According to Allan Bloom, Socrates makes the first statement by any thinker of the principle of non-contradiction. “It’s plain that the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing” (436b). Socrates is discussing the three ‘parts’ of the soul, but introduces the principle of non-contradiction with physical examples: the man standing still and waing his arms; the top that spins without moving its axis. The principle of non-contradiction is not only a principle of the mind. In Locke, for example, non-contradiction comes in at the sensual level; it isn’t only that there cannot be something shaded ‘blackwhite’ but that such a thing is inconceivable. The principle of non-contradiction inheres in all of being, ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’

1. Why Noēsis?
Central to the Republic is 473d, where Socrates makes his most outrageous claim: There is “no rest from the ills of cities” or “for human kind” unless “the philosophers rule as kings” or “those now called kings genuinely and adequately philosophize.” Who are the philosophers? They are “lovers of the sight of the truth” (475e). But, Socrates cautions, it is “the nature of acting to attain to less truth than speaking” (473e). The good regime will be easier said than done. Only a regime ruled by kingly philosophers or philosophic kings would govern with the truth in sight. To see the truth means noēsis or insight—the ‘I got it’ response. Without insight, logical analysis would reduce all things to thought-rubble, and logical dialectic would speculate without end. The mind would be trapped either in infinite regress or infinite, but pointless, progress. In the philosophically-governed city, insight will replace the opinion-icons with which rulers rule everywhere else.

2. Why I Am So Peculiar

The one who “from youth on strive[s] as intensely as possible for every kind of truth” (485d) will have weaker desires for other things: a weaker eros for money and for the human-all-too-human generally. This disturbs Adeimantus, who worries that philosophers are at best useless to cities, at worst vicious, and usually damned peculiar. “[Y]ou are telling the truth in saying that the most decent of those in philosophy are useless to the many,” Socrates concedes (489b). Sailors ambitious to rule will call “the true pilot” a stargazer and a prater.  The many want what they want, which is unlikely to be some remote truth. The true pilot is more true than pilot; he is not likely to find work as a pilot.

3. Why Dialogues?

This is why Plato writes dialogues. A philosopher, fixing his attention on what is, will want to ignore the ever-changing, petty struggles for ‘power,’ ‘riches,’ and other false goods. But Plato’s Socrates, even when asking his friends to lift their eyes to the stars, never forgets the person in front of him. He does not argue in the same way to Cephalus as he does to Polemarchus, to Glaucon as he does to Adeimantus. Socrates is the first political philosopher. The noble lie is noble because it is the true cure for the variety of souls that are untrue to themselves. Pre-Socratic natural philosophy had supposed that it could brush opinions/conventions aside. Socratic political wisdom, or prudence, seen in his conversations, can mollify most of the many, as the philosopher ranges between the lowest persons and topics to the highest thoughts, from opinion to noēsis—both presented through logos. The truth of what is must be filtered through what one may say, and who is saying it. By doing so, the philosopher avoids naivete about the ability of the human mind to jump beyond itself, to make a fast and easy break with sub-philosophic opinion.

But Socratic prudence enrages the thumotic few—Thrasymachus, for example—who fear any potential rivals (cf. 493b). In this dialogue, Thrasymachus is tamed (and Cephalus banished, and Polemarchus disarmed). In Athens, certain ‘Thrasymachuses’ were not tamed, and they eventually executed the political philosopher. Political philosophy is a shield because it is politic, but it is a red flag because it is political. Political philosophy raises the stakes een as it plays with a stronger hand.

