Republic Book 6: Truth and Beauty
SOCRATES: And do you think that truth is akin to what is disproportionate or to what is proportionate?
GLAUCON: To what is proportionate.
SOCRATES: Then, in addition to those other things, let’s look for a mind that has a natural sense of proportion and grace, one whose innate disposition makes it easy to lead to the form of each thing which is.
GLAUCON: Indeed.
SOCRATES: Well, then, do you think the properties we have gone through aren’t interconnected, or that any of them is in any way unnecessary to a soul that is going to have a sufficiently complete grasp of what is?
GLAUCON: No, they are all absolutely necessary. (486d-e)
Here we have, in a few short lines, much of what Plato has to tell us about living a just and good life. If I am to boil down Plato’s message to a single sentence, it would be this: to live a just and good life requires the cultivation of one’s soul (psyche) to apprehend beauty as a harmonious and graceful interconnectedness, and to put the psyche to work in the world to bring about this harmonious interconnectedness within ourselves, with others and within the world.
To “take care of our souls” (Socrates’ self-imposed mission as a citizen of Athens) means harmonizing ourselves with this interconnectedness. This is not just an intellectual harmony. This harmony is achieved through self-transformation that is deliberate and, at times, difficult work (ascesis). The whole psyche must do the work, and in the process one’s physical body and its thymos (the emotional part of the psyche) must be transformed as well. The passions are not annihilated or even denigrated: they must be re-ordered because the thymos is an important motivator of our actions. Plato is adamant, particularly in The Republic, that to live a good life is not and cannot be achieved through monkish anachoresis alone. The good life must be lived “here on earth” (484d): the philosopher must return to the cave (519ff), which is the part of the allegory typically left out by his interpreters. The just and good life is lived in the world as a member of a community (a polis). How we do this and particularly how the citizens of the polis pass this along to subsequent generations is at the heart of Plato’s thinking. Teaching as the passing on of shared values from one generation to the next is never very far from the surface of Plato’s work.
It is far too easy for us to read Plato as primarily an epistemologist or an ontologist and to demote or ignore his ethics. We are often tempted to read ethics as the work of Socrates and thus to see Plato as demoting Socrates’ ethics in favor of making him a mouthpiece for an epistemology (how we know) and an ontology (what it means to be something). But in this passage and the surrounding ones of Book 6, I find a profound sense of how the epistemology, ontology, and ethics are woven together, and therefore how important metaphysics is for Plato. To be sure, in my reading of Plato over the last several months, I’m coming to an appreciation of how important metaphysics is to ethics. We cannot treat ethics as only a practice untethered from what we authentically think about how the world is organized and how we fit into it. Our mythologies matter.
For Plato, important concepts like recollection and the Forms emerge from within ethical discussions. However, I want to be very careful to not reduce these important concepts to mere instruments that are completely at the service of ethics. We have to believe that these things are real and that we can apprehend them in some way, even if imperfectly. To be sure, we don’t need to believe that Plato’s theory of recollection (Meno and Phaedo) are completely correct. Rather, we need to understand that his concepts of recollection and Forms allow him to deal with very real problems of how we can transform individual belief into shared knowledge. Forms solve several philosophical problems including pattern recognition: how can I recognize that a circle drawn on a piece of paper represents a circle even though the diameter is certainly not uniform because it is hand drawn? Recollection solves a problem of shared understanding of the Forms. How can you and I both recognize the drawing as a circle? How can the person who drew it expect all three of us to recognize it as a circle? Positing an eternal soul that retains this memory of a circle is not a necessary belief to solve this problem, but it does point to a way to see ourselves as not completely solipsistic entities who have to make everything up ourselves with no collective ability to recognize that a circle on a chalkboard represents an ideal pattern that we call “circle.” Taken together, Forms and recollection solve a problem of continuity. How is it possible for me to continue to recognize different instances of tables as tables? How is it possible for you and I both to recognize these different instances as tables? Without both the Forms and recollection, we are left with a purely atomized experience that is atomized not just between people but within ourselves.
