Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study : Yale University Press, 2005. 432 pp. $20.00. ISBN-10: 0300126921; ISBN-13: 978-0300126921 (Book Review)

Soc DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9182-5 BOOK REVIEW Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study Yale University Press, 2005. 432 pp. $20.00. ISBN-10: 0300126921; ISBN-13: 978-0300126921 Jacob Howland # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 What is the essential teaching of Plato’s Republic? This is the question Stanley Rosen sets out to answer in his new book. His study of Plato’s masterwork has many virtues. It is strikingly original, yet it incorporates the best insights of the past century’s leading schools of interpretation. It examines every part of the text, often in minute detail, yet at its heart is a subtle and coherent argument about the philosophical paradox Plato is trying to illuminate in this dialogue. My remarks will attempt to convey the gist of this unifying argument. As is well known, Karl Popper asserted in his book The Open Society and its Enemies (1943) that Plato advocates in the Republic a dangerous kind of political extremism characterized by a totalitarian conception of justice. In response to this influential interpretation, Leo Strauss and many of his students have argued that Plato’s teaching was essentially the opposite of what Popper understood it to be. The Straussians maintain that the Republic is best understood as a satire on “the impossibility of extreme efforts to institute perfect justice,” and thus “a philosophical repudiation of philosophical tyranny” (5). On the Straussian reading, the Republic is fully compatible with what Rosen calls the Aristotelian “solution” to the political problem: the repudiation of the direct, radical intervention of philosophy into politics in the name of “a moderate aristocratically inclined democracy”—in other words, the rule of nonphilosophical gentlemen (5). For many years, Rosen endorsed the Straussian reading of the Republic, but in his new book he rethinks his former J. Howland (*) Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of Tulsa, 800 South Tucker Drive, Tulsa, OK 74104-3189, USA e-mail: jacob-howland@utulsa.edu view and renounces a key part of it. The main purpose of the Republic is not, as the Straussians argue, “to show the dangers entailed by an excessive pursuit of justice” (81– 82). The basic problem with this claim, according to Rosen, is that Socrates consistently “professes admiration for his revolutionary political proposals” (4). The Straussians must maintain that Socrates is being ironic, or, more bluntly, that he is lying, but one can find no good reason for him to do so—especially since, as Rosen observes, a direct statement of the Aristotelian solution would doubtless have been widely accepted by his Greek readers (5). In this respect, Popper is right: Socrates’ explicit approval of the regime he is constructing must be taken seriously. But this doesn’t mean what Popper thinks it means. Against both Popper and the Straussians, Rosen proposes that we miss the main point of the dialogue if we focus primarily on its political teaching. For the Republic is really about the nature of the philosopher, and its main purpose is “to show the impossibility of the full satisfaction of philosophical eros” (82). Let us try to unpack this claim. Rosen argues that whereas Aristotle’s Politics is “a guide to the practical statesman,” Plato’s Republic is intended to spell out the political implications of philosophical wisdom (143). By nature, Rosen maintains, philosophers want to suppress falsehood. The hatred of falsehood is the flip side of the love of truth. Rosen leaves open the question “whether the desire to suppress ignorance and injustice through wisdom and justice is itself an expression of philosophical eros or spiritedness”; in any case, “the two cannot be radically separated” (229). The philosopher qua philosopher is attracted to political power as the necessary means to the suppression of falsehood. (This incidentally confirms Polemarchus’s definition of justice as helping friends and harming enemies.) The philosopher’s attraction to power Soc for the sake of the truth is an expression of what Rosen refers to as philosophical “virility.” Philosophical virility is noble in that it serves justice, and it is necessary because justice depends on force. As Rosen writes, “man is the animal who conceives of justice, but disregards it whenever he can” (50). In a word, Plato teaches that man is sick. The Republic spells out what it would take, if not to cure him, then at least to render his sickness asymptomatic. And what it would take is a philosophical tyranny. We must proceed carefully here. Rosen is obviously not repudiating all aspects of the Straussian reading. In particular, the Republic unquestionably call attention to the unfortunate fact that a philosophical tyranny would transform human beings into brutes or monsters, and in this sense end up killing the patient whose disease it was meant to cure. I will return to this crucial point momentarily. But by assimilating Plato to Aristotle, the Straussians obscure the radicalism or of Plato’s teaching about the nature and responsibilities of the philosopher—a teaching, Rosen writes, that is “much closer to... the modern progressive spirit than is that of Aristotle, the true conservative.” Plato’s radical or modern spirit is visible in the Republic’s insistence that “justice must be pursued by doctrinal construction” (9); put succinctly, “sound practice depends upon salutary theory” (96). Plato thus “invents political philosophy” (5), or, more precisely, inaugurates the Western