In Book Three of The Republic, Plato provides an account of the type of education (or mousiké, which is best translated as education, but denotes something slightly different; according to translator Desmond Lee, mousiké includes training in philosophy, music, poetry and so on. This is a bit different from what we think of as education today!) he considers appropriate for children chosen to be the Guardians of The Republic (Plato's ideal state). Rather than prescribing an education in which one learns subjects such as mathematics, literature and so on, Plato chooses to proclaim that the Guardians be educated in a manner that will enable them to be the ultimate military force. In Plato's view, this involves not only teaching certain skills, but also restricting students from being exposed to certain "inappropriate" materials and/or aspects of society. In two sections, he deals with the mental and physical training which are necessary to successfully produce the Guardians. I will briefly discuss each section of Plato's conception of a proper education as described in The Republic, Book Three.
§1. Mental Training
Plato examines the moral and theological qualities of the poets (most notable Homer and Hesiod) and their works. In traditional Athenian education, reading poetry was considered essential. Unlike the Judeo-Christian cultures, the Ancient Greeks did not have theological scriptures based on some sort of direct contact with or divine revelation from God. Instead of a Bible, Torah or Qu'ran, the collected myths and epic poems (which arose from the culture) of Greece provided both the ontological and ethical bases for the culture. Plato, however, identifies flaws within this tradition.
First, Plato says (of course, Plato always makes his points through the character of Socrates, who engages in dialogues with others) that the misrepresentation of God is unacceptable. Plato's conception of God as the Good (Thomas Aquinas also writes of the summum bonum much later) dictates that God is perfectly good, and therefore changeless and incapable of deceit, and must never be otherwise represented
1. In traditional Greek mythology, the gods (aside from being a pantheon rather than a theological unity) are depicted anthropromorphically. They can be cruel, sadistic, selfish, petty and vengeful: We can admit to our state no stories about Hera being tied up by her son, or Hephaestus being flung out of Heaven for trying to help his mother when she was getting a beating
2. In addition, they can change shape, and often take the forms of human beings as well as animals. Initially, this may appear to simply go along with the idea of deities being omnipotent, but this may not actually be the case. In the myths, whenever a god takes the form of an animal, he or she is subject to the physical qualities of that animal. For instance, when Zeus takes the form of a snake, he has sexual intercourse in the manner of a snake, and moves like a snake, and so on. Again, while this may be attributed to a deity's omnipotence, Plato sees it as oxymoronic because by taking the form of an earthly creature, a god (Plato uses the terms God and god(s) interchangeably) automatically becomes less than absolutely perfect. Since God is absolutely perfect, according to Plato, there is no possibility that he would take any form other than that of God; this is not from the lack of omnipotence on God's part, it simply would not and does not happen. Because of this fallacy, Plato says that the poetry of Homer and similar bards is theologically incorrect and must not be permitted to be used in the education of the Guardians.
Second, the moral fibre of the gods as portrayed in Greek mythology is somewhat less than inflexible; they are often seen displaying licentious behaviour:
And then there is the story of how Zeus stayed awake, when all the other gods and men were asleep, with some plan in mind, but forgot it easily enough when his desire for sex was aroused; he was indeed so struck by Hera's appearance that he wanted to make love to her on the spot, without going indoors, saying that he had never desired he so much since the days when they first used to make love 'without their parents' knowledge'3
Also, the heroes of epics such as the
Odyssey and the
Iliad are depicted in moments where they show a fear of death; indeed, the afterlife itself is depicted in a rather morose way . To Plato, this is not suitable for students to be trained with
It looks, then,
Plato says,
that we shall have to control story-tellers on this topic too. We must ask the poets to stop giving their present gloomy account of the after-life, which is both untrue and unsuitable to produce a fighting spirit, and make them speak more favourably of it.
4Content is one part of the puzzle; Plato takes time to pay attention to form in his investigation of poetry. In the epics, the poets often spoke as the characters they were portraying, straying out of a consistent narrative form. Plato objects to this, saying that he does not want ... Guardians to deviate from their own character by representing other characters, especially bad characters.
5 He privileges straight ahead prose over forms of poetry and literature that involve the first person representation of characters in their narration. Plato prohibits this literary form of identity juggling in order to stress the importance of each man playing his specified role. A man,
he says, cannot play many parts as well as he can one.
6
Obviously, Plato's goal is to keep the Guardians from having the minds set on anything other than the Good. That is not necessarily to say that the Guardians are meant to understand the Good in the same way that a philosopher might; they have nothing to compare and contrast their received view with. Their access to material that portrays any sort of undesirable theological or moral ideas is to be entirely cut off, so that they have an inflexible understanding of the world. Since The Republic is to be built on the ideals of order and goodness, the opinions of the Guardians will be utterly in sync with state-sanctioned religion and morals. They will carry out the wishes of its leaders as though as though those wishes were their own; in truth, their wishes will be entirely in accord as those which the state makes known to them. This is the project of Plato's mental training: to produce warriors who will unquestioningly march into battle to defend the ideals of The Republic without the fear of death.
1D. Lee in Plato's
The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (1955; London: Penguin Books, 1987) 70.
2Plato, 74.
3Plato, 87.
4Plato, 81.
5Lee in Plato, 90.
6Plato, 94.
An update (aside from the bigger update that will be done soonish- ok, consider it an afterthought): Given that Plato posits an immortal soul, and that he says that you can only learn what is already in your soul and can be recollected through education, it appears to me that
Plato is proposing to manipulate and control immortal souls!
I know
some people think that
Hegel is arrogant and presumptious, but I think this takes the cake. Plato is on some proto-Orwellian shit.