Socrates' censorship of the poets, the art of government, and the advanced cognitive division of labor.

When I think of Socrates’ censorship of the poets in Book II-III of the Republic, I have had a tendency to understand it in terms of the disorder or corruption they produce in their audience, young and old. This is why he targets their representation of the gods and punishment (e.g., 379-382), and goes on to criticize, say, their representation of extreme emotions and the flourishing of unjust people (388-392). And why he ends up confining poetry to rather limited set of rhythms and topics (398ab).

As Griswold notes in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry, in Book X, Socrates returns to the topic and argues that “that poets do not know what they are talking about.” Among these sites of ignorance, as we may call them, are “the greatest and most beautiful things….warfare, generalship, city government [or city administration, διοικήσεων πόλεων], and a person’s education.” (599cd; using Reeve’s translation). I suspect this is familiar enough.

I want to emphasize however, that for Socrates there is a skill, craftsmanship, or expertise in each of these greatest and most beautiful things. And so one rather important charge (again we’re talking abut “the greatest and most beautiful things”) is that the poets misrepresent the nature of expert or skilled activity, and its contents. In fact, Socrates had explicitly said this just before — after introducing the distinction among creating or crafting, using a craft, and imitating a craft — that if somebody mentions, “that he has met a man who knows all the crafts and everything else that men severally know, and that there is nothing that he does not know more exactly than anybody else,” we must assume “that he is a simple fellow.” (599CD, this time using Shorey.)

It is worth noting that within the advanced cognitive division of labor, Socrates’ criticism generalizes to all who try to claim knowledge about field-specific expertise. So, this does not just describe what we may call content producers in the arts and entertainment, but in our age also consultants, journalists (and news operations more generally), and the intelligentsia (not to mention internet gurus). I return to this below.

So, poets sow a number of important confusions about the nature and content of expertise or (if you prefer) craftsmanship: they make it seem one person can be expert in a lot of things at once; they misrepresent the subject of expertise; and they cannot teach it. This is hopefully not a controversial reading of the Republic. Socrates goes on to claim that this ignorance sowing is in virtue of the fact that poets and their audience lack knowledge of a three-fold distinction between knowledge, lack of knowledge, and imitation. (598d.)

Before I go on it is worth noting that Socrates seems to assume that the regular users of a particular craft are actually in a good position to make judgments on its quality. I think he says that even explicitly (in the context of couch-making), but I can’t find the passage. This is especially intuitive for crafts where regular users can tell or establish whether the product functions or malfunctions.

However, Socrates’ assumptions is strongly implied by his claims about the fact that (i) Pythagoras inspired and was honored for an enduring way of life among his followers (600ab); (ii) that Protagoras and Prodicus succeeded at convincing many leading citizens around Greece “that they will not be capable of governing their homes or the city unless they put them in charge of their education and make themselves so beloved for this wisdom that their companions all but carry them about on their shoulders.” (600cd, again using Shorey.) Both (i) and (ii) are used to bolster the claim that Homer lacked expertise about the craft-involving things he portrayed. Notice, in particular, that Protagoras and Prodicus are presented as skilled in persuading many that they can teach some of the items on the list of the greatest and most beautiful things.

The presence of (ii) may be thought surprising because Protagoras and Prodicus are sophists, and we usually associate Plato with a fierce critique of sophistry. It is especially surprising that success in the market-place (for educating the ruling elite) is taking as a valid criterion for expertise in a particular field (educating the ruling elite in the art of government of homesteads and polities). This anticipates Spinoza’s claim that “in a free Republic both the arts and the sciences will flourish best [optime excolentur], if permission to teach publicly is granted to anyone seeking it, at the risk of his own resources and reputation. (Political Treatise (Vb188), Ch. 8.49 (III/346))* But it is not so surprising if we remember that for Socrates it is the user of a craft who is in good position to see whether it functions properly or not.

I don’t want to deny there is also some mockery in Socrates’ description of the popularity of Protagoras and Prodicus. (I return to this below.) And we may well wonder whether what is really taught is the art of good ruling, or if they are popular in virtue of teaching how to stay in power or remain popular. (Just like modern consultants are popular, perhaps, because they tell management what it wants to hear anyway.)

