Plato’s Revenge and the Promise of Politics: Reading the Republic with Hannah Arendt – Part 1 of 4
Hannah Arendt has argued that Plato sought to save philosophy from the hostility of the polis by establishing what she calls a “tyranny of reason” through the instrumentalization of the Forms and the enthronement of the philosopher as king. For Arendt, this elevated philosophy over politics, robbing speech and action of their political meaning and dignity and created an abyss between thought and action from Plato to Marx. Arendt’s response to Plato was to dethrone the philosopher by reintegrating thought and action through the recovery of the Socratic notion of doxa which bears within it the promise of politics. In order to understand Arendt’s view of Plato’s project and her own response to it I will employ the Nietzschean inspired metaphor of revenge suggested by Dana R. Villa (see Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.) I will therefore characterize Plato’s project to save philosophy from the hostility of the city as his “revenge against the polis” and Arendt’s subsequent claims regarding Plato’s political philosophy and her response to it as her “revenge on Plato’s revenge (Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 218.)”
The Threat of the City
Arendt argues that “the gulf between philosophy and politics opened historically with the trial and condemnation of Socrates” where “the hostility of the polis toward philosophy… showed its immediate threat to the life of the philosopher” and that this experience was subsequently the catalyst for significant upheavals in Plato’s philosophical and political thought (Arendt, Hannah, “Socrates,” The Promise of Politics New York: Schocken Books, 2005), Amazon Kindle e-Book, location 471-84, 484-500; Arendt, Hannah, “What is Authority?,” Between Past and Future, 1961, repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1993, 107.) After the trial and death of Socrates Plato despaired of political life and subsequently denounced doxa (opinion) and its rhetorical companion peithen (persuasion) (Arendt, Hannah, “Socrates,” location 471-84, 484-500.) Indeed, Plato’s reflections in the Seventh Letter of his unrealized hopes that the Thirty Tyrants were “going to lead the city out of the unjust life she had been living and establish her in the path of justice” coupled with his statement that the trial and death of Socrates’ was a “shameless” act against the “the justest man of that time” lends support to Arendt’s claim (Plato, “Letter VII,” in Plato: Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchison Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997, 324d-e; Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 107.)
Arendt argues that Socrates’ failure to persuade the judges at his trial that he was innocent of the charges of impiety and his inability to convince his friends that he must remain in the city to persuade itor obey its laws(Plato, “Apology,” in Plato: Complete Works, 36a-42a.; and Plato, “Crito,” in Plato: Complete Works, 51b,) led Plato to “doubt the validity of persuasion” which had played a significant role in the political life of Athens (Arendt, “Socrates,” location 471-84.) Arendt explains:
We have difficulty grasping the importance of this doubt, because “persuasion” is a very weak and inadequate translation of the ancient peithein,… …the specifically political form of speech, …[which] …the Athenians were proud that they, in distinction to the barbarian conducted their political affairs in the form of speech and without compulsion, they considered rhetoric, the art of persuasion, the highest, the truly political art (Arendt, “Socrates,” locations 471-84, 484-500.)
Persuasion lacked the force of compulsion, which for Plato, compromised its political effectiveness. Plato’s doubt over the political effectiveness of peithein led him to draw a sharp distinction between truth and opinion. Plato discovered, according to Arendt, “that truth, namely, the truths we call self-evident, compels the mind, and this coercion, though it needs no violence to be effective, is stronger than persuasion and argument (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 107-108.)” For Plato, truth was a mediating position between the persuasion of the sophist (whom he referred to as “useless”) and the violence of the tyrant (whom he called “the most wretched (Bloom, Allan, The Republic of Plato, 1968 repr. New York: Basic Books, 1991, 490e, 576b-c.)” This discovery led Plato to establish what Arendt calls the “tyranny of reason” where the many must be made subject to the truth of the few by a means that doesn’t involve coercion through violence which destroys the political life of citizens (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 108.) However, as Plato discovered, only the few are subject to coercion through reason and this became the “central predicament of Plato’s political philosophy (Ibid., 108.)” Plato was forced to find a solution to make truth universally compelling. His solution, as Arendt understands it, is what Dana R. Villa has referred to as “Plato’s revenge on the polis for killing Socrates and endangering his memory (Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 217.)”
