Robin:

Hello, Agnes and Arnold.

Arnold:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Hi. Apparently, we're talking today about the Republic. I feel outmatched. You're both philosophers, and this is 1 of the classic things you must have read dozens of times in your career. But I will venture in. But first I wanted to ask what you thought of the framing, which occurred to me in 2 LLMs agreed, that the difference between Plato and Aristotle somewhat analogous to the difference between humanities arts and STEM.

Arnold:

Right, so Aristotle has, I think, a very much more empirical approach. And so he starts the politics with, I think, what comes across as a very STEM and sort of quite modern idea, which is that you understand something when you've broken it up into its constituent parts and understood how they relate to each other. And yeah, he has this approach which begins from the family and works its way up to the state and that Plato very nearly has the opposite approach. That is, his approach is not basically descriptive, it's basically prescriptive. It sort of starts from the top. It differentiates something from a basic unity and It looks for something like an organizing principle at the highest level, rather than building up from components.

Agnes:

None of that sounds like the humanities to me in particular.

Arnold:

Well, I think the thing that makes it akin, I mean, humanities, you know, we have to look for the ways in which humanities deals with big theories, right,

Robin:

which

Arnold:

aren't necessarily obvious. And I think to the extent that humanities does deal in big theories, it does work a bit like the way Plato does, right. Just take, you know, this isn't exactly our branch of the humanities, but just take the, like, for example, Marxism and the role that that plays in, or Freudianism, or something like that, And the role that that plays in the kind of work that the humanities does, where it's sort of big top-down theory and it governs all the work below it. It is an attempt to sort of construct things from the bottom.

Agnes:

I mean, physics has got some top-down theories too. Like when you discover anything fundamental, you're discovering the top-down. I mean, I guess I see the humanities as a kind of inquiry where it's very important that the ones inquiring and the sort of tools that they use to inquire are sort of examples of the very thing they're inquiring about. So as a humanist, you're asking questions about yourself, sort of, why yourself, whereas the scientific approach is somehow from the outside. And in that mode, like, I guess it's just not obvious to me that Plato and Aristotle correspond, they both do both of those kinds of inquiry, It seems to me.

Arnold:

Saying that to look at something for something fundamental is to look for something top down was a very humanities moment for you.

Robin:

Many parallels here that I could go through if you want, but I just thought this could then echo our other discussions about STEM versus humanities here. When I looked up Aristotle's critique of the Republic, that seemed a lot like standard social science, whereas the Republic looks alien to me. So that's part of why I might, you know, see it this way. And then Republic is in some sense more like, I don't know, Marxism or the French Revolution ideology or sort of like grand divisions inspired by high ideals that have recommendations for specifics that aren't grounded very much on detailed social science.

Agnes:

I mean, Social science is not going to exist for another like 2400 years.

Robin:

Aristotle kind of did some of it. So I say when I look at Aristotle's critique of the Republic, they are standard social science observations.

Agnes:

What Aristotle is doing is saying the stuff in the Republic is not realistic.

Robin:

By grounding it on specific behaviors he sees around him that he sees as in conflict with those abstractions that Plato invokes.

Agnes:

Right. I mean Plato anticipates that. He's like, this isn't, I get that this is what you call unnatural, but he's like, but from my point of view, our society is unnatural. And so, right. Right. So, yeah, like, that that is the objection that like the idea that the men and women should do the same jobs, right? That's where that comes in. He says, our society is unnatural in that they don't do the same jobs. And Aristotle's like, no, looking around me, I can see men and women can't do the same jobs. That's Aristotle's empiricism. And it does come from looking around him. But I like, like just that example, right? Where Plato was saying, maybe the way we do things is unnatural. It's that Plato was holding less fixed about his society as being in some way organized in the way that it essentially had to be.

Robin:

So if we think about this in innovation terms we can see in business practice that Some businesses make small products that are a modest difference from previous products, and some people try to make radically new different products. And here, Plato is more trying to make a radically new thing farther away from existing practice, more based on abstractions and ideals that are less tied to the details of the existing practice. So we can think of it that way in terms of Plato's being more ambitious. And then we can wonder about other ambitious efforts in history to radically change things. And this then seems to resonate as an interesting comparison, like 1 of the first examples of a very grand, ambitious way to restructure things based on some ideals and categories that are inspired. And that makes it more interesting to me to see it as an early example of something we've seen many times later. And look, I can be accused of being somewhat the grand idealist because, say, futarky is pretty far from existing practice and based on some high-level abstractions trying to make proposals for big change. So in that way, I can be lumped in with Plato. I might say my stuff is more grounded in recent detailed social science, but Anyway, this is just ask about what framings we can have of this thing we're about to get into and what might it tell us about.

Arnold:

I think an alternative maybe to the ambitious versus sort of more grounded, I guess that's the famous painting. But an alternative framework to that is the idea that Aristotle and Plato just have different theories about how unities are achieved from the underlying constituents. So this is echoed in their respective theories of physics and the biological world. So Plato's theory of the biological world and the physical world is that the cosmos is a single being with a single purpose, and each part of it, including each little organism that lives within it, is a part of that big structure, right? That is, it's a sort of cog in the machine and its purpose has to be understood in relation to the purpose of the whole thing. And anything that's good or bad about it has to be understood in terms of that broader, bigger structure. Whereas For Aristotle, Aristotle thinks something like that is true, but it's true at the level of the organism, right? And it's not true at any larger level. That is, the organisms just coexist in a big, chancy, somewhat disorganized world. And, But they all are individually structured in this purposeful teleological way towards their own ends. And then when we get these bigger structures, like communities of animals, that has to be understood first and foremost in terms of how these individual ends are going to coordinate with each other and relate to each other. And so Aristotle would say, look, I'm as ambitious as can be, given that the primary realities are the individuals that live in the society and that we can talk about how they coordinate with each other, but in the end, we have to understand their behavior in terms of the individuals. Whereas I think Plato wants to say, the reason why we have to make these big revolutionary changes is because what it means to be an individual human being that kind of behavior that individual human beings express all of that stuff is really determined by the big superstructure that they live in, right? That is, if we can change the big unifying structure, then we just get totally new human beings out of it. And we don't have to be constrained by the ways in which they behave now.