tradition of philosophical constructivism in politics. I note in passing that this tradition was developed by the medieval Islamic philosophers Averroes and Al-Farabi, who, like Strauss, blur the distinction between Plato and Aristotle, but, unlike Strauss, are clearly “moderns” in the sense that they endorse a version of Platonic philosophical virility in politics. Rosen furthermore makes it clear that Plato’s radical “philosophical madness” (142) is an expression of his philosophical nobility. This point is essential for understanding Rosen’s own Platonism. “The greater nobility of modernity,” he states in The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven and London: 1989), “is not the consequence of modern arguments, but rather of the genuine philosophical nobility of the ancients, as manifested in the revolution instigated by Socrates” (p. 19). Rosen claims that philosophers are by nature attracted to political power as the necessary means to the suppression of falsehood, yet Aristotle, who expresses what Rosen elsewhere refers to as “the classical understanding of noble resignation,” is nonetheless a philosopher. (See Metaphysics in Ordinary Language [New Haven and London: 1999], p. 238. In this context, Rosen claims that the “modern revolutionary enterprise... [is] more noble than the classical understanding.”) This simple observation brings us to the paradox Plato illuminates in the Republic. On one hand, the Republic is Plato’s account of his struggle against decadence, including his own decadence as well as that of non-philosophers. On the other, Rosen states that the Republic is also a “catharsis of the philosophical compulsion to rule” (9), and if this compulsion must itself be purged, it would seem to be a form of decadence no less than an antidote to it. Let us consider each of these hands in turn. Rosen notes in connection with Plato’s struggle against decadence that poetry is a part of the philosophical nature that is suppressed in the just city. The poets are philosophical in the sense that they “express in beautiful speeches the deepest levels of the human soul and the most subtle nuances of human behavior” (356). They are, however, politically dangerous “because they expose the evil and shamelessness of the soul as well as its goodness and nobility” (118). In other words, “poets do not seek to change human behavior”; “poetry celebrates the diversity of the human soul but philosophy inculcates the correct principles of the best life” (30, 354). Plato’s injustice toward poetry (cf. 369) is a consequence of the harsh selfdiscipline required to cure our human sickness, and is connected with his injustice toward philosophy itself. This is not simply because, in purging poetry, he “purge[s] the natural philosophical interest in the diversity of the human soul” (354). More to the point, philosophy rules the city, but is at the same time subject to a “severe and unspoken restriction”: because serious philosophical disagreements would destroy the unanimity of the rulers, “all the philosophers must be ‘Socratics’” (81). But this means that philosophy is necessarily replaced in the just city by dogma; “in order for philosophy to rule, it must transform itself into ideology” (285). Indeed: as soon as philosophy intervenes radically into politics—as it does when Plato writes the Republic—it begins to deteriorate into ideology. “For what is ideology,” Rosen asks, “but the extreme politicization of philosophy?” (229). The suppression of philosophical eros in the just city is inseparable from the suppression of eros in its more ordinary manifestations. Philosophy must transform itself into ideology if it is to treat the sickness of the “feverish” city—a sickness that is not present in the first city, which Glaucon calls a “city of pigs” and which Socrates refers to as the “true” city (372d-e). According to Rosen, the truth of the city of pigs “lies in the representation of the limits that would have to be set upon human nature in order to maintain a happiness undisturbed by desire” (81). “In order to be at peace,” in other words, “humans must cease to be fully human”—so much so that they are forbidden in the just city even to mourn the dead, a prohibition that Rosen finds particularly unnatural (81, 97). In sum, Plato teaches in the Republic that “every attempt to enact the truth in human affairs without compromise leads to a reversal of that truth” (6). And this is a lesson that Soc Aristotle, unlike Nietzsche, learned well. One might argue that Aristotle could not have formulated the alternative of philosophical self-moderation had he not had the benefit of Plato’s extreme thought-experiment. Be that as it may, it is crucial to observe that the Aristotelian “solution” is in its own way no less flawed than the Platonic one, for it necessarily involves what Rosen describes as “a retreat backward into one degree or another of decadence” (6). This paradox stands at the very heart of the human predicament. These reflections bring us to the question of Rosen’s relationship to Strauss, a question invited by the book’s epigram, which reads “To the genuine Leo Strauss.” Cicero famously remarked that it was Socrates who “call[ed] philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men” (Tusc. Disp. 5.4.10–11). In comparison with Socrates, Plato might seem to have been retreating from the direct involvement of philosophy in politics when he chose to write dialogues rather than to philosophize in the marketplace. But Rosen makes it clear that Plato is the real revolutionary. Plato “differs sharply from his teacher and contradicts by example the political reticence expressed by Socrates,” in that he “dares to interfere with the contemporary