From Philosopher Kings to Philosopher Professors: Against the Relativists

Famously, Socrates caps off his preliminary account of the beautiful city in the Republic with a description of the primary condition – by his own admission a very controversial condition – by which a truly beautiful and just city could come to be, namely the rulers who can bring it about:

“Unless philosophers rule as kings in their cities . . .  or those now called kings and supreme rulers genuinely and adequately engage in philosophy, and this combination of political power and philosophy joins together in the same position, while the many natures that are now carried away to one of the two in isolation are forcibly blocked off from that, there is no rest from evils for cities, dear Glaucon, or, I think, for the human race, and this polity that we’ve now gone over in speech will never before that sprout as far as it can and see the light of the sun (473d-e).”[1]

At the risk of stating the obvious, a good and just state should be ruled by good and just rulers, if for no other reason than to preserve goodness and justice once established.  In other words, the good state must be ruled by someone who apprehends the good itself, which is precisely what Socrates understands a philosopher to be (475e; 505a-509c).  Only this ruler can promote goodness and justice because only this ruler knows what they are.  All others are like blind artists, creating a representation of something without knowing what the model looks like (484 c-d); the result bears no likeness to the original.  Thus, true justice will only obtain in a well-ordered city ruled by philosophers who have apprehended justice itself, the original against which the state could be measured.  The best city is a philosophical city, guided by wisdom, by knowledge, and by virtue, including justice.  If the best city is rightly ruled by philosophers, then genuine philosophers are, evidently, the best rulers.

It doesn’t follow, however, that philosophers are fit rulers for every state.  Indeed, an unjust state couldn’t be well ruled by a good and just ruler.  If by ruling well we mean preserving the order of the state by protecting its basic structure, a just and philosophical ruler could not rule an unjust state well.  The good and just ruler will either make that state good and just, thus undermining its basic structure, or else become bad and unjust himself.  It may be that the corrupted philosopher king was not much of a philosopher to begin with, but, in either case, the truly philosophical ruler and the unjust state simply don’t mix.  Although we would be foolish to not desire good rulers, the structures in all but the ideal political society preclude true philosophers from coming to power.  Aristotle makes a similar point in the Politics where he distinguished between the good citizen and the good person.[2]  The good citizen preserves the structure and laws of the city; the good person is morally and intellectually virtuous.  These only coincide in good states.  Political order is by nature conservative; political societies function by preserving their basic structure.  In most instances, changing that basic structure is either a last resort during crisis or else a tragic victory of ideology over common sense – perhaps both.  A good and just ruler would undermine the established order in any state other than the best, like the one Socrates imagines.  The philosopher simply isn’t a fitting ruler in actual political societies.

Indeed, Socrates suggests as much when he concedes that philosophers are useless in badly governed cities, like the properly trained pilot, with his expertise in navigation, his stargazing, is useless aboard a ship ruled by violent bullies and greedy sycophants (488a-489a).  The philosopher may be the most useful of humans, in the sense of being capable of benefiting others morally and politically, but when worth is reduced to utility, to functionality in a materialistic world, the philosopher is utterly out of place.  The relationship between the good state and the philosopher is, in effect, dialectical: a good political order is the condition by which the philosopher can come to be a ruler and the philosopher-ruler is the condition by which proper political ordering can come about.  The absence of one means the absence of the other.  Without a just order, philosophers are politically useless.

But Socrates’ case is not principally about philosopher kings or queens.  At the risk of stating the obvious yet again, the world is not ideal; it falls far short of the standard of goodness required for politics to accommodate the philosopher ruler.  Sadly, we do not live in beautiful cities.  Plato, of course, knew that very well, being forced to observe the unjust trial and execution of his friend, Socrates, a man peerless in virtue and human wisdom.  His subsequent experiences with the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, which might have involved being sold into slavery after a failed attempt to provide political advice, no doubt confirmed this impression.[3]  Justice rightly understood simply doesn’t obtain in politics – far from it.

Instead, Socrates’ argument about philosopher kings may be better understood as an apology for philosophy itself, for the philosophical life, which is also to say for a virtuous life.  The philosopher may not be a suitable politician, but he may be an excellent citizen if he can teach individual citizens to live well.  If the argument is an apology for philosophy, it is equally an apology for Socrates himself.  Contrary to what his accusers would eventually say of him, Socrates is not vicious.  Nor are philosophers generally: they are neither impious nor do they corrupt the youth.  No.  Philosophers are pious and they benefit the youth.  If the philosopher doesn’t fit in the established order, it is not because he is bad but because that order lacks virtue; indeed, we might guess that the less virtuous a civil society is the more likely it is to condemn virtue and punish its most virtuous citizens.  Socrates should not have been a ruler – and he never attempted to be – but his execution is a clear victory for vice, even if his trial was perfectly aligned with the law of the land.  Let me add that, if Socrates makes a case in favor of philosophy, Plato, whose Republic not only includes a literary Socrates arguing for philosophy, but is itself a beautiful work of philosophy that celebrates philosophy and the virtuous life by putting them on display, does so even more.  The Republic is not a program for political action – common prejudices against the book notwithstanding (thanks a lot, Professor Popper!); it is a defense of philosophy as moral education.