Robin:

So another framing then suggested by what you just said is Thomas Sowell's framing of the constrained versus unconstrained visions. Thomas Sowell said that the left tends to have a less constrained vision, i.e. People in the French Revolution had an ideal of what society should be and they just thought let's just leap there somehow and work it out. And conservatives of our various sorts have said, that's hard, we have a lot of constraints, we have to carefully sort of build up fault, checking that we can match meet our constraints. If you try to jump too far, you will fail because it's complicated and you can't just set up, you know, sketch out your high ideal and hope things will just kind of fit in.

Arnold:

Right, right, but those 2 different approaches, the constrained and the unconstrained, correspond to 2 different theories about the relation between the whole and the parts.

Robin:

Sure, right. And so then if we see the unconstrained vision as maybe more the humanities vision, which focuses first on the purposes and high ideals that we're trying to achieve, and then second tries to tend to the constraints that would get in the way of that then maybe that's also similar here but yes so we could say agree that Plato is trying to sketch an ideal and he doesn't see very many constraints on achieving this ideal or he doesn't discuss them much. Like, you know, there should be an education program.

Agnes:

There's just very detailed discussion of, for instance, how do you deal with sexuality and child raising in this new world? And he's like, here's a bunch of things we're going to have to do. We're going to have to say, you can't have sex except during festivals and then during the festival we say we have this these rules for who can have sex with whom and then here's what we do with the children and here's the educational program it's incredibly it's an incredibly detailed account of like how you create a totally different family structure from the family structure that we have which Plato also thought was essential for his Weird World. He just does a lot to talk about what would make it feasible.

Arnold:

But does Plato confront in a detailed way the constraints on that project? Like people are going to want to have sex during non festivals.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah. So he even says that like, that there's going to be not just, he's like, there are mathematical necessities and there are sexual necessities and he's like the sexual necessities are the ones that really are the constraints on my project which is that everyone's going to want to have sex with each other and so another thing we have to do is make sex really sacred or make relationships sacred So as to push back on that.

Robin:

So another-

Agnes:

He just takes- Okay. You may not think that his way of dealing with the constraints works, but he explicitly brings them up in a way, much more so than Arisal because Arisal, of course, doesn't have to think about them as much, because he's not coming up against.

Robin:

So another analogy that I think works here is that in economics and social science and policy, we have this difference between people who say, want more people to use mass transit or something. And then they make rules about that. And Then when they foresee problems, they add more rules onto the rules in order to create a regulatory structure they hope is dealing with the various problems they see. Then economists and other sorts of people say, you're still missing a lot of the constraints, you're still missing a lot of the issues in this world. Your attention to the few issues you saw isn't remotely sufficient to actually make this work well, given all the other constraints you're neglecting. And so then other economists say, look, you can't even make big complicated structures like that, That just doesn't work. You need to just let the world make its own complicated structures and then maybe have very minimal regulations that try to push on the margin for some things over others when you see certain problems. And that's an attitude difference in regulation. And then we might see that's happening here with say Plato versus Aristotle, that is, Plato is saying, oh, I'm going to fix this this way. And then you say, well, there's a problem. Oh, I'm going to add this fix. And then he's sort of adding fixes to elaborate a structure.

Agnes:

It might be worth pointing out that just the whole tip just layout what is the structure of the Republic, which is that Socrates is going and hanging out with a group of people and a challenge arises about like, is it good to be a just person? That is, should you treat other people in the ways that we conventionally call well? And there's this thought, well, if you could get away with treating them poorly, everyone would do that. Everyone would be unjust if they could get away with it. But we all praise that we all give lip service to being moral and good and just, because we get rewards for giving the lip service. But secretly, we would all prefer to be bad people if we could get away with it. That's the challenge that Socrates is facing. And he's gonna have to defend, no, actually we deep down really wanna be good moral people. We want to be just. That's what's actually beneficial for us. That's what's advantageous for us. That's what makes you like live a happy and flourishing and pleasant life is to be just. And the whole construction of the cities comes out of that project. And the way that it comes out of it is that Socrates thinks, and this goes along with what Arnold said a minute ago, that if we want to understand why it's good for an individual to be just, we have to look bigger. We have to look at the city that the individual is in. And we start with what justice is in a city and then we'll understand what it is in an individual, right? So that's the platonic move of going out. Okay. And then, and I wanted to raise this book part because there's a moment that in this re reading of the Republic jumped out at me, which is that when Socrates starts to construct his hypothetical city, which again he's not constructing for the sake of doing social engineering He's constructing just for the sake of defending being just in our world as things currently are, right, where we don't make any of the changes that he's proposing. He's saying in order to understand why it's good in our world to be just we have to construct this hypothetical city that maybe can't be constructed, whatever, right? It's a tool, it's an intellectual tool. And he constructs a city where there's a division of labor. So like there's a farmer and there's a shoemaker, etc. And they all, you know, work together to stay alive and to satisfy their basic needs of food, clothing, shelter. And so everybody's like, okay, let's look for justice in the city. And Glaucon says, but what about couches? And what about fancy food? Aren't you going to give the people in your city the modern conveniences that we Athenians enjoy today? Are you going to make them like peasants, the people in your city? And then Socrates is like, OK, maybe you didn't want to look for justice in the city, the sort of natural city, what he calls the healthy city. Maybe you want us to look for it in the inflamed city, i.e. The decadent city, like the kind of city we live in happens, where there are things like couches and fancy food and poets and where we have this need for resources to keep feeding our decadent hunger that forces us, for instance, to go to war against other cities. And that, and it's a result of that, that we end up needing these funny kind of guardians that have to be hostile to outsiders, but friendly to insiders. And then we have to educate those people. And when we create the education of the guardians and the world of the guardians, we end up having to do all the social engineering. So the point is just, you could see this all. This is the reason why I recommended the Republic to you was cultural drift, right? You're interested in cultural drift. And I said, so is Plato. Plato is interested in cultural drift. And this is kind of an important moment in that regard, this moment in Book 2, where we move from what you might call peasant culture to some kind of wealthy culture. Culture. And it's a result of that wealthy culture that all of this regulation has to come into place in order to, in some sense, you might put it in your terms, to sort of substitute for cultural evolution, we're going to substitute a giant philosophical apparatus that's going to stabilize that culture instead of the cultural evolution that could stabilize the peasant culture.

