Twilight of an idol?

Plato's Republic: A Study, by Stanley Rosen, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 432 pp.

FOR STUDENTS POSSESSED of searching intelligence, one of the powerful attractions of the Straussian teaching is its willingness, not to say its zeal, to articulate thoughts forbidden by the reigning orthodoxies of political correctness. With some justice, Straussians interpret their stance in terms of Plato's allegory of education as liberation from the cave of opinion. There is, however, a danger that the thrill of liberation will be mistaken for philosophy itself. There is an even greater danger that the fact of having formerly experienced that thrill will be accounted sufficient evidence that one has ascended to a philosophical life--especially when combined with a devotion to one's liberator (i.e. Strauss, or some second- or third-generation student of Strauss) as the measure of philosophical wisdom and integrity. Straussianism runs the constant risk of turning into just another ideology of the kind it criticizes in the name of philosophy, or else of falling into a cult of personality. It risks becoming idolatry.

One may suspect that, to whatever extent followers of Strauss succumb to idolatry, they might begin to feel somewhere in their souls an inner tension between the old thrill of liberation and the allure of a newly adopted, intellectually potent orthodoxy. One response would be to paper over this tension by means of an obsessive rehearsal of the original liberation, in the form of endless derisive critiques of the positions from which one has attained the freedom others lack. Another response would be to become a critic of Strauss, thrillingly to liberate oneself from the liberator.

Some such nexus of phenomena seems to lie in the background of Stanley Rosen's commentary on Plato's Republic. Rosen rejects the Straussian interpretation that the dialogue's principal aim is to portray the excessive and unjust results of the uncompromising pursuit of pure justice. He does not deny that the dialogue has this aim, but he considers it secondary. "The main purpose," he claims, "is to show the impossibility of the full satisfaction of the philosophical eros. This is to say that the philosopher both desires and does not desire to rule, or in other words that there is no more unity in the philosophical nature than there is in the city." This "philosophic eros" Rosen characterizes as "the common philosophical desire to engage in the extreme form of philosophical activity, which includes the exclusion of all views other than his own ... the desire to rule, or better, to encompass the whole." In one of Rosen's delectably provocative formulations, "The Republic is in part a daydream in which Plato imagines what it would be like to be a beneficent despot."

The upshot is that, in the first place, Strauss is wrong to interpret Plato as a conservative. Aristotle, who offers a reasonable account of the moderate regime, is the real conservative who "safeguards moderation, and so tradition, by separating philosophy from politics." Plato, on the other hand, "founds the radical Western tradition according to which justice must be pursued by doctrinal construction." This may seem a rather time-honored reading of the Republic. The new twist here is that, while previous versions have typically lacked the capacity to offer a sophisticated response to the Straussian reading, Rosen grants nearly everything that Strauss and Allan Bloom say about the Republic, but subordinates their reading to a rival interpretation of its significance.

The nub of Rosen's interpretation is the argument that Plato is attempting to articulate and come to grips with an inner conflict endemic to philosophy. On the one hand, there is "a political temptation to which philosophers are destined to succumb as soon as they undertake to deviate from tradition and to reconstruct the foundations of the just city, whether in speech alone or in acts as well." On the other hand, philosophers typically exhibit utter disinclination from and incompetence in practical affairs. Plato shows that philosophy must give in to the political temptation to the extent that it needs to influence politics to be more hospitable for philosophy, but that the inevitable result is the degeneration of philosophy into ideology, which in the fantasy version of the just city is necessarily maintained by a rigorous regime of force and fraud, i.e., tyranny and censorship.

When Rosen contends that the Republic is "more an unsuccessful catharsis of the philosophical compulsion to rule than a satire on the excessive pursuit of justice," it is hard to resist the inference that, to his mind, Straussians are symptomatic of the failure of this catharsis. The Straussian thesis that political philosophy is the core of philosophy, and that philosophers ought to practice the noble lie for the good of the city, sounds like what Rosen describes as the inevitable degeneration of philosophy into ideology when it seeks to foster its particular political program.

To turn about our earlier formulation: to the extent that Straussianism succumbs to idolatry by 1) uncritically upholding Strauss (or Strauss's Plato) as the model of the soul harmonized by philosophy, and 2) encouraging its adherents to give all their attention to the implications for political life of the insurmountable distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers (rather than giving their attention to the questions Plato appears to say philosophers are preoccupied with), it certainly seems to become an ideology of the philosophical life rather than a living out of that life. Rosen attempts to counteract this tendency by paying careful attention to the Republic's arguments concerning knowledge, opinion, the nature of the soul, and the relationship between images and originals precisely as philosophical arguments, as well as by maintaining that the soul of the philosopher is divided like everyone else's.

