Discussing "Statesman" By Plato

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "Statesman," which is one of the dialogues of Plato, who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The cover art for this episode is Plato as depicted in a portion of the oil painting The Death of Socrates, which French painter Jacques-Louis David completed in 1787.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Context
• 1:12 Discipline In Truth-Seeking
• 3:36 Spider Philosophers
• 7:29 Kings, Tyrants, And The Inaccessibility Of Expertise To Crowds
• 12:13 The Vulnerability Of Democracy To Plutocracy
• 14:40 The Ruler As Governed By Laws And Customs
• 16:08 A Brief Detour Into Herodotus And Hobbes
• 17:21 Dividing Plutocracy Into Aristocracy And Oligarchy
• 18:58 The Tyrant As Sophist
• 21:31 Cities Sinking Like Ships Through Depravity
• 22:47 Propaganda And Branches Of Knowledge That Are Components Of Statesmanship
• 24:50 The Statesman As Weaving The Fabric Of Society Together From The Threads Of Conflicting Virtues
• 31:05 A Closing Thought On Virtue, Vice, And Politics

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. This week we are going to be looking at another dialogue of Plato this one called Statesman and it's connected to the one that we looked at last week called sophist in that here The primary speaker is again not Socrates, but this unnamed visitor from Elea We talked a little bit last week about the Iliadic school about Parmenides Zeno and Melissus of Samos if you're interested and you haven't already you can go and check that out But this is continuing the conversation about the sameness or difference between the sophist Statesman and the philosopher. What are these three things? Are they the same thing? Are they different and this dialogue is mostly about defining what the statesman is and in a general sense They decide pretty early on that the statesman is the possessor of the expert knowledge of how to rule Justly and well, so that's getting us toward what we're talking about But that's still not a very good definition because it doesn't say very much about what he does or how he does it But it starts to point us in the direction that we end up going in and as in the sophist the visitor again Uses his method of division that we talked about last week to get at what the statesman or the king is doing pretty early On the visitor says quote such a method of argument as ours is not more concerned with what is more dignified Than with what is not and neither does it at all despise the smaller more than the greater but always reaches the truest conclusion by itself end quote and whether he was talking about the method of division specifically or About their mode of arguing Generally, this is an interesting and important thought that we're not concerned with what's more and less Dignified nor with what's larger or smaller It's only interested in getting at the truth and this made me think of Maybe my favorite line in all of the Joseph Conrad that I've read in the secret sharer. He says exactitude in some small matters is the very soul of discipline and if you're considering something from the social level from the level of Inter-human relations you can have your perspective skewed by what is as the visitor mentions dignified For example, does the question at hand have some immediately obvious? application to an important subject in a grand sense it's obvious how this connects to say logic or cosmogony or the origin and proliferation of life or at the social level It's very easy if you are a social media user to have a totally disproportionate perspective of the importance of a given person or a given incident because that is what the crowd is talking about today and so that topic then takes on a kind of Bigness or if you can rhapsodize about it in a persuasive way, then that looks very dignified in a very narrow sense I wouldn't say that that is dignified But it can kind of look that way if the emotions and attention of many people are already focused on that subject But here the visitor is saying that our method of argumentation is not Concerned more with the dignified than with the undignified With the large than with the small and it doesn't say this next part But we can extrapolate that the implication is that it doesn't matter how the object looks at that social level Physicists will tell you this we have a bias toward our human perspective Because that's the level that we live most of our life in but there are things that are much much bigger and much much smaller that are also equally important even if you were gonna stay anchored to the human perspective because they Impact what's going on at that human level? But if you're talking about trying to access some truth the human perspective doesn't matter any more than the spider perspective does It's just a perspective But what suddenly seems very important to the spider a fly caught in a net is not therefore important in any ultimate sense And so if spider philosophers spent a lot of time thinking very carefully about flies caught in nets or more importantly if they were more Skeptical and diligent and Disciplined and thorough in their investigations of flies caught in nets than they were in other things that don't Immediately capture the emotions of the spider crowd the way that the fly caught in the net does Then we would say that the spider philosophers had not gone very far in Detaching themselves from their own provincial view of the universe and accessing something more general So I think that's part of what the visitor or Plato was getting at there which is that some questions have an immediate emotional pull or obvious consequences for human life or active debates or