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In the first part of this paper, I wish to show that already in the Republic the relation is more a tension than an identity. If the philosopher and the ruler should be the same person, the Republic does not try to hide the extent to which these two roles conflict, as seen especially in the account of the philosopher's descent into the Cave and the account at the beginning of book VIII of how the ideal city will meet its end. In the second part of the paper, I consider Aristotle's response to Plato. Despite distancing himself in crucial ways from the idea of philosopher-kings, Aristotle, it will be argued, repeats rather than resolves the problematic tension and unity of philosophy and politics expressed by this idea.
If I choose these two thinkers, it is because they will be seen to appropriate this ideal in diametrically opposed ways. Heidegger's appropriation of the ideal at the time of his involvement with National Socialism results in an identification of philosophy and politics. Foucault's appropriation, in contrast, leads to the conclusion that philosophy and politics bear any relation to each other only in remaining absolutely distinct.
These two very different legacies of Plato's ideal clarify in conclusion what is at issue here for us today. The idea of rulers becoming philosophers or philosophers becoming rulers is introduced by Socrates as a condition for the possibility of the ideal constitution he has been describing up through book V and thus as the paradoxical proposal on which the other two depend, i. The famous analogies that follow in books VI-VII are explicitly attempts to illustrate the kind of education and knowledge that will distinguish the philosopher from non-philosophical guardians.
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But precisely because these analogies are meant to explain not only what it means to be a philosopher, but also what it means to be a philosopher-ruler , they describe not only the philosopher's ascent to knowledge, but also a descent, a return to those aspects of reality that the quest for knowledge had to leave behind. The analogy of the Divided Line, in contrast, while describing the philosopher's ascent via dialectic to an ultimate principle beyond 'hypotheses', also explicitly describes the need for a descent back down from this first principle b.
Yet in this analogy the account of the descent remains very abstract and is not explicitly related to the demands of ruling. The first two analogies, in other words, describe philosophy in a way that abstracts from politics even while gesturing, either implicitly or explicitly, to the descent that would be required by the philosopher's political engagement.
Thus the importance and indispensability of the third analogy: In comparison to the preceding analogies, the Cave greatly sharpens the contrast between the movement of ascent and the movement of descent. Indeed, it goes so far as to oppose them. The philosopher who has ascended out of the Cave does not naturally, as a matter of course, descend back down to it, as if this were simply the next step in his philosophizing. The desire of the philosophers as philosophers is to remain outside the Cave, i.
They must therefore be persuaded to return to the Cave. The only argument persuasive enough is an appeal to justice R. It is only just for them to give back to the city what the city gave them by assuming the burden of rule a-e. What is thus shown by Socrates's account of the descent, and what needs to be stressed here, is that even in philosopher-kings, philosophy and politics are not the same thing. Philosophy wishes to remain with the truth outside the Cave, political justice demands a return to the Cave; philosophy and its objects are located outside the Cave; governing requires a turning away from the field proper to philosophy and to a radically different field of experience.
Indeed, the paradox that Socrates stresses is that philosophers make the best rulers precisely because they want anything but to rule; if the idea of philosopher-kings has any merit at all, it is only because philosophy has a conflicted relation to politics. One could at this point object that we are only speaking of what philosophers desire. Is it not the case that the ideal of philosopher-kings makes philosophical knowledge identical to political knowledge? While philosophers may in the ascent lose the desire to be rulers, do they not learn on the ascent everything they need to know to be rulers?
On the contrary, what Socrates tells us about the experience of a philosopher who has descended back into the Cave suggests that the philosophical knowledge acquired outside of the Cave is quite different from the political skill needed for success within the Cave: And the reason is not hard to see: The philosopher must therefore adjust to the darkness before he can see any light at all, and therefore any discernable features, in the objects with which he must deal as a ruler.
Without this acclimatization and habituation, without continuous practice in dealing with the realities of the city, the philosopher will not only be a good ruler, but also a disastrous one.
Furthermore, Socrates tells us that the time needed for this habituation will not be short a2. These words are given extra force by the person who speaks them. Socrates indeed is not only the speaker, but the description of the philosopher in the Cave unable to defend himself in court d-e and ultimately put to death is an unmistakable reference to Socrates' own fate.
In any case, what is clear is that a philosopher is not solely by virtue of his philosophical knowledge a good or even competent ruler; other adjustments and abilities are required. This is a point that will be confirmed when we look at Socrates' initial defense of the philosopher-king paradox.
The opposition between philosophy and politics only becomes more pronounced if we note another way in which the Cave analogy goes beyond the two preceding analogies: As has been often noted, the shadows on the wall of the Cave, i. Despite the parallel drawn between the inside versus the outside of the cave, on the one hand, and the sensible world versus the intelligible as represented in the other two major analogies a8-b7 , the inside of the cave is not simply the sensible world, but the political world: When great numbers of people sit together in a popular assembly, the courts, the theater or any great mass gathering, and with much noise praise or blame words and deeds, taking both to excess, yelling and clapping [.
