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Falsehoods and Lies in Plato's Republic Avshalom M. Schwartz

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Falsehoods and Lies in Plato's Republic Avshalom M. Schwartz Falsehoods and Lies in Plato’s Republic Avshalom M. Schwartz Odysseus’ fame, I believe, is greater than his true experience because of Homer’s sweet poetry, for there is a grandeur in his lies and soaring artifice, and his poetic skill misleads and deceives us with its stories (Pindar Nemean, 7.20-24, trans. A. Verity) Abstract This paper provides a new interpretation of the Republic’s Noble Lie. I argue that the first half of the Lie—often overlooked by readers of Plato—is crucial for our understanding of Plato’s solution to the problems of stability and legitimacy in the ideal city. I show, first, that while Plato rejected some forms of falsehood in politics, he nonetheless recognized the necessity of falsehood in the ideal city and advocated for its use in the upbringing of the guardians. This, however, stands in tension with his claim that the philosophers are completely free of falsehood and thus poses a potential threat to their legitimacy. The first part of the Noble Lie, I argue, resolves this tension by naturalizing the falsehoods which the guardians received during childhood and thereby masking their false nature. Thus, it provides a crucial ideological justification for the legitimacy of the philosophers’ rule. Keywords: Plato; Republic; Falsehood; Political Authority; Political Legitimacy Word count: 9,495 1. Introduction In Republic VI, Plato lists the various characteristics of the philosophical soul, including his familiar claims about the philosopher’s superior rational capacity, bravery, and memory. More important for him, however, are the claims that the philosopher must have in their nature “a complete absence of falsehood (apseudeian), the unwillingness to accept any falsehood but to hate it, and the love of truth” (R. 485c).1 The philosopher, in fact, who is “truly a lover of knowledge,” must “above all yearn for 1 All translations from Greek are my own, unless otherwise noted. The translation of the Republic is based on the latest OCT edition (2003, ed. Slings). 1 the truth in any way straight from childhood (ek neou)” (R. 485d). At the same time, in books II and III, Plato stresses the importance of falsehood in the upbringing and education of the guardians and the life of the city. For example, he claims that “first we tell the children stories (muthous legomen), and the story, I suppose, is said to be false (pseudos) overall, but it also contains truth” (R. 377a) and insists that mothers and nurses should “mold (plattein) their souls by these stories (muthois) much more than they shape their bodies with their hands” (R. 377c). Plato not only expects that the philosophers and guardians will be persuaded by such falsehoods but also requires that they will be chosen based on their capacity to guard the convictions that they had acquired during their formative years, despite their often false nature (R. 412b-414c). How can we explain the apparent tension between these accounts? How can the philosopher-rulers display a “complete absence of falsehood” and admit no falsehood since childhood while also being nourished by falsehoods as children and required to maintain their loyalty to these falsehoods as adults? This question represents more than a mere theoretical puzzle. In fact, the tension between the philosophers’ claim to absolute truthfulness and the presence of falsehoods in their education and upbringing poses a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of the philosophers’ rule. It is, of course, far from obvious that Plato was concerned at all with the question of the legitimacy of the philosophers’ rule. Finley, for example, strongly argued that Plato, like the other “great theorists” of antiquity, “felt no need to grapple with the problem of legitimacy” (Finley, 1982: 12). Yet, as other scholars have demonstrated persuasively, much of Plato’s philosophical and political project can be viewed as an attempt not only to establish philosophy as a source of authority, but also to defend philosophers as the only legitimate source of authority against competing claims made by poets, sophists, and other wisemen (sophoi) (Allen, 2013; Lloyd, 1983; Nightingale, 2004). Plato famously dismisses the claims for authority made by the various sophoi on the ground that these ‘wisemen,’ in 2 fact, lack any real knowledge.2 The authority of the philosophers, in contrast, is legitimate precisely because it is grounded in reason and knowledge, themselves the product of the philosophers’ special access to truth. If the rule of philosophers is justified by their love of truth and the complete absence of falsehood from their soul, their legitimacy could be undermined by the presence of falsehood in their education and upbringing and their unconditional loyalty to convictions that contain falsehoods. Plato, of course, could have simply avoided making such strong claims about the philosophers’ relationship to truth “straight from childhood,” thereby evading this obvious contradiction and challenge to their legitimacy. Yet he chose to insist on it strongly and explicitly, which highlight the possibility that he viewed such claims as important to the construction of his ideal image of the philosopher. How, then, did Plato solve this tension and this potential challenge to the legitimacy of the philosophers’ rule in the ideal city? In this paper, I argue that the solution to this potential contradiction is found in the famous ‘Noble Lie.’ Specifically, I argue that the first half of the Noble Lie solves this tension by naturalizing the falsehoods and fictions that the guardians received during their formative years, thereby masking their false and fictive nature. Naturalization—which has long been considered as an important function of any ideology (Althusser, 1971; Mannheim, 1954; Ricoeur, 1986)—can be described in the context of Greek political thought as a transformation of a nomos—a law, custom, or norm that is by definition a social artifice—into physis—a fact of nature that is independent of society and its political 2 For example, Plato argues that poets know nothing but “how to imitate” (R. 600e-601a), that rhapsodes are actually “out of their senses” and lack any real knowledge (Ion 533d-535a), and that oratory is not a form of knowledge, but rather of flattery (Gorg. 464c-465d). 3 life.3 Claims about human nature, as Keum has recently argued, “are not merely descriptive, but carry powerful normative implications” (2020b: 54). Indeed, as I will argue, this particular naturalistic story supports the philosophers’ claim not only for descriptive legitimacy, but also for normative legitimacy. Although the guardians and philosophers have been fed with lies since childhood, the Noble Lie’s naturalization of their education and upbringing ensures that they can nonetheless view themselves, and be viewed by others, as displaying “a complete absence of falsehood” and “unwillingness to accept any falsehood” and as striving towards nothing but the truth since childhood. Thus, by transforming the training and education of the guardians from a product of customs and norms (nomos) to a product of nature (physis), the Noble Lie undermines the potential threat posed by these falsehoods to the legitimacy of the philosophers’ rule. In arguing so, this paper joins a growing body of literature that moves away from the common post-war interpretation of the Noble Lie as a vehicle of totalitarian politics and propaganda (Annas, 1981; Crossman, 1959; Popper, 1950). At the same time, it also departs from a conventional interpretation that takes the Noble Lie to be a (more or less justified) tool to be used on the lower classes by the philosophers in order to secure the order and stability of the state (Dombrowski, 2004; Kamatekar, 2004; Monoson, 2000: 128; Page, 1991; Reeve, 2006: 212; Rinella, 2007). Instead, it follows a group of scholars who take the Noble Lie to be primarily directed at the rulers themselves (Guthrie, 1975: 463) and as a means of securing a patriotic ideology (Schofield, 2006: 287), shielding the young from the full complexity of the truth (Ferrari, 1990: 113), or promoting a non-hereditary class ethos (Rowett, 2016: 89). Most notably, it joins the recent work by Kasimis (2016, 2018) and Keum (2020b) 3 For a discussion of these concepts, see, for example, Lloyd (1996), Pohlenz (1953), and Sanghdehi (2017). 4 in highlighting the naturalizing dimensions of the Noble Lie and its relation to Plato’s educational project in the Republic. The Noble Lie consists of two parts: the first (“Cadmic” or “Hesiodic”) part provides a mythical account of the autochthonic origin of the citizens and their formation under the earth; the second, also known as the ‘myth of the metals,’ offers a justification for the class structure in the ideal city. Despite this bipartite structure, much of the scholarly discussion of the Noble Lie has focused on its second half. In fact, it is not uncommon for commentators to entirely equate the Noble Lie with the myth of metals or even treat them as synonyms (Allen, 2013: 65; Cornford, 1935: 104; Monoson, 2000: 172; Reeve, 2006: 183, 210; Samaras, 2002: 49). As a result, much of the analysis of the ideological function of the Noble Lie has stressed its role in justifying and regulating the city’s class structure (Dombrowski, 2004; Kamatekar, 2004; Monoson, 2000: 128; Reeve, 2006: 211; Rinella, 2007; Samaras, 2002: 50). The justification of the class system in Kallipolis is, of course, crucial for the ideal city’s ideology. Yet, by focusing on the second half of the Noble Lie, we run the risk of missing the full complexity of its ideological function in society. Focusing on the first half instead, this paper argues that it provides not only a “foundational myth” (Carmola, 2003: 52; Schofield, 2006: 290) or an ideology directed at the rulers and encouraging patriotism and genuine care for the city and its interest (Schofield, 2006: 223–224, 286), but also another key element in the city’s ideology—securing the legitimacy of the philosophers’ rule.
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