The True Leader – The Philosopher King
Socrates and Plato thought that philosophers were this kind of people and that the city could identify and train them. According to them philosophers were primarily different because they could apprehend the FORMS. That makes the definition of the Forms key to determining the caliber of people fit to be king. Both Socrates and Plato found it hard to out rightly define the Forms; I will try to desist from my own presumptuous definition of the Forms, and leave it to your imagination. But let's try and get as closest as we can to what either Plato or Socrates thought the Forms might be.
Forms are eternal, unchanging, universal absolute ideas, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and the Equal. Though Forms cannot be seen—but only grasped with the mind—they are responsible for making the things we sense around us into the sorts of things they are. Anything red we see, for instance, is only red because it participates in the Form of the Red; anything square is only square because it participates in the Form of the Square; anything beautiful is only beautiful because it participates in the Form of Beauty, and so on.
Only philosophers can have knowledge of the Forms; to back up this claim Socrates paints a fascinating metaphysical and epistemological picture. He divides all of existence up into three classes: what is completely, what is in no way, and what both is and is not. What is completely, he tells us, is completely knowable; what is in no way is the object of ignorance; what both is and is not is the object of opinion or belief. The only things that are completely are the Forms; only the Form of the Beautiful is completely beautiful, only the Form of sweetness is completely sweet, and so on. Sensible particulars both are and are not. Even the sweetest apple is also mixed in with some sourness—or not sweetness. Even the most beautiful woman is plain—or not beautiful—when judged against certain standards. So we can only know about Forms, and not about sensible particulars. That is why only philosophers can have knowledge, because only they have access to the Forms.
That only "what is completely" is completely knowable is also a difficult idea to accept. Consider our beautiful woman. Remember that she is at the same time both beautiful and not beautiful and that her beauty must inevitably fade. So how can we know that she is beautiful, when she is not completely or permanently beautiful? To think therefore that she is beautiful then is erroneous and cannot amount to knowledge if it is partially false. But why can we not say that we know exactly in what way she is beautiful and in what ways not, that we know the whole picture? The reason that this does not work is that our beautiful woman is a changing entity, as are all sensible particulars. Since she herself is a changing entity, our grasp of her, if it is correct, has to change as well. Plato is adamant that knowledge does not change. Knowledge for Plato, as for Aristotle and many thinkers since, consists in eternal, unchanging, absolute truths, the kind that he would count as scientific; H is hydrogen, Na is sodium, H20 is water and this are true and unchangeable and thus knowledge can be obtained about them. Likewise we know about the forms of Gold and Silver and all elements in the periodic table and many of their known combinations. Like NaCl, the combination of sodium and Chloride to form salt. That's true knowledge; it's unchangeable.
Since knowledge is limited to eternal, unchanging, absolute truths, it cannot apply to the ever changing details of the sensible world. It can only apply to what is completely—to what is stable and eternally unchanging. By implication, it then implies that there can only be ONE truth about a particular thing. There's only 'One True beautiful' or "one True red' or 'one True Square' and so on, just like there is one true gold against which all other golds are judged as either 18 or 24 carat and so on. The Forms represent this 'one truth'. The ultimate Form, the aspiration of all knowledge, according to Plato and Socrates, is the 'Form of the Good'. It is from this 'Form of the Good' that all knowledge points, the harmony of all "Forms'. The Form of the Good is the Unifying Form, The Source Form, The Unity, The ONE, the absolute TRUTH. To understand this better, we will later review Plato's famous 'Allegory of the Cave'. I promised to desist from presumptions and present only Plato's and Socrates viewpoints on this, but it wouldn't hurt to throw in a spanner in the works would it?
"I am the truth, the way and the Life" John 14:6
The few who are good philosophers (those whose natures were somehow not corrupted, either because they were in exile, lived in a small city, were in bad health, or by some other circumstance) are considered useless because society has become antithetical to correct ideals. He compares the situation to a ship on which the ship owner is hard of hearing, has poor vision, and lacks sea-faring skills (analogous to modern day citizenry). All of the sailors on the ship quarrel over who should be captain (analogous to civil strife, party politics, competition for leadership), though they know nothing about navigation. In lieu of any skill, they make use of brute force (analogous to war) and clever tricks (such as campaigning in a democracy) to get the ship owner to choose them as captain. No one has any idea that there is real knowledge to be had, a craft to living. Instead, everyone tries to get ahead by clever, often unjust, tricks. Those few good philosophers who turn their sights toward the Forms and truly know things are deemed useless.
Whoever is successful (Through war or Democratic process) at persuading the ship owner to choose him is called a "navigator," a "captain," and "one who knows ships." Anyone else is called "useless." These sailors have no idea that there is a craft of navigation, or any knowledge to master in order to steer ships. In this scenario, Socrates points out, the true captain—the man who knows the craft of navigation—would be called a useless stargazer (True leaders sideline by democracy, totalitarianism or tyranny).