Metaphysics, ontology and epistemology must always somehow escape complete containment within the ethics conceived purely as practice. Otherwise, ethical practices are reduced to a hollowed out “art of living” that can only appear as various technes of the self untethered from any authentic connection with the world beyond ourselves because the techne doesn’t make room for belief in anything other than the technologies we use to create ourselves. Such a hollowed out “techne of the self” leaves us on the verge of a nihilistic technological determinism.
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Side Note: It seems to me that Decartes’ Third Meditation is an authentic attempt to reintroduce metaphysics into the purely solipsistic and atomizing exercise of the first two Meditations — an exercise that deeply and intentionally confronted the nihilism inherent in solipsistic thought experiments as the pure techne of the self.
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Ethics as mere practice contains the seeds of nihilism as it reduces any commitment to metaphysics, ontology and epistemology to techne — sub-technes within the overall technes of the self. This was anathema to Plato, who appreciated techne, but always wanted techne to be transformed by episteme and for episteme to be transformed by gnosis. It works like this: to be a good medical practitioner, the craft (techne) of medicine must rise above mere treatment of symptoms to become knowledge (episteme) of what is true human health (a Form). This epistemic knowledge must arise from a curiosity about what is truly healthy and not just the techniques for the treatment of symptoms. This curiosity is not satisfied by techne as mere “know how” about soothing a headache but as knowledge of what true human health is. The latter is what Plato called knowledge as episteme — the curiosity to seek the answer to the “what is” questions. This curiosity seeks to move beyond techne and thus to find its connection with a higher form of knowledge that informs the techne but is not contained by it. The latter approach — to see all knowledge as ultimately techne — would reduce knowledge to mere “instrumental reason” to borrow a phrase from the Frankfurt School, and we know where that got us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Enlightenment played itself out. Adolf Eichmann did the work of the Holocaust with spreadsheets and capacity calculations. (I’m writing this on the 60th anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s articles in The New Yorker.)
But Plato pushes us even further than episteme if we are to be true lovers of wisdom. Why would the doctor want to understand the truth of human health? Not only to be a better technician, but because human health is good. It is good not just for the person but for the polis. Healthy humans can fend off enemies and can go to work to produce food and other good things that allow citizens to flourish (eudaemonia). Health, therefore, does not simply stand alone as a good unto itself (though it is certainly a good “itself by itself”), but is interwoven with other goods. Thus the doctor cannot be a mere technician, but must be a citizen who is knowledgable of the the broader good of the polis, which must flow back into his techne to make it better and more beneficial to others. The whole thing, for Plato, is beautiful because it is all interwoven harmoniously.
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Side note: Clearly I am continuing to break my worldview free of Foucault. While I find value in his later work on care of the self and ascesis, he seems to me to have unnecessarily failed to authentically confront nihilism. He never really engaged with metaphysics and ontology but, at most, left them as mere instrumental tools of ascesis. Deleuze indicates that he was coming around to metaphysics toward the end of his life, but to ground his analysis on technologies of the self, technologies of power, and technologies of truth (as he did in the later interviews) seems to me to return all of our knowledge to instrumental reason hollowed out of any ground for spiritual practices that would allow us to reconnect these artfully created selves with others and the world.
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As should be clear, Plato is not advocating a oneway progression from techne to episteme to gnosis where one seeks to remain in the last stage. Anachoresis as a goal is not Plato’s intention. The flow must be both ways. This is absolutely clear in The Republic. The philosopher must return to the cave. That said, Plato is not, I believe, primarily a metaphysician nor an epistemologist nor an ontologist. He is showing us a way of fitting ourselves into the world through the transformation of our psyches. This transformation requires the active work (ascesis) of fitting ourselves into a world that wants to be harmonious and wants our psyches to be part of that harmony. This requires us to see the world as organized by “the good” (agathos) — a good that reveals itself through patterns (the Forms) and beauty (kalos) as the interconnectedness and propotion and grace of those Forms. Agathos holds it all together, and our psyches embody our interconnectedness as part of this harmony. Harmony is not possible if ethics is only techne disconnected from a genuine activation of a metaphysical and ontological curiosity that wants and desires and needs a vision for how the world fits together and how our psyches can be woven into this harmony. Again, this vision cannot be only technical or epistemological, but must be full of wonder. It must at some point be an aesthetic experience of beauty irreducible to a desire to technically manipulate it or to capture it in propositional statements. E=MC2 must have been as much an aesthetic experience and pursuit for Einstein as it was a propositional truth. The same must have been true for Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Watson and Crick.
