ISTM that Socrates, who expounds the City in Speech, would himself have no place in it. There is an official propaganda system in place to propagate the “noble lies” on which the city’s constitution is based. Art and music are carefully censored, traveling poets are crowned with garlands and ordered to move along. Why would philosophy get a pass? Anyone of any caste who habitually asks unsettling questions and challenges cultural assumptions would be run out of town if not executed. Am I reading it wrong?
Because it’s the philosophers who are supposed to be putting this whole system in place, maintaining it and determining which ideas are dangerous.
Yes, but, as Bertrand Russell writes in A History of Western Philosophy, “Although the rulers are to be philosophers, there are to be no innovations: a philosopher is to be, for all time, a man who understands and agrees with Plato.” I can’t see a man like Socrates lasting long in that environment, even if he happens to agree with Plato on every point.
So this can be fanwanked, but before I fanwank it the actual answer is Plato was probably not heeding a single thought about the actual Socrates’s actual beliefs when he wrote the Republic.
The fanwank is, Socrates is giving articulation to an ideal, and sees himself, ideally, as someone who, on grasping truths, will firmly assent to them. So in the ideal city, were he to live in it, he, a philosopher, will have managed to grasp all the truths, and the city will listen to him, and he’ll be right, and so of course will agree with himself (and with all the other philosophers, who will have grasped the same truths themselves).
In Socrates: A Man for Our Times, Paul Johnson discusses which of Plato’s dialogues actually express Socrates’ thoughts as Plato remembered them, and which are Plato using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own original philosophy. He writes as though the nature of each book in that regard is pretty much a matter of settled scholarly consensus – is it?
Any philosopher would want to spend his time philosophizing with others of the philosophizing class. Those who annoyed the hoi polloi would get the hemlock.
The same is true of pretty much all utopias. I’m thinking of Skinner’s Walden II. Since the place is presumed to be pretty much as good as it can possibly be, innovation is necessarily harmful, and thus to be deterred.
Like most utopias – or even Soviet Communism – it works if everyone believes in it. But once anyone doubts or dissents, the idealism fails, the bloom is off the rose, and the secret police coming knocking on doors in the night.
I did like the allegory of the cave…
And Socrates was a man who loved to annoy everybody.
Or, alternatively, as the late John Reilly once wrote in a review of Harry Turtledove’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies, “Popular uprisings rarely overthrow ideologies; rather, even the secret police eventually lose interest.”
That and Plato was probably his least annoying student. Alcibiades was a student of Plato’s, as was Xenophon and a number of the 30.
Basically Socrates went around demonstrating that the supposed wise people didn’t know shit of what they were talking about. And did this publicly.
You meant “student of Socrates’.” And that is probably the real reason why he got the hemlock.
That too.
Apropos of nothing, The Death of Socrates.
Yes, Alcibiades student of Socrates, not Plato. And Socrates could easily have proposed banishment and received it as a punishment. He probably could also have fled after the punishment was decided on. But his various assholes students had left a really rotten taste in Athens mouth. Combine that with his speech that Athens should impose a punishment of him living well at state expense and thanking him for all this was calculated to lead to a death sentence. That he didn’t take many opportunities to leave after that was his own doing. Socrates committed suicide.
There’s a sort of generally understood default division into early, middle and late works, with later works being purported to be further and further from simple transmission of Socrates’s own ideas. However by “generally understood” I don’t mean “universally agreed to,” just that it’s thought of as a kind of background assumption that is very open to question. And indeed, plenty of writers do question it.
Bertrand Russell made many contributions to mathematical logic. As a historian of philosophy he is utterly useless. i guess you will never accept this, Brain Glutton, but there you have it. There are many ways to read The Republic. I urge you to read the thing on its own, carefully, and with the aid of real scholars of classical Greek philosophy. That’s all I have to say.
I have read the thing on its own. I see no reason to disagree with Russell’s assessment.
Alcibiades was 25 years older than Plato, and was one of Socrates’ most prominent students. Although a military leader of some greatness Alcibiades eventually became embroiled in numerous political difficulties which lead him to become an exile and turncoat. IIRC Alcibiades’ behavior had much to do with Socrates fatal legal problems.
Without looking it up I believe Xenophon was also a student of Socrates, and that he composed Socratic Dialogues in Plato’s style although not of Plato’s quality. His most famous work is Anabasis- an account of the retreat of a force of about 10,000 Greek mercenaries from the middle of the Persian Empire, where they had become marooned in the course of servive in a Persian civil war.
Specifically, I’ve studied the thing, in a college course where The Republic was the only text and we spent the whole semester dissecting it.
BTW, Socrates, Xenophon and Plato (and Alcibiades and Critias) appear as character’s in Mary Renault’s historical novel The Last of the Wine. A much older Plato also figures in The Mask of Apollo.
And BTW, I also agree with Russell’s assessment in this regard:
This is more debatable, but an interesting speculation: