Karen Margrethe Nielsen
[ Η κακία-διαστροφή του τυράννου:
Πλεονεξία και ανομία στην «Πολιτεία»
του Πλάτωνος ]
« The
Tyrant’s vice:
Pleonexia
and Lawlessness
in Plato’s
Republic”
Karen
Margrethe Nielsen,
THE TYRANT'S VICE: PLEONEXIA AND
LAWLESSNESS IN PLATO'S REPUBLIC
First published:
12 May 2020
Plato's portrait of the tyrant
in book IX of the Republic marks
the culmination of Socrates’ defense of the just life. He has been challenged
to explain how justice, because of its very self, benefits its possessor and
how injustice harms them (367d), and why ‘injustice is the worst thing a soul
can have in it’ and ‘justice is the greatest good’ (366e).
To explain the effects of
justice ‘because of its very self’, Socrates must determine what justice is –
its ‘nature and origins’ – and thereby show that we always have reason to
prefer the just life over the unjust, regardless of the rewards and reputations
that follow from being thought to be just. Since these rewards
are ‘simulator accessible’, an unjust person can enjoy them in full, if he
‘creates a façade of illusory virtue’ around himself and ‘deceives those who
come near’, while keeping behind the façade ‘the greedy and crafty fox of the
wise Archilochus’, as Adeimantus puts it (365c).
In this way, the unjust man can
reap the rewards of complete injustice while enjoying the benefits of a
reputation for perfect justice. He gets the best of both worlds, and can even
placate the gods with pleasant prayers and sacrifices: stories of Hades won't
stay his hand and deter him from committing the ‘whole of injustice’ (hê
holê adikia): kidnapping and enslaving the citizens and installing himself
as tyrant (344b-c).
The defense of the just life is
cast as choice: between the life of the perfectly just man with an unearned
reputation for the worst injustice, and the life of a perfectly unjust man with
an undeserved reputation for perfect justice. To vindicate his claim that
‘justice is the greatest good’, and ‘injustice the worst thing a soul can have
in it’, Socrates must show that the tyrant is the least happy of all in the
city, although he has committed the whole of injustice and secured the maximum
amount of power and wealth for himself.
What, exactly, is the psychology of vice for Plato?
How should we understand the psychological causes of tyranny, the worst form of
vice? This question is complicated, not because Plato omits to present a vivid
and terrifying portrait of the tyrant in book IX, but because the tyrant by
Plato's own lights is not unlike the rest of us, though he lacks fundamental
restraints and a sense of shame. In the absence of such restraints, he pursues
the aims that we all wish to pursue, but abandon for fear of the consequences.
And yet the tyrant pays a price – the highest prince, indeed – for his greed.
He is not just wicked, but out of his mind.
In the most extreme cases, the
tyrant becomes a beast, devoid of normative competence: he is
incapable of recognizing moral norms, and unable to conform his conduct to
moral knowledge. Rather than enjoying the greatest freedom and the purest
pleasure, the tyrannical soul ‘is least likely to do what it wants’ (hêkista
poiêsei ha an boulêthêi) claims Plato: ‘forcibly driven by the stings of a
dronish gadfly (hupo de oistrou aei hekomenê biai)’ the tyrant ‘will be
full of disorder and regret (tarachês kai metameleias mestê estai)’
(577e). His soul is ‘full of slavery and
unfreedom, with the most decent parts enslaved and with a small, the
maddest and most vicious, as their master’ (577d). He has neither friends nor pleasant pastimes to divert him from the
consequences of his ruthless pursuit of power. Instead, he lives in a prison of his own making, ‘filled with fears and
erotic loves of all kinds’ (579b):
‘Even though
his soul is really greedy for it, he's the only one in the whole city who can't
travel abroad or see the sights that other free people want to see. Instead, he
lives like a woman, mostly confined to his own house, and envying any other
citizen who happens to travel abroad and see something worthwhile’ (579b).
‘A real
tyrant is really a slave, compelled to engage in the worst kind of fawning,
slavery, and pandering to the worst kind of people. He's so far from satisfying
his desires in any way that it is clear – if one happens to know that one must
study his whole soul – that he is in the greatest need of most things and truly
poor. And, if indeed his state is like that of the city he rules, then, he's
full of fear, convulsions, and pains throughout his life’ (579d-e).
‘He is
inevitably envious, untrustworthy, unjust, friendless, impious, host and nurse
to every kind of vice, and […] his ruling makes him even more so. And because
of all these, he is extremely unfortunate and goes on to make those near him
like himself’ (580a).
‘Womanly’, ‘slavish’, ‘fearful’,
‘poor’: the tyrant's ambition has made him the opposite of the manly, masterly,
and fearless person he wants to be. While ostensibly the envy of all his
subjects – ‘a true man’ (hôs alêthôs anêr, 359b2) – his life is
impoverished by his own injustice.
In this paper, I wish to
understand the moral psychology of the tyrant, whether he leads a private life,
or ‘some misfortune provides him with the opportunity to become an actual
tyrant’ (578c). Why does the tyrant not get what he wants? Why is he enslaved
to his own appetites rather than completely free of restraint? How does the
tyrant's ‘erotic love’ differ from the appetites of his subjects? When Plato
says that the tyrant is ‘forcibly driven by the stings of a dronish gadfly (oistros)’,
how should we understand this ‘great winged drone’ (hupopteron kai megan kêphêna,
573a1) and the painful sting it inflicts on the tyrant's soul?
«Γοργίας»: το παράδοξο της τυραννίας
The paradoxes of tyranny are
also explored in the Gorgias.
Socrates here startles Polus by claiming that ‘orators and tyrants have the
least power in the city’, and that ‘they do just about nothing they want to do
(ouden gar poiein hôn boulontai hôs epos eipein), though they certainly
do whatever they see most fit to do (poiein mentoi hoti an autois doxêi
beltiston einai)’ (466d-e). Despite Polus's fawning admiration for
Callicles and other powerful men, his life will be frustrated if he follows in
their path.
Polus (Πώλος) appeals to the tyrant Archelaus (Αρχέλαος) to show that the unjust man is happy, provided he
gets away with the ‘whole of injustice’, in Thrasymachus’ words from Republic.
I.
Archelaus (Αρχέλαος) was the illegitimate son of the Macedonian's king's
brother by his slave, and so by law himself a slave, but in defiance of his
conventional status, he killed the legitimate heirs to the Macedonian throne
and installed himself as ruler. It is precisely because he has
committed the whole of injustice that he is now the happiest of all, claims
Polus.
If we believe Glaucon's (Γλαύκων) argument concerning Gyges’ ring [το δαχτυλίδι του Γύγη] (Republic II 359c-360d), we would all want to follow
Archelaus down the path of injustice if we only could. But because we are
too weak to commit injustice with impunity, we create laws and enter into
covenants that prevent us from committing injustice in exchange for protection
against others’ overreaching. What light can the Gorgias throw
on Plato's analysis of the tyrant's wretched life in the Republic and
the psychology of vice?
Readers have paid insufficient
attention to Plato's description of the tyrant as lawless (paranomos, Republic.
VII 539a cf. IX), and have portrayed him as an extreme kind of intemperate man
(akolastos), rather than as the embodiment of the worst kind of
injustice. While the tyrant's vice manifests itself though his unrestrained
pursuit of pleasure, it is caused by his lawless conception of the good.
The tyrant does not simply lack
temperance (sôphrosunê), as this virtue is described in book IV:
‘unanimity between the naturally better and worse parts of the city and soul
that the part with reason should rule, yielding desires that are simple,
measured, and in accordance with reason and correct belief’ (431b-432a). The tyrant embodies the worst kind of
injustice (adikia), and so he suffers the worst kind of psychological
disorder.
II
Vice for Plato (is a character
trait that comes in multiple varieties, each kind representing a falling away
from the harmonious ordering that characterizes the just man and the just
state. This corruption – which culminates in tyranny – has internal
psychological causes, as well as external social enabling conditions, in the
form of household and state dysfunction.
The tyrant's vice is the
ultimate expression of human nature unchecked by law, whether in its external
manifestation in the constitution, or its internal manifestations in the
soul. These psychological tendencies exist independently of the political
circumstances that allow the tyrannical man to ascend to power as a
self-appointed champion of the poor. Indeed, Plato maintains that lawless
desires are not restricted to tyrants: they are present in everyone.
At the start of book IX, Plato
observes that ‘some of our unnecessary pleasures and desires are lawless (tôn
mê anankaiôn hêdonôn te kai epithumiôn dokousi tines moi einai paranomoi)’
(571b4-5). He acknowledges that ‘they are probably present in everyone, but
they are held in check by the laws and the better desires in alliance with
reason’ (571b5-7). In a few, godlike people, lawless desires have been
eliminated entirely (b7-9), while in others, only a few weak ones remain. The
former are presumably the incorruptible people that Glaucon has in mind in book
II, when he qualifies his earlier claim that no one is
willingly just ‘apart from someone of a godlike character who is disgusted by
injustice or one who has gained knowledge and avoids injustice for that reason’
(366c). But such people are few and far between: they are either divine or
philosopher kings. And so most people –
even the best – will have some lawless desires latent in their souls. These desires are awakened in sleep, when
the rest of the soul – the rational, gentle, and ruling part – slumbers.
Then the ‘beastly and savage part, full of food and drink, casts off sleep, and
seeks to find a way to gratify itself’. At such a time, ‘there is nothing that
it dares not do – free of all control by shame or reason’ (571c). The
appetitive part doesn't shrink from having sex with anyone, whether man, god,
or beast – or even a mother. It is wholly without restraint, both in the object
of its pursuit and in its choice of means.
The only thing that stands between us and the
tyrant is the wakefulness of reason and the restrictions imposed by law. That is why someone who wishes to be
healthy and moderate should exercise proper sleep hygiene. Before he goes to
bed, he should ‘rouse his rational part and feast it on fine arguments and
speculations’. He should neither starve nor feast his appetites, so they remain
quiet and won't disturb reason with their pleasures and pains. He should soothe
the spirited part in the same way, for instance by not turning in while angry.
Appetite and spirit need to be quieted and reason roused – that's the only way
to ensure that our dreams aren't lawless and that the soul sees the truth in
its dreams. For the tyrant, there is no respite. He becomes while awake what he
used to become occasionally while asleep (574e). This happens when idlers in
the household chase out any remnant of his father's thrift, and the drone they
have implanted in his soul – his lazy desire for pleasure – acquires a sting:
‘When the other desires – filled with incense, myrrh,
wreaths, wine, and the other pleasures found in their company – buzz about (bombousai)
the drone (kêphên) [the leader of the soul], nurturing it and making it
grow as large as possible, they plant the seed of longing in it. Then this leader
of the soul (ho prostatês tês psuchês) adopts madness as its bodyguard
and becomes frenzied. If it finds any beliefs or desires in the man that are
thought to be good or that still have some shame, it destroys them and throws
them out, until it's purged him of moderation (heôs an kathêrêi sôphrosunês)
and filled him with imported madness (mania)’ (Rep. IX 573a-b)
The drone is a ‘leader of the
soul’ – it is put in position of ruler by the swarm of appetites and in turn
whips the appetites up into a frenzy, much as a leader of a democratic mob
stirs the crowd into action. The use of ‘prostatês’ suggests that the
drone represents the leading part of the soul – reason – when it adopts
indiscriminate and maximal satisfaction of appetitive desires as its principle.
Any desire and any belief that opposes the supremacy of this principle is
destroyed and expelled. In the absence of any true belief, madness, in the
sense of the deepest illusion about the good – protects the rule of the drone.
Once the traditional opinions
that he has held from childhood about what is fine or shameful have been purged
from the tyrant's soul, the lawless desires in the appetitive part are free to
seek enjoyment indiscriminately. The tyrannical son uses deceit and force to acquire
wealth from any source, lest he suffer greatly from the pain of unfilled
cravings. Observing the young tyrant, Plato notes that ‘just as the pleasures
that are latecomers outdo (pleon eichon) the older ones and steal away
their satisfactions, won't the man himself think that he deserves to outdo (pleon
eichein) his father and mother, even though he is younger than they are –
to take and spend his father's wealth when he has spent his own share?’ (Rep IX
574a). If they won't give it to him, he will steal it by deceitful means, and
if that doesn't work, he will seize it by force.
How do these ‘lawless’ desires
relate to what Glaucon in book II posited as the basic inclination of mankind,
namely pleonexia? In book II, Glaucon, playing devil's advocate, sought
to prove that no one does justice willingly, but only because they are too weak
to do injustice with impunity. Justice is like bad tasting medicine: we only
obey the law because we lack the power to do injustice without paying the
penalty.
Glaucon (Γλαύκων) says that we will see this most
clearly if we grant a just and an unjust person the freedom to do whatever they
like. We can then follow both of them and see where their desires will lead: we
will catch the just person red-handed, travelling down the same road as the
unjust. The reason for this, says Glaucon, is
‘The desire to
outdo others and get more and more (pleonexia). That's what
everyone's nature naturally pursues as good, but nature is forced by law
into the perversion of treating fairness with respect’ (Rep. II 359c)
Pleonexia is
not simply greed, if by ‘greed’ we mean acquisitiveness. It is a kind of greed
that does not just want to maximize the good for itself, but to do so at
others' expense, in defiance of fairness. It thus arises in matter of
distribution, where proportionate equality is at stake. That is why ‘the desire
to outdo others and get more and more’ is an apt explication of the Greek term.