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Experiencing the interconnection as the simultaneity of beauty, truth and the good is the heart of what Plato has to say to us as a philosopher. The passage I cited at the beginning strikes me, as I said, as an important condensation of his message. Particularly, I’ve become interested in the Stoic concept of the providential universe and how important that is to my ability to put myself into some kind of order that is not an extraction and atomization of myself unto myself. This de-atomizing order is a progression that works like this. First comes a love of the search for truth. The search is far more ethically important than its arrival. The arrival may never occur, but, as Plato makes clear in several places, to give up the search because you think it is futile is nihilistic. We must have faith that we will become better and more just people if we believe that the search is itself a form of the good. At the heart of Plato’s ethics, one finds a profound faith.
Second, this search cannot be understood as purely intellectual and thus untethered from one’s emotions (thymos). Rather, the search is a key practice in taming and properly ordering our emotions and feelings. This is not Nietzsche’s Christianized ascetic ideal that sees the appetites as the root of evil and thus in need of stamping out. If there is a “tyranny of reason” (Twighlight of the Idols) in Plato’s Socrates, it occurs only when we stop short in understanding the full scope of the ethics that Plato is elaborating through the character of Socrates. We must always remember that the philosopher who leaves the cave must return energized by the exit. Without the return, the energy and experience of the good does not effectively exist.
Third, and what is most prevalent in the passage I started with, this search requires a disposition of the soul that seeks harmony with how things are: “let’s look for a mind that has a natural sense of proportion and grace, one whose innate disposition makes it easy to lead to the form of each thing which is.” What is the natural sense in this passage if not the symmetry between one’s psyche and the world? In these two words, if we take them seriously and read them in the entire context of what Plato has to tell us, we experience the interconnectedness of the psyche and the world. We sense the good when our innate disposition is tuned into the harmony, and it is tuned into the harmony because it is in harmony with itself. The proper disposition of the mind must occur first before one can undertake the progress. At the same time, the mind is described in the same terms as the interconnectedness of the Forms — proportion and grace. The good must permeate the soul — the natural sense and innate disposition — and this permeation is the result of the soul having the same proportionate and graceful qualities as reality. It is naturally tied into reality, but we must do the work to ensure that it stays tied in. This ascesis is itself a manifestation of the good and is beautiful and harmonious as it does its work.
As we see later in Book 6, “the good” is nothing other than the harmonious order of the universe that is apprehended in myriad ways by the soul. “Beauty” (kalos) is the quality by which the good is apprehended. The form of “the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power” (509b). The good is a Form but not of the same kind as others. It is not reducible to a propositional definition; it is not known in the same way as justice or good health can be known. When at 506d Glaucon asks Socrates to “discuss the good in the same way you discussed justice, temperance, and the rest,” Socrates demurs and indicates that the good cannot be defined like these other virtues. It is not subject to a “what is?” answer in the same way as the others.
To unpack this a bit, the good is not the same kind of Form as justice, temperance and other virtues. It is a Form that flows through everything: it is the interconnectedness of all things. This is why Plato’s Socrates will put beauty and the good together, sometimes synonymously, as a different level of knowledge. Episteme is the kind of knowledge that apprehends abstract Forms like health, justice, and temperance. It starts from the assumption that “what is?” can be answered in propositional definitions that are adequate representations of the being of the thing in question. We ought to be able to answer the questions “what is virtue?” “what is justice?” “what is good health?” because these beings/things are eternal and stable. We must believe that our words are adequate to grasp them (the topic of the Cratylus). To be clear, this epistemological assumption — that these things can be verbalized as adequate definitions — is an enabler of the more fundamental ethical practices on display in Plato’s works.
