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- Sarah is renowned for her
work on moral philosophy
in the Aristotelian tradition.
She's a specialist in
classical philosophy.
She's highly regarded as
an explicator of Aristotelian thought,
but her interests range
across classical philosophy
and into philosophy generally.
Her Aristotelian society
presidential address
was called "Actual Instead,"
and it was about the
relation between determinism
and the use of counterfactuals
to evaluate human actions.
This is not her first
distinguished lecture.
She's given many more than
one could reasonably recount.
For example, in 2003, she gave
the Nellie Wallace Lectures
at the University of Oxford called
"Nature and Divinity in the Philosophies
"of Plato and Aristotle."
She'll be presenting the
2014 Woodbridge Lectures
at Columbia.
She's written many, many
books on moral philosophy
and metaphysics within
classical philosophy.
Her most recent book
is "Nature and Divinity
"in Plato's Timaeus,"
that one reviewer described as,
"Platonic exegesis of the
highest, most demanding order."
In 2003, she edited and
authored a lengthy introduction
as well as a detailed
line-by-line commentary
to a new translation of
Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics."
She's also written "Aristotle and Beyond,"
the magisterial "Ethics with Aristotle,"
"Nature, Change, and Agency
in Aristotle's Physics,"
and "Passage and Possibility:
Aristotle's Moral Concepts."
She's written about topics such as
the classical notions
of virtue, temporality,
and the platonic conception of the soul.
She is now Professor of Moral Philosophy
and the Wardlaw Professor
at the University of St. Andrews.
Before she started at the
University of Edinburgh,
moved to Texas at Austin, Yale, Rutgers,
and then Princeton before
coming to St. Andrews in 2001.
She did her first degree in Oxford
in the heady Oxford of
1960s classical philosophy
with Royal, Guillain, and John Ackrill,
and she did her PhD at The
University of Edinburgh.
She's a member of the Academia Europaea
and a fellow of the British Academy,
The Royal Society of Edinburgh,
and the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
I'm very, very pleased
to welcome Sarah Broadie.
(group applauds)
- Well, thank you, John,
for these kind description,
and of course, I must
thank this great university
and the Howison Committee for the honor
that I definitely feel I've
received in being invited,
and I would want to express my pleasure
at being able to accept the invitation,
and even greater pleasure at
actually managing to be here
and gratitude for how well
everything has been organized
and the trip made so easy.
And even you have beautiful weather.
I know it's not just for me,
but I feel as good about it
as if it were just for me.
So, I come from a land
of swirling gray mists
and all of that.
This paper, or this lecture,
is titled "Plato and Aristotle
on the Theoretical Impulse,"
and I, for some reason, was
asked to give a subtitle
or a description,
so I provided a one-liner here.
"The Human Being as Theoretical Adventurer
"Through the Eyes of Plato and Aristotle."
That doesn't really tell you any much more
than the title does.
Okay, so this lecture is going to be more
about Plato than Aristotle,
but I'll start with Aristotle,
the reason being mainly to
set up a foil for Plato,
for what I want to say
on the subject of Plato.
Of the two philosophers,
Plato is harder to pin down,
anyway, on today's topic.
It was Aristotle who gave us
the terms theoretical and practical,
words whose form is almost the same
as in his Ancient Greek.
He also presented a very
clear and helpful contrast
between practical and
theoretical thinking.
In fact, Aristotle's contrast
is so clear and helpful
that one could almost call it canonical
for the historians of philosophy.
One result is that when we
find Plato making distinctions
that seem to lie on one side
of Aristotle's contrast,
we are liable to feel that Plato
has somehow missed his way,
that he was aiming, or was sort of aiming,
or should have been aiming
at the Aristotelian contrast,
but somehow failed to hit it cleanly.
I'm sure I used to have this impression,
but now I don't think it's correct,
and even if it were correct or true,
it tells us nothing of
positive interest about Plato.
In fact, Plato's handling of this matter
has a shape and a rationale of its own
and is full of positive interest,
and I hope that something
of this will emerge
as we go along.
My aim is not to defend Plato
in some sort of standoff with Aristotle.
I don't sort of think that either of them
exactly needs me as a defender,
but my aim is rather just to display
in a certain amount of detail
what some of their
differences on this topic are.
So, Aristotle, as probably
is very well-known,
treats practical and theoretical
as mutually exclusive types of activity,
intellectual activity.
For him, the objects
of theoretical inquiry
are universal non-contingent
features of the universe,
features that hold independently of us
and which our actions cannot affect.
