Plato’s Revenge
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 (Arendt, “What is Authority?, ” 108, 109.) She writes:
The reason Plato wanted the philosophers to become the rulers of the city lay in the conflict between the philosopher and the polis, or in the hostility of the polis toward philosophy, which probably had lain dormant for some time before it showed its immediate threat to the life of the philosopher in the trial and death of Socrates. Politically, Plato’s philosophy shows the rebellion of the philosopher against the polis. The philosopher announces his claim to rule, but not so much for the sake of the polis and politics (although patriotic motivation cannot be denied in Plato and distinguishes his philosophy from those of his followers in antiquity) as for the sake of philosophy and the safety of the philosopher (Ibid., 107.)
For Arendt, Plato’s assertion of the rule of philosophers and his subsequent establishment of a “tyranny of reason” constitutes an act of rebellion, an act of revenge, if you will, of the philosopher against the polis. Arendt claimed that Plato wrote the Republic to justify the rule of philosophers so that they would not be ruled by people worse than themselves and so that the quiet and peaceful conditions necessary for the philosophical life could be established and maintained (Arendt, Hannah, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982, 21.)
According to Arendt, Plato realized that in order for philosophers to rule they would have to ground their authority outside themselves so that “the compelling power does not lie in the person or in inequality as such, but in the ideas which are perceived by the philosopher (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 109.)” Arendt argues that Plato modified his philosophy after experiencing the conflict between philosophy and politics and witnessing the failure of peithein during trial and death of Socrates. She claims that Plato not only denounced doxa, replacing it with truth but also abandoned the beautiful, replacing it with the good (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 112.) She claims that Plato augmented his theory of forms by instrumentalizing the form of the beautiful into the politically useful form of the good (Ibid., 109-110.) Indeed Plato’s description of ta agathon (the good) in Book VII of the Republic as “the cause of all that is right and fair…[which]… the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see…” is very similar with his earlier description of ta kalon (the beautiful) in Book V (Bloom, The Republic of Plato, compare 479a-480 with 517c and 518a-b.) As Arendt points out, the Greek use of agathos (good) “means exclusively good-for, beneficial or useful (Arendt, “Socrates,” 515-32.)” Plato transformed the philosophically alluring idea of the beautiful into the politically useful idea of the good. This transformation creates political instruments from the ideas of the philosopher that “can be used as measures of human behavior because they transcend the sphere of human affairs (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 109.)”
Arendt argues that “the idea of the good is found only in the strictly political context of the Republic (Ibid., 112.)” She points out that while the philosopher is defined as a “lover of beauty” at the beginning of the Republic by the sixth book the idea of the good is introduced as the highest idea (Ibid., 112.)” The idea of the beautiful was not political, Arendt argues, and only served to illuminate the darkness of the philosopher. Consequently Plato modified the doctrine of the ideas in the Republic “so that it would become useful for a theory of politics (Ibid., 112.)” But, as Arendt points out, only the idea of the good can be “useful” because in Greek good “always means ‘good for’ or ‘fit’ (Ibid., 113.)” The beautiful stands at a considerable distance from the realm of speech and action and “cannot be imparted to the multitude in the conventional manner of persuasion… because their revelation and perception are not communicable in speech at all… (Arendt, Hannah, “Tradition of Political Thought,” in The Promise of Politics, location 1124-39.)” If the idea of the good is the highest idea and all other ideas partake in its “fitness,” then “in the hands of the philosopher, the expert in ideas, they can become rules and standards or, as later in the Laws, they can become laws (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 113.)” Arendt claims finally, that Plato “took human affairs so seriously that he changed the very center of his thought [the doctrine of forms] to make it applicable to politics” in spite of his “emphatic insistence on the philosophic irrelevance of this realm (Ibid., 113.)”
The instrumentalization of the Forms is justified by Plato’s analogy of the craftsman who reproduces in his craft the transcendent model (ideas) through imitation (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 110; Bloom, Allan, The Republic of Plato, 596b.) Arendt points out that through this analogy, “the ideas become the unwavering, ‘absolute’ standards for political and moral behavior and judgment” and this is precisely what becomes the “essential characteristic of specifically authoritarian forms of government (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 97-98,)” namely, “that the source of their authority, which legitimates the exercise of power, must be beyond the sphere of power (Ibid., 110, 111.)” Following Arendt, Dana Villa has explained that by employing the analogy of the craftsman Plato sought to make “the sophia of the philosopher seem pertinent to the world of the citizen” by augmenting his theory of forms so that they became “unvarying ‘yardsticks’ for the realm of human affairs” so that the forms could be realized in political action (Villa, Politics, Philosophy and Terror, 93.) This, of course led to a complete “separation of knowing and doing, one that replaces the transient doxa and endless deliberations of plural equals with relation of command and obedience (Ibid., 93.)”Arendt points out, however, that there is an inherent violence in Plato’s analogy of the craftsman so that “an element of violence is inevitably inherent in all activities of making, fabricating, and producing” and it is at this point that Plato’s philosopher king most resembles the Greek tyrant who is a type of expert (Arendt, “What is Authority?,” 111.)
Given, that only philosophers possessed knowledge of the forms, and these forms were the absolute standards for human conduct, philosophy and politics, thought and action could be divided and ordered hierarchically so that the commands of philosophers were executed without question by their subjects and the philosopher could live a quiet and peaceful existence free from the hostility of the city. For Arendt, this elevated philosophy over politics, robbing speech and action of their political meaning and dignity and creating an abyss between thought and action from Plato to Marx.