Robin:

And you're referring to his story that naturally rich cultures go through the cycle of oligopoly, democracy, tyranny, etc. And that's the kind of instability you're saying he is foreseeing and trying to prevent through creating an alternative structure. That would be the, in your mind, natural cultural evolution process.

Agnes:

I wasn't actually referring to that. I was referring to book 2, where once Glaucon says we're going to add fancy food and couches, that's what spurs the need to create guardians who then have to be educated in all the ways that basically correspond to Plato's big social innovations. So those social innovations are designed to try to stabilize that wealthy culture. So wealth is something that introduces a demand for cultural stabilization, which is to say maybe wealth causes cultural drift. We would put that point. And then, well hold on, And then when you get to books 8 and 9 and the decline of the cities, in effect, what Plato is sort of admitting is that giant thing that I introduced in order to stabilize this wealthy culture is probably not going to work forever. It's going to break down. You're going to get drift again.

Robin:

But what's the sign of the drift that would otherwise happen in a rich city without his extra stability? If it's not the cycle between tyranny, oligopoly, and democracy, well what's the instability that he points to?

Agnes:

It is the, in order to get the extra goods that make you wealthy, you have to wage war against other cities. And so You now have to train these people in your city to be hostile to other people, but also friendly at the same time. So you have to create a complex character, a complex kind of person. The thought is if you didn't do that, you couldn't get wealthy.

Robin:

That complexity is unstable.

Agnes:

Right, that complexity is what calls for a certain kind of educational control. And in fact, that is like when in book 8, when the cities start to fall apart, it is that exactly that what Plato predicts is that his careful control of the sexual necessities of who's allowed to have sex with who when is going to break down. He's like, yeah, I think human nature is stronger. In effect, he's saying stronger than my system. And then eventually these people who are in this position where they have to be friendly but hostile, those people, that's going to be the sort of democratic character eventually is going to, that's going to stop working perfectly. So yes, I think that's what he thinks is the source of the problem.

Robin:

So, I mean, for our listeners, you keep saying Socrates said but we all understand that's really Plato saying it wasn't actually Socrates saying it right this is Plato's position not Socrates historically.

Agnes:

So I'm talking about the character.

Robin:

Right right I just I just want our listeners they might listeners might not understand that So they might be confused when you say Socrates, I suppose, Plato. Sure, you guys aren't. And then the other point is you said that the book is rhetorically set up as this way to understand how individual justice should be understood. But in fact, people have seen this as a way, as a recommendation for social organization. And it's reasonable to take it that way and compare it to other sorts of things for that. Regardless of the rhetorical structure of the book, It is intended to make us think about real structures. And because we are a rich society and he was in a rich society, the fact that he's considering the rich society case is all the more reason to think that it's a serious proposal for us to consider.

Agnes:

I agree. Sorry, you want to say something?

Arnold:

Well, I think 1 thing that's sort of interesting about the Republic and that we also see a sort of version of in Aristotle's politics is that the Republic, as a book, has a kind of microcosm, macrocosm structure, right? So we take a look at the city in order to examine the soul. And then, of course, As people have pointed out, it's not entirely plausible that all the detail we talk about in the city is purely just about the soul. That is, it really does look like this is a picture of a city. And that Aristotle himself takes it as a political recommendation. So it apparently was read that way at the time too. But that what that suggests is that Plato, and I think you have a very similar thought, sees an individual as a complex coordinated system and a city as a complex coordinated system as having something like common laws, right, that there are principles that we could apply to both of those complex coordinated systems and that in some sense culture drift is a problem that individuals face as well as cities. And that really, in some sense, any complex system can be, we can talk about some kind of version of culture drift where we have rapid change, low selection pressure, and high homogeneity. We can just talk about that in evolutionary terms. And Aristotle similarly saw the coordination of the parts of an individual, of a family and of a city as being analogous to 1 another and subject to a lot of the same problems that these things, you know, forms of degeneration or rotting or something like that these things get into. And that like a very useful thing about the republic is just, you know, that it makes this observation, it's very important observation that The city isn't something radically different from the individual, that they're complicated coordinated systems and we can think about them in very similar terms. We can use the 1 to think about the other and so on. And it's just that they have a disagreement about the way in which yeah, I mean, as I said before, the relationship between the sort of parts and whole and how each determines the other.

Robin:

So if we want to get into the specifics of his proposal. His main concept is this idea there should be a guardian class who is well educated in a certain way in order to have a certain set of attitudes and skills, and that If a guardian class has the right attitudes and skills through the proper education, then things will go well. That's the core argument, I would take it, of the book. The core structure that he suggests.

Agnes:

Can I make it even simpler? A city is going to be ruled well when it is ruled by people who know how to rule it.

Robin:

And if you say know how to rule it, he makes these many other analogies with ship captains and you know, loggers and all sorts of other people who know how to do things. And he says, you want the ruler to also know how to do things like they know how to do things. But then he's going to make some different claims, some differences. That is, the kinds of things you need to know how to do as a ruler are not only different kinds of different things, but they're different kinds of things. And that seems to be the core claim that 1 can question in his analysis that the kind of thing you need to know to be a good ruler is some very abstract concept of justice and that you need to have an education system that gives you the right attitude toward that concept of justice. And with respect to, say, a cobbler or a ship captain or other thing, they don't need to know at the very abstract level the concept of a ship or the concept of a shoe or things like that, nor do they need to have the proper attitude towards shipping or shoeing trained into them that just typically happens appropriately in the context of learning to do those things. But for the guardians, he sees a difference where the kind of thing they need to learn is much more abstract, and then the kinds of training they need is really pretty far from that final thing, but somehow it's going to add to it. They need to be, you know, do gymnasium and rhetoric and mathematics and other things for 30 years. So somehow the kind of thing they need to learn to govern well is a not only a different thing, but a different kind of thing. And also they need to be trained into this attitude that you don't need to for these other areas. And somehow he thinks these kinds of training will produce the proper attitude toward this knowledge or the valuing.