For Aristotle, the objects,
by contrast of practical inquiry,
are contingent, that is,
they may or may not happen,
they depend on us as agents,
and in the first instance,
these objects are highly particularized.
The reason I say in the
first instance just then
is that basic practical
thinking for human beings
is a matter of deliberating
and deciding what to do
in particular situations.
This sort of thinking needs to be tailored
to the particular context,
since what it's good to do in one context
may not be good in another.
This basic practical thinking
does not count as philosophy
because it is ad hoc
rather than systematic
and it doesn't seek to ground everything
on first principles.
But there is also in Aristotle's
intellectual universe
a more detached and more
scientific kind of ethical
and political reflection
on the human good,
such as we find, of course,
in Aristotle's own treatises
on ethics and politics.
This kind of thinking
strives to be systematic
and to take everything
back to first principles,
and therefore it does count
as a kind of philosophy,
but Aristotle is very clear
that this kind of thinking, too,
is practical.
So, Aristotle's ethics
is a practical treatise
of practical philosophy,
practical rather than theoretical,
because it's meant to
actually guide social
and political practice,
particularly the practices of legislation
and general moral education.
Now, a related important
aspect of the practical,
theoretical distinction
according to Aristotle
is that theoretical activity
should be engaged in
just for its own sake
whereas practical
reflection seeks an outcome
beyond the undertaking itself,
normally, an outcome involving
or consisting of some change
or some difference, at any rate,
in the state of the
so-called external world,
that's either our social environment
or our physical environment,
or obviously both.
Now, one might think
that this is a false contrast,
the contrast between
theoretical being engaged in
just for its own sake
whereas practical seeks a further outcome.
One might think it a false
contrast on the ground
that theoretical activity aims
at building up bodies of knowledge
which remain in our possession
even when the theoretical
inquiry has ceased
for the time being.
This resembles the way practical activity
always aims at some
objective such as safety,
health, good terms of
employment, whatever,
and of course, these
could be for one's self
or for others,
and these objectives, if secured,
remain at our disposal when
the activity of getting them
and the activity of thinking
out how to get them is over.
But, it would seem that
Aristotle rejects this parallel.
Instead, he very
emphatically places the value
of theoretical activity
in the activity itself.
No doubt, the thinker's success
in leaving a body of scientific knowledge
would be an important
mark of the excellence
of his or her theoretical activity,
but apparently for Aristotle,
this activity itself is not
for the sake of any result,
not even for the sake of
having some new knowledge
in one's repertoire.
What really matters on this picture
is the actual achieving of
new understanding or insight
as opposed to being in the
state of having achieved it.
Now, I think that this
position may be plausible.
If what we're thinking of is
a scientist or a philosopher
who's engaged in what I'm just,
this is quite vague.
I hope I'll be forgiven for being vague,
but I know I need to ask to be forgiven
for being too detailed.
If what we're thinking of,
this may be plausible if we're thinking
of a scientist or a philosopher
who is engaged in a positive project
of finding something out
or maybe engaged in many positive projects
of finding something out.
The moment of positive
discovery is the great thing,
and of course, you know,
we experience that as something
very exciting, perhaps.
Likewise, for this thinker's students,
plausibly, nothing for them
is so valuable as the moment
when maybe under their teacher's guidance,
they succeed in solving some problem.
But what if our thinker is primarily
a sort of destructive critic?
Someone who aims to
tear down false opinions
and remove obstacles to good thinking
rather than engage in or
engage his followers in
positive intellectual enterprises?
Of course, Socrates in the pages of Plato
typically has this
negative or purely critical
or negatively critical role,
and I think that the same is very often
what Plato himself is fundamentally doing,
not so much trying, in my view,
directly to make new discoveries,
as trying to remove obstacles.
Of course, there are many
kinds of obstacles to effective
or good intellectual activity,
but maybe among the main obstacles
are two kinds of distrust
of the use of independent reason.
First, there is the kind of distrust
that effects everyone at first,
because at first, we can
only access the world
through sense experience
and through what other people tell us,
so we are bound to trust these sources
and to feel thoroughly at home
in our dependence on them.
Secondly, there is the distrust of reason
that can attack would-be rationalists
when they realize that
all sorts of paradoxes
can be launched against
reason by reason itself,
and when they can see no
way for reason to escape
its own undermining.
Now, Plato in different places
sets himself to overcome
each of these kinds of distrust of reason,
sometimes, of course, by exultation,
but especially with the second kind
where the problem seems to be that reason
is undermining itself
with its clever paradoxes.
In the second kind, he tries
to deal with it, especially,
by making logical distinctions
that free us from the traps
by which logic seems set to destroy itself
and our reliance on it.