The thought that the desire to
get more and more and to outdo others is fundamental to human psychology may
seem to paint a bleak picture of humanity. On this conception, a man is by
nature a wolf to another man (homo
homini lupus est). It is a conception that is rooted in Greek notion of
justice as ‘benefiting one's friends and harming one's enemies’ (Republic I
332a) with the only exception being that to the pleonectic man, there are no
true friends, only real or potential enemies. If this is right, we are by
nature not just greedy, but competitive. We don't just want to ‘get more and
more’, but we also want to outdo others. That is, we desire have more than our
fair share of divisible benefits while shirking our fair share of burdens.
Thus, we all struggle to get to the top, and seek the maximum satisfaction of
desires that have been maximized. Interestingly,
Plato nowhere challenges
Glaucon's assumption about human pleonexia, but rather takes it for
granted that this is, as it were, the default psychology of humankind in the
absence of law. While perfectly rational philosophers will have tamed the beast
within, it is still lurking in their souls, otherwise the proscription of
private property would be unnecessary: philosophers would be completely immune
to the charms of Gyges’ ring. As it is, Plato thinks that ‘our dreams make it clear that there is a dangerous, wild, and lawless
form of desire in everyone (deinon ti kai agrion kai anomon epithumiôn
eidos hekastôi enesti), even in those of us who seem to be entirely
moderate and measured’ (IX 572b).
III
If Glaucon's analysis of human
nature is right, we are all driven by the desire to outdo others and get more
and more. This does not mean that our desires are inflamed of necessity: in a
city that is well governed, we will only pursue pleasures that are beneficial, and
not those that are harmful. But this requires restraint and moderation, and
does not come naturally.
In book VIII, Socrates clarifies
a distinction that surfaced already on the foundation of the ‘healthy’ and
‘fevered’ cities in book II between necessary and non-necessary desires and
pleasures. Those appetites we (1) can't desist from and (2) whose satisfaction
benefit us are necessary, since we are ‘by nature compelled to satisfy them’
(558d). Those we could get rid of if we practiced from youth are non-necessary
provided that their presence leads to no good or the opposite.
The desire to eat to the point
of health and well-being is natural and necessary. Bread, for instance, is
natural and necessary on both counts: it's beneficial, and unless the desire
for bread is satisfied, we die. Delicacies are necessary, to the extent that
enjoying them is beneficial and promotes our wellbeing. The denizens of the
city of pigs do not lead a joyless life, but enjoy measured pleasures. As
Socrates describes them, they ‘put their honest cakes and loaves on reeds or
clean leaves, and, reclining on beds strewn with yew and myrtle, they feast
with their children, drink their wine, and crowned with wreaths, hymn the gods.
They enjoy sex with one another but bear no more children than their resources
allow, lest they fall into either poverty or war’ (372b-c). This lifestyle is
sustainable, and does not lead to disease or competition for resources. It is
also utterly unrealistic for people like us.
Our inborn pleonexia makes
us seek pleasures that harm both the body and reason and moderation of the
soul. Thus, the cravings of actual people are for non-necessary pleasures. In
the city with a fever, the citizens do not live in peace and good health, for
they indulge their desire for ‘all sorts of delicacies, perfumed oils, incense,
prostitutes and pastries’. Their enjoyment of prostitutes and pastries,
together with a newfound love of meat, create a greater need for doctors than
before, and so the city with a fever fills up with a class of professional
citizens catering to the needs of the fevered population: beauticians, poets,
choral dancers, chefs, cooks and swineherds. To finance their indulgence,
the citizens ‘surrender themselves to the endless acquisition of money’ and
‘overstep the limit of their necessities’ (373d). The appetitive desires that
lead to the pursuit of such luxuries are highly specific versions of natural
desires for food, sex and drink: Syracusean cuisine, Sicilian-style dishes, and
Corinthian girlfriends, to name a few of the delights that Socrates proscribes
for trainee guardians (Republic. III 404d). Such non-necessary desires
could be restrained without hurting our chances of leading a healthy and
fulfilled life. Indeed, we would be better off without them.
In book IX, Plato further
subdivides the non-necessary desires into lawful and lawless.
Lawless desires are not just desires for things that threaten the
health of our body and the moderation of our soul, but specifically for things
that are shameful in themselves insofar as they break fundamental norms and
conventions. Though Plato does not offer a firm criterion for when a desire
counts as lawless, his examples are evocative, and suggest that lawless desires
are desires for incest, cannibalism, murder, and other proscribed activities.
Sleeping with one's mother, or seeking satisfaction with anyone else at all,
whether man, beast or god, is lawless, as is foul murder and consumption of
forbidden food and drink – like human flesh or blood.
Such desires are the ones that
Aristotle classify as beastly in EN VII 5 – not because they
cannot be resisted – Aristotle envisions that some beastly characters, like the
tyrant Phalaris of Acragas [o τύραννος Φάλαρις του Ακράγαντα], could restrain his desire to eat a child or for some
unnatural sexual pleasure (EN VII 5, 1149a14-16) – but because these desires
are unnatural in addition to being non-necessary. We do not
have to agree with Aristotle's exact list of unnatural behaviors to understand
the underlying thought – he throws sex between males in with cannibalism and
trichotillomania – nor do we have to agree with his criterion for calling a
state or condition bestial. It is still possible to discern a general principle
underlying his categorization. In each case, the desire in question is one that
arises through disease, bad habits, or congenital conditions that run counter
to the norms of nature, as Aristotle perceives them.
Lawless desires as Plato describes them break apart social bonds and creates enmity and strife in the city
by making the citizens pursue satisfaction indiscriminately and in defiance of
norms. But unlike Aristotle, Plato takes such paranomic desires to be part of
normal human psychology. Lawless non-necessary pleasures aren't simply
excessive, since deriving excessive or highly refined pleasure from food, sex
or drink still involves objects that are natural for human beings. They are
rather derived from acts or objects that are shameful and lawless in
themselves. There's no such thing as sleeping with your mother at the right
time, in the right way, for the right result, to paraphrase Aristotle. In each
case, pursuing lawless pleasures means transgressing natural boundaries. If we
believe Plato, that's an impulse that lurks deep in the souls even of
law-abiding citizens.
How does the greed displayed by
the denizens of the fevered city turn into the lawless desires of the tyrant?