As a critique of certain tendencies of Straussianism, these cautions are well taken, and it is worth considering how deeply these tendencies run. As an interpretation of the Republic, on the other hand, it is hard to see how Rosen's careful reflections on the various arguments of the dialogue and their relationships to the dramatic action add up to the larger theses he advances--or, indeed, how they add up to any interpretation at all. Rosen, in Straussian fashion, contends that Plato is quite aware of the flaws in his arguments, but he rarely explains the significance of the bad arguments, either piecemeal or in toto. What we find instead is a desultory topical analysis of parts that, read alongside the original, ought to prove valuable for sharpening one's careful reading of the text (for Rosen is illuminating even when unconvincing, and one needs to respond by thinking through the arguments as carefully as he has). The four-teen-chapter book has very much the feel of a compilation of reflections from a semester seminar Rosen has given several times, interlarded with his musings about what is wrong with the Straussian reading.

Rosen's treatment of the arguments of the Republic is often refreshing, such as when he ably defends the reasonableness of Platonic ideas as an inescapable account of how it is possible to speak and to think coherently about the world and the best formulation of the mystery of understanding. His discussion of the relationship between the treatment of women in the Socratic city and the fate of modern feminism is lucid and persuasive. Remarks such as "if we reject the Platonic ideas, the emancipation of sexual eros is inevitable," and "strict nominalism is an absurdity," are worth savoring in the mind.

On the other hand, he seems to go quite astray on the most fundamental question. Rosen would have us believe that in his understanding of human nature and the consequences for political theory and practice, Plato is more a constructivist than we may have realized:

  Nature provides us with both our own defects and the cognitive
  capacity to perceive these defects and to attempt to rectify them. In
  short, human nature is divided against itself. Socrates frequently
  refers to this division as an illness and to philosophy as the
  physician. But medicine is a techne and not a direct expression of
  nature. In this sense it is true to say that for Socrates and Plato,
  art rules nature. As Nietzsche puts it, man is the not yet finished
  animal. When we inspect the roots, we find that the ancients and the
  moderns are not quite so opposed to one another as is often said to be
  the case.

Rosen can only reach this conclusion because he utterly fails to appreciate the fundamental significance in the dialogue of the centrally treated topic, the Idea of the Good. This deficiency illustrates best Rosen's tendency to lose sight of the forest by being too intent on the trees. He is concerned to establish some specific contribution the Idea of the Good makes to our moral or intellectual cognition. How will it help us to establish the goodness or badness of a specific action, or to rank several competing goods? Plato's point seems rather to be that we must accept the idea of a goodness that does not depend on our valuation if we are to understand justice at all in any terms other than a mere imposition of force and rhetoric. We can see this clearly if we consider Hobbes's explicit rejection of such an independent principle of goodness (Leviathan 6.7) and the consequences that follow and that permeate modern thought. Without accepting such a principle, we cannot entertain the question of the goodness of an action in any non-instrumental sense, nor can we even ask the question of the intrinsic rank-ordering of relative goods. There is no highest good, and so no hierarchy of goods (cf. Leviathan 11.1).

One of the intellectual currents of the late twentieth century has been a revival of the Idea of the Good in ethics, metaphysics, theology, and social and political theory. Rosen's failure to register even a trace of this conversation in his (accordingly lame) treatment of this fundamental Platonic theme suggests an unfortunate and unfounded, if all-too-Straussian, contempt for contemporary thought. It is true that constant and careful attention to the greatest works of the past offers the most reliable path to fundamental and comprehensive reflection on the human condition and the whole in which it is situated. A truly philosophic mind, however, ought to be on the lookout for the best contemporary probing of ultimate questions, as well as the challenge that may be offered to one's own practices of reading and privileging of books by the alternative practices and priorities of other traditions. If one were to read Rosen's diagnosis of the philosophical eros as a self-diagnosis, one might take this study as evidence of a strategy for fulfilling that eros by becoming king of a rather isolated intellectual tide pool.

MARK SHIFFMAN earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. He currently teaches in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University.