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Plato took a dim view of democracy as a process for deciding what to do. Plato thought rulers should be specially trained philosophers chosen because they were incorruptible and had a deeper knowledge of reality than other people… an idea that only a philosopher could have come up with. Narrated by Aidan Turner. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.

According to Plato, a philosopher king is a ruler who possesses both a love of wisdom, as well as intelligence, reliability, and a willingness to live a simple life. Such are the rulers of his utopian city Kallipolis. … genuinely and adequately philosophize” (Plato The Republic, 5.473d).

Philosopher king

philosophy

Written By: Melissa Lane (Links to an external site.)

Philosopher king, idea according to which the best form of government is that in which philosophers’ rule. The ideal of a philosopher-king was born in Plato (Links to an external site.)’s dialogue (Links to an external site.) Republic (Links to an external site.) as part of the vision of a just city. It was influential in the Roman Empire (Links to an external site.) and was revived in European political thought in the age of absolutist (Links to an external site.) monarchs. It has also been more loosely influential in modern political movements claiming an infallible ruling elite.

In Plato’s Republic the leading character, Socrates (Links to an external site.), proposes the design of an ideal city as a model for how to order the individual soul (Links to an external site.). Such a just city will require specialized military “guards,” divided subsequently into two groups—rulers who will be “guards” in the sense of guardians, dedicated to what is good for the city rather than for themselves, and soldiers who will be their “auxiliaries.” Already at this stage of the Republic it is stressed that the guardians must be virtuous and selfless, living simply and communally as do soldiers in their camps, and Socrates proposes that even wives and children should be in common.

At the outset of Book V, Socrates is challenged by his interlocutors to explain this last proposal. In response, Socrates expounds three controversial claims, which he acknowledges will expose him to ridicule. The first is that the guardians should include qualified women as well as men; thus, the group that will become known as “philosopher kings” will also include “philosopher queens.” The second claim is that these ruling men and women should mate and reproduce on the city’s orders, raising their children communally to consider all guardians as parents rather than attach themselves to a private family household. Those children, together with those of the artisan class (Links to an external site.), will be tested, and only the most virtuous (Links to an external site.) and capable will become rulers. Thus, the group to become known as “philosopher kings” will be reproduced by merit rather than simply by birth. Finally, Socrates declares that these rulers must be philosophers:

Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…cities will have no rest from evils…there can be no happiness, either public or private, in any other city.

Socrates predicts that this claim will elicit even more ridicule and contempt (Links to an external site.) from his Athenian contemporaries than will equality for women rulers or commonality of sex and children. Many Athenians saw philosophers as perpetual adolescents, skulking in corners and muttering about the meaning of life, rather than taking an adult part in the battle for power and success in the city. In this view, philosophers are the last people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.

Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher-king” is that the philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well. Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally because it is in their nature to love the truth and learning so much that they are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality, which in Books V through VII of the Republic is argued to culminate in knowledge of the forms of Virtue, Beauty, and, above all, the Good. The city can foster such knowledge by putting aspiring philosophers through a demanding education, and the philosophers will use their knowledge of goodness and virtue to help other citizens achieve these so far as possible.

Thus, the emphasis in the Platonic (Links to an external site.) notion of the philosopher-king lies more on the first word than the second. While relying on conventional Greek contrasts between king and tyrant and between the king as individual ruler and the multitudinous rule of aristocracy (Links to an external site.) and democracy (Links to an external site.), Plato makes little use of the notion of kingship per se. That he had used the word, however, was key to the later career of the notion in imperial Rome (Links to an external site.) and monarchical Europe. To the Stoic (Links to an external site.) Roman emperor (Links to an external site.) Marcus Aurelius (Links to an external site.) (reigned 161–180), what mattered was that even kings should be philosophers, rather than that only philosophers should rule. To François Fénelon (Links to an external site.), the Roman Catholic (Links to an external site.) archbishop charged with the moral (Links to an external site.) education of Louis, Duc de Bourgogne, the grandson of Louis XIV (Links to an external site.), the crucial issue was that kings should possess self-restraint and selfless devotion to duty, rather than that they should possess knowledge. The enlightened (Links to an external site.) despots (Links to an external site.) of the 18th century, such as Frederick II (Links to an external site.) the Great of Prussia and Catherine II (Links to an external site.) the Great of Russia, would pride themselves on being philosopher kings and queens. But philosophy by then had left behind Plato’s focus on absolute knowledge, signifying instead the free pursuit of knowledge and the implementation of reason.

Meanwhile, in the Islamic world (Links to an external site.), the medieval (Links to an external site.) philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (Links to an external site.) had championed the notion of a religiously devout philosopher-king. More than 1,000 years later the notion of such a figure acting as the interpreter of law inspired Ayatollah Khomeini (Links to an external site.) and the revolutionary state that he shaped in Iran. Finally, and more broadly, the notion of the philosopher ruler has come to signify a general claim to domination by an unaccountable, if putatively beneficent, elite, as in certain forms of Marxism (Links to an external site.) and other revolutionary political movements.

