According
to Plato, the just man is like the just city. That much is clear. The
point of this city/soul analogy is, however, rather less obvious. Ferarri’s
contribution to the Lecturae Platonis series disputes two influential
views on this matter. On the view associated with Bernard Williams, the Republic
claims that a city has the same moral configuration as its inhabitants: it
is F if and only if its citizens are F. We should therefore expect to find
oligarchic individuals in an oligarchic city, democratic men in a democracy,
and so on.

While intuitively
appealing, this reading leads quickly to a paradox. The just city is composed
of a reasoning strata, a spirited strata and an appetitive strata. Its justice
requires the right balance of all three under the overall control of the
reasoners. Individuals in the middling and lower strata are not
primarily under the sway of their own reason. That is why they need to be
under someone else’s guardianship. Hence justice does not hold sway
within their own souls. It must, to some extent, come from the outside.

Ferrari’s
forthright claim is that we can avoid Williams’ paradox by rejecting the
assumed identity between the moral configuration of city and that of its
citizen’s souls. Although Plato suggests (435e) that the spiritedness of
Scythia and Thrace does come from the spirited character of their inhabitants,
there is no clear cut textual support for the more general thesis that
this is a relation that always holds.

A rejection of
Williams’ reading impinges upon Ferrari’s understanding of Platonic puritanism.
Once we sever the necessary connection between the justice of the city and of
the individual, it is no longer the case that the just city needs to peer into
and mess around with the soul of all inhabitants for the sake of its own
survival. Justice in the city can be seen as a matter of compromise.
Furthermore, if the just city is caught up in compromise then we might expect
that justice in the soul which is akin to the city is likewise to be governed
by an art of the possible. (Even if it remains true that justice in the soul is
more attainable.)

Ferrari uses this
to make sense of Plato’s critical attitude towards the noble strategy of
withdrawal from a corrupting political life. (Exemplified in Republic Book
1 by Glaucon and Adiemantus.) To hold that the life of the individual can be
free of compromise if only political engagement is abandoned involves turning a
(sometimes wise) precaution into more virtuous than it is. As embodied beings
we will remain a compromise whether we engage in politics or not. On Ferrari’s
reading Plato again appear less than usually puritan (or at least differently
puritan). This may worry some readers. It worries me. (Perhaps I have imbibed
too much of Iris Murdoch ‘s view that Plato’s puritanism is a real and present
danger.)

Be that as it
may, Ferrari’s rejection of Williams’ thesis paves the way for consideration of
a weakened variation on the same theme set out by Jonathan Lear. According to
Lear, the analogy of city an soul is used to express causal relation between
the state and the souls of those who compose its predominant social strata. The
individual may internalize the character of their city, and they may externalize
their own character, molding the city in their own image. Ferrari wants to
associate this view not with Plato but with his rival Socrates and the view
that nobody can be a true ruler of others unless they can first rule
themselves. For Ferarri, to take this as the Platonic position would be to take
the analogy too literally, as if city and soul had identical real parts
between which causal relations could hold.

Nevertheless, he
does accept that there is an element of truth in this weakened thesis.
Relations between the individual souls of those in the predominant strata and
the city do go beyond analogical relations and are clearly causal in the
exceptional cases of the philosopher king and the tyrant. In the first case,
the character of the former is moulded by the ideal state, however this is
something demanded by its laws and does not exemplify any causal link that
holds more generally. In the second case, the character of the tyrant is such
that he seeks to bend absolutely everything to his will and this is an
exceptional circumstance not a normal one.

What emerges from
Ferrari’s treatment of Williams and Lear is a very clear and concisely stated
view of just what Plato is trying to do with the analogy. Were Plato only
concerned with setting out the features of utopia (as part of an ideal or real
political project) he would hardly have set up the relations of city and soul asymmetrically,
with the account of the former generally being used to make sense of the
latter. But neither does this indicate that the ideal city of Callipolis is a
device whose ultimate purpose is simply to cast light on the ideal for the
constitution of the self.

What the analogy
shows is the necessary limitations of a politics of the soul in which reason’s task
is limited to lording it over worldly spiritedness and the baser appetites.
Ferrari claims that the compromise nature of even the best state is a pointer
to the compromise (limited) nature of embodiment itself. This is something that
the comparatively virtuous political quietism of Glaucon and Adeimantus fails
to take account of. Their separatism will not free the best part of the
soul from its worldly encrustation. Ferrari’s view is a substantial part of the
work that the city/soul analogy carries out is that it shows that the
philosopher must aim at something other and more than the compromise of even a
healthy soul.

Insofar as this
sounds like a higher, other-worldly form of puritanism (and to me it does) this
may go some way towards easing any concerns about the anti-puritanism he is
previously credited with. But even without this culminating appeal to the
other-worldliness of Platonism, Ferrari makes his case in a masterly fashion.
He preserves the pace of the four lectures on which the book is based and doesn’t
get bogged down in endless qualifications. For someone who is uneasy about the
danger of crediting Plato with too much consistency, Ferrari’s approach
may even hold out the promise of making sense of too many
difficulties. This is not a volume that would be of much use to anyone who
lacked a fairly close textual familiarity with the Republic, but as a
well-integrated text it is an admirable piece of work.

 

 

© 2006 Tony Milligan

 

Tony Milligan completed his
doctorate on Iris Murdoch at Glasgow University where he currently tutors in
philosophy. He also teaches philosophy with the Lifelong Learning Centre at the
University of Strathclyde.

Categories: Philosophical