Strauss, Leo - The City and Man

LEO STRAUSS

THE CITY AND MAN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

ON PLATO'S REPUBLIC

Chapter II

ON PLATO'S REPUBLIC

notorious for his irony seems to be tantamount to not asserting anything. Could it he true that Plato, like his Socrates, the master of the knowledge of ignorance, did not assert anything, i.e. did not have a teaching? Let us theo assume that the Platonic dialogues do not convey a teaching, but, being a monument to Socrates, present the Socratic

way of life as a model. Yet they cannot tell us: live as Socrates lived. For Socrates' life was rendered pOSSible hy his possession of a "demonic" gift and we do not possess such a gift. The dialogues must then tell us: live as Socrates tells you to live; live as Socrates

Generally speaking, we can know the thought of a man only through his speeches oral or written. We can know Aristotle's political philosophy through his Politics. Plato's Republic on the other hand, in contradistinction to the Politics, Is not a treatise but a dialogue among people other than Plato. Whereas in reading the Politics we hear Aristotle all the time, in reading the Republic we hear Plato never. In none of his dialogues does Plato ever say anything. Hence we cannot know from them what Plato thought If someone quotes a passage from the dialogues in order to prove that Plato held such and such a view, he acts about as reasonably as if he were to assert

that according to Shakespeare life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But this is a silly remark: everyone knows that Plato speaks through the mouth not indeed of his Protagoras, his Callicles, his. Menon, his Hippias, and his Thrasymachus, but of his Socrates, his Eleatic stranger, his Timaeus and his Athenian stranger. Plato speaks through the mouths of his spokesmen. But why does he use a variety of spokesmeo? Why does he make his Socrates a silent listener to his Timaeus' and hisEleatic stranger's speeches? He does not tell

US;

no

ODe

knows the reason;

those who claim to know mistake guesses for knowledge. As long as We do not know that reaSOD, we do not know what it means to

he a spokesman for Plato; we do not even know whether there is such a thing as a spokesman for Plato. But this is still sillier: every child knows that the spokesman par excellence of Plato is his revered teacher or friend Socrates to whom he entrusted his own teaching fully or in part. We do not wish to appear more ignorant than every child and shall therefore repeat with childlike docility that the spokesman par excellence for Plato is Socrates. But it is one of Socrates' peculiarities that he was a master of irony. We are back

where we started: to speak through the mouth of a man who is 50

teaches you to live. The assumption that the Platonic dialogues do not convey a teaching is ahsurd. Very much, not to say everything, seems to depend on what Socratic irony is. Irony is a kind of dissimulation, or of untruthfulness. Aristotle therefore treats the habit of irony primarily as a vice. Yet irony is the dissembling, not of evil actions or of vices, but rather of good actions or of virtues; the ironic man, in opposition to the boaster, understates his worth. If irony is a vice, it is a

graceful vice. Properly used, it is not a vice at all: the magnanimous man-the man who regards himself as worthy of great things while in fact heing worthy of them-is truthful and frank because he is in the habit of looking down and yet he is ironical in his intercourse with the many.' Irony is then the nohle dissimulation of one's worth, of one's superiority. We may say, it is the humanity peculiar to the superior man: he spares the feelings of his inferiors hy not displaying his superiority. The highest form of superiority is the superiority in wisdom. Irony in the highest sense will then be the dissimulation of one s wisdom, i.e. the dissimulation of one's wise thoughts. This can take two forms: either expressing on a ~6-