Agnes:

It's not clear to me what the relationship is between, you know, stuff like the musical education and the physical education and the what stories they're told on the 1 hand, and the sort of training of the philosopher in things like mathematics and astronomy that you get, you know, all the way over in Republic 7. You might just think that what's happening with the like motivation training, as we might call it, is prep, the preparation for that intellectual training later. Well, it's, it's the thing that he thinks makes the rulers capable of ruling. Cause if you remember the ship captain analogy, the way that it goes is that the,

Arnold:

you've got the ship and you've got the ship owner who's this rude, sluggish, short-sighted creature, he's sort of the mob. And then, but he's the strongest 1. And all of the people who want to rule are trying to convince him to go with them and throwing each other overboard and they consider political skill that is being a good ruler or being a capable ruler, the ability to throw your enemies overboard and convince the ship owner to do what you want. That's what I think it to be. And then Socrates asked him to imagine somebody who's like wandering around on the deck, paying attention to the tides and the stars and all of this other stuff, the stuff that seems highly abstract and strange and irrelevant to the actual practice of ruling. And he says, this is the only person who's an actual ship captain, because those are the kinds of things you need to pay attention to navigate and to keep the ship safe. But everybody else sees him and they say, oh, look at you, stargazer, tide-bottler. What are you doing?

Robin:

But we can understand that if you're actually trying to guide a ship, looking at the ship itself and the places it's going is very relevant. But when you say the city needs a guardian and this guardian is going to like do gymnastics and music and we're going to go, how is that like the guy on the ship who sees the stars?

Arnold:

So The thing that the captain of the ship of state needs to observe in order to steer the ship is the form of the good. So that's the book 6 conclusion. And in order to see that form of the good, they have to develop a certain kind of personality and mental sensitivity. And this stuff about music and gymnasium and all of that stuff, I think it's just you have to take somebody who, you know, lives in a world of their senses, and you have to slowly bring them up towards more abstract things. And like we do this with kids, teaching a kid geometry, right? So very early on, they might object that your triangle is not quite straight or the, you know, the lines don't match up or try to use a ruler to measure the lines or something like this. And you have to, you have to say to them, no, no, it's not this triangle that we're talking about. It's somehow triangle itself or triangles in general or the geometrical triangle and it takes a little bit of work to get a child to make that abstraction, to make that mental abstraction. And the education basically consists in a bunch of practices that may allow you to make ever more impressive acts of abstraction and become ever more comfortable dealing with abstract objects. And then once you can see the form of the good, then you finally have something which will prevent civil war. Because it's constant, it never changes over time. It's the same for everybody. It doesn't speak to any particular interests. It's just the good. And he thinks that's the thing that can actually hold a society stable is something like that, some kind of principle of...

Robin:

That seems to be the key claim we can question. That is, The ship captain doesn't need to learn increasingly abstract triangles in order to guide a ship, although the ship's trajectory is a geometric thing. But nevertheless, he doesn't need training in high-level geometric thinking to-

Agnes:

He doesn't need to learn astronomy.

Robin:

Right, but astronomy specifics of astronomy, not abstract categories of astronomy.

Arnold:

Well, I think the idea is that relative to, you know, wheedling and convincing and throwing people overboard, that is abstract. And it's just the ship of state is harder to steer.

Robin:

It's just a different topic, I would say. That is, you might well say, you know, the ability to run a store well is different than the ability to gain control of the store or a farm even. A farm, farming isn't a very abstract thing necessarily, but If you're just fighting over who controls the farm and you're good at that, that doesn't make you good at farming, it would apply to any other task. But still for pretty much all the other tasks, I doubt he would recommend this very abstract training for becoming a manager of a farm or a ship or a store.

Arnold:

So Aristotle's own criticism of the role of the form of the good in ethics and politics in the Nicomachean Ethics Book 1 Chapter 6 is roughly the objection you're giving now, I think, which is to say he says, look, it's not clear what learning about the form of the good is going to do for anybody. It's not as if a shoemaker needs to know that in order to make good shoes, right? They just need to learn to make shoes. The form of the good seems to contribute nothing to any practice, so why should we expect it to contribute something to political practice?

Robin:

And that is my doubt here that I'm expressing and I guess, but

Arnold:

well, I guess, stand by your man.

Agnes:

Well, I was just thinking about the idea of abstraction and that from the point of view of the sailors who are fighting over convincing the captain to let them be in charge, what the stargazer is doing is very abstract in the sense that it seems to be separated from, to be in a different realm or different domain from the things that seem relevant to what they're doing.

Robin:

It's distant and irrelevant, but not more abstract. I would say we have a separate concept of abstraction versus concreteness in in-farming or shoemaking or store following and ship building. We have concepts of abstraction and they make sense. But the question is, so even if you wanted to be skilled at taking over ships, you could be skilled at seeing many detailed practice of how to do that or reasoning abstractly about the taking over a ship, you still might think reasoning really abstractly about taking over a ship might not be that helpful to actually take over a ship. Having seen how George did it and how Joe failed might be a lot more useful in teaching you how to do it.

Arnold:

But like imagine, imagine you were to take an ancient farmer through a modern farmers education right? The modern farmer would need to at a certain stage learn quite a lot about organic chemistry.

Robin:

Right and business.

Arnold:

Especially the beginnings of that organic chemistry lesson would look like, okay, so here's a molecule and bond and all of these things. And the ancient farmer would say, I don't see how this connects up with farming at all. And the modern farmer would then say, well, you just have to wait. In a couple of years, we're going to get to the part of this course that's relevant to immediately making decisions about fertilizers, right? But the early parts of this course are theory, because we can't understand these practical applications until we understand the abstract theory. And maybe Plato is just saying something like that is that in order to get into good practical decisions about ruling, you need to understand theory first. And that initial theory level of education is going to look utterly impractical. It's just that its practical significance is not just, it's just not going to show

Robin:

up for a while. You could make that same pitch, although about any profession in the ancient world, and in the modern world, and in fact modern education does make this pitch. Modern education does tell people you should learn some abstractions before you can learn concrete things, and there is a reasonable critique such as by my colleague Brian Kaplan who Agnes hosted at her night owls, that in fact we oversell abstraction. That is, because schools are good at abstraction and it's high status, then we teach people a lot more abstraction than they need. But at least in the modern world, people have a habit and track record of getting good jobs when they learn this abstraction. So for an individual level, it can make sense. But in this ancient world where hardly anybody was getting much educated, certainly not much abstraction. It's a much bigger pitch for him to say, well, leaders need far more abstraction than they have now, but just leaders, not other people. I'm just the guy to teach you with these abstractions I've got. It looks a little self-serving.