To answer this question, we need to understand how indulging our limitless
desire for unnecessary pleasures unleashes a tyrannical pursuit of lawless and
unnatural pleasures. The ‘limitless’ nature of non-necessary desires suggests
that they cannot be satisfied. Indeed, on Callicles’ [Καλλικλής] conception of the appetites, satisfaction of all
desires would put an end to enjoyment, and so the tyrant will cultivate
desires, allowing his appetites to grow as large and numerous as possible while
ensuring that he has the power to satisfy them (Gorgias 491e). This
is the best life, according to Callicles. Whenever one desire has been sated, we ought to
want more, and we ought to be constantly looking for greater and more extreme
sources of enjoyment. Once released from restraint, appetitive desires are, in
a word, restless.
This restlessness manifests as
a search for new and increasingly bizarre sources of pleasure: ones that exceed
past sources in intensity and duration. In the case of the emerging tyrant,
Plato notes that ‘pleasures that are latecomers outdo the older ones and steal
away their satisfactions’ (IX 574a). Those who indulge their non-necessary
appetites will quickly adapt, and need new thrills to experience the pleasure
they crave, since old sources no longer deliver. It's not just individual
people who ‘outdo’ each other, in other words, but also pleasures themselves.
Plato thus discerns an internal dynamic that leads us to seek new objects of
enjoyment in place of old, and where the pursuit of gratification leads us from
necessary and healthy delicacies, to unnecessary ones, and eventually to the
pursuit of lawless pleasures. In the absence of rational restraint and a sense
of shame, we will start enjoying objects that are neither necessary nor natural
for human beings. This suggests that human pleonexia has the
potential to take us all the way to the tyrant's lawless life.
It is instructive at this point to contrast Plato's pleonectic account
of human nature with Thomas Hobbes’ account of human desire in the Leviathan. Hobbes ‘puts for the
general inclination of all mankind a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power
after power, that ceaseth onely in death’ – where the power of man is ‘his
present means, to obtain some future apparent Good’ (ch. X ‘Of Power, Worth,
Dignity, Honour, and Worthinesse’, p. 62). While Hobbes clearly learnt a
thing or two from Glaucon's account of the nature and origins of justice
in Republic II, his analysis of this ‘perpetuall and restlesse
desire’ diverges subtly from Plato's analysis of human nature. In Chapter 11 of
the first part of the Leviathan (‘On Man’), Hobbes rejects the
idea that human desire can ever be satisfied, which certainly seems like an
acknowledgement that we are pleonectic. But Hobbes’ explanation for why we seek
more and more powers (broadly speaking) differs from Glaucon's:
‘the Felicity of this life,
consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis
ultimus (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in
the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose
Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.
Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another,
the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later. The cause
whereof is, That the object of mans desire, is not to enjoy once onely,
and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future
desire (…) So that I put for the generall inclination of all mankind,
a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in
Death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more
intensive delight, that he has already attained to; or that he cannot be
content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means
to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more’ (p.
70).
To Hobbes’ mind, then, human
acquisitiveness and ambition is not a sign that we seek to ‘outdo others and
get more and more’, as Glaucon posits, but rather an expression of the fear
that we shall not have quiet enjoyment of the powers that we already have. In
short, we lack assurance for the future. Hobbes thus reads the Republic through
a Protestant lens: people in the state of nature reason like Plato's oligarch,
hoarding resources as a bulwark against an uncertain future. Had they been
assured of future enjoyment, they could have been content with a ‘moderate
power’. But since they can't secure the means to live well, their desires will
be ‘perpetuall and restlesse’. To Plato's mind, we all seek more and more
because we want to do better than our fellow citizens, not because we are
afraid we will lose what little we have.
The competitive aspect of pleonexia and
its drive towards preeminence plays a crucial part in the emergence of the
tyrant. While his pursuit of appetitive pleasure drives the budding tyrant to
burn through his parents' wealth, and while the need for money makes him break
the law, the tyrant's lawbreaking is not primarily instrumental. For the
tyrant, breaking the law and casting off all norms and conventions that
restrain him is a way of asserting his power, and so to rise above everyone
else – citizens he considers competitors in the pursuit of power. The tyrant is
driven by appetites strengthened by erôs and madness, but
unlike his father, the democratic man, he would not be content to have his
appetites fully catered for, since that is in principle, if not always in
practice, compatible with leaving as much and as good for others. To the
tyrant's mind, any restriction on his greed is an affront: a sign that he is
not yet supreme. It is only when he is above the law – a rule-maker rather than
a rule-taker – that the tyrant will have achieved the complete freedom from
restraint that to his tyrannical mind makes him ‘like a God among humans’, not
subject to the laws that according to Thrasymachus make the lives of the ruled
wretched.
IV
It is helpful at this point to
consider the tyrant's genealogy, to see how he differs from his close
relatives. The tyrant is fifth generation in a family in decline, each son
displaying a character that is inferior to that of his father. These increasingly
corrupted characters reflect the shortcomings of earlier generations, as well
as the misfortunes suffered by them in the city. They also reflect the social
conditions in the city – the presence of strife and enmity, or the presence of
a class of corrupting idlers: ‘drones’ as Plato calls them.
That there are four types of vice is highlighted
already at the end of book IV.
Having concluded the provisional analysis of justice as inner harmony, Socrates
observes that this should occasion an inquiry into ‘how many forms of vice there are’. ‘From the vantage point we've
reached in our argument, it seems to me that there is one form of virtue and an
unlimited number of forms of vice, four of which are worth mentioning’ (445c).
Since ‘it seems likely’ that there are ‘as many types of soul as there are
specific forms of political constitutions’ – namely five souls and five
constitutions – they must study each in turn, starting with the best.
The analysis is delayed,
however, while Socrates defends his radical proposals for the guardians' education
in books V-VII, and only picked up again at the start of book VIII.
The best constitution is the one
ruled by one outstanding person or a group of outstanding people: kingship or aristocracy. If this is the
correct form of government, all the others are deficient in some way.
In descending order, the vicious
constitutions and the vicious character states are timocracy and the timocrat, oligarchy
and the oligarchic man, democracy
and the democratic man, and tyranny
and the tyrant.
The tyrant, who embodies the
worst kind of vice, is thus at the end of a sliding scale of depravity.
Aristotle echoes Plato's sentiment about the multiplicity of vice and the
singularity of virtue. However, Plato differs from Aristotle in thinking
of vices as types of constitutions rather than excessive or deficient states
flanking the virtuous mean. The reasons are complex, but the fact that the
worst kind of vice is concerned with lawless desires suggests that there could
be no appropriate way of enjoying them, and so – by Aristotelian standards – no
virtuous mean of which tyranny would be the excessive state.