But if this state of "education," or rather lack of real education, is in fact being depicted by Socrates in the Cave, then this state of affairs poses an obstacle and danger not only for the emerging philosopher but also for the philosopher returning to the Cave to rule. This philosopher must contend not only with ignorance, but also with the artificial opinions and prejudices created in the unnatural political relation between the chained prisoners and the puppeteers hidden behind them.
This of course was Socrates' own fate: It is significant that the philosopher who returns to rule in the Cave is not described as going behind the parapet and assuming control of the puppets; instead, like Socrates himself, he apparently goes directly to the prisoners and tries to engage them in conversation. The implication here is that in fact they do not converse; they see the same shadows, praise and blame the same things by yelling and clapping, but for precisely this reason there is no occasion or need for genuine conversation between them.
In doing so, the philosopher is working not only against the inclination of the prisoners to remain focused on the images before them, but also against the manipulators of these images. It can of course be objected that the philosophers who return to rule cannot do so by simply conversing with the prisoners; this may be the only way of converting other philosophers, but to rule they must ultimately take over the whole system of image-production in the Cave.
It is presumably this aspect of rule that is being described in the specific proposals of censorship to be found in books II and III: This again shows how different and even opposed the demands of philosophy and politics remain even in the ideal state: But, in the analogy of the Cave, such control of the entire city by philosophers is not even described and is made to seem a very distant prospect: If we return now to the very start of book VI, we see that Socrates there, after defining philosophers as those who know the Forms, makes it perfectly clear that such knowledge by itself, in abstraction from its difficult enactment, is insufficient for political rule.
While Socrates and Glaucon agree that philosophers will be better rulers than the lovers of sights and sounds, they do so only on the condition that philosophers will not fall short in the other requirements: While Socrates then proceeds to deduce these practical virtues from the love of wisdom that defines philosophers, this is possible because the love of wisdom is itself a disposition of character and not merely an attribute of reason.
This explanation in turn shows that becoming a useful and virtuous philosopher depends on much more than native intelligence and knowledge. Indeed, the virtues of the philosophical nature can become the greatest vices under the wrong external conditions b The idea of philosopher-kings is therefore not the naive idea that philosophers simply as such will make the best rulers, but rather the idea that they could make the best rulers under the right social and practical conditions.
It is here, of course, that we run against the infamous paradox: It is on account of this seemingly vicious circle that Socrates must repeatedly appeal to the divine in defending the possibility of philosophical rule: This would appear to suggest that a state ruled by philosophers is not humanly realizable. But what needs to be emphasized now is simply this: Once Plato's position is clarified in this way, the contrast with Aristotle's position becomes much less clear.
Though I cannot possibly hope in this short space to do justice to the differences between Plato and Aristotle on the relation between philosophy and politics, I want to look briefly at texts that might suggest differences to show that these differences are not as great as might at first appear. If we look first at Aristotle's critique of the Republic in book II of the Politics , we must be struck by the fact that in focusing this critique on the second of Socrates' paradoxical proposals, i.
How are we to interpret this silence? Is it a condemning silence, as if to suggest that the proposal of philosopher-kings is too absurd even to merit comment? Yet there is another possibility: The relevant passage here is Politics ba1 where, on some translations, Aristotle, in referring to Socrates' account of the education of the guardians, appears to dismiss it as an extraneous matter: However, as Catherine Zuckert has suggested, Aristotle could be seen here as simply following the lead of Socrates who in the summary he gives of the Republic in the Timaeus 17cb also leaves out the philosopher-kings; the reason Zuckert suggests is that they may have not considered the proposal of philosopher-kings to be part of the regime or constitution itself cf.
Recall that Socrates introduces the philosopher-king as a condition for the ideal city's coming into being, and so arguably as not forming part of the definition of this city. This supports the main point I wish to make: Thus, in summarizing the political proposal in the Timaeus, Socrates can leave out the philosophical training and knowledge of the rulers which, if it is what qualifies the rulers to rule and thus what makes the city possible, still lies outside of the city, just as the distinction between the outside of the Cave and the inside will never be overcome.
If we turn next to the Ethics , which Aristotle himself calls 'political science' and thus does not sharply distinguish from the Politics, we do appear to find an implicit critique of the idea of philosopher-kings in the explicit critique of the Idea of the Good in book I, chapter six. Recall that Socrates introduces the Idea of the Good as the object of the 'greatest study' to be undertaken by the philosophical rulers. Furthermore, Aristotle's critique appears to bring into question precisely that movement of descent, that movement of application that is so critical to Socrates' account of the relation between philosophy and politics.