Relevance to the current state of the public discourse and that matters too it's not that those questions don't matter if you can bring any modicum of order to the Mad circus of the public discourse then that's obviously a good thing, butJust because the answer to a question one way or the other does not have immediate or obvious consequences does not mean that we shouldn't treat it with the same level of care and attention that we would something that is the topic of the day in the discourse. And that's why this made me think of that line of Joseph Conrad, "'Exactitude in some small matters is the very soul of discipline.'" Because being disciplined in some areas of your life and not in others is certainly better than not being disciplined anywhere at all. But true discipline may be a reflection of a love for precision or a love for order for its own sake. And it doesn't matter if anyone is going to see it or not. If somebody is disciplined in their work, that's useful and helpful, and it means that they can get things done more efficiently and find necessary information or tools when they need to. But that same person could also be a little bit loose, for example, in keeping their laundry folded on their shelves or in their drawers. They fold their laundry initially, but maybe over the course of the week, by reaching for a shirt that's underneath the other ones, you make the ones on top a little bit disordered. And by the end of the week, it doesn't look as orderly as it did when you first folded everything. And this is something that nobody but you or maybe your wife will ever notice, but true discipline would mean maintaining order under those circumstances also. Maybe it doesn't even affect anything, but you're going to keep it in order. If for no other reason, then your tolerance of the disorder actually affects you. If you look at the shirts that are a little bit out of order on the shelf, not all messed up, but they're just not as tidy as they were when you started, and you say, that's fine and move on, then you've told your mind a certain level of disorder is acceptable. And all of this is not really about keeping your laundry in order. It becomes much more significant when we come back to tolerating disorder in your thoughts. If you are less rigorous about a question that has no obvious application or consequences, not only is that myopic, like the spider philosophers we were talking about, but it will also make you a little bit less able to deal with the consequential questions when they come along. So that's why, to read it one more time, the visitor says that, quote, that such a method of argument as ours is not more concerned with what is more dignified than with what is not, and neither does it at all despise the smaller more than the greater, but always reaches the truest conclusion by itself, end quote. And as they're trying to get at what the king or the statesman does, one of the things they identify is that the king cares for the whole human community, together, not for individuals like a doctor does. Because they start by saying, well, the king is somebody who cares for people, and then the visitor says, well, couldn't the doctor come in and say, no, I care for people, or I do that also. And so what the doctor does for the individual, the king does for the whole community. And there's a mention here of the difference between the tyrant and the king as being enforced rule or voluntary rule. The king rules by the consent of the governed, not that that's necessarily true in every historical case since Plato's time, but that's how they're using this term, whereas the tyrant rules without the consent of the governed. His rule is enforced. And that's an idea that appears in Aristotle also, but here is an earlier instance of it. And later, he gets into this thought experiment that echoes or maybe gives some reasoning behind some of his thoughts in the Republic, and statesman was written after Republic. So maybe he was filling in some gaps here, or maybe he's repeating an idea that's in the Republic also. It's been a long time since I read that, so I can't remember if this specific idea is in there. But he gets into this thought experiment. He says, what if people realize that doctors and steersmen, the guys who steer a ship, were sometimes corrupt, either they made deliberately bad decisions or accidentally bad decisions, and so then the people decide to democratically determine rules about these fields of expertise, about medicine and about navigation or steering a ship. And they go through a whole process of determining the rules for these fields, and then afterwards, they also institute rules against investigating the rules or imagining that they could be different than they are. And then he says, imagine that this applies not only to doctors and steersmen, to medicine and navigation, but to hunting, generalship, painting, carpentry, toolmaking, farming, herding, horse rearing, and math, that the way we are going to determine the rules of these fields is by democratic process. And they decide that that would be the end of expertise. Expertise would be destroyed, and it could never be restored because of the prohibitions on investigating or changing the rules, and life would become unlivable. Well, and then they say, what if a ruler contradicted those rules, those laws? That would be even worse. So that's why the laws have to be followed. And we're going to get into some more of what he says about that topic.but we can pause there for a second, because this is a very interesting and foundational paradox in governance. This process that we use for refining government, which, as you can see, did not begin in 1776 in North America, it's at