Agnes:

I don't think he was saying that he's the guy. That is, I think he was saying that-

Robin:

his students, the kinds of people he teaches that they are that I mean, I mean, didn't Aristotle teach Alexander the great.

Arnold:

I taught him the idiot is

Robin:

okay but still,

Agnes:

this is a Aristotle says play that right

Robin:

right but still about Aristotle top, I mean, Plato taught Aristotle, right?

Agnes:

Right. But like, I guess I think that the what Plato is saying is that you could have a stable, quasi stable, even there he's going to admit they could fall apart, society that is rich if that society became educated in a certain way. He has Socrates, which you're reading as his representative claim that he doesn't have the relevant kind of knowledge. So he specifically has Socrates disavow knowledge of form of the good. So Socrates is saying in the voice of Plato as you're reading him, I'm not the person who can offer you this. I'm not going to train politicians. I can't do that because I don't have the relevant knowledge. What I'm saying is if someone had it was not me, then you could have a stable society. Or another way to put it is, this is what it would take. And you might say, well, I mean, it's very implausible that we would ever find this where we have it. I think Plato's like, I agree. We probably won't have stability then because this is what it would take to happen. He said, in effect, a way to think about it is, you only go to the level of abstraction for any pursuit that you need given your circumstances. And so if you are an ancient shoemaker, and most people don't even wear shoes in most circumstances. And if they do wear them, they only need the simplest kind of leather thing. Then you probably don't need to go very deep into shoe theory. But now suppose that you are having to manage a plant that makes like the souls of shoes, 17 different kinds of souls, etc. You're going to have to have some theory there, right, to make that work. So how much abstraction you need is a function of the task. Plato is saying, yeah, ruling a wealthy society, which is to say stabilizing a wealthy society is a really, really hard task that requires really a lot of abstraction more than we're capable of at the moment.

Robin:

That last phrase doesn't follow because it's a hard task and it's complicated doesn't mean you need a lot. Many people today do a lot of very hard tasks without much abstraction being useful for them, right? But Playing basketball, for example, it's a hard thing to do at the professional levels. They learn a lot by the time they are a professional basketball player, but abstraction is just very little part of that process.

Agnes:

I'm skeptical about that. That is, I'm skeptical. I bet you...

Robin:

Certainly the kind of abstraction Plato's talking about.

Arnold:

Yeah, that's right.

Robin:

It's very little part of that process.

Agnes:

That's probably only this.

Arnold:

But they get pretty scientific.

Robin:

Sure, they learn a lot of specific concrete complicated things.

Agnes:

My guess is that basketball players have many abstractions about basketball the rest of us don't have. Even if that's only a small part of their education, they have to make use of abstractions. In order to succeed at basketball, they need to know some theory about the human body and basketball, et cetera, that I don't need to know. And Plato is just saying that there's a lot more of that required for ruling.

Robin:

You're presenting Plato as if he's saying, I have no idea how to produce this education we would need. But then they go into specifics about how many years to spend in which particular topic areas in order to achieve this education. Doesn't that sound like he thinks he knows something about it?

Agnes:

Earlier you were complaining that he's not going into enough concrete.

Robin:

That's why I said like it's whether he's attending to the constraints that should be on his detail, not that he doesn't give detail. Yeah, I mean,

Agnes:

he gives reasons for the details. So you have to be attending to some constraints in order to do that.

Robin:

Right, so my critique would be, for whenever he has an idea, he throws 1 reason that, on average, might suggest it, which is a pretty weak reason. And he doesn't consider any contrary reasons. He's just very weak with his reasons. He does for each thing he gives, gives some sort of reason mostly, but.

Arnold:

So as far as this abstraction stuff goes, and to the extent that we like sort of need or use abstractions, an interesting feature of the Republic, if we really take seriously the city's soul analogy, right, is that if the Republic sketched in the dialogue is a map of the soul, the just soul, then 1 of the funny things about it is that the just sold person is a philosopher, and the Republic, which is supposed to be a map of the philosopher soul, includes philosophers as

Robin:

recursively.

Arnold:

Right. That is, that that Plato just dives right into the idea that there's a kind of recursive structure of rule, right, which means that in order for, and whereas the other parts of the soul slash city, right, so the the repetitive part, the productive part and the the dispirited part the guardians, they don't need to have the abstract idea, right. The, for them, The organization

Robin:

itself encodes the all of the significant parts of the abstraction, and

Arnold:

they just need to obey the structure. Right. So like somebody working in a corporation doesn't need to understand how their entire business works. They can just do what their corporation demands of them, and everything will work out. That's why corporations work so well. And then we can even raise the question, does anybody need to understand? Anybody in the corporation, does any individual need to understand how this business works, or is it sufficient that the organization itself encodes that understanding and directs people's behavior in the relevant way, right? And Plato apparently thinks, and this is something that we can argue with him about, Plato apparently thinks that somebody has to get it. There has to be the philosopher within the philosopher within the philosopher within the philosopher such that they possess that comprehensive abstract knowledge of what's going on in order for the organization itself to encode that. I'm not sure Aristotle believes that's true. I'm not sure Aristotle believes anybody at all has to have something like a comprehensive grasp of the good.

Agnes:

Doesn't the ruler need phrenesis?

Arnold:

Yeah, But the phrenesis is very practical in particular, right? It's not abstract, is the point. There are no frenetic generalizations. It's not a general science that has general principles.

Robin:

I mean, if you think of an animal, it has a brain, say, and the brain manages the rest of the body of the animal, and then it knows more things than the rest of the body. But the animal doesn't have to consciously know abstractions. It could just embody them. And so similarly, a human leader might need to embody certain abstractions, i.e. To have their behavior match the abstractions, but that doesn't mean they need to consciously understand them, unless they're going to be consciously choosing them over alternatives, some process that will make them drift away unless they did a reanalysis and made sure to choose the proper thing.

Arnold:

Right. And we actually see Plato covering that difference, right? So the city of pigs, the initial city that's perfectly just because everybody just does their work and desires nothing beyond the basic necessities, is a city in which nobody understands the city, nor does anybody need to, right? Like an animal, they sort of work and are coordinated without any big overarching principle. It's when that city turns outward and has to stand in some relationship, especially 1 of aggression, towards other cities that suddenly we need a central directing ruler.