4. What Should I Strive For?

Dialectical inquiry concerning opinions concerning justice lead eventually to “the idea of the good.” What, then, is “the good”? Inquiring minds (like Glaucon’s) want to know. No retreating into professions of ignorance on this one, old boy. Instead, Socrates advances an image: The good is like the sun, which causes knowledge and truth, causes the ‘isness’ of what is. In contrast to the sun and its light there is the cave, where the inhabitants worship false icons, loving what they believe to be their own. The man educated, drawn out of the cave, is a man converted—his soul “turned around” (518c), away from ‘his own’ and toward the good. Never diminished by being beheld, the good underlies the only true communism. The good is what is truly everyone’s own, unseen by those insufficiently erotic and thumotic to make the ascent, unseen by those overwhelmingly erotic and thumotic souls who prefer to rule in the cave than to serve in the light of the sun, as Milton’s Satan almost put it. The difficulty in answering Glaucon’s question directly is clear: noetically to see the good requires soul-turning, conversion; Glaucon is not a philosopher, so his question is as impertinent as it is pertinent. The same goes for Plato’s readers. Plato writes dialogues, not essays, not dictionaries or encyclopedias. Browsers need not apply.

5. Would Philosophers Rule?

The many don’t want the philosophers to rule them. So said Adeimantus. Nor do the philosophers want to rule the many. So now says Glaucon, Adeimantus’ superior in mind and heart. These twin, stubborn truths make the ‘actual’ establishment of philosophic rule highly unlikely. The only good ruler is he who does not love ruling, Socrates says. Only in the philosophic city can philosophers be justly compelled to rule, for only there do they owe their philosophy to the city. There is now no philosophic city, except in speech; ergo, there will never be a philosophic city, except in speech, unless the philosophers are unjustly compelled to rule, either by a populace somehow made desirous for being ruled by the apparently useless and peculiar, or by the few who suddenly decide to relinquish their dreams of supreme victory and honor. That is, philosophers will rule when their rule—when anyone’s rule—is no longer much needed.

6. What Is Going ON, Here?

Education in truth of guardians—that is, a political-philosophic education—is never more obviously unlikely than in the latter half of Book VII. The ascent of the soul from mathematics to dialectic in Callipolis, the beautiful city, leads to the profoundly undogmatic, and therefore unpolitical, thought that the looks of ultimate things cannot be properly insisted upon, although their existence can be insisted upon. The anger is that young souls trained in dialectic act like puppies; they chew on the carpet. The young should not learn to despise the laws too quickly, if ever; they will become lawless without becoming philosophic—which, in political terms, means that they will not become prudent. Prudence is the one virtue of the soul that is fully natural, not produced by habits and exercise (518e). (In terms of the Protagoras, prudence is the true virtue, as it is a form of knowledge but it cannot be taught, is not technical.) Ultimately, these observations make Socrates conclude that the founding of the beautiful city will require the exile of all except philosophers and children ten years of age and younger. Socrates has founded not a city but a school. This leaves city-founding in any ordinary sense far behind, and is another specimen of Socratic irony.

7. Why Socrates Is Not a Nice Guy

“Irony I can get from my children. From my deli man, I expect wisdom.” So said the lady in the radio commercial for a New York City deli, whose owner was portrayed Socratically, that is, as ironic and wise. Ironic children are unhousebroken puppies. Ironic wise men are irritating, not-nice. They may display the most tasty delicacies, courtesans and cakes for the soul. But those goods are always just out of reach for most would-be customers. Irony itself is a sort of lie or untruth, perpetrated by one who thinks he knows the truth better than his interlocutor. Surely our lives would be less troublesome if we simply killed the wise? So thought, and did, the Athenians. The founders of the commercial republic hoped to make the world safe for the wise by claiming that the wise are useful, insisting that they be. This is the noble lie of the Enlightenment. Those who doubt it are not nice.

 

In the first four books of the Republic, Plato uses the word ‘truth’ on its derivatives in fifteen passages. He uses the word ‘lie’ in thirteen passages, most famously when discussing the “noble lie.” Lies are mentioned more frequently in the first half of the Republic than in the second half; truths are mentioned less frequently in the first than in the second half.

