City of Man: A Novel Reading of Plato's Republic

By Jean-Luc Beauchard and John Panteleimon Manoussakis

Why does life in society make us so unhappy? Why has civilization always been marked with social unrest? From the time of Plato, our greatest thinkers have understood that in order to confront the ills of the city, one must first look to the individual, to the maladies and discontents of the human soul. In this novel reading of Plato's Republic, the insights of Nietzsche and Freud are brought to bear on one of western civilization's most important texts. But what is at stake is far more than our interpretation of the Republic. City of Man will leave readers better equipped to face the crises that confront us today by reintroducing the import of that oft-quoted but rarely practiced Delphic maxim: know thyself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666752786

Jean-Luc Beauchard

Jean-Luc Beauchard is a philosopher and Catholic priest. He has taught courses in philosophy, theology, and literature at multiple colleges and universities in New England.

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Preface

We are wont to forget the cruelty at the heart of this world, the darkness it harbors within. Perhaps that is because this world is our creation and we prefer not to look too deeply into ourselves.

¹

Yet any impartial consideration of the absurdity and callousness that governs so much of our daily lives will cause us to question not only our ideals, our moral standards—our understanding of justice and the certainty with which we wield it—but our fondness (prejudice, bias may be more fitting terms) for culture, for civilization, for humanity itself. Camus, who understood that humor is the best means of waking men to forgotten truths, observed through the mouth of Meursault how ridiculous it is that our laws and often our fates are decided by men who change their underwear.

²

A fine point. But the situation is more dire still. George Orwell, in his essay Inside the Whale, reminds us that in Europe nearly every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies,

³

has, at one time or another, been a human body. And Europe is far from alone in this regard. We too spend our days walking over a vast graveyard, whistling through a valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). Yet we forget—and, indeed, must forget—that our streets are paved over corpses, our cities erected atop burial grounds. We forget that the dead are always with us, always beneath us, at the foundation of everything we do.

Strange. Who are these lifeless ones? Why are we so quick to push them from our minds? Why do we offer them no monuments, no way of commemorating the dead save the buildings we construct above them in order to conceal them, to keep them hidden in the crypt below? Yes, if we are being honest, we will have to admit that this too has been one of the dark places of the earth, as is every place inhabited by the race of man. But has the glow of our electric lights—bright enough to blot out the stars—made it any brighter? Have the advances of science, technology, human understanding brought us any nearer to penetrating that immense and incomprehensible void, the darkness upon which everything stands?

Let us consider those early adventurers who made their way across the black waters of the Atlantic and dropped the first anchors on this country’s unmolested shores. Well, they made it here. That counts for something. But what did they find? What was their reward? They called it the New World and yet it was constructed just like the old. It certainly had all of the old problems. Forests, famines, flies, disease. Brutal heat and biting cold. Death skulking in the air, in the water, hanging over the land like fog over the sea. Imagine what it was to climb down from one of those toy ships after being tossed about like a plaything by blind and raging swells. Imagine being greeted by dark and mysterious wilderness, wild animals and wild men in whom you see reflected the madness of your own heart. Imagine the loneliness, the frustration, the tedium, the fear. And all the while the growing suspicion that nothing will come of it, that—live or die—these things matter little: The hand has been dealt and lost and there is nothing to be gained.

⁴

They called it the New World but there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) and each of them must have been gripped by that same human fear, the fear that fills us all, that pushes us, drives us, compels us to commit the inhuman atrocities that are the hallmarks of human existence. The fear of death.

It was up to these men, these small, insignificant men, to discover a New World, to build it, to cultivate it, to bend it to their wills. Well, how did they set about doing it? It’s fashionable these days to look back at the crimes committed by frightened men in frightening times—those whom, when faced with the horror of existence, acted horribly—and to condemn them for being the monsters we are certain they were. (Indeed, if we remember the dead at all, we do so only to thank God that we are not as bad as them—and this, incidentally, is the one time we remember God.) Yet are we really so different from our ancestors? Have we not sprouted from the same root, were we not made from the same stock?

For Augustine, man is the corrupted animal. If we today find this observation untimely, if it conflicts with contemporary mores—that is, if we are unwilling to admit that the stain of Adam rots each of us to the core and hope instead that it is possible to be a good man, a just man, a moral man—we must surely admit that collectively we are not much better than those we condemn for having shaped this new world by brute force, the triumphant monsters, as Nietzsche would call them, who constructed civilization by unhesitatingly laying their terrible claws upon a populace and shaping it to their wills.

⁵

We must say that something of those monsters of old still lives in our new world, that society testifies to their continued influence while at the same time attempting to conceal it.

Do you suppose it was an accident that both Cain and Romulus founded cities, that the hand that murders is the hand that creates?