Robin:

Which needs to understand abstractions of the good. That's the question of why that would suddenly come in under warfare, say, without all of the other city issues.

Arnold:

Right, but it's just like this story that I learned recently that I really like, where a sea squirt is a modal animal that moves around and tries to find a home. And it has a brain and everything and senses just like you'd need. And then once it attaches to a piece of coral and settles there, it metabolizes its own brain. That is, it's only because it needs to direct itself that it

Robin:

needs a

Arnold:

central nervous system. And you know, Plato is sort of noticing this about organizations or coordinated systems that they need central directing systems only to the extent that they turn outward and have to move themselves around in an environment, maintaining a kind of internal coordination does not require that kind

Robin:

of direction. So if you think of a household that was isolated, you could still need conscious thought and analysis to manage the household. And just because you decide to trade with neighbors or fight with neighbors doesn't mean suddenly now you need concepts and abstraction. Plenty of abstractions are useful in terms of internal management organization.

Agnes:

Yeah, but you could sort

Arnold:

of see how it would apply there too, right? So you if you just had an isolated sort of homesteading farm, right, without any real contact with anybody else. Everybody could sort of do their jobs in that farm. And, like, for example, there might be jobs that the men do and jobs that the women do, and they might be differentiated because of physical differences. But there really wouldn't be a need for the household to have, so in the Greek world, the men are the outward facing elements of the household, whereas the women are the inward facing. And in some sense, the central job of the men was to say, here is my household. Here's what we stand for. Here's what we do to everybody else. And so they needed to have some kind of conception of what their household was, right? Whereas otherwise, it could just sort of function. But the men needed to be able to direct what went on in the household because they needed to cause it to as a whole play a certain role in the policy.

Agnes:

And that also entails that the man has to have a somewhat different relationship to his household when he's inside of it than he does to that same household when he's presenting it to the outside. And that's what Plato thinks, that that's the thing that he thinks then calls for this the entire project of the republic is that differentiation

Robin:

but then why doesn't it in fact apply to men and households why don't you say men and who run households need to have 30 years of education with the gymnasium and music and everything else so they can learn the abstract concept of the good of the household so that they can help manage a household with respect to outsiders.

Agnes:

I think that they would, and that's why his city does not have households.

Arnold:

Yeah, I think that's right.

Agnes:

He gets rid of the family.

Robin:

He only does that in the guardian class, not in all the other classes, right?

Agnes:

Right, but like arguably all of the problems of luxury are in effect being solved by way of the guardian class. So like, yeah, he's just not thinking about the, and that's why the question, does his educational system apply to the whole society or does it only apply to the guardians just isn't answered. It's you can't really tell from the public. He played was so uninterested in that question that he doesn't give you any resources to even answer it.

Robin:

So we should, for our listeners, mention that in addition to this 30 years of education and the abstraction, he has a bunch of other recommendations for the guardian class that many of us find surprising and unlikely. They need to share wives in common. They need to not have private property and wealth. So I guess some, all their production is supplied by somebody else. These are also pretty surprising claims.

Agnes:

They need to believe in elaborate myth, which is that they were born, that they have special stuff in their souls that makes them be in that class and that they were born from the earth and that their whole education that they received was actually a dream. So that they don't think of the education as contingent, so that they think of it as necessary. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there.

Robin:

And for each 1 of these, he gives a reason for each 1, but it's a pretty weak reason and he doesn't consider contrary reasons. So either we have to credit him for a lot of analysis he's not showing here, or think he's kind of winging it.

Arnold:

Yeah, I mean, I think the basic underlying principle behind all of the moves is just that, you know, I think you as an economist are very comfortable with the idea that we have many levels of organization and coordination are just sort of communicating with the lower levels and. Right. Plato, I think, thinks that intermediate levels of organization and coordination are competitors with top levels, That if you have families, then family loyalties will compete with state loyalty. And that all of the things that we're doing with the guardians are ways of removing those competitors. So in the US military today, there's this issue, right? That the Marines sometimes talk about in public, but rarely that there's a lot of loyalty to the Marines. And there's this question like, okay, well, if becoming a Marine and making somebody an effective Marine means making them very loyal to the Marines and making them think of themselves as very special. And then how, how Do they relate to the rest of the US population? Because now we just look like fat, aimless slobs. And that's a worry, right? It's a concern. Because that's a dangerous thing to have in your city, is a military organization more loyal to itself than to the state. And Plato is just very, very aware of those kinds of dangers. And especially things like family and clan loyalty as a competitor.

Robin:

But instead of seeing we have this large world with all these institutions are important and productive and we need to accommodate them all, he says we need to make this 1 institution great and it has any conflicts with anything else, the rest has to go, like free speech, family, everything, you know, commerce, It all has to go if we see any potential conflicts with this thing he's trying to make.

Agnes:

Yeah. Right. The funny thing is that of all the things that he is trying to change, it's clear from just numbers of pages which 1 he views as most incredible, like the 1 that's going to encounter the most resistance that people, his reader, what he anticipates his readers to think is crazy. And it's not the women in common, it's not the women having jobs, it's not the abolition of the family, it's not even, it's the censorship of Homer. That is it's the it's the it's the the thought that the poets that were banishing the poets from the city and we're not gonna we're not gonna read poetry. He's he's basically getting rid of literature as we might think of it. Of most of what's an epic of like pretty much all of tragedy, of comedy as well. So he sees that as that's really hard sell. And there's almost 2 books of the Republic are about, and they're not going to be able to say this in their city, and they're not going to be able to say this in the city.

Robin:

Well, that's a good example, then, of, well, how much detail does he go into considering the other potential functions and constraints on the existence of literature in terms of his analysis, and he seems like he just doesn't consider much. He doesn't think about what other useful things they could be doing or what other processes would make us find them valuable and want to keep them. He just looks at, you know, all the different ways in which you will try to evade my rules and how I'm gonna like makes more rules to lock down the rules I have to make sure my rules are followed.

