Monday, December 13, 2021

Republic Book 3, Section 2 & 3

"Socrates turns to a consideration of the physical training for the Guardians, which course in gymnastic should begin quite early in life and continue through life."

Broke: letting warriors set their own training schedule. Woke: letting Plato sit in his armchair and tell you how to exercise. Irresponsibility and classic scholar arrogance. 

That said it's hardly impossible for a scholar to know more about the training regimen than a warrior does, but it requires a lot of Aristotleanism. Have to go look at the training yourself, observing closely, and to try a few small-scale tests. Further, this will get out of date. Even if you achieve warrior+ levels of understanding, if you look away for a moment, they'll learn things you don't know.  

"The Guardians are to abstain from any form of intemperance: gluttony, drunkenness, or any form of sexual license."

Grassmonkeyism. Confusing obeisance to Satan's social dominance for piety toward the heavens. 

Insofar as this sort of thing is accurate, it's a coincidence. I'm not saying drunkenness is good, but through history we can see repeatedly that Plato-types get wildly activated about vices with performance relevance at the sub-1% level. They're not trying to make you healthy, they just want an excuse to order you around. Rule in Hell etc; do Satan proud. 

A bit of projection too. For warriors, drink is probably a straight-up good at times? It's scholars that need to avoid the sauce entirely. If you can't tell which brain cells were killed by a night on the town, you're not exploiting your brain fully yet. Train harder.

--

"Socrates proposes that the citizens be told "just one royal lie," a "needful falsehood."

Yeah bros, let's just worship Satan a little. Just a little though!
Veritas is a jealous bitch. If you cheat on her a bit she'll be a complete cunt to you.

To be fair, I'm biased. My faith in Veritas is unlimited. Fiat vox veritatis, ruat caelum. Vigeat veritas, et pereat hominis. 

If you speak the truth and it doesn't work out for you, the problem was you failing truth, not truth failing you.

"Glaucon is extremely doubtful about the efficacy of this "royal lie" and so is Socrates"

...because it's an obvious mistake.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The Guardians are to abstain from any form of intemperance: gluttony, drunkenness, or any form of sexual license."

Is not this type of hard rule is reasonably applied to populations incapable of discretion?

It's like the inverse of the "you know it when you see it" rule of porn.
Lets say - the guards can get drunk, but keep it reasonable. Then you open up a can of worms, because who is calling the "reasonable" line? Easier to just ban it outright rather than risk an incident.

This is how I could potentially be ok with hate speech laws, if they are extremely fixed and fair. There's no "this person can say that because of their group membership", oh no no. If you suggest I don't have an opinion "because I'm a white male" I should be able to have you arrested for hate speech. Oh, don't like those laws so much now....

I think you have hinted at it before. One rule for elites, one for peasants. Is Socrates wrong to consider the guards incapable of discretion, that's the real question here.

Alrenous said...

The idea is to worship Gnon, not Satan. Move away from rituals, especially narcissistic social rituals, and toward curiosity and engagement with the external, physical world. If the Guardians are in fact pious, then Plato doesn't need to lay down any rules. They will see for themselves what's important and what isn't - and, critically, how important each thing is.
If they're not pious, it's already over. That's a deadly sociological sin.

The Guardians are all lords, not children. Treating them like children is not going to work out.
By assumption, the Guardians are in charge. Rather than asking who is marking the "reasonable" line, it's important to ask who can stop them.
By assumption, the Guardians are responsible. As a matter of fact, everyone already has a rule about drinking on the job. If you're treating them as if they're irresponsible, then you shouldn't be treating them as if they're Guardians in the first place.

In general it violates the [mind your own business] rule. If they can't hold their liquor that's between them, their lord, and their god. If they do something illegal to me because of this, I charge them with the crime, I don't charge them with being drunk. Addressing this sort of behaviour is exactly what courts are for.

This also works in reverse: perhaps they decide among themselves to give up drinking. I can't ban them from banning it either. It's none of my business.

Gluttony isn't even a sin. "Sexual license" means doing sex things that are bad - yeah okay but the problem is a) there's a lot of disagreement about what's bad and b) how bad are they, though? Respond proportionately, not like a hall monitor (and anyway nobody can enforce these rules on the Guardians except the Guardians themselves).

The point of a Guardian/Lord class is that they can indeed be trusted to enforce rules on themselves. The folks enforcing the laws should be exactly the kind of person who doesn't need the law enforced on them by any external agent. That's qualification #1.

One of the major issues with the modern world is a shortage of such folk. Even if you had real laws, there aren't enough enforcers to enforce it. Every modern race is inherently a lawless race.

Anonymous said...

>If you're treating them as if they're irresponsible, then you shouldn't be treating them as if they're Guardians in the first place.

True point. I suppose my immediate reaction to this was to think of the Guardians as being low status/ self- control - otherwise why would they have made such a suggestion?


>The point of a Guardian/Lord class is that they can indeed be trusted to enforce rules on themselves.
Yep. Now I understand exactly your original point, agree.

A Guardian should be able to apply external discretion. If the ruleset governing their own behaviour has zero discretion inbuilt you're going to end up with zero discretion guardians. Not a useful thing.

Alrenous said...

There will be more on this later, focusing directly on the philosopher-king.

P.S. It's good to repeat things in different words, for clarity. I call it radio discipline - assume there's noise on the line. Because there's noise in the line.