When I teach this portion of the Republic, the students who aren’t already taken in by philosophy’s claim to be intimately related to the best life for humans are generally offended by the suggestion that philosophers should have power, even if only in an ideal state that doesn’t exist.  They no doubt picture their intelligent, but rather awkward and impractical, professors wielding even more power over them than they already do; who could blame them for being suspicious of that?  It seems to me, however, that the most deeply offended students are the ones who concede that philosophy might not be utterly stupid; indeed, those who reject philosophy completely don’t seem to care enough to be offended.  How dare philosophy, which is just another discipline in school, and thus no better or truer than any other, claim to have a more privileged role in politics, in life, and in learning than anything else?  At the buffet table of academic life, this is pure and unfounded arrogance.  After all, to each their own.

The offended students see the philosophical claim to superiority as self-serving, as if to say that the claim is nothing but an expression of philosophical pride, an uncritical preference for what some philosopher, long dead and longer irrelevant, happened to be doing.  Anyone who repeats the claim, is guilty of the same. (As an aside, I would be tremendously honored to be a small fraction as “irrelevant” as Plato!) Any reasons philosophers may give – and they do give them – aren’t reasons at all; they are merely self-justifications masquerading as objectivity.  Philosophers conceal their true motives behind the pseudo-objectivity of reason.  Of course, many of us, regular humans as much as supposed philosophers, can be guilty of this kind of self-justification: what I do is best, how I live is best – because it’s what I do.  Ask three people what life is best and you will likely get three different answers, each one as self-aggrandizing as the last.  But we shouldn’t confuse small-mindedness with the repeated historical claims of a genuine way of knowing the world.  That we are self-serving in our most unthinking moments doesn’t mean that philosophy, a preeminently thinking activity, is so too, and in its most elevated moments, like the Republic, no less.

Although their perception is wrong, these students are offended by what they perceive as a kind of subjectivism or relativism parading as a reasoned claim to knowledge.  They are right to be troubled by relativism, by the view that there is no objective truth and that all our claims to supposed knowledge are equally valid; they are wrong that Plato is a crypto-relativist, let alone that he advances a relativist position, whether secretly or openly.  Quite the contrary.  Plato rejects relativism entirely.  Indeed, that is one of the main points of Socrates’ defense of philosophy.  Only knowledge of the objective and absolute standards of truth, and of good and evil, can order our lives privately and politically.  But here we discover the real – and ironic – ground of the offense: the audience sees the philosophical claim to knowledge, as reasoned and as compelling as it may be, as being relative to the subject who happens to engage in some purely historically contingent scholarly endeavor, and they perceive it as such because they believe all claims to knowledge are relative.  That’s to say that the offended students are relativists who are offended by the claim to the contrary.

I doubt that anyone really is a thoroughgoing relativist.  We can say that there’s no truth, no objective standard of knowing, no standpoint outside of pure subjectivity from which to judge the truth or rightness of competing claims, and we can dismiss people and books that demonstrate the contrary, but it is much more difficult to live that position consistently.  True relativists don’t make very good drivers, or electricians, or crane operators, or cooks, or any of the countless human activities that involve believing in the regularity of the material world, and where disbelief results in negative, possibly deadly, consequences.  I am always amused by the students I meet who espouse relativism aggressively, whereby rejecting everything Plato and I seem to have to say about truth, but who, without a hint of irony or self-criticism, complain that the grades I assign them are mistaken or, worse, unfair.  We don’t need a philosopher to help us understand we can’t have it both ways.  Either the student is right and there is no ground to complain over a grade or Plato and I are right and there is at least a possibility that the grade I have assigned is off the mark (and, since the teacher is more familiar with the standard of appraisal than the novice, an even stronger possibility that it is not).  Without truth, there is no mark to miss.

Nonetheless, the default intellectual – shall we say, pseudo-intellectual – position today is some species of relativism, the view that there is no true standard of true and false, of beauty and ugliness, of right and wrong, and of good and evil.  It is easy to refute relativism: the relativist relativizes all claims to truth, except for one, namely, the claim to relativism itself; relativism is, says the relativist implicitly, objectively true.  Relativism contradicts itself.  Done.  And it has been done since the beginning (see, for instance, all of Plato’s dialogues!).  But there it is all the same, inspiring generation after generation to shrug their shoulders and object to any claim they don’t much like with the clichéd “who’s to say?”