⁶

Or is there perhaps a connection between the construction of the city—the cultivation of the polis, the building up of the state—and the violence that civilization is meant to suppress? Can one be civilized without being violent, cultured without loving cruelty? It may seem like I’m being hyperbolic. But, as I said above, the most disinterested consideration of human society will reveal that culture is not only built upon but necessitates a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture.

⁷

The two are bound together like two creatures with one head. Don’t believe me? Why, look around you: blood is flowing in rivers, and in such a jolly way besides, like champagne.

⁸

This statement, penned a hundred and fifty years ago, is as true today as it was then, as it will be a thousand years hence.

Socrates tells us in the Republic that if we want to understand the human psyche we should first look to the city: an image of the soul of man. In this book, I propose to do just that. However, I will not look at the ideal city, will not construct a just city in order to understand what man ought to be, as Socrates attempted to do. Such a place has never existed. Nor such a soul. Rather, it is by looking honestly at the city of man, by entering into the profound darkness of its heart, that I hope to broach the subject not of what we should be but what we are. Such a project will undoubtedly fall well short of its purported aim and the image it offers will, I suspect, be partial and distorted. (There are truths too terrible to know and we philosophers are as good as any at concealing them from ourselves.) Nevertheless, this work represents one man’s attempt to pay more than lip service to that oft-quoted but rarely practiced Delphic maxim: know thyself. It represents a feeble but honest effort to gaze unflinchingly into the dark.

JLB

Fenwick University

Boedromion 14 / September 14, 2019

Libation to Demeter & Persephone / The Triumph of the Cross

1

. Do not mistake my meaning. The world itself was created ex nihilo, as my colleagues in the theology department will tell you. But this world, the civilized world, the world of man in which we live and the only world we know, is the strange, savage construction of human beings. We have made it in our own image and likeness, so accurate a portrait that we no longer recognize it as our own.

2

. Camus, The Stranger,

109

.

3

. Orwell, Inside the Whale, in A Collection of Essays,

218

.

4

. For more on the meaninglessness that confronts all such human endeavors, see, Beauchard, The Mask of Memnon.

5

. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (

2

, §

17)

.

6

. See, Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal. . . . The handshake seals the covenant. The hand brings about the ‘work’ of destruction. Heidegger, Parmenides,

80

.

7

. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (

1

, §

11)

.

8

. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground,

23

.

book 1

A city is thus a priori unsuited for a comparison of this sort with a mental organism.

~ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

1.

Freud’s observation, made without reference to the Republic, is nevertheless so essential to the inquiry we are about to undertake that we are compelled to begin with it.

¹

The city/soul analogy, of which much has been made over the millennia, is worthless. Contrary to the many—indeed, too many—scholars who have staked their readings upon it, we find from the outset that the Republic is not a work concerned with the justice of the individual soul but one focused on, even obsessed with, the question of how best to govern the masses. As Bloom rightly asserts, the title that Plato chose for his manifesto, politeia, is better translated regime than republic.

²

And a citizen (politēs) living under that regime is no more than a possession of the polis, the city’s servant, its slave.

³

The fact that the liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization but rather is abolished thereby,

⁴

a fact that sounds so objectionable to our modern ears, is perhaps made more digestible if we keep in mind why human beings associate with one another in the first place. Why live in society? Why submit to its rules and strictures? About the answer to that question, there can be no doubt. We form societies because each of us isn’t self-sufficient but is in need of much.

⁵

We associate with others because they are useful to us. It is to my advantage to live and work in a community of fellow workers, those who benefit me by their labor and whom I (begrudgingly) benefit by mine.

⁶

This point, uncontroversial as it may seem, has serious implications. We will take them up in the pages to come. But before we do, we must pause over another question. How, in the first place, does one become useful to others? What is it about human beings that makes us advantageous to live with? Certainly, we were not useful from the start but were made to be so. How and by what? Nietzsche, inspector general of the human community, proves insightful on this point. As he rightly notes, before human beings could be relied upon to consistently benefit one another, we first had to be made consistent. We had to become dependable; that is, be able to do such extraordinary things as give our word and keep it, make promises and trust the promises of others, pay our debts.

⁷

But how does one become dependable? How is one made consistent? Answer: Like any domesticated animal, by means of strict regulation.

⁸

One is ordered, structured, civilized into utility. Said differently, one is forced to live under a regime and so become regimented.

To say, as Aristotle does, that man is the political animal is to say that man is the restricted animal, the animal defined by an order imposed upon him from without.

⁹

Politics is not something we do. It is what we are. The political animal is the ordered animal, the calculable animal, the animal artificially structured by the morality of mores and the social straightjacket,

¹⁰

the animal regulated by the state.

¹¹

If this assertion is not accepted from the start, if it is dismissed offhand like so many other uncomfortable truths, then so too will everything that follows be cast aside in pursuit of more charming words, the kind that soothe and persuade while concealing the truth. Now, comfort is no mean thing. Indeed, it might justly be argued that the sole purpose of philosophy is to anesthetize its practitioners to the pains of this world.

