The Politics of Transcendence: The Pretentious Passivity of Platonic Idealism.

• Author: Ryn, Claes G.

Plato and Aristotle are still approached with deference by many political thinkers who have not abandoned the notion of moral universality. Some of them treat Plato as the ultimate philosophical authority and even regard substantial criticisms of him as a sign of not really having understood him. Yet Plato and Aristotle are philosophers with human flaws, and their weaknesses, too, have influenced Western political philosophy and practice. It is possible to argue, specifically, that certain dubious tendencies in Greek philosophy, especially in Plato, have deeply affected the Western way of thinking about political morality, even among philosophers who disagree with them. Those same tendencies may help explain the strong prejudice against the notion of moral universality in modern political thought. One reason for revisiting Plato and Aristotle is to separate persuasive from questionable elements in their legacy and to remove obstacles to a reconsideration of the issue of moral universality.

Present-day admirers of the Greeks typically assume that criticisms of Plato and Aristotle must stem from nihilism or relativism. Most of their critics, as well as academia in general, do indeed reject the idea of a universal good for politics. According to long-dominant liberal theory, routinely violated in practice, the state should not exhibit any moral preferences but should be a neutral umpire among contending interests, a view that flatly contradicts the Greek ethos. Most academic liberals today recognize no moral standard beyond subjective desires and claim to want virtually endless tolerance of differences (though this tolerance turns out to be highly selective). Liberals of this type and the Greeks seem to hold philosophically incompatible views, the one camp accepting and the other rejecting a universal moral good.

But questioning the Greeks need not imply a refusal to accept the idea of moral universality. One can criticize Plato in particular because his political idealism has fostered a fundamental misunderstanding of moral good in politics. In the Western world, reflecting on this flaw may be one of the preconditions for gaining a wider hearing for the notion of moral universality and for elaborating a morally sensitive, yet non-ethereal, non-sentimental and realistic political ethics. So profound has been the influence of Plato's political idealism that it continues to affect even thinkers who reject the notion of a higher good for politics.

Tensions within the Republic

For many admirers of the Greeks, the greatest single work of political ethics is Plato's Republic. Over the centuries, its way of connecting politics with the transcendent has cast a powerful spell. The truly just society, Plato proclaims, cleanses government of unworthy ambition. It establishes rule by the wise and virtuous. One of the reasons for the appeal of the dialogue is surely that the reader who feels the lure of its vision is able to think that he or she must surely have a noble soul for identifying with such a pure and lofty aspiration.

It would be incorrect to describe Plato's great dialogue as the quintessentially Greek work of political philosophy, for not only does it express Plato's opposition to much of Greek culture, but Aristotle, the other giant of Greek thought, has weighty criticisms of it; his philosophy is in important respects quite different from Plato's. But the Republic helped shape Western thinking about political morality. The dialogue is at the bottom of much of the wisdom of the Western mind but also of some of its more unfortunate features.

Platonic transcendence separate from all particularity.

One very old tendency in Western philosophy is to approach morality, including public virtue, ahistorically. Thinking of that kind conceives of the standard of political good as existing somehow apart from all particular social circumstances, apart from everything individual and changeable: That with reference to which historical life should be morally assessed cannot itself be historical. An important aspect of that tendency of thought can be traced back to the Republic. In this dialogue Plato contends that politics should be tied to the transcendent Good, a reality that he understands as lying entirely beyond the world of concrete particulars, as having no essential, integral relation to man's historical existence. A similar view of moral universality has been held by many over the centuries who have rejected the idea of universality. The inclination to think of universality as abstract and disembodied may be one of the reasons why the notion of a higher, more than subjective and transitory norm for life a nd politics has often seemed hard for philosophers to accept, especially since the nineteenth century.

But Plato's political idealism has many admirers even today, and indirectly it may be more influential than generally assumed. Plato's thought will be examined here to assess its general significance for understanding politics and morality. So that the analysis will not appear one-sided, it should be pointed out from the beginning that in the Republic as well as in the entire Platonic corpus a more historically grounded strain of thought competes with ahistoricist universalism: Reliance on immediate human experience contends with idealistic avoidance of the concrete world. The complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the dialogue prevents easy categorization and explains why over the centuries philosophers of very different types have been attracted to it. Taking note of the two mentioned orientations and examining the tension between them will help identify the dubious element in Platonic idealism and may shed light on the disagreement about political virtue in later philosophy.

Plato tries to show, on the one hand, that politics ought to conform to a transcendent standard of perfection. He expends great energy on the architecture of the just polis. On the other hand, he expresses virtual despair that what ought to be can ever be realized. Politics probably will always remain the sort of thing it has been--hence the melancholy of the dialogue. Despite the radical discrepancy between what Plato takes to be just and what has existed historically, he does not seriously consider that something might be fundamentally wrong with his conception. That the just republic is probably unattainable is of no consequence. What is ideal must be kept before the mind's eye to give proper direction to the soul and to politics.

Political idealism may undermine morality.

For Plato, adjusting the understanding of political morality to politics as we know it in history would be a betrayal of everything high and admirable. Morally noble people take their stand with true justice, the discipline that orients the soul and society to the Agathon, the transcendent Good. Only people of inferior character would be willing to accommodate degrading reality. Innumerable readers of Plato have found his moral idealism and his refusal to compromise indicative of complete dedication to the Good. But is it? A case can be made that, by associating political morality with an unattainable, ahistorical standard and urging those who aspire to virtue to contemplate the ideal rather than the possible, Plato falls prey to a romantic abstractionism that undermines political morality.

What might be called Plato's hypermoralism is connected to a methodological tendency to speculate in the abstract, apart from life and politics as known in actual human self-experience. Yet that tendency is far from always dominant in the Republic. For some purposes Plato makes repeated use of historical, experiential evidence. Most of his comments about human nature and politics are rooted in observations of concrete life--life at its best and worst as well as in its ordinariness and mediocrity. Human existence presents to the philosopher a broad range of potentialities. The contrast in the dialogue between life and politics as historically known and the alleged ideal is related to a methodological tension between relying on the facts of actual human experience and discounting or setting them aside.

An Experiential Foundation for Morality

The arguments of the Republic that may be considered most vivid and plausible rely heavily on historical-experiential evidence. Plato's insights regarding the moral terms of human existence are for the most part a result of careful examination of actually lived life. Opinions vary regarding Plato's purpose in designing the ideal republic, but it is generally agreed that he sees political good as having only one possible source: individual souls shaped by the moral-intellectual discipline of justice. The polis cannot become just without just individuals. In one of his more questionable arguments, Socrates even goes as far as to explain the structure of a just polis as but an enlargement of the structure of a just individual soul. To Plato as to Aristotle it would have made no sense to differentiate sharply between public and private life in the manner dear to so many liberals today. According to a familiar modern mantra, as long as a person's private life does not interfere with the person's public duties, it should be of no interest to others. Private vice may be compatible with, or, in the view of some, actually correlated with, public virtue. For the Greeks, by contrast, a person's character is all of a piece. The individual who acts in private life is morally the same as the one who acts in public life. An inability to subject appetites to moral control is a flaw of character that is bound to manifest itself also in public life, even if rhetorically disguised or moderated by external restraints like law. Rapacity may manifest itself in so-called "private" life as voraciousness about food and drink or as sexual promiscuity, but it is equally likely to appear in so-called "public" life, for example, as a ruthless or...