The point that I'm driving at is this:
the condition of no longer
being in intellectual bondage,
whether, as it were
enslaved to the experience
of the senses and sort of
traditional, unreflective, maybe,
wisdom of the culture,
or in intellectual bondage to some kind of
seeming logical problem that prevents one
trusting reason anymore.
The condition of no longer
being in intellectual bondage
is surely more desirable
than the achievement,
the transition into having
achieved that condition,
just as being free from illness
is more desirable, one would suppose,
than the moment of recovery.
Indeed, the achievement of freedom
gets its value from the
value of freedom achieved
and not the other way 'round.
So, if Plato's exemplary philosopher
is the one who frees him-
or herself and others
from blocks to intellectual progress
whereas Aristotle's exemplary philosopher
is one who is actually
making positive progress,
as of course was the case
with Aristotle himself,
the founder or pioneer of
so many distinct branches
of human knowledge.
If each of these great
philosophers, as it were,
have in mind a different kind
of exemplary philosopher,
then maybe we shouldn't be surprised
if the two thinkers diverge,
as I believe they do,
in how they see the
intellect's prime objective.
For Aristotle,
it's the very act of
specific positive discovery,
whereas for Plato in many places,
it's the condition of not
being hobbled by one or another
snare and delusion.
Now, given this difference,
perhaps we shouldn't be surprised
to find other differences
between Plato and Aristotle
when we try to compare them in terms
of some kind of contrast between practical
and theoretical reason.
Now, that contrast was Aristotle's,
and we're going to see in more detail
how Plato not only did
not draw the contrast,
but, for better or worse,
wasn't even groping for it.
Only we have to stay with
Aristotle a little longer
so as to note that for him,
the contrast isn't just between
types of subject matter,
that is between a
theoretical subject matter
that is universal and necessary
and a practical subject matter
that is changeable and
contentious and so forth.
For as well as this modal
and ontological difference
of subject matter,
there is also for
Aristotle a deep difference
between the styles of
thinking that are appropriate
for when we're being practical
and when we're being theoretical.
Theoretical thinking
seeks only understanding,
and in itself, it could go on forever,
extending its frontiers,
perfecting its reasonings,
and cultivating its ramifications,
whereas practical thinking,
and there are many passages in Aristotle
that support this point,
practical thinking, even at its best,
tends to rely on rough
sketches, abbreviations,
and limited perspectives.
This, for Aristotle, is true,
even if the level of systematic inquiry
into universal questions
of ethics and politics
and it is even more
true for the basic level
where practical thinking is in response
to particular situations.
But in Plato, we have a philosopher
who, apparently, anyway,
seldom, if at all, seems to
worry about any deep contrast
between good thinking styles
in so-called practical and
so-called theoretical reasoning.
That being so, we shouldn't be surprised
if the entire
practical-theoretical polarity
turns out to be somehow unreal for him.
In general, philosophers
divide up territory differently
depending on what oppositions
they regard as fundamental.
Take for example a passage
in Plato's dialogue "The Statesman"
where he classifies
knowledge into two main types
and he calls one of them
practicae, practical,
but Plato here doesn't mean by practical
what Aristotle was going to mean by it.
Plato's division is actually
closer to the traditional
Ancient Greek contrast of deeds
and words because practical
in Plato's sense here
is restricted to expertise
that operates by physical work,
so working with your hands.
The contrast is with kinds of expertise
that operate just through
thoughts and words.
This latter kind he calls kinostikae,
that word has to do with knowledge,
which in some translations is rendered
by the word theoretical,
but is actually better translated
by the word intellectual.
Now, this intellectual type of
knowledge in Plato's dialogue
divides into two narrower kinds.
One, illustrated by
mathematical reasoning,
is called criticae,
which literally means the
art of making judgments,
because it's merely concerned
to make true judgment.
As Plato says, these are his
words, "Like a spectator."
So it doesn't do anything to anything.
It just stands back spectating
and hopefully making true judgments.
Whereas the other kind of intellectual,
main kind of intellectual knowledge,
is called directive,
since it directs the activities
of the manual workers.
It is illustrated by the master builder,
by the ruler's advisor,
the advisor of the leader
of society or the community,
and finally, by the ruler himself.
So, the basic division here is not between
the true contemplator of changeless facts
and the agent of change
in the world around us,
it's between those who
get their hands dirty
and those who operate solely
by thought and speech.
For Aristotle, of course,
the master builder and the
ruler belong on the same side
as the workers who work with their hands,
even though they are more
honorable and admirable
and their practical knowledge is,
in some way, more profound.