If the only relativists in the university were the students, we’d be fine.  They’re mostly young, and many are still capable of being persuaded by and towards good sense.  After all, they are ostensibly in school to learn, and some of them still take that seriously; those who do can be helped to cultivate the docility and openness to truth that have always been conditions of learning.  But they aren’t the only ones.  There are also the professors, at least some of whom espouse relativism, in some form or other, in their teaching and writing, while others, more subtly and cleverly, build courses that end by championing relativism without having to bother making a case in its favor – all the better for them, I suppose, since there’s no case to be made that doesn’t slip into the self-contradiction I noted above.  Apart from the appalling courses, usually named after a brand of “theory” or some such nonsense, whose celebration of relativism is not at all subtle, the most obvious examples to my mind, in philosophy no less, are the courses that neutrally present a series of competing theories (of ethics, of beauty, of political organization, of knowledge, of – gasp! – reality, etc.), ending with no resolution of the fundamental question of the course.  The result isn’t surprising: the student leaves believing that the question has answers, but that none is more compelling than the others.  Some answer might be more likeable or might fit more comfortably with the student’s pre-established opinions and biases, which means the student may pick one the way I pick a necktie in the morning to match my pants and shirt, but it is no more objectively true than any other.  Thus, relativism wins.

In some of the cases I have observed, a course might even begin by covering relativism directly before moving on to the relativist practice of nonjudgmentally laying theories side by side.  The result in such more refined cases is no less surprising: the student leaves as a more refined relativist, which is to say one who now believes he has reasons to support his error.  Of course, he doesn’t have any more reasons than he did previously, but he is convinced he does, which conviction reinforces his error and deepens his intellectual arrogance, the very arrogance philosophy is supposed to undermine.  I dislike both strategies, but the second is clearly more troubling.  If they’re going to be relativists, let the students at least remain unrefined ones.  There’s more chance that the unrefined relativist comes to his senses than that the clever and intellectually committed one does.  Let’s be a bit more Hippocratic here: if we can’t cure them of their errors, let us at the very least not make them worse off!

But if we had to contend with students and some professors, we might not be that badly off.  Even professors can be persuaded and guided, especially the young ones; and others can, in theory at least, be ignored, even if not fired (I have for several years been telling those who will listen, not altogether in jest, that we could solve most of the university’s problems if we just fired all the relativists).  The real challenge is that the modern university is structured relativistically: take a bit of this, a bit of that, check some administrative boxes by completing some requirement (which can be satisfied in myriad ways), specialize in whatever you fancy, and if we don’t offer that, then maybe we could arrange some special “interdisciplinary” degree just for you.  The irony is grand and tragic: the institution designed to promote the apprehension of truth, which is supposed to discover it and teach it, is now organized around its rejection.

I can hear the objection right away – the splendidly relativistic objection: but that’s just your opinion.  Yes.  It is.  But it is an opinion deeply rooted in the tradition of philosophy, in the history of human thought, and in the history of higher education.  Reflecting on the origins of higher education in Plato’s Academy, Josef Pieper writes:

“[Whatever] idea we might have of the teaching, the curriculum and material taught in Plato’s school (there is a whole spectrum of opinions about these matters), one indisputable fact is that Plato’s school in Athens was a philosophical school, a community of people philosophizing, so that its intrinsic characteristic is philosophy, the philosophical way of looking at the world.  From this, as a first defining element of the academic, results the thesis: academic means philosophical; an academic educational institution is a philosophical one – one which is at least based on philosophy.  To pursue a branch of knowledge in an academic way means to pursue it philosophically.  And consequently, an education that is not philosophically based and not shaped on philosophical principles cannot properly be called academic.  A subject of study that has no philosophical orientation is not academic.”[4]

The university is nothing if not philosophical, by which I don’t mean that everything taught and researched in universities is or should be philosophy, as if to say that the chemists and economists should abandon their studies and turn to philosophy or else leave the academy altogether.  The university is philosophical in its origins and in its fundamental meaning insofar as it is oriented around basic philosophical principles, such as that truth is (it exists), that truth can be grasped by humans through the application of their reasoning, that the standard of truth is independent of humans, and that truth is objective, universal, and absolute.  So long as they recognize and adhere to the priority of truth, the chemists and economists can just keep on with their business.  The “theorists”?  Maybe not.

Words matter, of course.  That we still refer to the university as “the academy”, and frankly still call it “university”, the place where the view of the whole can be grasped, tells us we are still in the midst of philosophy, however overgrown by sophistical weeds it may be.  That doesn’t mean that universities actually fulfill their historical mission as places where the universum can be studied, and thus as places where philosophy properly understood flourishes by guiding the entire institution.  I am not so naïve as to say that.  But this does suggest we may have some proper ground from which to understand and even judge the modern university, and if we can judge it, maybe we might yet repair or reform it too.  It may be too much to expect philosopher kings; it may be wrongheaded to want philosopher senators, presidents, and prime ministers; but philosopher professors, philosopher deans, philosopher provosts, and philosophical universities?  Surely that is not too much to strive for.

Notes

[1] Plato, Republic, translated by Joe Sachs (Newbury Point, MA: Focus Publishing, 2007).

[2] Aristotle, Politics, translated by Joe Sachs (Newbury Point, MA: Focus Publishing, 2012), 1276b15 ff.

[3] See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Pamela Mensch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3.19-21.

[4] Josef Pieper, What Does Academic Mean?: Two Essays on the Chances of the University Today, translated by Dan Farrelly (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 7-8.

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