Republic Book 6: Philosophers and Echo Chambers

In Book 6 of The Republic, Plato provides an image of an echo chamber that resonates particularly well with our modern condition. He literally describes an echo chamber:

When many of them [sophists] sit together in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps, or any other gathering of a mass of people in public and, with a loud uproar, object obsessively to some things that are said or done, then approve excessively of others, shouting and clapping; and when, in addition to these people themselves, the rocks and surrounding space itself echo and redouble the uproar of their praise or blame. In a situation like that, how do you think — as the saying goes — a young man’s heart is affected? How will whatever sort of private education he received hold up for him, and not get swept away by such praise and blame, and go be carried off by the flood wherever it goes, so that he will call the same things beautiful or ugly as these people, practice what they practice, and become like them? (492b-c)

Plato emphasizes how these echo chambers work on our emotions. This passage occurs within a longer argument about what makes up a true philosopher (a lover of wisdom) and, particularly, how one who loves wisdom at an early age is corrupted by these kinds of emotional experiences. We have here all the key features of a modern media-driven echo chamber: obsessive objections, excessive approval, amplification of these objections and approvals that “redouble the uproar of praise and blame,” and most importantly the penetration of all of this into the soul of the participant that makes him/her simultaneously a copy of the others and absolutely confident in these reverberated opinions.

What is being corrupted according to Plato? The easy answer is the soul (psyche), but we have to look beyond this seemingly simple concept to get at the heart of the matter. His concern is not with the weak-minded who are going to be corrupted anyhow. He is concerned with the corruption of strong philosophical minds that are strengthened by this reverberation. This is the true danger for a city: the philosophically strong become stronger in their overconfidence. They were already strong, and this strength has been energized and amplified by this corruption. In Nietzschean terms, ressentiment (as the energy of obsessive objections and excessive praise or blame) is driven into the soul such that it becomes so deeply corrupted that it is hard to turn it around:

Now, suppose someone gently approaches a young man in that state of mind [“brimming with pretension and empty, senseless pride”] and tells him the truth: that he has no sense, although he needs it, and that it cannot be acquired unless he works like a slave to attain it. Do you think it will be easy for him to hear that message through the evils that surround him? (494d-e)

But again, what aspect of the soul is being corrupted? To answer this is to get at the heart of what Plato thinks philosophy is. There are four aspects to uncorrupted philosophy that I want to look at in this meditation: 1) a love of the search for truth, 2) this search is a progression from opinion (doxa) to knowledge (episteme) to understanding (gnosis) that never has a definitive end, 3) a calm but insistent disposition of the soul that makes the progression possible, 4) this progression must reverse direction so that gnosis flows back into episteme which flows back into doxa. This latter flow is crucial and is the force of the allegory of the cave from Book 7. Book 6, however, is critical in establishing these four aspects of Platonic knowledge, which is what I want to focus on in this meditation.

I believe that these four aspects are central to what we’ve come to call neoplatonism, and they get at the spiritual practice of philosophy as self-overcoming. This self-overcoming is the heart of Book 6, and arguably all of Plato’s work. Book 6 sets the context for all of his conceptual scaffolding, especially the Forms. I’ve argued in earlier meditations that the Forms should be understood not through epistemology as his “first philosophy” but as intellectual and emotional commitments within a spiritual practice designed to break through our knee-jerk opinions (doxa) to arrive at more deliberately held values and virtues. In short, the Forms are mental techniques for making us speak what we believe and to expose those beliefs to dialectical investigation. But in order to be effective, these techniques cannot remain at the level of pure techne. They must be real commitments to epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology, otherwise the techniques are hollow at best and nihilistic at worst. The goal is a better psyche capable of breaking free of echo chambers because it has been trained to not accept the roar of the crowd, but to step back from the roar, calm oneself and think about what is being said and whether or not you want to accept it as true. This cannot be done effectively through ethical practice as mere techne. You have to be committed at some level to a desire to create your own understanding of how things are and your ability to know those things.

