A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

A guide by D. J. Sheppard

Yet Plato's Republic is not only a 'must read' for philosophers, but also fruitful to examine. Equally, if the need for a guidebook is increased by the obscurity and complexity of a text (as all the above are indeed obscure and complex) the Republic is definitely a book that needs a lot of explanation. And here, in a style that is clear but a little too much like a PhD thesis, is assuredly a lot of explanation. 

Here the explanations are sprinkled with page references to secondary texts (Julia Annas alone gets 25 or so citations, which in this slim book is more references than for all the other major philosophers, such as Aristotle and Socrates, combined) conservatively structured and carefully neutral. Essentially, the book provides is a linear commentary on the text, as the series editor says the guides are designed to be read 'alongside' the originals.

Sheppard does a good job in setting out both may of the main issues, and the various opinions people have had on them. He says at the outset that in doing so, he has 'endeavoured to make as few interpretative decisions as possible, instead offering a range of interpretative possibilities in order to help readers develop their own response to Plato's text'.

But is it 'Plato's text' at all? Because, Sheppard soon launches, some people say 'Plato' was not really called 'Plato; some people say the 'Seventh Letter' that is offered as evidence of Plato's (or whatever he was called) political activism - and other people say is a document by other people entirely with their own aims. And who wrote the Seventh Letter matters, as it is often used as support for the political interpretation of the Republic. 

In fact, the only bias, that Sheppard will admit to, is scepticism that the Republic is a serious attempt to sketch out a political philosophy. Inevitably, having aired this intriguing option, Sheppard than adds it is 'certainly not his intention to suggest that his assumption is mistaken', only to suggest that it is but one of a number of possible ways to view the Republic. This, I would say, is to duck the responsibility of a guidebook, certainly to reduce it s usefulness. If we were to buy a guidebook of a more practical kind, say a map, and it indicated that some people thought that this route was impassable but others thought it was good shortcut, we would not consider that a very useful kind of guide.

Or take that other issue, central to any a philosophical discussion of the Republic, just whose opinion is any particular character reflecting anyway? Is Socrates voicing the views of the historical Socrates - or of Plato? Or is it perhaps neither - that the dialogues are much more literary exercises than they are historical or even philosophical ones? No wonder, as Sheppard notes, some commentators have warned that abandoning he assumption that Socrates speaks for Plato leads swiftly to the collapse of the interpretative debate into 'a babble of competing voices'.

As to this issue, our guide says firmly that 'having brought the matter to the reader's attention, in what follows I shall endeavour to take account of both approaches where adopting one or other position has significant interpretative implications. To do otherwise would be to read the Republic on the reader's behalf.'

But that is exactly what a guidebook should do. Alas, too often, on too many of the 'big questions' about the Republic, Sheppard adopts a modest demeanour, too modest indeed, and declines to give a definite opinion.

That said, he does at least raise many interesting debates, and his book is full of detailed and sensibly selected research. There is a good exercise in context-stetting, in which it is noted that the reputation of the Republic as the key work of Plato is of relatively recent, (nineteenth century) origin, and by no means clearcut. In Raphael's famous picture, 'The School of Athens', in which Plato is depicted pointing upwards to the heavens and Aristotle is gesticulating urgently downward to the earth, Plato is holding the Timaeus, not the Republic, Sheppard points out. This is a nice way to illustrate his point, that the Republic was not always considered Plato's most important work, but I suspect it may also be a bad way to do it, as surely Raphael would have wanted to put in Plato's hands a dialogue emblematic of Plato's impractical and 'metaphysical' interests, irrespective of considerations of merit, as part of his carefully constructed imaginary scene.

Again, it is interesting to read here that John Stuart Mill tells an anecdote about a bookseller who went bankrupt, and blamed it on his inability to sell even a copy of Plato's dialogues, as a prelude to speculating that the might not be in the whole of Britain then 'so many as a hundred persons who have ever read Plato'. Yet, as Sheppard immediately notes, in his 'on the one hand, and then on the other' style, only twenty years later Plato's Republic was being successfully republished as part of the popular 'Golden Treasury Series'.

Not taking a stand is always a good way to avoid errors, and indeed the book has a reassuring quality of neutrality, with just one or two exceptions, such as during an extended discussion of 'feminism in the Republic' when Sheppard offers that Plato's relatively egalitarian comments on the proper role of women (in the Republic) are surprising for the topic being raised at all, given that 'Aristotle, by comparison, has little to say about women in either the Politics or the Nicomachean Ethics, setting the tone for Western Philosophy until well into the Twentieth Century'. This is a serious misrepresentation both of Aristotle and more broadly the representation of women in Western Philosophy, for indeed Aristotle does expound in his Ethics a very influential view of women in which he says that they are inherently inferior to men, lacking reasoning powers, and by natural right should be treated like domestic animals. We should recall his comment here:

'It is the best for all tame animals to be ruled by human beings. For that is how they are kept alive. In the same way, the relationship between the male an the female is by nature such that the male is higher, the female lower, that the male rules and the female is ruled.'

When Sheppard wants to though, he can be more persuasive. He recalls that the reputation of the Republic (we should add, in the UK) really derives from Benjamin Jowett's adoption of the text for the 'Oxford Greats' syllabus in 1872. Jowett, it seems , saw in the Republic, 'a means of shoring up traditional moral values in the face of increased scepticism of religion' as well as a useful blueprint for how a modern state, that is one transformed by the industrial revolution, might be organised. 'Moreover, in Plato's vision of the 'Philosopher-Ruler' Jowett saw an idea of disinterested duty that he hoped would inspire those who read the Republic at university to devote themselves to public service rather than the pursuit of wealth'.

Sheppard's account makes the case for the Republic as a proper study not only for Philosopher-Rulers but for more humble students, and also along the way makes for itself a good claim for inclusion in the range of secondary texts supporting the great original work.
 

 Reviewed by Martin Cohen