But we should not ignore the fact that Socrates clearly thinks the art of ruling is a skill; this is, after all, one of the key points of the ship of state passage—piloting a ship is a real skill (488de). (It’s also the point of Plato’s Statesman.) In fact, the charge against the poets in Book X is strictly analogous to the charge against the dangerous wealthy and demagogic political elites (Machiavelli would call these the ‘Grandi’) in the ship of state passage (see (recall) especially 489c). In both cases, poets and self-serving social elites, they end up creating confusion about what the real art of government is (and who should be put in charge).

Just before I promised I would return to the apparent mockery of Protagoras and Prodicus. Recall that when Socrates first introduces Damon (at 400bc), we are also left with a bit of confusion about Socrates’ tone about Damon. But when he returns to Damon explicitly, Socrates says “For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions, as Damon affirms and as I am convinced.”—424c [Reeve’s “the greatest political laws” may be better for πολιτικῶν νόμων τῶν μεγίστων.]

Damon has expertise pertaining to music; Socrates agrees with Damon that innovating in music can be sufficient to undo the stability of the polity. Musical life (be it as an instrument of education or civic festivals) is constitutive of the political order. Damon is acknowledged by Socrates to be an expert in one of the causes of social/political (in)stability and that is highly salient to the art of ruling.

More subtly, in the presentation of Plato on Damon, Socrates is himself part of a community of experts, who are students of politics (and other philosophical matters), and who also practice judicious deference to each other’s expertise. These features of expertise are wholly obscured by the poets and other sowers of confusion about topics on which there is expert knowledge. I also think these features are obscured by the presentation of Socrates in the Apology, where one can come away thinking that Socrates is an isolated gadfly primarily adept at undermining the exaggerated pretensions of others. (I leave aside here complex questions about real Socrates vs Plato’s Socrates and to what degree Plato’s presentation of Socrates over time.)

As I wrap up, I want to make two points with the second one leading to a final reflection. First, all the way back in Book 2, just before he introduces the “true polity,” Socrates had insisted that political life originates in the need for the division of labor (369bd). It should come, thus, as no surprise that the cognitive division of labor draws Socrates’ attention throughout the Republic. Again that philosophers should rule is the capstone of the argument that there is expertise in ruling.

Second, there is an incredibly popular narrative that (to simplify) philosophy is the mother of the sciences, who become independent and develop into their own technical expertise. Part of this narrative involves the idea that after the scientific revolution, which spawned and is still spawning many new fields of scientific expertise, philosophy’s own relationship to the advanced cognitive division of labor has shifted. One may well think then that Neurathian orchestration, Quine-ean regimentation, Ballantyne's regulative epistemology, or my ideal of synthetic philosophy are ((principled) responses to this shift. That is, one may well think that the predicament and task of modern philosophy is how to respond to the effects of the advanced cognitive division of labor.

As regular readers know, Elijah Millgram’s The Great Endarkenment opens with a great set piece about the Hebrew Bible’s depiction of Tower of Babel. Millgram points out that it (to simplify) represents the difficulty of managing the obstacles generated by the skilled cognitive division of labor in political projects. The failure to do so leads to civilizational collapse, and political (and linguistic) scattering.

If the reading of the Republic developed here is correct, then Plato also takes the job of responding to the challenges to art of government generated by the advanced cognitive division of labor quite seriously and this is, then, not some belated artifact of modernity. Rather, in so far as Plato’s writings on philosophy are constitutive of our idea of philosophy (and please know I am aware of the many patterns of exclusion this entails) this task may well be thought constitutive of philosophy as such.

I could stop there, but I want to note that the advanced cognitive division of labor within philosophy (and the professional academy) also generates a kind of recurring forgetting that it is (one of) philosophy’s role(s) to respond to the challenges to art of government generated by the advanced cognitive division of labor. We get caught up in our own projects after all, and the modern academy has not found a good niche (despite the existence of schools of leadership and public administration) to institutionalize it. This is a bit surprising because that it is a topic of great importance is, as we have seen, affirmed by Jerusalem (Hebrew Bible) and Athens (Plato).

*For more on this, see my “Spinoza and Economics.”