Plato identifies different psychopathological
causes for each of the steps of the descent into tyranny. There may be an
unlimited number of forms of vice, but the causes of discrete kinds are still
intelligible and amenable to classification. Virtue – in the form of justice –
is rule by reason, and vice the corruption of rational rule.
This corruption of reason
starts with the appearance of the timocrat,
a lover of physical training and hunting, as well as exploits in war. He is the
son of an aristocrat in a city that isn't well governed, and ends up torn
between the influence of his father, and the rest of the household, which pulls
him away from moderation and virtue. His aristocratic father leads a private
life and doesn't fight back when he is insulted, whether in private or in
public in the courts. As a result, he is put at a disadvantage. The timocrat's
ambitious mother is angered by her husband's diffidence and blames him for it:
‘she tells her son that his father is unmanly, too easy-going, and all the
other things that women repeat over and over again in such cases’ (549d). As a
result, the timocrat is pulled in contrary directions: ‘His father nourishes
the rational part of his soul and makes it grow; the other nourish the spirited
and appetitive parts’ (550b). What the timocrat comes to realize is that ‘those
in the city who do their own work are called fools and held to be of little
account’, and so he starts craving money as a means to self-assertion. Since he
is not a bad man by nature, but merely keeps bad company, Plato argues that he
settles in the middle, and surrenders the rule of himself to the middle part –
the victory-loving and spirited part. He becomes honour loving and proud, and
subordinates the search for truth to a spirited pursuit of positions of high
office. However, whether we achieve or retain high office depends more on those
who confer such honours than those on which they are conferred, and so a
fundamentally decent timocrat will eventually ‘crash against the city like a
ship against a reef, spilling out all his possessions, even his life’ (553a).
The oligarch is the timocrat's son. He watches with alarm as his father
suffers a reversal of fortune. The mature timocrat sticks to his principles
despite public disapproval, placing honour above all else. When his enemies
bear false witness against him in court, he ends up put to death or exiled or
disenfranchised. The oligarch, at first inclined to follow in his father's
footsteps, now sees him lose everything: ‘humbled by poverty, he turns greedily
to making money, and, little by little, saving and working, he amasses property’
(553b). The oligarch desires money, not as a means to the satisfaction of his
desires, but rather as an insurance policy against the vicissitudes of fortune.
He ‘places the appetitive and money-making part on the throne, setting it up as
a great king within himself, adorning it with golden tiaras and collars and
girding it with Persian swords’ (553c), not because he seeks pleasure from the
satisfaction of his appetitive desires, which he seeks to keep minimal and
subordinate to the overarching goal of amassing wealth. The oligarchic man is a
miser; he wants money for the power and security that it represents when it
remains unspent, not for the pleasure it secures when squandered.
In this regard, the oligarchic
man and his son, the democrat, are both governed by their appetites, but in
different ways. The oligarch is a fearful man, he makes a profit from
everything and hoards it, and keep his ‘dronish appetites’ in check, though
they are present in his soul because of his lack of education. He holds his evil
appetites in check ‘not by persuading them that it is better not to act on them
or taming them with arguments, but by compulsion and fear, trembling for his
other possessions’ (554c). Thus, he is not averse to spending other people's
money to satisfy his appetite for luxuries, but he will not contribute his own
resources, even for fine ends. Consequently, though his better desires
generally control the worse, he is not free from internal civil war, for his
‘dronish appetites’ for luxury are reined in by his thrift, not by a conviction
that they shouldn't be satisfied. His son, the democratic man, shares his
father's view that it is fine to spend other people's money on luxuries, and
so, taking his father's lesson to heart, he helps himself to his father's
fortune.
The democratic man is reared in a ‘miserly and uneducated way’ by an
oligarchic father. He is torn between his father's frugal principles and the
life of debauchery promised by his friends. When he tastes the honey of the
‘drones’ – hedonistic idlers – and associates with people who can provide
‘every variety of multicolored pleasure in every sort of way’ (559d), this
turns him from an oligarchic to a democratic orientation. At first, he suffers
from internal strife between the oligarchic principles inside him and the
unnecessary desires nurtured by his new friends: ‘sometimes, the democratic
party yields to the oligarchic, so that some of the young man's appetites are
overcome, others are expelled, a kind of shame arises in his soul, and order is
restored’ (560a). However, since the ‘citadel of the young man's soul’ – his
rational part – is ‘empty of knowledge, fine ways of living, and words of
truth’, his appetitive desires soon grow numerous and strong, and return to
occupy the citadel of his soul. The democratic man then returns to the ‘lotus
eaters’ – or idling ‘drones’ – and lives with them openly. Having persuaded him
that measured and orderly expenditure is boorish and mean, the lotus eaters
join forces with his many useless desires, and expel the thrifty part of his
soul. They ‘return insolence, anarchy extravagance, and shamelessness from
exile in a blaze of torch-light, wreathing them in garlands and accompanying
them with a vast chorus of followers’ (560e). Revaluing all values, they call
insolence good breeding, anarchy freedom, extravagance magnificence, and
shamelessness courage, inverting the relationship between virtues and vices
that the democratic man inherited from his father.
When
the ‘great tumult within him’ has spent itself, the frenzy of his youth dies
down. The democratic man then puts all pleasures on an equal footing,
‘surrendering rule over himself to whichever desire comes along, as if it were
chosen by lot. When that one satisfied, he will surrender rule to another, not
disdaining any but satisfying them all equally’ (561b). His overarching
principle is that all pleasures and equal and must be valued equally – there is
no distinction between pleasures belonging to fine an good desires and
pleasures belonging to shameful and base desires that could justify pursuing
and valuing the former and restraining the latter:
‘And so he
lives on, yielding day to day to the desire at hand: Sometimes he drinks
heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and
is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he is
idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what
he takes to be philosophy. He often engages in politics, leaping up from his
seat and saying and doing whatever comes into his mind. If he happens to admire
soldiers, he is carried in that direction, if money-makers, in that one. There
is neither order nor necessity in his life, but he calls it pleasant, free, and
blessedly happy, and he follows it for as long as he lives’ (Republic. VIII,
561c6-d7)
The democrat thus levels all
natural distinctions between his necessary and unnecessary desires, treating
them all as equally valuable and worthy of being satisfied. As a result, he
becomes a complex and ‘multi-colored’ man, full of all sorts of characters,
with no order or necessity. His enjoyment of the philosophical or political
life is short lived, a mere simulacrum. True philosophers seek to know the good
with their entire being, putting themselves in order and structuring the city
into a harmonious whole. They don't treat philosophical puzzles as a pastime.