Agnes:

That's not, that's not quite right. I mean, that's not quite right about his reasoning about getting rid of the poets. He thinks that poets tell a bunch of lies about the gods. And they do this because they don't actually know stuff. They're just making stuff up, basically. But they're making stuff up with a view to appealing to people's passions because that's how they get popular. And so they're positioning themselves as social leaders in a sense as educators. So Plato sees them as, he does think about what their current social role is. He thinks their current social role is to educate the people. And he's like, but I'm trying to do that. So I got to get rid of my competition. You know, it's very much like the David Brooks piece that you tweeted about where David Brooks is like lamenting the fact that, you know, in the 1970s and 1980s, these novelists were in some sense our leaders. They were an elite. Plato's like, yeah, that's bad. That's what we don't want. Right? David Brooks thinks it's dehumanizing when the novelists stop leading us. Plato thinks no, it's dehumanizing when the novelists are leading us.

Arnold:

For the reason that you gave, which was that why should we think the play these novelists know anything?

Agnes:

Exactly. They don't have to write

Arnold:

nice books. That's it.

Robin:

Yeah. Right. But he sees a group in society he's immense 1 theory of why they're there and now he's done he's not looking for others and he's willing to like once he sees this conflict with what he's trying to do like regulate the amount of existence it's not a very careful analysis it's not a very thorough analysis it's just it's happy when he finds 1 thing.

Agnes:

Well, given if he's right that about what they're doing, which is maybe plausible given that like thousands of years later, David Brooks still wants them to be doing that. Then even if they do other things, it doesn't matter. Cause the thing that they're trying to do, it's really important to not get them to do that. If what you think is that the number 1 rule about a city is that it's going to be ruled well if the people who rule it know how to rule. Once we've established that poets are a group of people who are trying to rule the city, but they don't know how to rule, whatever else they're doing doesn't really matter. You've got to stop them from doing that.

Robin:

So I have like other examples what seem to me very shallow analysis or commentary, but I don't know to what extent it's worth bothering, but it seems to me like he just keeps making claims and the arguments in front of them are just very weak and insufficient. Is that your perception or?

Arnold:

I mean yes, so I think that's true of Aristotle as well, right, so if you go through, that is I think Aristotle's way of arguing is sometimes seems a little more palatable to like the sort of modern social scientific ear, but for the most part, Aristotelian texts don't contain a lot of arguments. And to the extent that they do, they usually have the structure. Here's what I think, because 1 reason, move on to the next topic, right? And he's not doing something like thoroughly investigating the view, but I think maybe what we should do is sort of reframe a little bit what the aim of this kind of argumentation is. That is, I think if what we're looking for are something like well-defended, well-established scientific conclusions, this stuff is just going to fall really, really far short. And it's not about the primitiveness of their methods or a lack of a scientific culture or anything like that. It's really just that they're just kind of up to a different kind of job. What Aristotle often is trying to do, and so for example, I'm excluding the biological works here, which really are much more scientific and which really do consider other possibilities and options in a much more thoroughly way. What Aristotle is trying to do a lot of the time is just kind of show you a picture, show you a kind of, a kind of hole, which can be used as an interpretive framework through which to navigate a topic in the absence of any kind of framework that might exist before that, right? And so what we might read Plato in the Republic too is being something like, look, here's how to think about the state. Here's how to think about what it would mean to step back from our given state and our given problems and our given issues, cultural issues, and think in the abstract about what a state ought to be. And he's just sort of painting a picture of what that kind of thinking looks like. And he's much more interested in giving you a comprehensive and complete theory of a state in the abstract, right, that isn't the Athenian state or the Spartan state or the Corinthian state, but just a human community, right, as we might model in a theory. And he's much more interested in giving you a complete picture of how that works than it is in giving you a particularly well defended picture from which he can make practical recommendations. Like the idea is to

Robin:

okay so if I if he offers a framing and I ask does that framing make sense How much do are we using this framing? Is this actually underlying a lot of our thinking now? Maybe this seeing it clearly here will help us question it. What is the framing? Seems to me like this is a lot about like an ideology. That is when you look at potential leaders running for president, you say, which 1 of them has the right ideology? Right. That's more doing what he suggests, making sure your leaders have your concept of the good or-

Arnold:

Well, Think about it.

Robin:

Or what you think is the right concept of the good. That's what he says, the main thing, to make sure the guardians have the right concept of the good and everything else will go great, as long as you have that. That's, in essence, the idea. You don't need to pay anything else attention to politics except ideology. Make sure you elect people who have the right ideology.

Arnold:

I'm underestimating the degree to which the microcosm, macrocosm, recursive structure thing that we've been talking about determines the contents of this book. That Plato's picture is much more deeply guided by the idea that individuals and cities are basically coordinated systems that have analogous structures, and that in order for a city to be well-ruled, it has to have a part which is itself basically a well-ruled city. Right? And that that thing in order to be well-ruled has to have a part that is itself a well-ruled city recursively. That's doing a huge amount of work in this text. And so Plato's suggestion is just if you want to think about the state in the abstract, if you want to have it come up with a theory of the state or even a theory of the individual psyche, which the Republic very much is as well, the way to do that is understand this recursive analogous structure.

Robin:

And do we believe this is true in fact today that the structure of the state is analogous to the structure of individual minds?

Arnold:

I don't at all, but I think it's an interesting suggestion.

Robin:

Okay well then if that's the essence and we look to that then we can ask, you know, do we, is that valuable now? Is that something we are willing to embrace now and we say no?

Arnold:

I think it's at least valuable in understanding that doing the thing Plato wants us to try to do with his particular way of doing it is, it's very good to acknowledge that we ought to come up with some idea like that, right? And even if we disagree with this idea, it's very important to think about how it is that we are disagreeing with this idea. Like, you have a different idea, I bet. I bet your idea is something more like Organically emergent structures that we have to balance with incentives from the bottom and stuff like this, right? You're an economist. This is my prejudice and that's It's really interesting to be able to acknowledge that that's an approach arrival approach a distinct approach, and that there are other ways of doing it and that a lot of what you say about economics might fall out of that first principle, that first picture that you go with, and a lot of what's going on with Plato or maybe Marx or whatever, these other sort of top-down revolutionaries, is that they have this other approach, but it has to do with this abstract picture that he's painting here.

Robin:

And maybe in some sense, that's a better parallel between STEM and humanities would be that STEM more often stays within existing framings and humanities are more often willing to venture out and explore an alternative framing, which they don't lay out in full detail but the point of it is just to help you think in terms of a different framing and consider it.