It is hard not to hear in the following passage a reference to the account of the Idea of the Good in the Republic:. Perhaps, however, some one might think it worthwhile to have knowledge of it [the Idea of the Good] with a view to the goods that are attainable and achievable; for having this as a sort of pattern we shall know better the goods that are goods for us, and if we know them shall attain them.
After significantly admitting that this view has some plausibility, Aristotle objects that arts such as weaving, carpentry and medicine do not seek such knowledge nor apparently require it in producing their distinctive goods. As Nietzsche suggests, no matter how unbearable life can be, its self-examination comes with a reward: Life examined is thus life transformed. In this sense, true philosophy is by definition performative ; it is not something we talk about, it is something we do. In his Memorabilia Xenophon has Socrates say: If it is to remain something meaningful, philosophy does not have to limit itself to describing things, it has to make things happen , it has to effectuate a change.
Philosophy does not exist properly unless it is embodied in a human being; in a sense, philosophy is word become flesh. Christianity made the most of this insight. In a sense, then, the life of such a philosopher is scripted, if by no other than herself. She just cannot do whatever she fancies; what she does has to be consistent with what she says one should be doing.
Every single gesture has to fit into the logic of the whole; anything strident can endanger its integrity. Had Socrates, for example, asked the Athenian court for forgiveness, that single gesture — an accidental weakness, one may call it — would have seriously compromised his entire philosophical project. One of the significant corollaries of the notion of philosophy as embodiment is a renewed gravity of biographical writing. A philosophical biography does not consist now in a series of isolated anecdotes, but it is a well structured narrative whose purpose is to instruct and shape the mind of the reader.
The need for such narratives led to the crafting of idealized accounts that might enlighten and edify. On the other hand, such an omission is indicative of how persuasive and widespread this interpretation has already become. Often it is as though Montaigne forgets where he is headed, if indeed he is headed anywhere; even more often the reader does not know what to make of what the book has to offer. Why should we be interested in something like this at all?
By ordinary literary standards, that such a book could even have had any success at all was unlikely; that it was an instant bestseller is incomprehensible. Yet, the Essays is no ordinary text. This is writing as an act of mourning — the proximity of death is the most important test a writer can pass.
Socrates as a flesh-and-blood human being who lived, suffered or felt pleasure, sweated, and made love, who ate, burped, spit, pissed, and defecated. Socrates, the comedic figure. Where else could he be? The ugly, pot-bellied eccentric. The soldier commended for his bravery who stands, like a snowman in the middle of a winter campaign, caught in one of his embarrassing staring fits. Importantly, this corporeal Socrates, an unsurpassable realist who knows the ugly world inside-out, does not want to make saints out of us, just slightly better human beings. That philosophy was for him a matter of bodily performance is revealed in the story by the way he relates to the other guests.
It may well be that it was on such occasions that Socrates — the lover of masks and disguises, the ironist, the histrionic — revealed something unusually deep about himself: The work they produce, outstanding as it may be, is not supposed to change their lives. Today philosophical conversions are regarded with suspicion and strongly discouraged; if they do happen, they tend to be dismissed. Today a philosopher can in principle live like a pig and still be seen capable of producing immortal works of philosophy.
If he is to be criticized for anything, it is not the lack of harmony between what he says and what he does that concerns his critics, but the flaws of his work, the weakness of its arguments, the lack of internal consistency. Doog rated it really liked it Mar 23, Michael Nicholl rated it really liked it Jan 23, R L Wilson rated it really liked it Apr 04, Constantinos Kyriacou rated it liked it Nov 25, Lisa rated it it was ok Jan 04, John Mannion rated it really liked it Jun 02, Martin Clacker rated it it was amazing Apr 05, Bleach rated it really liked it Dec 25, Annie rated it liked it Aug 13, Helen rated it really liked it Apr 06, Ayu rated it it was ok Feb 11, Jonathan rated it really liked it Feb 22, John Atkins rated it it was amazing Oct 04, Frank Spencer marked it as to-read Dec 20, Ian Yorston marked it as to-read May 25, Jessi marked it as to-read Sep 10, Idmon marked it as to-read Oct 24, Tom Newman marked it as to-read Jan 22, Marina marked it as to-read Feb 14, George Baker is currently reading it Feb 18, Michelle Dickinson marked it as to-read Jun 10, Matt Loten is currently reading it Dec 20, Joshua Gaulin added it Dec 24, Adam marked it as to-read Dec 31,
At one point Fest observes: To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Foucault's appropriation, in contrast, leads to the conclusion that philosophy and politics bear any relation to each other only in remaining absolutely distinct. On Heidegger's reading, in short, there is no descent from philosophy to politics, no struggle and danger in the philosopher's attempt to become politically effective. View More by This Author.