To be a philosopher is to subordinate all desires to the desire to know the
truth, so that no desires swim against the philosophical current: ‘...as Plato
notes in the stream-analogy in book VI, ‘when someone's desires flow towards
learning and everything of that sort’ he is concerned with the pleasures of the
soul itself by itself’, and ‘abandons those that come from the body – if indeed
he is a true philosopher and not merely a counterfeit one’ (VI 485d). The
democratic man contains a multitude of characters, then, not because he at
times has the true character of the politician, and at other times the true
character of the philosopher, but because he sometimes engages in activities
that mimic the serious commitments of each. He treats philosophical discussion
as a pleasant diversion, rather than a way of life.
Each of these three – the
timocrat, oligarch, and democrat – are ‘mixed types’, torn between different
conceptions of the fine and noble. They are thus not single-minded in their
pursuit of honour, money, and non-necessary pleasures, but rather veer between
two commitments (the timocrat, the oligarch) or flit all over the place (the
democratic man). In this respect, they all differ from the aristocratic man and
the tyrant, who show a firm commitment to a single goal and thus display
greater unity of purpose than any of the other characters.
V
The tyrant's pursuit of pleasure is led by the great winged drone in
his soul: erotic love. The drone acts as a leader of the mob, rousing his
appetites and promising that they will achieve satisfaction without restraint
under its leadership. If what I have argued is correct, the drone, as a leader
in the soul, represents reason's endorsement of the indiscriminate pursuit of
gratification. The leader unifies and protects the appetites against the
restraint of shame and law, and kills off any beliefs or desires that oppose
the indiscriminate pursuit of gratification. These appetites ‘need many things
to satisfy them’ (573d): ‘feasts, revelries, luxuries, and girlfriends, and
that sort of thing’ (573d), making the tyrant needy. At least initially, he
pursues the same kind of pleasures that the democratic man goes in for in
youth, and that he also enjoys, intermittently, in old age.
Plato describes the life of the
democratic man as ‘neither slavish nor lawless (oute aneleutheron oute
paranomon)’ (572d2). The democrat has a residual sense of shame, and
sometimes restricts his appetites for the sake of his health – perhaps he does
dry January or commits to not seeing his Corinthian girlfriend for a while,
until he gets bored, and seeks new diversions. His son, the tyrant, ends up
lacking even the most residual sense of shame when erôs assumes
command of his soul.
There is a long tradition in
Greek literature for associating tyrants
with luxury and debauchery. It is tempting to think that the tyrant's
vice is ultimate an extreme form of intemperance (akolasia), and that
the tyrant's reasons for pursuing increasingly bizarre pleasures is the
satisfaction that these objects hold out. Thus, he really relishes the taste of
human blood and the satisfactions of sex with animals, gods, and parents. This
analysis obscures the overarching argument of the Republic, and
Plato’s insistence that the tyrant
embodies the worst form of injustice. His
injustice consists in his unwillingness to recognize any law that restrains his
freedom: the very laws that make human society possibly by imposing limits on
our exercise of power. The tyrant’s superior stealth and force ensures that
he won’t be punished if he violates the norms and principles that ground human
societies. He is an outlaw, and establishes his superiority precisely by
committing the acts of injustice with impunity.
This suggest that it is the
breaking of the rule rather than what is achieved by breaking the rule that
attracts the tyrant. The tyrant doesn't use political power as a means to the
satisfaction of his desires, but rather seeks political power as a an
expression of his superiority, expressed by his untrammeled pursuit of
pleasures that are prohibited by the laws that bind others. He can do whatever
he wants with impunity: that's why he is superior to those he rules, the truly
simple minded.
If
this is right, Arruzza does not quite capture the etiology of the tyrant's
pursuit of gratification when she claims that
‘[t]he tyrant is incapable
of governing himself, and hence is a slavish figure, because he is
driven by his eroticized appetites rather than by the autonomous judgments
of his rational part. His relationship to political power is
instrumental to the futile attempt to satisfy his insatiable appetites, as
ruling others is taken as the ultimate means to unlimited enjoyment. And
precisely for this reason, his subjects are turned into his slaves and
instruments of enjoyment’ (Arruzza p. 182–3).
[ Cinzia Arruzza, A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in
Plato's Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
See also Annie
Larivée, ‘Eros Tyrannos: Alcibiades as the Model of the Tyrant in book IX of
the Republic’, The International Journal of the Platonic
Tradition, vol. 6 (1), (2012), pp. 1-26.
For
Alcibiades’ lawless character, see Thucydides, History of the
Peloponnesian War, VI 15, 3-4. Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades contains
observations that conform to Plato's portrait, though it would be a mistake to
think that Plato is trying to capture any particular historical figure in his
portrait of the tyrant. About the young Alcibiades, Plutarch reports ‘But all
this statecraft and eloquence and lofty purpose and cleverness was attended
with great luxuriousness of life, with wanton drunkenness and lewdness (peri
potous kai erôtas hubrismata), with effeminacy in dress,—he would trail
long purple robes through the market place,—and with prodigal expenditures. He
would have the decks of his triremes cut away that he might sleep more softly,
his bedding being slung on cords rather than spread on the hard planks. He had
a golden shield made for himself, bearing no ancestral device, but an Eros
armed with a thunderbolt. The reputable men of the city looked on all these
things with loathing and indignation, and feared his contemptuous and lawless
spirit (paranomia). They thought such conduct as his tyrant-like and
monstrous.’ (XVI). As a young man, he is said to have inflicted gratuitous
violence on his elders, just for the fun of it: ‘He once gave Hipponicus a blow
with his fist — Hipponicus, the father of Callias, a man of great reputation
and influence owing to his wealth and family — not that he had any quarrel with
him, or was a prey to anger, but simply for the joke of the thing, on a
wager with some companions’ (VIII). ]
While it is true that the
tyrant cannot make ‘autonomous judgments’, if by this we mean judgments that
are responsive to the good, the alternatives are not (a) being driven by one's
appetites or (b) being governed by the autonomous judgments of reason. For the
tyrant is governed by reason, but his rational part does not do its own work
well, by making him know the good. Instead, it adopts indiscriminate and
maximal satisfaction as an end. Reason is not simply instrumental in the
tyrant: it sets his end. What makes the tyrant's pursuit of pleasure different
from the young democrat's is that the tyrant's rational part, represented by
the drone, endorses sensuous gratification as an aim, and deliberately removes
all residual obstacles in the soul. He is thus governed by corrupted reason:
his vice has destroyed any good principle in his soul, and replaced it with
Calliclean hedonism. Since the lawless desires were already present in the
tyrant's soul, the removal of restraint, and the resulting state of madness, unleashes
his paraphilia and murderous desires.
