On Models in Plato's Republic
More than a decade ago, L.A. Paul send me a draft of a paper that was published (here) as “Metaphysics as modeling: the handmaiden’s tale,” Philosophical studies 160 (2012): 1-29. I am an admirer of the paper because, as my more loyal readers know, I am rather fond in my ‘meta-philosophy’ of applying philosophy of science and philosophy of economics moves to philosophy itself. Within philosophy of science (and PPE), there is not just a literature on scientific modeling, but many use modeling in their own philosophy. More recently, even Timothy Williamson embraced modeling in the second edition of his Williamson The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley) as apt for serious philosophy.
A few years after I read Paul’s essay, I moved to a political science department from philosophy. I quickly realized that I had to adjust my approach to teaching because my students were not being taught elementary logic and so a focus on the structure of arguments was wholly unfruitful. I started to present the works I taught in terms of different kinds of models with different commitments about human nature, property, gender relations, equality, etc. (Unsurprisingly, teaching Utopian/Dystopian literature also works rather nicely that way.)
When I re-stated my conception of synthetic philosophy last year at the Aristotelian Society (here) I was finally able to acknowledge in print L.A. Paul’s influence on my evolving meta-philosophical views. In that paper, building on my teaching practices, I treat “Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy’s relationship to the other sciences within the advanced division of labour.” I return to this below.
I am not alone in thinking of some of the moves in the Republic in terms of models. For example, David Wiens (UCSD) does so, too, in chapter 2 in his From The Best To The Rest: Idealistic Thinking in a Non-Ideal World (in press, Oxford University Press.) (This chapter also discusses Hobbes and Rawls.) The book should appear in a few months. I am not an unbiased reader of that book because the work is published in a PPE series I co-edit, and I am hosting an author-meets-critics workshop on it today in Amsterdam. And what follows is partially prompted by re-reading that chapter (and notes to the commentary on it).
So, if one ascribes modeling as a procedure to Plato, it’s quite natural, I think, to see the City of Pigs/healthy city (372CD) and the Kallipolis as related models. A fairly modest change in the fundamental parameters — the introduction of luxury goods — produces a very different kind of polity. The sensitivity to such changes is familiar to modelers. Let’s stipulate that the City of Pigs and the Kallipolis can be understood as models of ideal polities that guide normative thinking in political theory. The previous sentence is not Wiens’ position, although he suggests it is a natural temptation to think it. And he uses it to set up his own position (which I won’t discuss here today).
Of course, in the argument of the Republic the modeling exercise was introduced to make tractable the nature of justice in an individual (368E) on the assumption that there is a kind of morphism or mapping between man and polity and that the model will allow the qualities of justice to be easier visible than in the original. So, in virtue of its features (scale, external to the mind, etc.) the model is also a kind of heuristic device to do a kind of conceptual or descriptive analysis on the nature of justice in an individual.+ (If you think that analysis is normative in character, I won’t object.) Wiens would accept this.
When later, in book 5, there is some reflection on the exercise (472c), Paul Shorey conveys the Greek as follows, “We wished to fix our eyes upon them as types and models.” The underlying Greek has παραδείγματος [paradeigmatos], which has a range of associations (including, but not limited to, exemplar, pattern, but also model. This anticipates the slipperiness of Kuhn’s use of the term.) Since the perfectly just man is itself an exemplar, the slippage between exemplary man and model-polity is not wholly unintended.
Now, as is well known, later in Book 8 (making good on a hint in 449a), the Kallipolis, in which the wise rule, is treated as superior to four political forms, timocracy (in which a kind of militarism rules), oligarchy (the wealthy), democracy (the many), and lawless tyranny. And it is quite nature to think of these as comparison scenarios/models to the ideal model. This is rather important to Wiens’ argument. And he is right about it. But there are also other uses of these models, and this is not noted by Wiens.
For the account in Book 8 is also a kind of natural history of political corrosion, that is, corruption in the Machiavellian sense. Something like this is explicitly marked in the text when Socrates describes how one such polity gives rise to an inferior kind of polity (545C). In fact, the efficient cause of such change is a kind of civil war among the ruling elites (545D). But the underlying structural cause is an instability that is characteristic to all of the political forms (in the Kallipolis a failure in the eugenics program among the guardians; among the timmocrats the zero-sum nature of honor etc.)