Plato (Links to an external site.)

Plato, ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), teacher of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and founder of the Academy, best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence.… (Links to an external site.)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosopher-king

THE PARADOX OF THE PHILOSOPHER KING
Republic 471d – 480a

In his masterpiece dialogue, The Republic, Plato presents Socrates, speaking in the first person, retelling the course of a discussion on the nature of “justice.” The main persons who provoke the discussion in the dialogue are Glaucon and Adiemantus, Plato’s real-life brothers. Socrates is challenged to defend his belief that the virtuous life -or as it is put in the dialogue “the life of the just man”- is the greatest in happiness. To make sure that it is justice, and not merely the appearance of justice which leads to happiness, Socrates is to imagine a competition between the perfectly just man who shall appear to others (because of their ignorance) as supremely “unjust” versus the perfectly unjust man who is ruthless, observing no moral constraints in attaining what he wants, and who possess a magical ability never to “get caught” and always appear to others as supremely “just.”

Naturally, we must first determine what “justice” is. Socrates’ strategy is to analogize the human soul to the Greek city-state (polis in Greek, which gets mistranslated “republic”), for the polis is the soul of its citizens “writ large.” If we can discern where justice is found in the polis, we can then, in the analogy, see where it is found also in the individual human life. This leads Socrates to develop a model of an ideal just polis.

The view of the social-political whole which Plato gives here strikes most contemporary Western readers as “authoritarian” and neglectful of those “individual human rights” which form the philosophical basis of the democratic conception of political authority. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the Greek polis is radically different from the contemporary nation-state and that Plato’s avowed purpose is not to develop a real political system. Furthermore, perhaps somewhat ironically, the conception of “natural rights” which underlies contemporary justifications of democratic government, itself derives from a conception of what it is to be human that has at least one of its roots in Plato’s philosophy.

For our purpose of understanding Plato’s theory of knowledge (epistemology ) as presented in the Theory of Forms, it is not necessary to go into the details of Plato’s ideal state; suffice it to say that as we would expect, the perfectly just state will be one ruled by the perfectly just ruler(s). In the analogy to the soul, the ruler in the polis is the parallel to the “mind” (in Greek: nous) in the soul. As the eyeball is the organ with which the body can see, so the “mind” may be thought of as the “organ” with which the soul acquires knowledge. The perfectly just soul would then be a soul “ruled” by a mind that had perfect knowledge, complete wisdom. This use of “perfect” is intended to mean no possibility of error or mistake; the perfectly just ruler(s) will necessarily do what is right, for if an error was made, one could imagine a better ruler who didn’t make that error. Such an “ideal” may very well be humanly impossible, but, Socrates insists, it is still essential to have such a perfect ideal as a kind of “yardstick” against which to measure the degree of justice or injustice in actually existing states and people.

Socrates defends his conception against three “waves” of criticism directed by Glaucon and Adiemantus. The passage assigned begins with the third -and most devastating- of these waves, and this is the challenge to explain what the least possible change in existing social-political institutions could bring about the realization of such an ideal, or at least move us as far as possible in that direction.

Socrates’ answer is known as “the paradox of the philosopher-king” and is stated dramatically at 473d: the way to bring about a just state is to have it ruled by philosophers, or what is commonly called “the Philosopher-King.” This conclusion would naturally be felt as paradoxical by most of Socrates’ listeners because philosophers were perceived as people with “their heads in the clouds” and consequently as manifestly unfitted for the realities of the political world. So now to defend his view, Socrates must finally tell us what he means by the ideal perfect “philosopher” and what sort of education would produce such a person.

We start with the root meaning of the word “philosophy”; the philosopher is the lover of wisdom. The philosopher is in pursuit of wisdom in all its forms, in love with learning. But people seek to learn many different kinds of things, are all of them philosophers? No, the philosopher is distinct from the others in that the philosopher wants to learn “the truth ” as distinct from the false illusions (being sold by sophists in the marketplace). The learning of the philosopher is, therefore, the acquisition of true infallible knowledge, whereas others, those who follow the sophists. learn merely fallible “opinions” (in Greek: Doxa)

So now the original question about justice, an ethical question, is transformed into an epistemological question: how do we distinguish true genuine knowledge (the real thing the philosopher seeks) from fallible opinions (the phony, “counterfeit” beliefs of the “lovers of opinions,” the sophists). In answer, Plato presents the most famous exposition of his “Theory of Forms” (Links to an external site.) which extends to 521b. Many crucial distinctions on which this theory is based appear in that discussion.

This is going to be different than your discussion question. But still covers the readings under Lesson 1.

For each set of readings, students will keep an active reading journal. The information you will write about will specifically come from the reading material for the week. Journals should be written in APA, and should include direct quotations, the student’s interpretation, and how the student connects these readings to the following:

A) his or her own life

B) other people who share common backgrounds with the student

C) the student’s community as a whole

D) society at large.

This assignment is more personal, only the instructor is reading it. You will be graded on your punctuation, grammar, etc. Be detailed, give examples of how you relate.