Now, is Plato's taxonomy in
this dialogue superficial
compared with Aristotle's?
I wouldn't be surprised if many readers
assume that Plato here has just lost touch
with the real contours
of the subject matter
that he's supposed to be talking about
and is motivated instead by petty snobbism
against the blue-collar worker.
But, there is a more philosophical
and more charitable explanation
of Plato's classification
in that dialogue "The Statesman,"
namely that he's simply following his own,
I think everyone knows this about Plato,
his own fundamental distinction
between the use of the senses
and the use of the intellect
where use of the intellect
includes verbal articulation.
Now, if this distinction is
playing a dominating role,
then we have a natural grounding
for the division in that
dialogue between manual
and intellectual activities.
The manual ones obviously
entail use of the senses
as does checking the physical
quality of the product.
Whereas this is rather,
as it was slightly of somewhat
idealized picture, of course,
but whereas the expert who
simply issues directives
is in the same general box
as the purely contemplative expert,
say, the pure mathematician,
since both of them operate
just by thinking and speaking,
and Plato surely has it in mind here
that both the directive thinker
and the purely contemplative one
are operating from an intellectual grasp
of reasons and causes.
Now, this aspect,
the intellectual grasp
of reasons and causes,
is a major theme in the famous preamble
of Aristotle's "Metaphysics."
Aristotle's "Metaphysics" is probably
one of the most difficult works of,
well, it's a perhaps a
set of works of philosophy
brought together,
a very early point,
some of the most difficult philosophy
that's ever been produced,
but he begins with what is
now divided into two chapters
where it's just absolutely pellucid.
One can just dive straight
into this pool of water
which is just the right
temperature for anyone,
whether they've studied
the metaphysics before
or whether it's the 15th
time that they've tried
to kill themselves understanding it.
(audience laughs)
So, in this famous preamble,
this idea of the intellectual
grasp of reasons and causes
is an important theme.
In the preamble, Aristotle
traces a hierarchy
of types of cognition,
all the way up from the
lowest and commonest type
which is sensory cognition,
to the highest and most
rare which turns out to be
the purely theoretical knowledge
of the ultimate causes of all things.
An essential intermediate
rung of this cognitive ladder,
which has got a number
of intermediate rungs,
is the non-theoretical
expertise, or technae, of,
for example, the medical practitioner
who understands the reasons or causes
why such-and-such treatment is successful
as distinct from the
also medical practitioner
who just has a good hunch about the matter
based on unarticulated experience.
But we should notice the non-platonic way
in which Aristotle starts all this off,
and I've just given you the quotation,
the first two sentences.
His famous first two sentences
which right away introduce
Aristotle's great difference
between valuing something for itself
and valuing something for
the sake of a further end.
He says, "All human beings
by nature desire to know.
"An indication of this is the
delight we take in our senses
"for even apart from their usefulness,
"we delight in them for their own sake,
"and most of all, in the sense of sight."
So, the primary contrast here
is not at all Plato's contrast
between intellect and senses.
Instead, it's the very
Aristotelian contrast
already encountered in this lecture
between welcoming cognitive
activity for its own sake
and welcoming it because useful.
In the "Metaphysics" passage,
the senses are first
brought in interestingly
to illustrate both sides of this contrast
even though the senses
are right at the bottom
of the hierarchy of cognition.
There at the bottom because they belong
to our basic biological nature,
which we share, of course,
with many other animals,
to some extent,
whereas the highest sort of cognition,
it's not biologically based at all.
It has to be carefully cultivated
and is noble and difficult and rare.
Yet, the fact that all of
us, whether educated or not,
naturally enjoy the sheer
exercise of our senses,
gives Aristotle a universal
and totally familiar starting point
for the claim that the very
highest form of human knowledge,
which he also says is the most godlike
form of human knowledge,
is such that is and ought to be sought
just for its own sake.
It's this that enables
him a few steps later
to conclude that this
highest human knowledge
must be of a kind completely
devoid of any practicality,
namely its knowledge.
It's a grasp of the ultimate
causes of all things.
I'm now going to turn for a while
to Plato's huge dialogue "Republic,"
looking in particular at the career
of the philosopher rulers
in Plato's ideal city-state,
or anyway, the ideal city-state
of that dialogue "Republic."
Plato's whole approach in this work
is founded on his basic distinction
of senses versus intellect.
We've already seen that where
this distinction dominates,
the theoretical and the practical
do not necessarily divide
off from each other
in the sharp way that's
characteristic of Aristotle,
and so it is with Plato's
philosopher rulers,
their special education designed
precisely to qualify them
to take the reins of government
includes a lengthy grounding
in pure mathematics and astronomy.
