Of the several documentary projects I have going on right now, the one about AI has turned into a documentary on Plato as justification for class society. And as I write it, I'm coming to grips with a challenging realization: quoting Plato verbatim is absolutely not feasible.
To say “The Republic is dense, complex, and risks losing the audience’s attention” is the kindest version I can muster. Further, it is not just a straightforward text; it’s written as Socratic dialogues – fictional conversations between Socrates (who was not Plato) and others (also not Plato) where the conclusion is whatever Plato thinks it should be. This issue is compounded by the fact that we’re dealing with translations, which adds another layer of complexity.
Moreover, if one steps back from the entrenched belief that Plato’s works are important and correct – foundational to our societal thought – they read like unhinged nonsense.
Take, for instance, this passage talking about the importance of maintaining the purity of the guardian (philosopher-king) class:
“How?” “Somewhat in this fashion. Hard in truth it is for a state thus constituted to be shaken and disturbed; but since for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved, and this is the manner of its dissolution. Not only for plants that grow from the earth but also for animals that live upon it there is a cycle of bearing and barrenness for soul and body as often as the revolutions of their orbs come full circle, in brief courses for the short-lived and oppositely for the opposite; but the laws of prosperous birth or infertility for your race, the men you have bred to be your rulers will not for all their wisdom ascertain by reasoning combined with sensation, but they will escape them, and there will be a time when they will beget children out of season. Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable and commensurable with one another, whereof a basal four-thirds wedded to the pempad yields two harmonies at the third augmentation, the one the product of equal factors taken one hundred times, the other of equal length one way but oblong,—one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of the pempad lacking one in each case, or of the irrational lacking two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of the triad. And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births. And when your guardians, missing this, bring together brides and bridegrooms unseasonably, the offspring will not be well-born or fortunate. Of such offspring the previous generation will establish the best, to be sure, in office, but still these, being unworthy, and having entered in turn into the powers of their fathers, will first as guardians begin to neglect us, paying too little heed to music and then to gymnastics, so that our young men will deteriorate in their culture; and the rulers selected from them will not approve themselves very efficient guardians for testing.
- Plato, Republic, Book VII p. 546
Were this another project, quoting Plato verbatim would be how I would show how nuts the type of shit he is saying is. But Plato's style of discourse, much like that of Jordan Peterson, often resembles a filibuster. Simply quoting it kind of shuts one’s brain down.
Instead, I realize that I will have to do on-screen references for my claims about Plato, which means people won’t bother reading his actual words. If I were someone else, that would mean they’d just trust whatever I am saying about Plato. But I am Peter Coffin, so that means they will tell me I have not read Plato’s Republic and that I misunderstood what he was saying. It obviously means something else (or isn’t meant to be taken literally)!
But all that does is make the case to me that it is extremely important to critique the words of these people who are revered in the Western canon. Marx’s words on idealism and Hegel show us what he thought of these near-sacred names; he viewed Hegel’s work as “freeing us” of the metaphysical idealism of previous philosophy (though Hegel was, himself, an idealist Marx critiqued, as well).
There are times when Marx must be reined in, too, though. Though they may be considerably fewer, all these figures are just people. They have strengths and weaknesses and sometimes say things that make no sense.
I think it’s important to put Plato in his place, though, because his work is foundational in the justification of our flawed socioeconomic structures. Of course, there will be more on that as soon as I have it to share.
Something which perpelexes me is that conservatives condemn Marx for contemplating the "abolition of the bourgeois family" but Plato plans out the abolition of the family much more concretely in The Republic (Book V, I believe)--Yet conservatives, including Christians, love Plato.
Long comment/useless musing ahead...
I’m not very knowledgeable about philosophy, but I am about the theory and practice of translation. I mention this more as a curiosity, perhaps, as it might not have anything to do with what you’re pointing out. But just in case it might be of interest…
Here are my two cents on translation: the passage you quoted is written in a bit of an archaic style of writing —though I agree it’s inscrutable, at least to me.
Depending on when that was published, it might just be outdated, or it might be modern, but the translator chose that style to “preserve” the feel of “ancientness” of the text, if you will. “Old wine in old bottles”, as one of my translation professors used to say (and many translators do go this route, modern audiences be damned). And it is a translation strategy, which means it is a choice made by the translator(s)/publisher. As a strategy, it is artificial in that English is not Ancient Greek, so technically the translator(s) may opt for so-called “equivalents” in plainer language and more modern English (this is similar to what translation scholar Venutti calls foreignizing vs domesticating translations).
I haven’t looked into it, but it’s possible there are more modern translations written in plain text, and not just that, but making a bona Gide attempt to translate ancient Greek concepts into modern ones. There is nothing stopping any publisher from putting out a more accessible text, or figuring out ways to make it more accessible to laypeople. The ideas may still be somewhat foreign (we are talking about an ancient language spoken by an ancient culture, so there are several degrees of separation), but can be handled in a myriad ways by experienced translators and editors if that is their intention.