least as old as ancient Greece, and it's probably much older than that. But this process of deciding collectively what the rules that affect all the people are going to be is at once absurd, when you think about it in the terms that he's talking about, that what if you determined math that way based on a majority vote or any other field, and so therefore, why would you determine something of huge consequence to absolutely everybody that way, like the public laws? And at the same time, there isn't another obvious solution, because if you have a guy ignoring all the laws and ruling according to his whims, that is likely to be worse, which is why laws came to be in the first place. The human experience of having the leader be unchecked or uncontrolled in his power is not necessarily terrible in every case. There have been many monarchs throughout history whose reign was better by many different metrics than many leaders who were democratically elected. Being elected doesn't guarantee that you will be a good governor any more than inheriting a throne will guarantee that you'll be a bad one. But with monarchy, and we use monarchy to refer to hereditary monarchy, but the word monarch, one ruler, doesn't necessarily have to be hereditary. We're just talking about a situation in which one guy is responsible for everything. He has total authority, and what comes with that is the total responsibility. The buck stops with him. There's no blaming another party. There's no saying, oh, they wouldn't let us do it. He is responsible. Even if you're a critic of representative democracy and you're open to the idea of a monarchy and you cite these examples in history of this monarch and that monarch being very good for their people, you still have the problem of that system eventually falling into the hands of a person who is not a good monarch, and they just use it selfishly or foolishly. And it seems that it would only be a matter of time, that even if you had five or 10 good kings in a row, you're eventually gonna get one who's not good. And if he has full authority, then there's no way to stop him from doing what he's doing. Though the counterargument there is that it's not as if elected leaders are flawless either, and you can have a bad leader get into office, and he can mess up the country in various ways. And it does seem that democracy is vulnerable to plutocracy in a way that monarchy is not. It's harder for an outside group to get control of a monarch than it is for them to get control of an elected leader and to remain entrenched in their power even as the elected leaders come and go. And so then you have to wonder whether the almost religious discourse surrounding democracy is less a reverence for democracy than it is for plutocracy. That the reason why questioning democracy or critiquing democracy as a system is not so much about that critique being a threat to the popular will, so much as it is a threat to that plutocratic class that hides behind this veneer of democracy. And their power is strategically protected by the perceived sanctity of that democracy. That the loss of that perception would be a strategic loss for them. It would be a major loss. And so it must be protected with all of this rhetoric. But getting back to this contradiction about trying to establish good governance, he emphasizes it with the line, quote, no large collection of people is capable of acquiring any sort of expertise, whatever, end quote. And that's the basic problem that we're talking about is that crowds of people cannot get expertise in any field. The individual members of the crowd can. This is not to say that the masses are dumb at the individual level. The individuals in the crowd can have all kinds of expertise, but the crowd as a separate super organism is incapable of acquiring expertise, Plato says. And he says this applies to the collective of the rich as well. That if there is such a thing as kingly expertise or expertise in statesmanship, neither the rich nor the masses can get it as a group because that's not in the capacity of a group. And so then the visitor says, quote, the requirement then, as it seems, for all constitutions of this sort, if they are going to produce a good imitation of that true constitution of one man ruling with expertise so far as they can, is that given that they have their laws, they must never do anything contrary to what is written or to ancestral customs, end quote. And there's a version of political history that's sometimes given, which is that the emergence or maybe the reemergence of democracy in Europe timed approximately with the enlightenment and the political movements that came amid and after it is the first time in history that a monarch or ruler was himself governed by.laws. And that's simply not true. I guess we would have to look at the different governments of the dark ages and the middle ages. It's possible that this was lost and that a lot of those Kings basically ruled with total authority without concern for custom. But I would bet that that's a cartoonish depiction of what was actually going on in most cases. Because here, Plato is saying that the ruler ought to follow the laws of the country that is ruling in the ancestral customs that have evolved over time. And this will get him closest to the ideal of ruling with some kind of expertise in statesmanship. This is the best option we have. And the follow-up task here would be to look at Cleisthenes and different constitutions in ancient Greece, and probably you will find rules for the governor as well as for the people. But this idea is being presented here not as hugely revolutionary in a tone asserting very aggressively that the King should have rules as well. He's