Erôs and madness are not just names for
the tyrant's appetites, but describe the tyrant's unified commitment to his
ends. In this regard, Dominic Scott notes, the tyrant's erôs resembles
the philosopher's: both have a single-minded and unwavering commitment to their
end. It is therefore not the fact that the tyrant is dominated by erôs that
makes him wretched: philosophers too have an erotic attraction to truth and
knowledge, and love the whole of it, rather than a part. What erôs adds
is unity of purpose: the tyrant is now wholly committed to the life of
debauchery, and will shy away from nothing in his pursuit of power. Nor
does erôs as such have a distinct object. The references
to erôs do not introduce a fourth category of desire, but
rather highlights a particular way of seeking the objects of desire, whether
the desire is rational or appetitive. If, like the tyrant, your dominant
desires are appetitive, erôs makes you pursue appetitive end
exclusively and with determination. If, like the philosopher, you desire truth
and knowledge, erôs will lead you to pursue this aim
exclusively and with determination, setting all other concerns aside. This is
already hinted at in Plato's description of the true philosopher in book V.
Here he teases Glaucon by comparing the lover of wisdom to a lover of boys, and
notes:
‘It isn't appropriate for an
erotically inclined man to forget that all boys in the boom of youth pique the
interest of a lover of boys and arouse him and that all seem worthy of his care
and pleasure. Or isn't that the way you people behave to fine and beautiful
boys? You praise a snub-nosed one as cute, a hook-nosed one you say is regal,
one in between is well-proportioned, dark ones look manly, and pale ones are
children of the gods. And as for a honey-colored boy, do you think that this
very term is anything but the euphemistic coinage of a lover who found it easy
to tolerate sallowness, provided it was accompanied by the bloom of youth?’ (…)
(474d3-474e5)
The observation about Glaucon as
a lover of boys generalizes to all lovers: when someone desires something as a
lover of it, he desires everything of that kind, not one part of it and not
another. That's why a lover of wisdom – the philosopher – doesn't desire one
part of wisdom rather than another, but the whole thing. It is possible,
however, to be a lover of something without being driven to pursue it by erôs. Erôs is
an obsessive pursuit of the object of your desire. Erôs is a tyrant
because it makes you pursue one goal exclusively and obsessively. It seeks
omnipotence like a tyrant. But it does not have a distinct object for Plato;
rather erôs describes the way in which one
pursues an object of desire. Erotic desire is not a category alongside the
other types of desire that Plato identifies in the Republic.
The tyrant thus seeks to have
his way. In so doing, he simultaneously defies normal relations of ruler and
ruled, attempting to master his own father and mother, in blatant violation of
duties of filial piety. Lawlessness manifests in acts that hubristically
defy the sacred and social order. Breaking into people's houses and looting
temples shows complete disregard for what is his own and what is someone
else's, of what we owe each other and what we owe the gods. As Scott puts it,
lawless desires involve ‘transgression of boundaries that would tend to destroy
the very possibility of human relationships, family, and society, not just
destabilize them (cf. 580a3–4)’ (p. 139): They are, he says ‘blind to the
sacred as well as to the social, and the tyrant has cut himself off equally
from both’ (p. 139).
This strikes me as a concise
description of lawlessness as Plato describes it. But the drive to lawlessness
is not just a byproduct of the tyrant's erotic and single-minded pursuit of
pleasure. He does not commit acts of incest, cannibalism, murder, and
bestiality simply because such acts help him satisfy his non-necessary desires
(it's in any case hard to see how bestiality could be instrumental in this
way). Nor does he necessarily derive great pleasure from sleeping with his own
mother (however lovely, mom is presumably past her prime). The point of these
acts is not enjoyment of the object of appetite, but the transgression of law
itself. Such acts express his complete defiance of any authority, whether in
the form of human or divine laws. The tyrant can tolerate no master and seeks
to outdo everyone, and so he cannot be subject to the same laws that bind
citizens together in a political community or the laws that govern the
relations between father and son or man and god. His defiance of such laws –
and the fact that he gets away with it – is what establishes his dominant
position, and this defiance is expressed through his complete freedom from any
bonds, even the very bonds that make a community possible. The tyrant is
therefore defined by his pursuit of lawless pleasures. They
express his most deep-seated convictions and his self-conception as a man who
is subject to none and master of all. We thus see how the pleonectic drive that
Glaucon posited as the basic inclination of mankind back in book II naturally
leads us to lawlessness when reason and our sense of shame have been entirely
removed. The erotic love that the drones implant unleash forces that were
already present in our souls. It gives birth to madness, and this madness is a
kind of hubris: wanting to rule over the gods, and recognizing no
limit to one's power.
It would therefore be a mistake
to attempt to shame the tyrant by exposing his behavior for what it is. The
tyrant asserts his dominance precisely by acting in defiance of moral and legal
norms, and when he is called out for his bad behavior, he simply bares his
teeth. If justice is ‘high-minded simplicity’, as Thrasymachus says, and
injustice more masterly than justice, then breaking the law is really nothing
to be ashamed of – provided that you can get away with it. Power – not
satisfaction of desires – is the fundamental motive behind the tyrant's vice.
In violating the laws – and so in acting lawlessly – he reveals his true
nature.
VI
I have argued that the tyrant's
lawlessness is not a coincidental consequence of his ruthless pursuit of
pleasure and luxury, but rather the way in which he asserts his power and
unwillingness to be bound by normal laws and conventions. The tyrant is thus
opposed to the rule of law, at least as these laws apply to him: he places
himself above the law. By committing ‘the whole of injustice’ and installing
himself as a ruler with unlimited powers, he demonstrates that he is by nature
entitled to the greatest share of divisible goods in the city.
For the tyrant, fair
distribution is relative to worth, but he measures worth in power, expressed
through superior stealth and force. His stealth is displayed in acts of
dissimulation, when he presents himself as the champion of the poor, as well as
in the ruthless plots by which he dispatches his enemies. His force is
displayed in acts of gruesome violence that will deter any potential enemy from
challenging his rule. The tyrant is thus unjust, not because his appetites are
limitless and without restraint (that would make him intemperate by Plato's
lights), but because he thinks he ought to have whatever he wants, because he
deserves it. His lack of restraint in breaking fundamental norms against
murder, incest and cannibalism, is a symptom of his disdain for the
prohibitions and inhibitions that restrain the weak. While acts or murder and
savagery may be instrumental on some occasions, and while the tyrant may choose
them as a means to an end (the ascent to and defense of power), this is not his
main reason for engaging in such acts.