 

The Fifteen ‘Truths’
1. (330E). Cephalus is the first man to mention the true. Old age, he says, brings out the fear that myths of punishment of the unjust in Hades might be true. Cephalus is a caricature of the man of the four cardinal Socratic virtues: He treats old age as a substitute for moderation, piety as a substitute for courage, fatherhood as a substitute for wisdom, money as a substitute for justice (if wealthy, one need not cheat or lie, but perhaps one can bribe the gods). Cephalus is a man impossible to respect who must be respected according to his age and position. Self-deceived, ‘living a lie,’ he half-coerces, half-tempts others to lie to and about him. To speak freely, and perhaps truly, the unwealthy Socrates him to go away.

2. (331c-d). Socrates is the next to mention the true. He asks Cephalus if justice is simply truth-telling and giving back what one takes. His answer to this question is no; it is permissible to withhold both truth and property from a madman. Truth-telling is not necessarily just.

3. (335a). Cephalus’ son, Polemarchus, is the third man to mention the true. Polemarchus (his name means ‘war-ruler’) claims that justice means paying one’s debts, helping friends, and harming enemies. He has the impulses of Carl Schmitt with the mentality of the accountant. Socrates compels him to admit that one must distinguish real friends and enemies from seeming-friends and seeming-enemies. The good, therefore, is not necessarily ‘one’s own.’ Is the true?

4. (3357c). Here Socrates speaks with the “wild beast,” Thrasymachus, who decries Socratic indirection and irony. Socrates exhibits that irony by calling Thrasymachus wise. “Shall I say something other than the truth, you surprising man?” Socrates asks, feigning innocence, on his way to trapping the beast into asserting his own definition of justice without extracting one from Socrates. (This he must do, having scorned Socrates’ holding-back.) Justice is the advantage of the stronger, Thrasymachus says. He openly disdains the self-serving pieties and Cephalus and son, as well as Socrates’ polite evasions. He wants to be seen as a realist, a teller of unpleasant truths, a real man who truly speaks of what truly is.

5. (349a). Thrasymachus sarcastically says, “Your distinction is very true” (sarcasm being the irony of the thumotic man) in response to Socrates’ summary of Thrasymachus’ opinion: injustice is the way of the virtuous and wise, a thing “fair and mighty.” Socrates questions whether Thrasymachus really is” speaking the truth in so asserting, or only joking. For it is virtuous and wise to be knowledgeable, not ignorant, and the knowledgeable man will always have a certain advantage over the ignoramus, whether or not the ignoramus is politically stronger. Thrasymachus sweats and blushes. He is less interested in learning than in having a reputation for learning. In injuring Thrasymachus’ reputation, Socrates silences him, inflicts a mortal wound—if only in speech.

6. (365a-b). The next man to mention the true is Glaucon, “always most courageous in everything,” who wants to know if Socrates wants “truly to persuade us” of the superior goodness of justice. Superior goods are those desirable instrumentally and in themselves. Why not merely seem to be just? Is not injustice what is naturally good? If one had the ring of the tyrant Gyges, with its power of making the wearer invisible, why not satisfy all one’s erotic and thumotic longings with no regard to dull inhibition? An entirely ‘invisible man’ would be a god, known only through his voice and works. Why should a god be just? Glaucon radicalizes, gets to the root, of Thrasymachus’ challenge. Glaucon is a potential tyrant and perhaps a potential philosopher. Which way he will go may depend upon Socrates’ ability truly to persuade him. Of course, truly to persuade someone may or may not be to persuade him of the truth.

7. (362a). Further, Glaucon says, let there be two such rings, and two such men—one just, the other unjust. Make the just man be reputed to be unjust, and make the unjust man seem just. Who is happier? Surely the unjust man, who despises decent conventions and gets what he really wants, “pursues a thing dependent on truth and does not live in the light of opinion.” Surely the unjust man finds happiness, while the pilloried man of justice finds only misery. (Or could there be some ring of Gyges that makes the just man invisible to his enemies? Some true lie to tell them, and preserve himself?)