just saying that it's better if the King or the ruler or the statesman follows the rules of the country that he's governing, which suggests that at that time, some rulers did this, some didn't. And that's one of the big messages that I got from reading Herodotus, and maybe we'll discuss him someday, is that even at the time that he was writing also in the 5th century BC, even up to that time, history was a story of the churning of government, democracies becoming tyrannies, tyrannies becoming aristocracies, aristocracies becoming democracies, that these things continually change as a result of invisible patterns that we have yet to articulate. And that reminds me of a line from Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes that I had to look up, but I have it here now and is relevant to this discussion in Statesman. Generally, Hobbes writes, quote, the skill of making and maintaining commonwealths consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry, not as tennis play, on practice only, which rules neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure have hitherto had the curiosity or the method to find out, end quote. So Hobbes says that governance must have rules like geometry, not only skill that comes from practice like playing tennis, but we haven't been able to figure out what the rules are yet. But anyway, let's get back to Plato. And remember, we were just talking about how the closest option that we have to ruling with this kind of expertise is for the ruler to follow the laws and ancestral customs that he inherits. And then Plato says, quote, when the rich rule by those customs, that is aristocracy. And when they do not, that is oligarchy, end quote. So I don't think he used the word plutocracy anywhere in this dialogue. But if we were to consider plutocracy government by the rich, then it seems that there he divides that into good plutocracy, which he would call aristocracy, that is the wealthy governing according to those laws and ancestral customs, and oligarchy, which is the wealthy governing indifferent to those laws and customs. And while we're on the topic, he mentions in passing the five constitutions, and he doesn't enumerate them here, but for Plato, it's generally accepted that the five constitutions of government are aristocracy, oligarchy, which we've talked about, tyranny and democracy, which we've talked about a little bit, and then timocracy, which is a word that's not used nearly as much as the others, but it's government by those who own a certain amount of property. And at the time of the American revolution, voting rights were largely determined by the states. And so the original 13 colonies all had their own requirements for voting, and you can look them up online. They varied a little, but a lot of them required, for example, that a voter have 50 acres of land for them to be able to vote. That was true, for example, for Delaware, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Virginia. I found a source on this from the University of Wisconsin, but you can do your own research if you're curious. And later, the visitor gives us a longer definition of the tyrant that is worth reading. He says, And what of the case when some one ruler acts neither according to laws nor according to customs, but pretends to act like the person with expert knowledge, saying that after all, one must do what is contrary to what has been written down if it is best, and there is some desire or other, combined with ignorance, controlling this imitation? Surely, in those circumstances, we must call every such person a tyrant. Then it is in this way that the tyrant has come about, we say, and the king, and oligarchy, and aristocracy, and democracy, because people found themselves unable to put up with the idea of that single individual of ours as monarch, and refused to believe that there would ever come to be anyone who deserved to rule in such a way, so as to be willing and able to rule with virtue and expert knowledge, distributing what is just and right correctly to all. They think that a person in such a position always mutilates, kills, and generallymaltreats whichever of us he wishes, although if there were to come to be someone of the sort we are describing, he would be prized and would govern a constitution that would alone be correct in the strict sense, steering it through in happiness." And I think one of the key points there is that he uses the word imitation. There is some desire or other combined with ignorance controlling this imitation. And last week when we were talking about the sophist, the same visitor was saying that the sophist is somebody who creates the imitation of truth. The way that an artist can create an imitation of an animal or something else so that from far off it looks like the real thing, a sophist is someone who can create an imitation of truth so that in the same way, if you don't examine it too closely, it can appear to be truth. And here him using this word imitation suggests that he's saying that a tyrant is a kind of sophist. A monarch who gives some reason why they do not need to follow the laws and the customs. And again, having a separate term for this kind of monarch, if there is a term for a monarch who does not follow these laws and customs, then that must mean that the ancient Greeks had plenty of monarchs who did follow them or it suggests that because otherwise, why would you need this separate word for that? And in the second part of that passage, he says that that's probably what the origin of this need for rules and laws is, is that people were always afraid of or fed up with the experience of having a monarch who treats people badly and kills people at whim and