Richard Kraut captures the tyrant's injustice in a note that has
reference to Aristotle's account of injustice in the narrow sense, but that
seems equally applicable to the mindset of the tyrannical soul in Plato's Republic:
‘When someone exercises the
vice of pleonexia, he does so by violating a law or rule that is
generally observed in his community. He regards such rules as illegitimate
restraints on his behavior. He has no admiration for his fellow law-abiding
citizens, but regards them as mere fools and weaklings. The pleasure he takes
in getting the better of them derives from his general contemptuousness toward
the law and those who respect the law. His injustice is the expression of his
sense of superiority towards others, and the pleasure he takes in his act
derives not only from gaining some good (money, honor, safety) but from the
satisfaction he takes in expressing his contempt for others’
As Kraut notes, ‘[s]omeone who is unjust in
the narrow sense does not regard the suffering of others as a cost [of doing
unjust acts], but as part of the appeal of acting unjustly’ (p. 139).
The tyrant is the quintessentially unjust person, someone who is not
simply soft or self-indulgent, but who treats his share of benefits as a
measure of his worth. The ethical outlook of the tyrant – whether in word or in
deed – is succinctly summed up by Callicles when he contrasts what is just by
nature with what is just by law in the Gorgias. It is just by
nature, he claims, that the superior should both rule over and have a greater
share than his inferiors:
‘The people who institute laws are the weak and the
many. So they institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and
their own advantage in mind. As a way of frightening the more powerful among
men, the ones who are capable of having a greater share, out of getting a
greater share than they, they say that getting more than one's share is
‘shameful’ and ‘unjust’, and that doing what's unjust is nothing but trying to
get more than one's fair share. I think they like getting an equal share, since
they are inferior. These are the reasons why trying to get a greater share than
most is said to be unjust and shameful by law and why they call it doing what's
unjust. But I believe that nature itself reveals that it's a just thing for the
better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the worse man
and the less capable man. Nature shows that this is so in many places; both
among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that
this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the
inferior and have a greater share than them. For what sort of justice did
Xerxes go by when he campaigned against Greece, or his father when he
campaigned against Scythia? Countless other such examples could be mentioned. I
believe that these men do these things in accordance with the nature of what is
just – yes, by Zeus, in accordance with the law of nature, and presumably not
with the one we institute. We mold the best and the most powerful among us,
taking them while they are still young, like lion cubs, and with charms and
incantations we subdue them into slavery, telling them that one is supposed to
get no more than his fair share, and that's what's admirable and just. But
surely, if a man who is equal to it arises, he will shake off, tear apart, and
escape all of this, he will trample underfoot our documents, our tricks and
charms, and all out laws that violate nature. He, the slave, will rise up and
be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature will shine forth (exelampsen
to tês phuseôs dikaion)’ (Gorgias 483b-84b).
Contrast this with Hobbes’ conception of natural law in the Leviathan.
Hobbes argues that natural law commands the acknowledgement of ‘naturall
equalitie’, and so recommends the making of peace among equals:
‘If in this case, at the
making of Peace, men require for themselves, that which they would not have to
be granted to others, they do contrary to the precedent law, that commandeth
the acknowledgement of naturall equalitie, and therefore also against the law
of Nature. The observers of this law, are those we call Modest, and the
breakers Arrogant Men. The Greeks call the violation of this law πλεονεξία; that is, a desire of more than their share (Hobbes Leviathan Ch.
XV of Other Lawes of Nature).
This, in effect, is the
conventional conception of justice defended by Glaucon in book II. If
Thrasymachus is right, it is an inherently unstable agreement, since the
assumption of natural equality is false, making democracy naturally prone to a
descent into tyranny. On this point, at least, he and Plato agree.
VII
I started my discussion by observing the paradoxes of tyranny. The
tyrannical man is full of disorder and regret, slavery and unfreedom. Plato
adds to the list of characteristics the claim that the tyrant is in the
greatest need of most things and truly poor, he is ‘inevitably envious,
untrustworthy, unjust, friendless, impious, host and nurse to every kind of
vice, and […] his ruling makes him even more so. And because of all of these,
he is extremely unfortunate and goes on to make those near him like himself’
(580a). The list of characteristics drives home the tyrant's wretched
predicament. Why should we think that Plato is right to attribute these
characteristics to the tyrant? After all, he seems to be capable of securing
the objects of his appetite, however bizarre, and while he may be poor in
spirit, he surely makes up for it in wealth. Why, then, is the tyrant full of
regret? And though he may make enemies easily, and cannot trust that his allies
are friends rather than sycophants, it seems odd to claim that the tyrant is
necessarily friendless: he is certainly capable of entertaining a crowd.
Why friendless? Why full of
regrets? And why does the tyrant not get what he wants? The world is at his
beck and call. These startling claims are easier to understand when we see the
tyrant's true objective, namely to outdo others. Friendship requires
reciprocity and equality, two values the tyrant is loath to recognize. He can
only succeed if someone else fails, for what he wants is supremacy as a private
individual, and what he promotes is his own private interest, which he sees as
in competition with the interests of everyone else. By contrast, philosopher
rulers are also supreme, but they rule for the sake of the common good, and
precisely because they don't aim to advance their own private interests, they
can share a common purpose and hence be friends. Thus, even if the tyrant could
overcome his paranoid suspicions, and even if his companions could overcome
their fear of sudden death, it is structurally impossible for the tyrant to
have friends, since that requires seeking the same good as another.
The tyrant's regrets are also a reflection of the internal logic of his
desire. It is impossible for the tyrant to attain what he wants, first, because
he can never achieve happiness by pursuing ends that are inimical to human
wellbeing. His false conception of the good means that he will never get what
he wants. Second, his pursuit of increasingly intense and varied pleasures
will not result in maximization, for the pleasures slip though his fingers as
his mind adapts, and he falls back into neutrality or pain where once there was
pleasure. The tyrant regrets his actions, not because he thinks they are foul –
he does not – but because they never bring him the satisfaction he craves.
That's why he is truly poor and envious of those who seem to fare better. It is
not just because his soul is disordered, then, that the tyrant is wretched: the
nature of his disease becomes clear when we consider the self-defeating internal
logic of unleashing the swarm of pleonectic desires locked up in the human
soul. As Plato might have said, best put a lid on it.
Πηγή:
Wiley, Philosophical Perspectives, 1999-2023
αναπαραγωγή
ανάρτησης
Λόγος Έμφρων
logosemfron.blogspot.com
[ ανάρτηση 30 Απριλίου 2023 :
Karen Margrethe Nielsen,
“ The Tyrant’s vice:
Pleonexia and Lawlessness
in Plato’s Republic ”,
Wiley Online
Library
ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ
ΣΚΕΨΗ ]