All that we need to make our city possible, Socrates concludes, is one such philosopher-king—one person with the right nature who is educated in the right way and comes to grasp the Forms. Now Socrates turns to the final stage in the construction of the just city: the question of how to produce philosopher-kings.
He had mentioned that the guardians-in-training are subjected to many tests so that rulers are chosen from among them. One point of the test was to see who was most loyal to the city. Now we see that another major point of these tests is to determine who among them can tolerate the most important subject. The most important subject for a philosopher-king, it turns out, is the study of the Form of the Good. It is in understanding the Form of the Good that someone gains the highest level knowledge and thus becomes fit to be a philosopher king. Socrates explains that the Form of the Good is not what is commonly held to be good. Some think that the highest good is pleasure, while the more sophisticated think that it is knowledge. It is neither of these, but Socrates cannot really say directly what it is. The best he can do is give an analogy—to say "what is the offspring of the good and most like it." This analogy is the first in a string of three famous and densely interrelated metaphors; The Sun, The Line, and The Cave.
Yet not until we hear the next analogy do we understand just how important this Form of the Good is to knowledge.
The analogy of the line is meant to illustrate the ways of accessing the world, the four grades of knowledge and opinion available to us. Imagine, says Socrates, a line broken into four segments. The bottom two segments represent our access to the visible realm, while the top two represent our access to the intelligible. The lowest grade of cognitive activity is imagination. A person in the state of imagination considers images and reflections the most real things in the world. The next stage on the line is belief. Belief also looks toward the realm of the visible, but it makes contact with real things. A person in the stage of belief thinks that sensible particulars are the most real things in the world. Further up the line, there are two grades of knowledge: thought, and understanding. Although thought deals in Forms, it uses sensible particulars as images to aid in its reasoning, as when geometers use a picture of a triangle to help them reason about triangularity. Thought also relies on hypotheses, or unproven assumptions. Understanding uses neither of these crutches. Understanding is a purely abstract science. The reasoning involved deals exclusively with Forms, working with an unhypothetical first principle, which is the Form of the Good.
To reach understanding, an individual using the crutches necessary to thought, works his way up with philosophical dialectic toward the Form of the Good. Once you reach the Form of the Good, you have hit on your first principle, a universal proposition which makes all unproven hypotheses unnecessary. You now understand the Form of the Good, and all the other Forms as well. In a flash, you have reached the highest stage of knowledge.
Plato claims to have no way to explain the Form of the Good directly, but there is good reason to believe that he had something in mind as the highest good. Many scholars have believed that the Good was supposed to be identical with the One. The One represents unity, and unity, in turn, is closely related to determinacy. The advantage of this reading is that it helps to explain the connection between intelligibility and reality. Undoubtedly, something is only a real, determinate thing because it is a unified thing, a One. If this characteristic really is the Good, then it makes sense that the Good is responsible for all of reality. Nothing could be real, could exist, without this characteristic.
In the metaphor of the line, the most difficult stage to understand is imagination. Plato indicates that art belongs to this category, many have understood imagination to refer to a state of mind in which products of art are viewed as the most real things. This state of mind is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Imagine a person who acquires his sense of self and of the world around him from images he sees on a soap opera or in a movie. (In Plato's time, the equivalent art forms would be epic poetry and tragic theater.)
Such a person is not that difficult to imagine. You might even know someone like this. Under imagination our perceptions of the world are completely uncritical. In this state, we do not attempt to relate one perception to another. We see a reflection, and do not differentiate this from the object it is reflecting. In belief we are able to correlate our perceptions, but fail to subject them to critical analysis or we look for explanations but only in particular terms, rather than universal terms.
Thought and understanding are easier to pin down because Plato is more explicit about them. Thought is abstract reasoning that makes use of images and unproven assumptions. In order to prove theorems, we need to appeal to certain axioms that are taken as true. Understanding makes the axioms and hypotheses of thought unnecessary by seizing on a single universal proposition on which the entire body of knowledge can be based
To explain this further Socrates presents the most beautiful and famous metaphor in Western philosophy: The Allegory of the Cave. This metaphor is meant to illustrate the effects of education on the human soul. Education moves the philosopher through the stages on the divided line, and ultimately brings him to the Form of the Good. I will give a summary of 'The Allegory of the Cave' but to read Plato's original text please click here. The 'Allegory of the Cave' is a theory put forward by Plato, concerning human perception. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning.
'The Allegory of the Cave' by Plato
The Cave: Imagine a cave, in which there are prisoners tied to some rocks, their arms and legs are bound and their head is tied so that they cannot look at anything but the stonewall in front of them. These prisoners have been here since birth and have never seen outside of the cave. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between them is a raised walkway. People outside the cave walk along this walkway carrying things on their head including statues of people, animals, plants, wood and stone.