is not under any control. And this next passage is a little bit haunting because he's talking about cities sinking like ships through depravity, the depravity of their rulers and the people immediately under them who think they have a knowledge of governance, but really don't. They think they have this expertise in statesmanship and kingship. And Plato says that even up to the time that he's writing in, in the fourth century BC, there have already been numberless examples of this. And while he has no knowledge of the 24 centuries of history that we have seen since his time, he does anticipate it here. Plato writes, quote, or should we rather wonder at something else, namely at how strong a thing a city is by its nature. For in fact, cities have suffered such things now for time without limit, but nevertheless, some particular ones among them are enduring and are not overturned. Yet many from time to time sink like ships and perish and have perished and will perish in the future through the depravity of their steersmen and sailors who have acquired the greatest ignorance about the greatest things. Although they have no understanding at all about what belongs to the art of statesmanship, they think they have completely acquired this sort of expert knowledge most clearly of them all. And listing branches of knowledge that are precious or related to statesmanship, Plato lists generalship, the art of the judge, and that part of rhetoric, which in partnership with kingship persuades people of what is just and so helps in steering through the business of cities. And he mentions here something that I think we could call propaganda. And I use that term neutrally just as a way of promoting a particular message or belief or idea, not necessarily for malicious purposes. You could use it that way right now, I'm not using it that way. The visitor asks, quote, to which sort of expert knowledge shall we assign what is capable of persuading mass and crowd through the telling of stories and not through teaching? And the other person says, this too is clear, I think it must be given to rhetoric. And the visitor says, and the matter of whether to do through persuasion, whatever it may be in relation to some people or other, or else by the use of some sort of force or indeed to do nothing at all, to what sort of expert knowledge shall we attach this? This would be none other, I think, than the capacity of the statesman, end quote. So he talks about persuading the mass and the crowd through storytelling as part of rhetoric. And in a more modern parlance, we might talk about narrative, but storytelling can happen in a 30 second commercial. You're framing something in a certain way. And if you're trying to persuade the masses, you set up the story such that they are in one position, the object about which you want them to act in a certain way is in another. And you tell the story such that they'll take the action that you want them to take. And that can also be done with a movie or a TV show or a book, or indeed through a political narrative. It doesn't have to be fiction. A politician can, in a series of speeches, do this kind of storytelling. But I think it would be safe to call that propaganda. And in the second part of that same passage, he's talking about how deciding whether to do something either by persuasion or by force, and also deciding whether to do anything at all is some action needed. If so, what is the action that's needed? This kind of judgment is part of what falls under the expertise of statesmanship. And later, he gets into a long chain of reasoning that starts from a question about whether the virtues ever contradict each other. And he says, we sometimes praise.strength and vigor, and we sometimes praise calmness and moderation. And he gives the example of praising pieces of art, of poetry or another kind of art, and people can praise poetry for its vigor or for its tranquility. And these are opposing things, but they are both praiseworthy. And he says we can also criticize both of these things when they occur in the wrong context. If something is vigorous at the wrong time, it just looks chaotic or manic. And if it's gentle at the wrong time, it might look weak. And he says that different people might naturally lead toward one of these two virtues or the other. And the result is that there are at least two large groups. One of them is maybe a bit more vigorous and strong, and the other one is a bit more calm and moderate. And talking about these groups, he says, quote, we shall see that those who possess them in their souls are at odds with each other if we go looking for them, both in all the spheres we mentioned just now, and no doubt in many others. For I think because of their affinity to either set of qualities, they praise some things as belonging to their own kin, and censure those of their opponents as alien, engaging in a great deal of hostility towards each other about a great many things. This disagreement of these classes of people is a sort of play, but in relation to the most important things, it turns out to be a disease which is the most hateful of all for cities. And the other person asks, in relation to what do you mean? And he goes on, in relation to the organization of life as a whole. For those who are especially orderly are always ready to live the quiet life, carrying on their private business on their own by themselves. They both associate with everyone in their own city on this basis, and similarly with cities outside their own, being ready to preserve peace of some sort in any way they can. As a result of this passion of theirs, which is less timely than it should be, when they do what they want, nobody notices that they are being