political situation through the power and artistry of speech” (242). By “exposing the views of the few to the many,” he “takes the first step on the road that leads finally to the repudiation of Platonism and the rule of poets and those whom Plato would have regarded as sophists” (5–6). The real peculiarity of Rosen’s book lies in the fact that it takes a step back toward Platonism, yet does so by means of nothing less than a purge or catharsis of certain elements of his former Straussianism. To repeat, Rosen parts company with Strauss in emphasizing philosophical virility, and, more specifically, in frankly elucidating the political implications of philosophical wisdom. If I understand Rosen correctly, these dimensions of his reading of the Republic are part and parcel of his considered response to relativism—the peculiar decadence of the late modern and post-modern era that Strauss did as much as anyone to combat. As we have seen, however, Strauss’s endorsement of Aristotelian resignation effectively conceals the Platonic alternative of philosophical constructivism in politics. In all fairness, Strauss’s unwillingness to acknowledge Platonic philosophical virility—even as an antidote to relativism— may be justified on the ground that he experienced firsthand the ultimate consequences of the degeneration of political philosophy into ideology, and in particular into a gruesome form of tyranny that was imposed with maximum spiritedness. But that was then, as they say, and this is now. While Rosen writes that “the implied teaching of the Republic is that the desirability of bringing philosophy into political life outweighs the dangers implicit in the frankness that such an effort entails,” he hastens to add that “this is, of course, true only at certain moments and places in history” (6). And this, he seems to suggest, is one of those times. While I will leave it to others to debate the merits of this view, it is reasonable to maintain that we cannot meet the threat posed by the current enemies of the West without resolving that philosophy discloses certain fundamental truths and that these truths are worth fighting for. I would like to draw these remarks to a close with some reflection on the relationship between Rosen’s new book and the debate between his two teachers, Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, that was first published in the 1954 edition of Strauss’s On Tyranny. As is well known, Kojève argues in his essay “Tyranny and Wisdom” that there is no essential difference between the philosopher and the tyrant. (See Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (New York: The Free Press, 1991), pp. 156, 158.) In particular, both are motivated by the desire for “recognition,” a desire that can be fully satisfied only within the context of politics (and indeed, according to Kojève, only through the establishment of a universal, homogenous state). But because ruling is incompatible with the pursuit of the quest for wisdom, the philosopher is internally divided: the “whole question” concerns whether or not he wants to rule. (Strauss, p. 150). In response to this argument, Strauss insists that, in comparison with the philosopher, the ruler is erotically defective; “the ruler is not motivated by the true or Socratic eros because he does not know what a well-ordered soul is.” His eros is “mercenary,” “a shadow or imitation of true love”; “he is concerned with human beings because he is concerned with being recognized by them” (Strauss, p. 202). According to Strauss, the philosopher who exhibits this concern thus “ceases to be a philosopher” and “turns into a sophist” (Strauss, p. 203). Rosen clearly agrees with Strauss about the distinctive eros of the philosopher and the impossibility of reducing this eros to the Hegelian quest for recognition. Yet he rejects Strauss’s explicit contention that “the classical argument derives its strength from the assumption that the wise do not desire to rule” (Strauss, p. 194). Rosen maintains that the philosopher is motivated by an essentially erotic desire to unify theory and practice, an eros that manifests itself as “the desire to rule, or better, to encompass the whole” (81). Kojève is thus correct to assert that “philosophy is... marked by an inner disharmony between the desire to rule and the desire not to rule” (166). According to Rosen, however, this disharmony springs in part from the philosopher’s ambivalence toward human life, as reflected in the Republic’s simultaneous emphasis on the good life and depreciation of human existence, and in part from his realization that the unification of theory and practice cannot be obtained (355; cf. 97). Rosen’s synthesis of Kojève on the one hand Soc and Strauss on the other is succinctly expressed in his remark that “those who are not tempted by the prospect of exercising power are not genuine philosophers; but neither are those who succumb to that temptation” (129). As should be clear, I think that much of the pleasure afforded by Rosen’s book on Plato’s Republic comes from its profound engagement with the question of what it means to be a philosopher. Rosen’s book informs by showing as well as saying; like Plato, he knows that “speeches are themselves deeds” (242). In this connection, it is a great honor for me to conclude by publicly acknowledging that it was Stanley Rosen’s lectures on Plato’s Republic during the academic year 1981–1982 that first taught me what it might mean to try to hold speech and deed together in a philosophical life. Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. Cambridge University Press published the paperback of his latest book, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith, in 2008.