The astronomy is actually
not observational astronomy,
but kind of ideal mathematical,
purely abstract as it were, astronomy.
This mathematical education prepares them
for the next stage of their education
which is training in the
yet more abstract discipline
called, quote, dialectic.
Here, the inquiries are even more remote
from sense experience.
Dialectic, in Plato's words,
is the sole discipline that
systematically attempts
to grasp with a respect
to each thing itself
what the being of it is.
I guess only a philosopher
could have written that.
Yet Plato's trainee rulers
are selected from the start
not only as being mathematically
and dialectically able,
but as exhibiting to a very high degree
the moral virtues of justice,
courage, self-discipline,
love of truth, a boundless
desire for mental exercise
and learning along with
a rock-solid orientation
towards the good,
even before they grasp
what it is intellectually.
After that, after having all
these moral virtues drummed into them,
they receive the years of training
in higher mathematics and dialectic.
That training is still
not over, even after this.
Next, these trainees go
back into civic life.
This is, of course, the
ideal trainee ruler.
They go back into civic
life where for 15 years,
they are exposed to the experiences,
not as leaders, but as
just workers, really,
managers, really,
the experiences of warfare
and administration.
All this is what has to happen
before they can receive
the culminating vision
of the good itself
that in the republic,
the absolute intelligible
first principle which,
once grasped, brings into
unifying focus the entire domain
of subordinate intelligible forms.
Only then is the education
of the rulers complete,
and, in Plato's words, "Now,
they must labor in politics
"and rule for the city's sake,
"not as if they were doing something fine,
"but rather as if they're doing something
"that just has to be done."
Now, this whole amazing
construction weaves together strands
that we might want to
single out distinctly
as practical and theoretical.
Obviously, the ideal rulers must be moral
as well as intellectual paragons,
since without sound moral formation,
they might be cowardly or unjust rulers.
The moral formation in Plato's eyes,
especially in the qualities of persistence
and refusal to be
contented with half-truths
and specious answers
or anything less than the
best in thought and action,
this moral formation for Plato
is clearly a necessary condition
for the desired intellectual development,
simply because the intellectual
studies are so difficult.
Then there is also on Plato's part
the fear of the evils of dialectic.
He expresses this in "The
Republic" in many pages.
The evils of dialectic
as currently practiced
in non-ideal political conditions.
According to him, "it makes
morally unsteady people
"into clever skeptics about morality.
"It fills them with lawlessness
"so that so-called philosophy
is not only discredited
"in the eyes of ordinary people,
"but it becomes toxic to some
of the brightest intellectuals
"in the community."
Even so, there's much
to be baffled by here,
even if we were to buy
into these last few points.
Obviously, if all this
abstract training is necessary
for future rulers, then,
this is a kind of tautology,
really, what I'm saying,
then of course they need to get it.
If it's necessary, they need it.
But, why should such a loss
of dialectic mathematics
be supposed necessary
for becoming a ruler?
This, that is, being a ruler,
is after all a practical task.
Now, I see at least two
responses to this question.
One of these responses
we might find congenial.
The other one, probably not.
The congenial answer, which I
don't think goes far enough,
involves two points.
First, Plato was right to see government
in a complex society and culture
as needing personnel who
are good at thinking clearly
at a high level of generality
and willing to follow lines of
reasoning wherever they lead.
Rulers need this ability or
else they need some advisors
who are like that.
The second point is that for Plato,
it so happens as a matter
of historical fact,
there were few if any examples available
of the consistent pursuit
of clear, unbiased,
and genuinely cogent reasoning
apart from mathematics
along with dialectic as practiced
by someone like Socrates.
So, the specific intellectual training
described in "The Republic"
could be seen by us
as essentially from our
perspective a placeholder
for any kind of rigorous
training in thinking.
It is kind of an accident that
it's so completely dominated
for him by mathematics.
That's a relatively
common-sensical explanation
for why the future rulers
in Plato's republic
need all that training
in maths and dialectic.
The other explanation's
not at all common-sensical,
but I think it's pretty platonic.
It is based on the assumption
that the intelligible objects,
or intelligible relationships,
studied in mathematics and dialectic
are akin to and perhaps
even are somehow models
for the order and harmony
that constitute justice
and the other virtues in the just city
or the just community
and in every just person,
and especially, of course,
in the philosophical ruler.
Thus, for Plato, for the
individual philosopher,
doing philosophy is, in Plato's words,
is, quote, "Consorting with the divine
"and coming to imitate it."