unwarlike and making the young men the same, and that they are perpetually at the mercy of those who attack them. The consequence is that within a few years, they themselves, their children, and the whole city together often become slaves instead of free men before they have noticed it. But what about those who incline more towards courage? Isn't it the case that they are always drawing their cities into some war or other because of their desire for a life of this sort, which is more vigorous than it should be, and that they make enemies of people who are both numerous and powerful, and so either completely destroy their own fatherlands, or else make them slaves and subjects of their enemies." So he says there are these two types of people, and both of them, if they are allowed to live exactly how they would want to live, will bring on the destruction of the city that they're living in. Either the one by being too weak and passive and bringing on attack and enslavement that way, or the other by being too aggressive and picking fights with powerful enemies against whom they can't win, which then brings on the enslavement of their city by another route. And then given this problem, he then brings in the statesman and talks about how his role is to weave these two types together. But that happens after a sifting out of people who are neither courageous nor calm, either by exile or execution. And he doesn't specify, but I think that he means in the gradual process of justice, that the bad people in the society are put to death or exiled as they commit various crimes, and that the people who are left over, these either courageous or calm types, can then be woven together into a strong fabric. And at one point he compares it to music. He says, quote, It belongs to the statesman and the good legislator alone to be capable of bringing this very thing about by means of the music that belongs to the art of kingship, end quote. And he says that this kind of bonding or weaving of vicious men to other vicious men, using the word vicious again to refer to the opposite of virtuous, to be related to vice, that if you try to weave vicious men together in this way, or you try to weave virtuous men to vicious men, that won't result in anything lasting. But if the statesman is trying to get these two types of virtuous people together, then that will result in a strong society. And he says that this bonding of parts of virtue that are unlike each other, these different parts of virtue that even maybe contradict each other, he says that this is divine. And, quote, Everything in cities cannot go well either on the private or on the public level unless both of these groups are there to give their help, end quote. So you need both of these types. And he closes out by saying, quote, This marks the completion of the fabric which is the product of the art of statesmanship, the weaving together with regular intertwining of the dispositions of brave and moderate people. When the expertise belonging to the king brings their life together in agreement and friendship and makes it common between them, completing the most magnificent and best of all fabrics and covering with it all the other inhabitants of cities, both slave and free,free, and holds them together with this twining and rules, and directs without, so far as it belongs to a city to be happy, falling short of that in any respect," end quote. And that's pretty much the end of the dialogue. And so I think we can take that as his definition of what a statesman is doing, or what he should aim to do. And if you notice in that last passage, he's not saying that everybody in the city is necessarily part of that fabric. But you need that fabric to then cover the other inhabitants, sort of like a blanket. He doesn't say a blanket, but he says fabric, and he says covering. So the idea maybe is that that class of moderate and courageous people create some kind of stability or protection for the other people. So it's not necessarily that he imagines that the king will chase out or execute anybody who doesn't fall into one of these two categories, but maybe those who would otherwise be part of this class, maybe some of the more prominent people in public life, he might say that you might have to get rid of them in one way or another in order to make room for this fabric that the king or statesman is weaving out of the virtuous people in the society. And one of the things that I like about reading ancient Greeks, or even a lot of writing before the 20th century, but certainly the ancient Greeks, is that for them, vice and virtue were integral to politics. I think somewhere in the politics of Aristotle, he talks about how virtue and vice are more important to a city than wealth and poverty. But a lot of modern political discourse imagines vice and virtue as being separate, old-fashioned, alien notions, and politics is a business of subsidies and imports and exports and legal process, and these two things are completely alien from each other. But taking the history of European political thought, that view is the anomaly, not the norm. And another note I wanna add here is that it might be tempting to put Plato's scheme here of these two different types of virtues on top of competing political parties. And at least speaking for politics in the United States, I think the problem with doing that is that it would be pretty much impossible to decide that one of the two parties is more courageous and vigorous and the other is more calm and moderate. You might be able to find that they have those traits on particular issues, but not across the board. But we can leave it there for now. So farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.