Obviously, the very same models — and in fact the very same narrative in Book 8 — have a dual role as comparison scenarios to the ideal model and as episodes in the natural history of political corrosion. In the latter case the models enter into a kind of stadial history (of decline) that serves as much as a warning/prediction as an explanatory tool in analysis. There is a narrative of a cyclical rise and fall of civilizations inscribed in the Republic. (Interestingly enough, the absence of the healthy polity in this natural history suggests an important disanalogy between it, and the Kallipolis.) If you wish in these dual roles the five models anticipate something of Max Weber’s ideal typical analysis.
Now, obviously some people may think all of this is quite anachronistic. I plead guilty happily. But the more important charge is that in some respects the Republic’s verbal scenarios may be far removed from the kind of more specific entity contemporary social scientists may wish to call a ‘model.’ There is something to that charge, but for now I set it aside. (Wiens’ own larger argument has important things to say about this.)
But it strikes me there are at least three other important model polities depicted in the Republic (while leaving aside the important suggestion at 592b of a παράδειγμα in the heavens). First, the ship of state parable (488a–489d). This is pretty clearly supposed to be a model of democracy-in-action and its corruption/corrosion by the ambitious, wealthy. In fact, it calls attention to features of this corrosion that are left implicit in the Book 8 narrative of the stadial decline.
Second, the cave analogy. Now, if you are especially fond of epistemology and metaphysics, I don’t want to claim the main point of this scenario is exclusively political. But it is also political since it is introduced to help illustrate the nature of education of the guardians. In particular, among other things, it provides a model of (with a nod to Kitcher, we may call) disordered science. It is, in fact, very alert to the credit economy of what we may call correlational, predictive sciences (as distinct from a science that grasps underlying essences/causes):
And if there had been honors and commendations among them [the prisoners in the cave] which they bestowed on one another and prizes for the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences and co-existences, and so most successful in guessing at what was to come, do you think he would be very keen about such rewards, and that he would envy and emulate those who were honored by these prisoners and lorded it among them... [tr. Shorey, 516c-d)
And in this model there is alertness to the dangers that scientific innovators, or cranks, face in the light of an existing scientific consensus: “and if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him?” Obviously, I can’t stop you from seeing in all of this the fate of Socrates or (as is clear in Al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd) any would be prophet of new things to mankind.
What the ship of state and the cave analogy have in common — in addition to the thinly disguised warnings against the mortal dangers faced by those whose knowledge and expertise go unrecognized by non-experts confused about their lack of expertise — is that they call attention to the workings of particular or a very limited number of institutions and practices and help model their functioning. So, while it is too strong to call the function of these models ‘consciousness raising’—their function is, in part, to call attention to and magnify the role of some important social institutions whose operation and effects would otherwise be invisible operating behind our back in the way that much later Utopian literature would habitually develop.
Third, the Republic portrays Socrates as living in conversation with many others in Athens and Piraeus. And, in so far as Socrates is an exemplar — and I am happy to acknowledge (if you insist) this need not be the sage as the Stoics presented him, although the Stoic position is attractive —, he is an exemplar of how one lives in an imperfect political environment. And, in particular, as I emphasized in my Aristotelian society paper, he helps illustrate philosophy’s relationship to the other sciences within the advanced division of epistemic labour in an imperfect even corrupted polity that can be compared with his account of the same in the ideal Kallipolis. And while it is not natural to consider the Republic’s narrative as offering us an implied model of Athens, in some ways it is actually a lot more detailed than the other inferior model polities.
My emphasis on the last three model polities is to suggest that the function of models in Plato’s political theory need not be limited to the exposition or the construction of an ideal model to guide normative thinking in some fashion. They are also cognitive aids or scaffolding that help us understand and analyze, even be better aware of the details social reality. Plato’s use of modeling is a species of social theorizing that is not limited to guide normative thinking in political theory/philosophy.* Lurking in today’s post, then, is the idea that the modeling turn in philosophy is itself a partial return to Plato.
*On this point Jonny Thakkar’s Plato as Critical Theorist is also worth reading.