8. (365c). The next man to mention the true is brother Adeimantus, seconding Glaucon’s opinion in his own characteristically more measured way. Isn’t the just life simply too much trouble? Lighten up; take it easy; gimme a break. Seeming is stronger than the truth, according to the respected poet, Simonides; so draw a shadow painting of virtue around your clever, manipulative soul, and lay hold of the main chance. After all, the very gods can be corrupted with a show of humility and a few token offerings. If Glaucon loves victory, Adeimantus loves honor; if Glaucon is a lion, Adeimantus is a fox.

9. (372e). This dual assault on justice causes Socrates to raise the stakes. Let us try to find justice not in the individual soul but in a city to be founded in speech, by us. This proposal (not incidentally appealing both to Glaucon’s libido dominandi and to Adeimantus’ love of honor), takes the dialogue beyond the souls of petty chiselers and even big tyrants, and to the highest (or is it the lowest?) level: the soul of the founder of the city. Is the founder a divine legislator or a supreme tyrant? In so proceeding, Socrates finds Adeimantus easily satisfied with a modest, austere city, a sort of Minnesota-of-the-mind. Glaucon is more ambitious and more erotic. What, no relishes? No “courtesans and cakes”? But “the true city,” Socrates protests, is the healthy, moderate one. He does not protest too much, quickly turning to “the feverish city” of Glaucon’s imagination. Neither tyrant nor philosopher can rest content in the true city, the small town that satisfies the basic animal necessities and nothing more.

10. (376e). More desires, more wealth: The City now needs guardians, warriors, men not of appetitive eros but of spirit, men who will defend the city without sharing its desires, men who love their own and hate outsiders. This (Socrates playfully suggests) is the philosophic way: to be friendly to the known—a lover of wisdom, a philo-sopher—and unfriendly to the unknown. (It is more likely that the philosopher will be unfriendly not to the unknown but to the incorrigibly unwise, but Glaucon, unwise if not incorrigibly so, doesn’t notice that.)

Turning to Adeimantus, the more patient brother, Socrates tells him that the discussion of the education of these potentially dangerous guardians will take a long time. Part of “music” education is education in speech. Speeches “have a double form, the one true, the other false”; saying it doesn’t make it so. This double form of speech recalls the (possibly) “true myths” Cephalus feared. Will the guardians believe that punishment in Hades awaits bad men?

11. (377a). The tales we tell children are double. As a whole they are false, but with “true things in them.” Such tales must precede action, gymnastic, in the smallest children, inasmuch as “the beginning is the most important part of every work,” especially work with the tender and “plastic” young, on whom impressions are easily ‘imprinted.’ The myth-makers or poets must be compelled to tell stories that will incline the young soul to justice. (Suddenly, when speaking of children who are future guardians, Socrates’ skeptical interlocutor is no longer so ignorant of what justice is, or why injustice might be undesirable.)

12. (382a-b). The most shocking truths poets now tell concern the gods. Gods as liars, thieves, adulterers, gods as changelings and deceivers: You can’t trust such gods; they only weaken the guardians’ needed courage. “Don’t you know,” Adeimantus, “that all gods and human beings hate the true lie, if that expression can be used?” The true lie is the lie of the soul, a falsehood about “what is most sovereign” to oneself. The true lie is ignorance. A spoken lie is a sort of artifact or imitation of a falsity in the soul; inasmuch as no one, god or human, wants anything less than what is good for his own innermost being, the true lie is the true enemy of everyone.

13. (382d). As for spoken lies, they may be useful, “so as not to deserve hatred.” Real enemies and false friends deserve no better. As for poetic tales, they are lies when poets know what they often cannot know—”the truth about ancient things,” such as human origins—but they can be useful lies when they imitate the truth insofar as it is known. The gods need no lies, as they fear no human enemies and are not ignorant of an ancient things. Sober, respectable Adeimantus readily agrees that poetic tales should depict sober, respectable, trustworthy gods. At the same time, Socrates wants to appeal to the thumoeidetic Glaucon: the gods Socrates presents to the young, aristocratic brothers are ‘idealized’; that is, they partake of the stability and transparency of the eidos, a word first spoken in the dialogue by Glaucon, whose name means ‘gleaming.’ These gods do not hide behind clouds; bright as the stars, like good children, they are seen, not heard.