He says that in "The Republic."
Studying mathematics
and dialectic enhances
and perfects the harmony established
in the future leader's soul
through his or her basic moral training,
and then through her or him as a conduit,
once they are in power as actual rulers,
that same harmony comes
to be realized in the city
whose life they now direct.
Now, this picture seems to imply
that nobody can be fully just,
courageous, or temperate.
These are, as it were,
what we think of as basic moral virtues.
Nobody can be like that
unless he or she has had the benefit
of highly intellectual studies.
This is a conclusion which
many of us would find repellent
and unreasonable.
However, this response of ours
reflects a common sense understanding
of what it is for the harmony and the soul
to be enhanced and perfected
and what it is to be
fully just, courageous,
and temperate.
In fact, I take Plato's meaning to be
that through studying the abstract forms
of mathematics and dialectic,
the individuals' psychic harmony is raised
from being a personal
disposition for good,
basic, practical conduct.
It continues to be that, but
it's now no longer just that.
It's raised from just being that
to being a disposition
with the additional power
of reflecting on itself,
articulating its own general nature,
and finally propagating this pattern
into the wider community,
both by the way it governs
the city or the community
and by introducing this
pattern through teaching
to the next generation
of philosopher rulers.
In other words, the philosopher
rulers' higher education
is not meant to make its
recipients more just or courageous
in the ordinary way
nor does it inculcate some
entirely new set of virtues
of, say, as it were, purely
intellectual enlightenment.
Instead, it's meant to bring the ordinary
or familiar virtues up
to an unfamiliar level
of programmatic manifestation,
a level from which they have a chance
of being effective on a grand scale
in the culture and society.
Now, metaphysically, this
is a more interesting,
though whether or not correct,
I'm certainly not going to try to say,
but metaphysically, this is
a more interesting picture,
and it's one that preserves the intuition
that not very highly-educated persons
can be thoroughly, morally good.
More to our purpose, however,
this picture helps make
sense of Plato's mingling
of the practical and the theoretical
for the picture strongly suggests
that the trainee rulers must
focus on the eternal objects
of mathematics and dialectic
just as they are in themselves,
rather than focusing on
those eternal objects
as somehow the means to or the basis
of some kind of practical project
that points downwards, so to speak,
towards the realm of change.
In the words of Socrates
in "The Republic,"
the trainees studying these objects are,
these are his words,
"Consorting with the divine."
Now, if we consort with the divine,
we probably should not behave towards it
like those who when honored
by an audience with queen,
pope, or president.
I can say I tried to be really
ecumenical with my examples.
Those who win honor with such an audience
are all the time principally thinking
of how this precious encounter
is a boost to their future career.
When we consort with the divine,
whether it is majesty,
holiness, or supreme executive authority,
maybe I shouldn't say
power, but just authority.
When we consort with the divine,
we shouldn't be looking past it,
looking over its shoulder
as if this contact
is a stepping stone to something else.
So, the words of Socrates
suggest full absorption
in the intelligible objects themselves
rather than attention to
them just as forwarding
some ulterior project.
Let me apply here an
idea from the great myth
in a different platonic
dialogue, "The Phaedrus."
There, he says that for the intellect
to see the incorporeal forms
is for it to feed on
them and get nourished.
Now, when a hungry person literally eats,
what presents itself
to the appetitive drive
is just the food material itself
with its gustatory
properties or qualities.
The drive that ingests what nourishes
is cognizant of its object as
good or satisfying, period.
It does not cognize it.
I'm talking about the sort
of sheer drive, the passion,
passionate impulse.
It does not cognize it as good
for the further process of
growth or restoring the tissues,
even though these things are true,
it is good for those reasons.
In the same way, the intellect
just takes in the forms,
enjoying them as they are in themselves.
This would be experienced as what we call,
in the Aristotelian, as it were, line,
theoretical contemplation.
"The Republic" trainees'
focus on the objects
of mathematics and dialectic
seems to be like that,
Furthermore, one may well
suppose that these objects
are most effective when taken in
in that theoretical way.
That is that only in their pure form,
not framed by a purpose to be
played out in space and time,
are they most efficacious for transforming
an ordinary virtuous soul into
a rationally articulate power
for propagating political
structures similar to itself.
So, here we have one sort of explanation
for Plato's insouciance in "The Republic"
about combining practical and theoretical.
Just very quickly to summarize it
because it actually quite complicated,
this explanation involves
four main points.
One, the ordinary moral
virtues become fully effective
in benefiting the wider society
only through being raised up
into a kind of institutional
model of themselves
as distinct from being simply practiced
in the lives of particular individuals
scattered here and
there in space and time.