Episteme is a lower level of knowledge than gnosis, often translated as understanding. This is an experiential understanding that occurs after one has moved through contemplation of the Forms. As such, it is more properly understood as an aesthetic experience of the good, which is why Plato keeps it conceptually close to the ability to apprehend beauty. This is the key point that I want to focus on. The “innate disposition” that Plato’s Socrates elaborates in Book 6 is essential to the progression. It is the trained ability to apprehend through gnosis how everything is interconnected. It is the ability to find the good that is flowing through everything and is thus “beyond being” but is still a Form. The Stoics would pick this up later as the providential universe and, it seems to me, that Nietzsche’s amore fati is another expression of the same idea.
The importance of the metaphor of the the sun captures this beyond-being quality of the form of the good. It is a metaphor that allows us to imagine how proportion, grace and interconnectedness are real but not in the same way as seemingly discrete virtues like justice, temperance, and courage are. Yet we should not fall into the trap that beauty and the good are separated from the others by hard boundaries. If we try to reduce knowledge to episteme, we will indeed find ourselves subject to a tyranny of reason. But if we see the full scope of Plato’s interweaving of episteme and gnosis, of arete (virtue, excellence) and agathos (the good) and kalos (beauty), of nous (intellect) and psyche (soul) and thymos (appetites and desires), we find a much richer and more balanced ethical practice. We will find a concept of self-ordering that is not reducible to the ascetic ideal as the denial of one’s thymistic drives, but as an interwoven and harmonious whole that sees itself as woven into the rest of the world, including the others with whom we live. This natural sense and its innate disposition, however, do not require a Panglossian anesthetized inability to experience tragedy. This disposition is not an apathetic and nihilistic obliviousness to ugliness and tragedy, though it is easy to see how Plato’s ethics can become that. The commitment to returning to the cave carrying the energy of one’s experience of the good is a commitment to stave off such a nihilistic disposition.
Without the deliberate cultivation of the “innate disposition” that is fundamentally temperance, one cannot be open to the various practices of truth-seeking that are the motor of our self-ordering. Again, Plato emphasizes the ability to apprehend, and this is why temperance is such a crucial virtue for Plato. This apprehension is not only epistemic knowledge, as is too often the case with interpretations of Plato. This apprehension is a profound openness and willingness to experience beauty and the good without reducing them to epistemic definitions that take the form of clear answers to “what is?” questions. Yet, the ability to deeply embrace the “what is?” questions is fundamental to reaching the state of apprehension that can experience the good as the beautiful and vice versa.
I am thinking about a mode of apprehension that is not easily categorized into effort or grace, but it is both simultaneously. Episteme is definitely aligned with effort, but it is the necessary effort of dialectical dialog that is fundamentally the self-examination of what one believes. (As such, it is a form of ascesis that is not reducible to asceticism that starts and ends as self-denial.) Committing to the self-examination of our own beliefs leads to aesthetic experiences. It is not possible to understand aporia as anything other than an experience of the sublime when one comes to the realization, with Nicias (Laches), that one has not been living up to this point a good life though you certainly believe that you have been. Progression is occurring when this form of pain becomes pleasure.
Episteme is the path to gnosis, and this requires a disposition to oneself and one’s fimly held opinions (doxa) that opens them up to the pragmatic and spiritual belief that the progression is possible. This is where contemplating the metaphor of the sun becomes crucial as an ethical practice that introduces gnosis as a form of knowledge that is not reducible to the propositional demands of episteme. This metaphor also illustrates how the ability to apprehend, aesthetically, the good as beauty cannot be a prescription for anachoresis as withdrawal from the world. The progression from doxa to episteme to gnosis must reverse such that doxa is transformed. When our opinions and beliefs are transformed, so are our actions. It is not the object of the sun that Plato is emphasizing, but the light that shines and the energy that makes things grow.