14. (389b-c). The guardians’ education for courage eschews poetic tales of Hades, frightening names, divine grief, divine laughter. The guardians’ education for moderation inculcates obedience, requires restraint with respect to diet, sex, and money. Central to this educational list is truth, which “must be taken seriously, too.” Private men must not handle a lie. A lie may be useful to human beings “as a form of remedy”; only “doctors” can be trusted to lie rightly. In politics, the doctors are the rulers; they may lie “for the benefit of the city.” The ruled must not lie about political things to the rulers, any more than a sick man should lie to his doctor about symptoms. Respectable Adeimantus concurs in this unequal distribution of latitude.

Inasmuch as the Platonic dialogues consist in large measure of conversations between a philosopher and a rogues’ gallery of quacks, creeps, and ignoramuses, not all of them private men, it would be silly to suppose that Socrates does not see the danger of his argument. The problem the argument raises is not so much the danger of spoken lies as the danger of ignorance—of not knowing what is beneficial to the city and the soul, of the true nature and therefore the true good of the city and the soul.

15. (413a-b). No one wants to lose the truly best by force or fraud. This goes for opinions as well as for objects and persons. “[T]he departure of the false opinion from the man who learns otherwise is willing, that of every true opinion is unwilling.” The guardians must be tested, to see if they guard, hold fast to, the true opinions with which they have been inculcated. Those who pass this testing shall rule the city.

 

The Noble Lie

An example of a true opinion is the noble lie. It’s a Phoenician thing: Theban, to be specific—the myth of autochthony, which will induce guardians to defend their city as, literally, native ground. To autochthony Socrates adds the myth of the metals, whereby the guardians are reconciled to a tripartite political structure whereby auxiliaries will serve the rulers, with whom they are allied in ruling farmers, artisans, and merchants. Autochthony makes the city seem more natural, more literally ‘grounded,’ than it is; the myth of the metals makes nature seem more politically stratified than it is. In this, Socrates shows how to make thumoeidetic Oedipus of Thebes useful instead of tragic. The noble lie is a lie because it exaggerates, ennobles, the truth. But it is a true lie, so to speak, in that it ensures that he who tends most to ignore the body—the heroic man, lover of victory and honor, the ‘ideologist’ who contradictorily loves and abstracts from his own but does not know himself—will moderate his ambitions without denaturing his spirit or intellect.

Self-knowledge is the theme of Book IV, where the word-cluster centered on truth never appears. This may be because the neat division of the soul into three harmonious parts will prove to be in need of correction and supplementation, in the Republic and elsewhere in the dialogues of Plato.

David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

 

A much-ridiculed Victorian lady hoped that Darwin’s theory of evolution was untrue, or, if true, that would not become generally known. As a matter of principle our contemporaries assume that what is true ought always to be made known, that generally-known truth is an unmitigated good, at least in the long run. this assumption has had many consequences, some trivial (you and I probably know more about the British royal family than is entirely healthy), some good (we also know more about health), some catastrophic. In the last category I count false opinions disseminated as if they were true, Marxist dialectic and Nazi race theory being two conspicuous examples. The Victorian lady had a point. She may not have understood science, but she knew something about civilized society.

In line with the Enlightenment project, we moderns have been taught to dismiss Aristotle’s physics as a teaching one or two steps beyond superstition. Can anyone today imagine that the moon is alive, or that the human species is eternal? Does anyone still suppose that the earth is the center of the universe, or that a moving body is trying to get to its ‘natural place’?

David Bolotin agrees that these Aristotelian teachings are now risible on their face. But he denies that Aristotle believed them any more than we do. To follow Bolotin’s argument is not only to overcome one’s superficial impression of Aristotelian science but to reflect upon the character of science—’ancient’ and ‘modern’—in its uneasy relations with the political orders. If ‘science’ means knowledge, more specifically the knowledge of nature, then science does not easily fit into the City of God or the City of Man. If science doesn’t easily ‘fit in,’ if it is vulnerable to misuse and abuse, it needs a defense, an apologia. The Enlightenment exaltation of science was intended to make science invulnerable to attack by giving it some of the authority of the old religious establishments. In view of the attempts at ‘deconstructing’ science in the academy today, and in view of the dangers of the abuse of science and the popularity of pseudoscience, a more cautious stance might be in order.

