those it does not know.  Presumably since it is difficult and even hard to imagine how to educate people into a combination of contrary temperaments, Socrates recommends that these traits are, in our terms, “artificially selected” for, so that they are found by nature in our guardians, in the same way we would breed puppies as guard dogs.  This type of selection process, we should note, is a binary: either you have the traits in question or you do not, and selection into the guardian class requires that you do.

Later in Book 5 (454d), when Socrates introduces his radical notion that women are capable of the same achievements as men, albeit at a reduced and inferior level, there seems to be another criterion of selection utilized.  Whereas before there was a binary process, into which either one fit or did not, here Socrates acknowledges a spectrum of fitness.  In this argument, a woman is not as strong as a man; nevertheless, accommodating her weakness as one of merely degrees, she can do the same things as a guardian man.  I will call this type of selection for fitness “scope selection,” over agains the first type, “binary selection.”   

However, one can raise the objection that these two standards are at odds with each other. If, in the case of selecting the guardian men in “binary selection,” we were to make accommodations due to nature, as we do in the case of women “scope selection,” then it seems that we could introduce all kinds of cases Socrates wishes to exclude.  We could say that a man born with only one arm can do mostly everything a two-armed man can do “provided we acknowledge the reduced workload that only one arm limits him to.”  Similar things could be offered in the case of reduced mental capacity or even inferior, flabby bodies.  In fact though, at 375c traits such as keen senses, speed and strength are explicitly advocated, showing that Socrates does in fact wish to cultivate a type of guardian, one who is not the best of some particular kind of human (e.g. the best of scrawny men), but a best human in a sense meant to extend to the whole species.

It is unclear then, what prompts Socrates to have two distinct standards, one for male guardians, one for female guardians, when, perhaps ironically, Socrates is in the midst of an argument for the equality, in some sense, of the sexes.