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.
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