The first of the four aspects is the love of the search for truth. Plato is clear throughout his body of work that the search is the value, not the arrival. The arrival often never happens. The very real danger is a nihilistic belief that if the arrival is impossible, then the searching is also futile. In the Meno, Socrates calls this an “eristic argument” — one that gives up too easily because the end point has been proven to be impossible to achieve. For Socrates, the end point may be futile, but that doesn’t really matter because he is not trying to make an epistemological point so much as a moral point. Ethics is “first philosophy” for Plato’s Socrates, not epistemology. At least, this is how I think neoplatonism understands Plato. Arguing whether or not this is the correct reading of Plato is unnecessary and uninteresting for me. In fact, trying to get the right reading of Plato seems to favor epistemology and/or ontology as first philosophy because it is the thing that we can go looking for hiding behind the body of work. It is akin to asking, “What did Plato really believe?” The typical answer is to look behind the face of the texts to try to find an underlying ontology and/or epistemology on which the ethics is built as a kind of superstructure. Ethics is demoted in this reading in a way that I think is misleading.

The second aspect is that the search is a progression that starts with a dialectical examination (the elenchus) of what one believes:

So, won’t it be reasonable, then, for us to plead in his defense that a real lover of learning strives by nature for what is? He does not linger over each of the many things that are believed to be, but keeps on going, without losing or lessening his passion, until he grasps what the nature of each thing itself is with the element of his soul that is fitted to grasp a thing of that sort because of its kinship with it. Once he has drawn near to it, has intercourse with what really is, and has begotten understanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and — at this point, but not before — is relieved from his labor pains. (490a-b, emphasis added)

There is a lot going on in this passage, and to fully unpack it would be to nearly completely articulate how Plato’s ethics, epistemology, and ontology are woven together. This would mean fully digging into how the soul is “fitted to grasp” knowledge of what is “because of its kinship with it.” This starts to get at the disposition aspect of Plato’s ethics, but for the moment, I want to focus more on the progression articulated here.

This is an abstract discussion of this progression, but it can be made concrete and practical. To ask what makes a good table is to ultimately seek for a pattern that makes it possible for us to differentiate good tables from bad ones. To stop there, however, is to stop at carpentry as a form of technical know-how (techne, in Greek). To push beyond techne is to continue to ask about the goodness of tables in general. Why do we need good tables? We need them because it makes other good things possible — gathering of family and friends for a meal, for example. Why is this good? Because harmoniously connecting with other human beings is good. Why is that good? Because harmony leads to less violence and more generosity. And so on.

This progression gets at how Plato’s epistemology informs his ethics. The value is in genuinely and authentically undertaking the progression and not stopping at the received opinions of the echo chamber. Nor should we stop at knowledge as technical know-how (techne). We need to keep pushing to higher levels of knowledge (episteme) and understanding (gnosis) that reverberate back into the world, which is what I think Plato means in his phrase “he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and — at this point, but not before — is relieved from his labor pains.” This is hard work and can only be undertaken by souls that are strong and determined enough for the difficult journey. But as we saw earlier, these strong souls can be corrupted and are strengthened by this corruption, not weakened. In Book 6, this is the condition of the soul of a sophist, which is why they are so dangerous to the city.

We can also see how this progression leads to his statement that “the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power” (509b). To say that the good is “beyond being” is not necessarily to say that it resides in another world outside of this one. That may have been true for Plato, but it is an unnecessary conclusion that could easily lead us into attributing Nietzche’s ascetic ideal to Plato. Any cursory reading of Plato, especially The Republic, should make it clear that “the good,” even if it is otherworldly, has no value unless it is activated in this world. We must remember that Plato’s overriding concern is ethics and how “we are to discover the difference between the just life and the unjust one” (484b). The only reason to discover the difference is so that a just life can be lived.

While it may be possible to read a “just life” as having a reward in an eternal afterlife (see the Phaedo), Plato’s emphasis is unequivocally on the ethics of citizenship. The function of the philosopher-king is to “establish here on earth conventional norms concerning beautiful, just, or good things” (484d, emphasis added). The city, Athens in particular, is the here on earth in which his dialogs take place. I’m not saying anything controversial here. This is well understood in the scholarship, but also is easily grasped by treating his dialogs as literary works rather than as abstract expressions of a philosophical system that would have been better expressed as treatises or essays. As Pierre Hadot pointed out, the literary form of the dialog and the presence of challenging interlocutors kept Plato’s work from becoming the mere expression of a doctrine. The dialogs are a literary demonstration of how conversing with others can be an ethical practice not reducible to statements of philosophical systems hiding in the background.