Agnes:

I think that I mean 1 1 way to think about the sort of innovation of the Republic is that there's, in a way what Plato is doing is saying there's a certain constraint you have to pay attention to where someone like Thursimachus or people who suggest that look everybody would just do the evil thing if they could get away with it that they're not thinking about the system They're not thinking about all of those people as being contained in a system. And Plato's like, that's how we have to try to think about what it is to be a good person, is what is it to be a good person in relation to other people where their reactions to you are some of what you're going to be anticipating and being a good person. And the microcosm macrocosm is 1 like simple framing for understanding that relationship between an individual being good and the some property of the whole city that is thereby achieved which for Plato is just gonna be it's the same property it's just goodness over again you might think it's gonna be a different property

Robin:

but

Agnes:

But I guess I think that Plato is at the very least like kind of posing that as a problem and saying you can't totally like just go rogue in thinking about how am I gonna like be a happy person or live a good life or something, you have to in some sense think of yourself as part of a system and that your goodness is going to have something to do with the goodness of the system as a whole. And this constraint shows up over and over again in the Republic, like when Adamantus, for instance, says, but you're not making these guardians very happy. I want them to be rich. Because he's like, I'm an upper class person, so clearly I'd be 1 of those guys. But what about all my private property that I want to have. I'm just like, no, that's not how we're thinking about this. We're not thinking about the individuals rip them out of their context and then just make them get as much as possible. We're thinking of them in this new systematic way.

Robin:

But I agree that that's a thing he's doing. I don't know how original it is, but it certainly is a thing he's doing, is saying, think of society as a system that needs to function together, just like an organism needs to function together, like your mind does. And then in addition, he's saying, the people who are the guardians in the system need to understand abstractly that it is a system and in the way that it is. And that's a novel claim because previous systems don't do that, right? All the other systems we know about, they aren't actually run by tops that understand fully their nature as a system.

Agnes:

I mean, from Plato's point of view, there hadn't been some other theories of systems before this, right? At least as far as I know. And from Plato's point of view, actually, that part, he's drawing more on conventional wisdom, because he's just analogizing, ruling to other crafts. So he's saying, look, in general, whenever you have anyone who is in charge of a complicated thing, it's going to be because they know. The shoemaker knows how to make shoes.

Robin:

But he wants this guardian to understand much more abstractly. Sure. The nature of the good that they're serving.

Agnes:

The point is that they know what they need to know. That is, that the way that things work is by somebody knowing something.

Robin:

Right, but his new addition is to say, and the guardians who understand, who run society need to understand, or should, or could usefully understand at a much more abstract, deep level, the nature of the good that they are promoting.

Agnes:

The general rule is anyone who knows anything has to understand that thing at whatever the level of abstraction is that you have to have in order to master the thing and those levels of abstraction differ And you're right that in this case, there's going to be a lot required. But I'm just saying the thing you said a minute ago, which is, oh, his innovation is introducing somebody who has knowledge. What I'm saying is that's not an innovation. That part was just the systems part. That's the innovation.

Robin:

But the very, very abstraction, the high level of abstraction of the knowledge he is presuming and recommending is unusual. And that's a striking feature

Arnold:

of this. Yeah, though, I mean, like a classic Greek philosophy example of this kind of thing. I mean because they don't have complicated organizations. They lack a lot of the social and material technology to have really complicated systems like that. But architecture, right? So you have an architect, they have an idea of the house. It's not even totally clear that they have a drawing of it. They just have an idea, right? They have a sense of how houses should be built and they probably do diagrams or something, but the idea that they're working from a blueprint, probably we don't even have that. And they have a bunch of craftspeople at various tiers, right, so that they have probably sort of skilled managers, and then they have sort of relatively unskilled labor, you know, we're just hewing wood and attaching things together and, you know, cutting rocks and stuff. And all the questions have to go back up to the architect about what should be done and what's good and all of this stuff. Because the architect is the only 1 that understands what makes a house good, right? Not just a wall, but a house. And so the idea of that kind of hierarchy led by somebody who has assigned a kind of mental abstraction or abstract grasp of the good to be achieved, that is, I think, just going to come very naturally to them as an idea. And I think Agnes is right that the innovation on Plato's part is to see the state and the individual as being analogous systems, and to see the idea that we need this highly abstract thing, in the case of the state. Maybe a thing to say about that, And I'm sorry, because this is just going to get very weird. But we're talking about a system, a set of systems which have this recursive feature, right? That the city has to be ruled by people who are themselves ruled by an element that is like the philosophical element. And you might wonder what that's going to look like once we start talking about parts of a person. Like, I have to have a little philosopher in me, right, the rational part of my soul. And I think that part of the reason why the ultimate object of, because that represents a puzzle, right, That recursion represents a puzzle for Plato, because that can't keep going all the way down. I think his solution to the puzzle is just that, once we start talking about my rational soul, At some point, the thing that's doing the ruling work just is the form of the good. And that can't be a complex system. And so he has to have the thing at the bottom of the recursion be simple, right, in order for it to govern these complex systems. And that simple thing therefore needs to be abstract. It's not abstract for any other reason that it has to be simple, that it has to not be a coordinated system of parts. And so his recursion system within a system idea leads him in the direction of this highly, highly abstract object that we need to have a grip on. And you might think that that's just a fault of his theory that we do get led in that direction, but his thought is that That's good news. And it's good news because this simple object, because of its simplicity, the simplicity of the good, is invariable. And since it's invariable, it'll hold off civil war. Which he takes internal conflict and civil war to be the essential problem of cities and people and all of this stuff. And I actually think it's worth noting that you don't think that, and in fact cultural drift is not a problem of conflict. And that's a really interesting key difference.

Robin:

Right. And like say with respect to AIs, many people think the key to AIs is making sure they have a simple, easy to inspect value function that all the AIs agree on and that's why they would be peaceful with each other and that any differences or opacity in their values is going to produce war and conflict and disaster. And it's

Arnold:

stable and that it's perfectly stable over time.

Robin:

Right.

Arnold:

That's a very platonic problem.

Robin:

Right. I think we've finished up our time, but anybody want to concluding summary remarks or anything?

Agnes:

No.

Robin:

Well then thanks for talking.

Agnes:

Yeah. Thanks, Robin.