Secondly, this institutional
model that I've just mentioned
is not an entity distinct
from those original virtues
in the way in which a
representation is distinct,
as we normally think, from
the objects represented.
It is rather, and this is a
real piece of, as it were,
Platonism, which only
became fully articulated
by Platonists after Plato.
So, rather, what I'm calling
this institutional model
is the same original ordinary virtues
at a different level of actuality.
This is to put it in
somewhat Aristotelian terms.
That's one reason why the
trainees have to possess,
they actually do have to possess
the ordinary virtues themselves.
Third quick point,
the raising to this new
level is accomplished
by studying abstract structures
through mathematical and
dialectical activity,
and fourthly and lastly,
this process works only because
the intellect in that study
focuses on and takes in those structures
in themselves and for their own sake.
For anyone who accepts this account,
distinctions between
practical and theoretical
have melted away, or at any rate,
turned out to be somewhat superficial.
This is so whether the contrast is drawn
between practice of the basic virtues
and study of the intelligible structures
or between this study and the realization
of political goods through government,
but this story does incur
a huge burden of proof.
It postulates a kind of isomorphism
between the intelligible
structures themselves,
that is, the things you study
in mathematics, et cetera,
and the grand level of
virtuous dispositions
of concrete individuals,
and secondly, it postulates
a same kind of isomorphism
between those same
intelligible structures,
that's still the
mathematical, et cetera, ones,
and justice in the concrete
society as a whole.
Now, all this makes sense
only on the assumption
that justice, et cetera, in
the concrete human individual
is a harmony strongly akin to
if not in the end the same as
some kind of mathematical structure.
From Aristotle's perspective
as is well-known, probably,
this assimilation of ethical properties
to mathematical ones is
a philosopher's fantasy.
Perhaps Aristotle thinks this
because he takes his own
theoretical practical contrast
to be fundamental and
independently secured
and deduces from it a corresponding gulf
between mathematical
and ethical properties.
I just, again, I'm not, as it were,
in the business of defending
one of them against the other,
but I have to point out
the Platonists could reply
that this move just begs the question,
from what we've seen,
it might well be that Platonism is happy
to soften the theoretical
practical contrast
precisely because Platonism
is independently attracted
to a sort of mathematization
of the ethical.
We have looked at how the
practical theoretical distinction
fares in Plato's "Republic"
when we try to apply it
to the different elements,
moral elements and intellectual elements,
of the philosopher rulers' education.
This education prepares
them for actual government,
and actual government is not
a further phase of their education.
Now let's look at the
relationship that Plato suggests
between that education as a whole,
particularly the intellectual part of it,
and the work of government
to which it paves the way.
Naturally, he gives the title
philosophy to dialectic,
the highest intellectual discipline.
He's probably also happy
to call mathematics
and astronomy philosophy, too.
Now, we wouldn't be surprised when, or if,
Plato says that the trainees
in his ideal curriculum
will be less than complete if
they don't eventually take up
the reins of government.
I mean, you do all this training,
and then for some reason,
you don't actually govern,
there's something incomplete there.
But, in one passage, this is
the second one on the handout,
second and last,
he seems to suggest something
stronger and more arresting,
namely a really quite
surprising suggestion,
namely that the philosopher,
as a philosopher,
is incomplete not just that
his career, as it were,
is incomplete if he just
trains but never governs,
but that his being as
philosopher is incomplete
unless and until he or she lives under
a constitution that suits his nature,
and that will be the constitution
in which philosophers rule.
I won't read out the
whole of that passage,
but the underlined phrase,
I hope, makes the point.
This passage, I'll just give
it a tiny bit of context,
it comes just after where
Socrates describes philosophers
in existing cities, that
is non-ideal situations,
who have managed to remain uncorrupted.
He says, either they've gone into exile,
or their city is such a
totally one-horse place
that nobody of any stature
would want to take part
in running it, right?
Or, as in Socrates' Athens,
they withdraw from public life
because they can't change
the injustice around them
and nor can they compromise with it.
And it's in this context
that he makes these remarks,
Socrates makes these remarks.
The main point is in the third speech.
Socrates says, "Under a
suitable constitution,
"that is one which encourages
philosophers to rule,
"his own growth," that is his growth,
I take it to mean his actual growth
as a philosopher will be fuller
and he'll save the community
as well as himself.
So, in other words, not only
is it at the essence of rule
that rule is best when in
the hands of philosophers,
but it's of the essence of philosophy
to culminate in rule by philosophers.