This brings me to the third aspect of neoplatonic ethics: the disposition of the lover of wisdom. Plato spends considerable time on this question. A lover of wisdom is not robotically and dispassionately pursuing truth as a progression of abstract propositional definitions of “what is.” This pursuit cannot become, as will be made clear in the allegory of the cave, a monkish and permanent anachoresis from the world. To withstand the nihilistic echo chambers of life in the world, a lover of wisdom must have a disposition to the world that permeates his/her very soul. He/she must step into the echo chambers with intention because they are unavoidable if one wants to be a genuine citizen. This disposition of the soul is what gets corrupted by echo chambers and is why Socrates’ description emphasizes, not falsehood itself, but the emotions that are the driving force of the echo chambers: obsessions, excesses, uproar, shouting, et cetera. One cannot love true wisdom and break free of commonly held beliefs unless one maintains this calm disposition in the midst of argumentation. One has to be on guard with oneself and keep watch for the presence of the opposing disposition — the desire to win the argument at all costs, which is for Plato’s Socrates a defining characteristic of a sophist. While this disposition is central to Book 6, there is a moment in the Phaedo where Socrates demonstrates this self-awareness and checks himself to reverse course: “I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of the discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth” (Phaedo 91a).

All three of these aspects of philosophy must weave together. If any one of them collapses, the nihilistic temptations of the echo chamber are too powerful. I want to try to understand how this weaving together works in Plato’s ethics. Specifically, I want to take some time to untangle the relationship between calmness, beauty and the good that are deeply interwoven in Plato’s Socrates’ discussion throughout Book 6. The typical knee-jerk reading of Plato, which I have been guilty of in the past, is to look at this interweaving as a rational process that favors unity over diversity and sees the world as fallen. Transcendence would thus become the end game for human fulfillment, and the faculty that accesses this transcendence is reason. Rational discourse as logos would be the practice of reason that achieves transcendence as anachoresis — withdrawal from the world to seek salvation and solace by removing oneself from the daily grind.

Plato is adamant in Books 6 and 7 that this is moral failure, but it is so easily overlooked because we’ve been taught to think that Plato is the contemplative philosopher who devalues action. Typically, he is contrasted in this aspect to Aristotle who is the more practical of these two philosophical giants. This is an unfair reading of Plato that sees him as an exemplar of Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. Not only is this an unfair reading, it also can easily trap me into a ressentiment-fueled critique of Plato’s ethics that leaves no way out of the ascetic ideal. I’ve been trying to come to terms with breaking through the ascetic ideal by embracing it and pushing through it rather than trying to stand aside from it. I am trying to take Nietzsche seriously when he asks, “where is the other model?” Rather than seeking the other model as a hard denial of the ascetic ideal, it seems to me that the seeds of its overcoming are found within it, not standing over against it in some imaginary exteriority. Such an external stance would need to see the ascetic ideal as itself an object of knowledge that represents yet another instance of a fallen world — an object that would inevitably fuel ressentiment-driven nihilism. The ascetic ideal would reconstitute itself by making itself into the object of ressentiment. Thus the ascetic ideal would become simultaneously subject and object. That’s not exactly the other model Nietzsche challenges us to look for.

At this point, we arrive at the fourth aspect of Plato’s ethics that I pointed out earlier. It is, I believe, a way through the ascetic ideal. The progression from belief to knowledge to understanding must reverse itself so that it transforms our beliefs, which are the drivers of our actions. This is a very complex argument, and I want to spend time unpacking it. The ethics that Plato outlines, particularly in Books 6 and 7, is one of transcendence and return, not just transcendence. Transcendence, in other words, cannot only be an exit from the cave. What one learns through gnosis must return to the world and inform one’s know-how (techne) as a citizen leader. The trick will always be negotiating the return not only so that I can keep my sanity amid echo chambers, but so that I can show others how to undo the effects of the reverberations on them.