The Shadows: So, imagine that you are one of the prisoners. You cannot look at anything behind or to the side of you – you must look at the wall in front of you. When people walk along the walkway, you can see shadows of the statues they are carrying cast on to the wall. Because you have never seen the real objects, you believe that the shadows are real.
The Game: Plato suggests that the prisoners would begin a 'game' of guessing which shadow would appear next. If one of the prisoners were to correctly guess, the others would praise him as clever and say that he were a master of nature.
The release: One of the prisoners is released from his bindings and dragged from the cave with a lot of resistance. He is shocked at the world he discovers outside the cave and does not believe it can be real. As he becomes used to his new surroundings, he realizes that his former view of reality was wrong. He begins to understand his new world, and sees that the Sun is the source of life and goes on an intellectual journey where he discovers beauty and meaning. He see's that his former life, and the guessing game they played was useless.
The Return: The prisoner returns to the cave, to inform the other prisoners of his findings. They do not believe him and threaten to kill him if he tries to set them free.
The cave represents people who believe that knowledge comes from what we see and hear in the world – empirical evidence. The cave shows that believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a 'cave' of misunderstanding. The Shadows represent the perceptions of those who believe empirical evidence ensures knowledge. If you believe that what you see should be taken as truth, then you are merely seeing a shadow of the truth. In Plato's opinion you are a 'pleb' if you believe this (their insult for those who are not Philosophers). The guessing game represents how people believe that one person can be a 'master' when they have knowledge of the empirical world. Plato is demonstrating that this master does not actually know any truth, and suggesting that it is ridiculous to admire someone like this. The escaped prisoner represents the Philosopher, who seeks knowledge outside of the cave and outside of the senses. The Sun represents the 'Form of the Good - philosophical truth and knowledge.
His intellectual journey represents a philosopher's journey when finding truth and wisdom. In the cave When they talk to one another about "men," "women," "trees," or "horses," they are referring to the shadows. These prisoners represent the lowest stage on the line—imagination. Seeing the statues that are responsible for the shadows represents belief. He has made contact with real things—the statues—but he is not aware that there are things of greater reality—a world beyond his cave. Next, this prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the world above. At first, he is so dazzled by the light up there that he can only look at shadows, then at reflections, then finally at the real objects—real trees, flowers, houses and so on. He sees that these are even more real than the statues were, and that those were only copies of these. He has now reached the cognitive stage of thought. He has caught his first glimpse of the most real things, the Forms.
When the prisoner's eyes have fully adjusted to the brightness, he lifts his sight toward the heavens and looks at the sun. He understands that the sun is the cause of everything he sees around him—the light, his capacity for sight, the existence of flowers, trees, and other objects. The sun represents the Form of the Good, and the former prisoner has reached the stage of understanding.
The goal of education is to drag every man as far out of the cave as possible. Education should not aim at putting knowledge into the soul, but at turning the soul toward right desires. Socrates explains that the vision of a clever, wicked man might be just as sharp as that of a philosopher. The problem lies in what he turns his sharp vision toward. The overarching goal of the city is to educate those with the right natures, so that they can turn their minds sharply toward the Form of the Good. Once they have done this, they cannot remain contemplating the Form of the Good forever. They must return periodically into the cave and rule there. They need periodically to turn away from the Forms to return to the shadows to help other prisoners.
Since the stages in the cave are stages of life, it seems fair to say that Plato thought that we must all proceed through the lower stages in order to reach the higher stages. Everyone begins at the cognitive level of imagination. We each begin our lives deep within the cave, with our head and legs bound, and education is the struggle to move as far out of the cave as possible. Not everyone can make it all the way out, which is why some people are producers, some warriors, and some philosopher-kings.
Given that the philosopher-kings have made it out of the cave, it might seem unfair that they are then forced back in. Remember that the goal is not to make any one person or group especially happy, but rather to make the city as a whole as happy as possible. Remember also that the philosopher-kings are only able to enjoy the freedom above ground that they do because they were enabled by the education the city afforded them – they were dragged out of the cave despite their reluctance. They were molded to be philosopher-kings so that they could return to the cave and rule. They owe the city this form of gratitude and service. Philosophers will actually want to rule—in a backhanded way—because they will know that the city would be less just if they refrained from rule. Since they love the Forms, they will want to imitate the Forms by producing order and harmony in the city. They would loathe to do anything that would subject the city to disorder and disharmony. Socrates ends by remarking that the reluctance of the philosopher to rule is one of his best qualifications for ruling. The only good ruler rules out of a sense of duty and obligation, rather than out of a desire for power and personal gain. The philosopher is the only type of person who could ever be in this position, because only he has subordinated lower drives toward honor and wealth to reason and the desire for truth.
The Making of a King
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