¹²

But if it is comfort you seek, then I implore you to put this book down and not pick it up again. Find another work, one that is more charming, one that can charm the fears right out of you. Read the Republic. Read it like an academic, like one trained to know what he will find in a book before he has read the first page. However, if you are with me, dear reader, if you are willing to see things as they are and not as you want them to be, then let us begin this exploration together and not stop until we have looked honestly at what the Republic can tell us about the nature of political things—that is, the nature of man,¹³ of you and of me and of the darkness we harbor within.

2.

You’re still here? All the better!

Before we begin our reading of the Republic, we see from the title alone that the picture of man being offered is that of the animal who imposes order and structure upon existence because his existence is ordered and structured from without.

¹⁴

This is apparent from the opening lines of the dialogue.

I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to pray to the goddess; and, at the same time, I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival, since they were now holding it for the first time. Now, in my opinion, the procession of the native inhabitants was fine; but the one the Thracians conducted was no less fitting a show. After we had prayed and looked on, we went off toward town.

¹⁵

This descent to observe a festival taking place outside the city at night represents a return to the primordial chaos, the darkness that precedes society, the state of nature in a world devoid of human construction. That the festival is taking place for the first time clues us in to the fact that we are observing the origin of human life. Here, at the beginning, the civilized Athenians are no better than the warlike, belligerent, spirited Thracians.

¹⁶

All are equal in the Dionysian frenzy that grounds our existence. All are one in the maddening dance.

¹⁷

Now note the vantage point. We do not enter the fray. We are observers, onlookers peering down into the dark. Like gods on Mount Olympus, we watch with impunity, untouched by the orgiastic cries, the pain and passion and confusion below. We are philosophers. We are detached. We watch from a distance. ("I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival.) Why return to this place of primal rupture? Why observe this disordered dance? As the very next lines of the dialogue make clear, we do so in order to turn toward town" better equipped to understand the polis and thus decide how it ought to be governed. We look to man’s beginnings so that we might direct the city’s ends.

¹⁸

(Indeed, it is no accident that the setting of this opening scene is the Piraeus—a port that, according to Bloom, was open to the diversity and disorder that come from foreign lands as well as various outlandish ways of life

¹⁹

—and yet that ultimately found itself walled in, brought under the regime of the city, literally confined by its structures.)

²⁰

On our way back to civilization, equipped as we now are with the knowledge that will help us govern, help us rule over that most unruly of creatures, man, we are met with resistance. We are not the only ones who have been to the nighttime procession and seen the truth of where man comes from, what man is. Led by Polemarchus (whose name means leader of war), a group larger and thus stronger than us has also witnessed the chaos and perhaps even partaken therein.

²¹

They too are ready to impose their wills upon the city of man, to work that raw material of people and semi-animals into a form that fits their vision.

²²

And they do not take kindly to the would-be philosopher kings who have set themselves above the darkness, removed themselves from the struggles of human affairs. Socrates and Glaucon are outnumbered. They are overpowered and overcome.

²³

What this early confrontation with Polemarchus and his compatriots on the road to the civilized life reveals is that, at bottom, society is built upon power—the power of the group over and against the desire of the individual.

²⁴

Socrates and Glaucon are in a hurry to get away to town. But they are prevented from doing so by the first state, a band of warlike brothers who ask: Do you see how many of us there are? . . . Well, then . . . either prove you are stronger than these men or stay here.

²⁵

Faced with such threats, what choice do they have but to stay and do as I tell you?

²⁶

Of course, this early semblance of a state is, as Nietzsche says, a fearful tyranny, an oppressive and remorseless machine.

²⁷

It cannot be otherwise. The replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community [which] constitutes the decisive step of civilization can only be felt as a sudden and pitiless incarceration to the once free, now caged human-animal.

²⁸

But that is not to say that it is without benefit. We have all read stories of desperate men who seek their own imprisonment for fear of starvation. (At least they feed you behind bars.) Similarly, in order to escape the unlivable chaos of life beyond the walls of the polis, in order to protect oneself from the wills and whims of other individuals who are merely stronger, one readily submits to the power of the group. And this submission, one soon learns, offers protection from more than the threat of the stronger. It protects against the greatest threat of all: human need.

Agreeing to live within the confines of society enables one to ensure, as best as one ever can, that one’s needs will be met. We said above that the genesis of human society is need. We live together because it benefits us to do so. And while I need protection from the threat of violence, I need a lot more besides. I need food. I need shelter. I need clothing. I need a means of perpetuating the species. If it were not for society, I would have to secure all these things on my own and I would have to do so under the constant threat of violence, the threat posed to me by others who are attempting to secure for themselves the very same necessities. Because of society, I can work to secure one thing—say, the food supply—and have my other needs taken care of for