To understand how this reversal provides a way through the ascetic ideal, I will focus on the section that occurs roughly between 500 and 502. The first thing to understand is that echo chambers are not places of intentional falsehood. Such an echo chamber would have no connection to philosophy. Plato’s Socrates wants us to see that the echo chambers are not completely absent of the love of truth so much as they are mistaken or incomplete philosophy. The inhabitants of the echo chambers think that they are pursuing truth, but all that is happening is the reinforcement of existing beliefs:

None of those private wage earners — the ones these people call sophists and consider to be their rivals in craft — teaches anything other than the convictions the masses hold when they are assembled together, and this he calls wisdom. It is just as if someone were learning the passions and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he is rearing — how to approach it and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most docile and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what tones of voice soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through associating and spending time with the beast, he calls this wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft [techne], and starts to teach it. Knowing nothing in reality about which of these convictions and appetites is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, he uses all these terms in conformity with the great beast’s beliefs — calling the things it enjoys good and the things that anger it bad. (493a-c, emphasis added)

Here we have Nietzsche’s ascetic priest in action in the form of the sophist. His job is not to truly impart wisdom but to reinforce what the masses (hoi poloi) already believe to be true. The substance of the sophist’s work is to reinforce and stoke anger while calling this wisdom. This is the very definition of the ascetic priest — at least in its first phase as Nietzsche described it — as the one who fuels outward facing ressentiment that sees the world as a hostile other. Plato, in other words, sees the sophists as promoting nihilism in the guise of wisdom.

To make this clear: the sophists are not consciously deceiving the masses. No one, in Plato’s Socrates’ worldview, ever does anything that they intentionally think is bad. We always pursue what be believe to be good. This is critical to Plato’s ethics, and I’ve already come to terms with this in an earlier meditation. It works like this: central to Plato’s ethics is parrhesia — the commitment to say what you believe to be true about the topic at hand. By doing so, the interlocutor is forced to expose his beliefs (it’s always a he). But for Plato, this is not just a rational exercise of knowing something; it is also an ethical one because actions are at stake. Actions are always driven by beliefs. This is the heart of ancient philosophy. It is so ingrained in us today that it is easy to miss this innovation. Euthyphro is on the way to court to prosecute his father for murder. His motivation is the virtue of piety. When Socrates asks him to define (unsuccessfully) what he believes piety is, we have something fairly new in the history of philosophy. Euthyphro has to say what he believes because what he believes is driving his action — by his own admission. This is one of the dominant patterns in Plato’s Socratic dialogs, especially the early ones. Crito believes that Socrates’ conviction is unjust and that it is an act of justice to bust him out of prison. In speaking his beliefs, Crito gives up his plan because he’s come to see it as not just. Hippocrates seeks the teaching of Protagoras in the belief that he will be made more virtuous, but neither Hippocrates nor Protagoras can define virtue. This undermines Protagoras’ authority to teach and Hippocrates’ motivation to seek his teaching.

The crucial point is this: the sophists are not consciously introducing falsehoods into their teaching of the masses. They believe that they are imparting wisdom because no one ever consciously does what they think is wrong. This is their value to society, and it is the kernel on which Plato’s Socrates will build his entire moral edifice. Therefore both the sophists and the masses value wisdom, and the sophists show us this truth. However, they are mistaken as to what true wisdom actually is. The sophists merely reinforce knee-jerk beliefs and call that wisdom. For Plato’s Socrates, this is not evil, it’s just a case of beliefs being mistaken for knowledge. The beliefs are not “tied down” to use the metaphor from the Meno. We are not dealing with a morality of good and evil but an ethics that needs to take love of wisdom seriously. This is what keeps Plato’s critique of the sophists from being an accusation of absolute nihilism. The love of wisdom exists, but it is incomplete because it remains stuck within belief (doxa) and does not progress out of belief to become theoretical knowledge (episteme) and eventually understanding (gnosis).