In other words, this is really, I think,
very surprising and controversial.
Philosophy is deficient as philosophy
when this fails to come about.
That is when it doesn't, as it were,
the wave doesn't break over
into actual practical rulership
and this is true, that is
philosophy in that situation
is deficient as philosophy
even when being in that situation,
whether or not invited to rule,
is not the fault of
philosophy's practitioners
but of external circumstances.
And maybe Plato therefore means to imply
an equally startling claim
about pure mathematics and dialectic.
Given that these subjects
are essentially philosophy,
it belongs to be these disciplines as such
to be the propaedeutics
of ideal rulership.
For them to be deprived
of that particular role
is for them to be somehow
diminished versions
of what they themselves are.
However, this might seem to be in conflict
with one very famous feature
of Plato's ideal city,
namely the feature that
once the philosophers
have been fully trained,
they are actually not at all keen
to leave their special studies,
their intellectual studies,
and take up the task of government
within the city itself.
They have to be goaded towards
their foreordained role
by considerations of justice
of what they owe to the
city that educated them.
Basically, the city's
given them this scholarship
which lasts long, much,
much longer than any,
as it were, scholarships
in the real world,
but in the end,
they need to do something in return.
They see ruling as a yoke
to which they much submit.
They have to put their
necks into the halter,
but the passage that we've just looked at,
the second on the handout,
seems to say that actual rule
is the natural completion
of the philosophical curriculum.
If so, shouldn't their transition
to it be happy and spontaneous?
The answer is no, not necessarily.
A natural progression,
in the sense of a thing's
development into its full nature,
need not be smooth and easy
in the case of human beings.
Some of its stages can only be effected
by a struggle against the current grain.
The clearest example is the human being's
initial ascent from Plato's cave,
you know, the great cave that comes
in the middle of "The Republic,"
as it was right down the
bottom of "The Republic."
The human being's initial
ascent from the cave,
which is the condition of illusion
in which we're all
imprisoned to begin with,
it's hard to break out
of it, he emphasizes.
Turning one's back on the cave's shadows
so as to start the climb towards sunlight
is painful and disorientating.
Even so, it is a move
towards our full realization
and not away from it.
There is more, but I just, one more point
about the reluctant
ruler in "The Republic."
The idea that reluctant
rulers are the best rulers is,
of course, paradoxical.
From the point of view of common sense,
it probably seems, anyway, at first,
that in general people
will be better at a task
if they're keen to do it.
However, Plato is very
clear that good rulers
must be ready to resign
their office eventually,
no doubt so as to make room
for the next ruling generation.
For Plato, ever systematic,
and an extremely sort of tidy thinker,
for Plato, this means that good rulers
must have built into them,
into their very capacity as good rulers,
the disposition not to cling to the job.
Thus, the ideal education
of rulers as rulers
must design them to be eager to step down.
This is Plato's mechanism.
Might think this was a
super-utopian mechanism
for ideally ensuring that leaders
peacefully hand over the
task when the time comes.
You know, there are no
elections in Plato's republic.
It's totally non-democratic setup.
Thus, Plato brilliantly dispatches
two birds with one stone
by assigning a dual function
to mathematics and dialectic.
These studies give the trainees
what Plato thinks is their
intellectual equipment
for the true work of governing,
while at the same time,
these studies set them up to bid that work
a happy farewell later on.
What makes this second function possible
is that the trainees as
part of their training
fall in love with
mathematics and dialectic
for their own sake,
hence they're reluctant to take up rule,
and in a sense, they cannot
wait once they've taken it up,
to lay it down.
They want to go on
spending indefinite time
with abstract studies,
and later, when they are ruling,
it will be as if they can't
wait to get back to them.
This vision of Plato's makes havoc
of any neat Aristotelian separation
of practical and theoretical,
for in Plato's reluctant rulers,
the purely theoretical
enjoyment of mathematics
and dialectic is joined at the hip
with a practical political
purpose that looks beyond them.
We have here, in fact,
an interesting interplay between godlike
and un-godlike longings that help
to compose the human being.
For Plato, the impulse to
theorize for its own sake
is one of the best things in
our genuinely human nature
and it also manifests our aspiration
to live on a godlike plane.
But for human beings,
indulging this impulse,
the theoretical impulse,
also serves a purpose beyond itself,
although not in such
a way as to compromise
its internally free,
self-justifying, godlike quality.
Giving in to our theoretical
impulse is our protection.
Perhaps for Plato, the
uniquely suitable protection
against another equally human passion,
namely the ugly, dangerous lust for power.
Thank you.
(attendees applauding)
(bright electronic music)