The defense science has received in the past three centuries has been in a sense far too effective. The rhetoric of Enlightenment tends toward religious fervor without religious consolation, the churchy sort of atheism on display in such unlovely personalities as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. When the quest for certitude pushes into scientific terrain—as it must, if science bears heavy public responsibility—the explorer takes on a pilgrim’s confidence about the destination. He is therefore quite likely to lose his way in a quest where the perplexities are the markers on the road map. Not only does excessive certitude infect science with unscientific dogmatism, it degrades the social and political forms within which any orderly inquiry must proceed.

Aristotle approaches both nature and political life more cautiously than his critics do. For example, when he addresses the problem of how things come into being, he avoids the extreme of poetic accounts on the one hand and of reductionism on the other. To endorse the poetic account in its extreme form—that beings come out of nothing—would be to call into question the existence of nature itself as an object of sustained inquiry. Why study something that is radically contingent upon the many and conflicting wills of the Hesiodian gods? But to attribute beings to an atomized or otherwise inchoate natural substrate would be no improvement; chaotic matter is no better subject of knowledge than warring gods. Aristotle accordingly teaches that form and substance cohere, generating individual beings. He does not believe he knows how this generation occurs. If modern physics (for example) leads physicists back to a ‘Big Bang.’ they tacitly admit that the earliest act of coming-into-being destroyed the conditions of its own occurrence. The remaining evidence of the character of those conditions may well be compromised, indeterminate to scientists.

In considering Zeno’s paradox—if any distance consists of infinitely divisible parts, how can any object traverse that distance?—Aristotle similarly demarcates a space for natural science between religion and mathematics, those twin spheres of certitude. The certitude of religiosity depends on revelation of divine thoughts and actions, which unassisted human reason cannot fathom; the certitude of mathematics depends on abstraction, which unassisted human reason fathoms readily but which the stuff of nature does not resemble. (Thus statistics, the set of modern mathematical techniques designed to describe empirical reality, is probabilistic not apodictic.) Aristotle insists on the foundation of natural science in the perception of individual beings. Neither the infinity of religion nor the infinities of geometric abstractions can account fully for natural objects ‘on their own terms’—as one natural being, man, looks at another. Zeno’s paradox conflates mathematics and science. So, in its own way, does modern political science, starting with Hobbes. A natural scientist need to live with an ‘infinity’ which is really synonymous with indeterminacy. Political men cannot be so relaxed, and so had better not be, or pretend to be, so scientific.

With acute attention to textual detail—the empeiria of reading—Bolotin shows how Aristotle navigates what might be called a ‘second sailing’ for natural science. Unlike the first sailing, the inquiries of previous natural philosophers, this one can avoid the Scylla of political ire and the Charbydis of apolitical folly. Aristotle himself did not entirely avoid Scylla; he had to leave Athens at the right moment in order to avoid reliving the fate of Socrates. But his writings eventually became eminently respectable, in tandem with the biblical religions as understood by thinkers who knew how to think on two tracks. In Bolotin’s words, Aristotle “regarded the task of natural science to be articulation of the manifest character—understood as the true being—of the given world, a world whose ultimate roots he did not think that this science could ever discover.” Thoughtful religious people and prudent scientists alike should be able to live with that formulation, and for centuries many of them did. The symbiosis of religion and natural science may be fruitful; much that is important in modern science and mathematics has resulted in the study of change, a study that a Bible-centered civilization is more likely to care about than was ancient Greece or Rome. But the synthesis of religion and natural science has issued in impressive displays of evil and folly. Bolotin’s Aristotle help to keep the categories straight.