What does it mean to take love of wisdom (philosophia) seriously? To more fully understand this, we need to unpack the implicit relationships between belief, knowledge, and techne that are at the heart of Plato’s critique of the sophists’ echo chambers. For simplicity, I’ll copy the citation above again, but this time with different emphasis:

None of those private wage earners — the ones these people call sophists and consider to be their rivals in craft — teaches anything other than the convictions the masses hold when they are assembled together, and this he calls wisdom. It is just as if someone were learning the passions and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he is rearing — how to approach it and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most docile and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what tones of voice soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through associating and spending time with the beast, he calls this wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft [techne], and starts to teach it. Knowing nothing in reality about which of these convictions and appetites is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, he uses all these terms in conformity with the great beast’s beliefs — calling the things it enjoys good and the things that anger it bad. (493a-c, emphasis added)

Plato’s critique hinges upon how the sophists prepare themselves to teach. For them, they remain devoted to a particular kind of knowledge — techne, which often is translated as craft, as it is here. Techne is the ability to manipulate reality to create an outcome. Plato offers many, many examples of techne throughout his work: shipbuilding, medicine, lyre-making, carpentry, making music, painting, wrestling, commanding armies, et cetera. The sophist, like these other craftsmen, are motivated by making a living — they are wage earners. For Plato, this can’t be the sole motivation. When it comes to teaching what sophists claim to teach — the virtues of being a good citizen — this is a morally bankrupt disposition. Plato’s answer, embedded in this passage, is that the craft of teaching people how to be good citizens must be oriented to knowing what is truly “fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust.” If one’s techne for these things remains aligned only with common opinion, then echo chambers will be the necessary mechanism for their craft.

For Plato, politics is definitely a techne, but this techne needs to be guided by a true love of wisdom, particularly for what is just, what is beautiful, and what is good. To accomplish this, Plato has Socrates separate belief from wisdom. The virtue of wisdom, if authentically embraced, shows up as a love of the pursuit of truth, not a reinforced confidence in one’s beliefs. In other words, authentic wisdom makes us question our beliefs. The sophists appear to be doing this, but they are not. They are simply pursuing their own wage-earning craft the easy way — by making the masses overly confident in their own beliefs and calling this wisdom. To reverse the echoes of the chamber, Plato’s Socrates orients us away from a confidence in our beliefs. This is why Socrates always insists on both his own ignorance and that the interlocutor answer “what is_____?” questions about virtue. He thus draws the interlocutor out of his knee-jerk beliefs by making him say what he believes about a particular virtue. Socratic ignorance, when combined with “what is” questions, is a technique for distancing the interlocutor from his beliefs at the same time that he speaks his beliefs. The paradox is powerful: at the moment he says what he thinks (parrhesia), the interlocutor becomes more intimate with his beliefs while distancing himself from them. This is the substance of the famous aporia.

The key move in this technique is to differentiate knowledge as techne from knowledge as episteme. Episteme proceeds through reason and dialog while techne simply seeks an outcome. Episteme is the type of knowledge that is most popularly associated with Plato: What is virtue? What is courage? What is temperance? True curiosity to finding answers to these questions is morally necessary so that you can distance yourself from your beliefs while you become more initmately familiar with them. This is how you undo the effects of echo chambers and how the progression from belief to epistemic knowledge to understanding gets started.

The Forms emerge within Plato’s dialogs as a way to separate and re-align techne and episteme. To be clear, Plato does not want a hard boundary between techne and episteme. Rather, episteme must inform and guide techne. Let me take an example. A doctor is a practitioner of the techne of medicine. As such, he/she knows how to cure specific ailments. If you have a headache, take some aspirin. This is techne. But this is different than understanding what health is and knowing how to bring it about. To truly be a good medical practitioner, the doctor needs to be curious about understanding the what human health truly is. An authentically good doctor would look at the whole picture of the person’s health and try to diagnose and treat underlying causes of the symptoms and not just the symptoms themselves. In this way, the doctor seeks wisdom related to his profession and rises above being a pure technician.

Yet the doctor remains a technician, otherwise he wouldn’t be a doctor. To put this in terms of progression and reversal, the techne must be made better by moving from the doctor’s technical knowledge of what works to a deep desire to understand why it works and then to a knowledge of what true health is and how to bring it about — and not just how to cure ailments. So the progression from techne to episteme must also be a reversal such that episteme flows back into the doctor’s techne to make it better. To be a good doctor, both episteme and techne must be present in the doctor. This presence is also what makes the doctor a good citizen who can withstand the echoes of the chamber.