Better Understanding Plato’s Republic

“Plato’s Republic is not, primarily, asking the question ‘what is justice?’ as much as it is asking what kind of city do we live in? Before we can address any political issue we must first know whether we are living under a regime of tyranny or liberty.”

Plato has suffered a terrible reputation as a progenitor of fascism and tyrannical politics, ever since Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies. While few professional philosophers regard Popper’s book as a strong read on the history of philosophy, especially for its one-sided and largely inaccurate depictions of Plato and Hegel, Popper’s provenance still holds much sway. Far from advocating blueprint utopianism, Plato’s Republic is an in-depth examination into the origins and manifestation of tyranny (as I’ve explained in my commentary on Plato’s Republic).

Plato in Context

Part of the problem with interpreting Plato is that we often approach Plato through the received lenses of his successors. Plotinus and the Neoplatonists spiritualized Plato, turning Plato into a sort of mystic sage with esoteric knowledge about the spiritual origins and destination of humanity. (This too is carried forward by contemporary esoteric Traditionalists.) Plato’s Christian readers, like St. Justin Martyr and St. Augustine, also argued that the worthiness of Plato was in his commitment to metaphysical truth, the good life, and spiritual side. As such, the Christian “baptism” of Plato was divorced from his political situatedness.

Plato was a political philosopher first and foremost, in large part, because the birth of philosophy was contingent to morality—and morality to the political because the highest good of the Greek world was the polis. Reason served the end of the political and was not conceived of as an independent high good in-and-of-itself.

The problem with the spiritual reading of Plato is that it obscures the fact that all of Plato’s dialogues, including the Timaeus, his most exoterically spiritual and metaphysical work, were political in nature. As I’ve also written concerning Plato’s Symposium, “Plato was a moralist. An ethicist. He was concerned with the primacy of action, of engagement, in a world that was deeply iconoclastic, barbarous, and savage. Love of wisdom allows for the creation of that space where ethical and loving life is possible. This means that eros must remain to any understanding of the self, world, and politeia.” Plato’s commitment to metaphysical truth served not a spiritual end but a political end.