CAROL JONES

DOING PLATO
Sean Sayers, Platos Republic: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999, 178 pp.
Students, as Sayers remarks in his preface, are often apprehensive at the
prospect of studying Platos Republic, fearing it will be difcult, boring,
obscure and irrelevant. Few, he states, nd it so, and no doubt this is the
case when he is their teacher, for his approach to Plato in this book is
illuminating and thought-provoking. In particular, he succeeds in drawing
convincing connections to contemporary political issues and philosophical
debates throughout. Not all students are so fortunate as to enjoy this kind
of approach to Plato. Many endure lectures which do little more than pull
ideas, quotations and arguments from the text, regardless of their context,
before inviting the students to consider their implausibility or outrageous-
ness. The facile dismissal of Platos thinking is then faithfully reproduced
in seminars, essays and exam papers. So students wonder what might have
been the point of studying Plato at all, while their tutors note that the
students seem to nd Plato irrelevant and consider whether courses on such
timeless subjects as eliminative materialism would be more appropriate to
twenty-rst century undergraduates.
This kind of teaching is becoming more prevalent in UK universities as
the effects of modularisation and short-term, part-time teaching are felt. It
used to be a common complaint that university departments were ceasing
to think of education as a coherent whole, which aimed to deepen and
expand the students thinking about a subject; instead they were concerned
with creating self-contained modules, out of which, they hoped, an
education could be assembled. Now this complaint can be aimed even
at the course modules themselves. Not only modules but even individual
lectures are modular units with little or no connection to the other parts in
the whole. A course team convenes to decide who will give which lectures
for a rst-year module: one lecturer will do Hume, another will do the
mind, a third will do science. This collection of atomic lectures will be
declared a course, and delivered to the students in an order determined only
very faintly by pedagogical imperatives, and mostly by entirely extrinsic
ones.
Res Publica 8: 295299, 2002.
2002 Kluwer Law International. Printed in the Netherlands.
296 CAROL JONES
This approach to education (in part an ideological shift in the under-
standing of what education is, in part a pragmatic response to economic
demands) has created tensions which are bound to produce a major move-
ment in the state of higher education sooner or later. The universities
response to the market is itself fragmented, equivocal and confused. We
need to decide what it is that we are trying to provide for our students,
and to justify that provision with conviction instead of bemoaning pres-
sures beyond our control whilst and this applies particularly to the
older universities smugly congratulating ourselves on our excellent
reputation. Back to Plato.
Sayers goes on to note that many students are shocked and repelled
by the authoritarian and illiberal attitudes expressed in Platos text and
fail to see beyond these to its deeper philosophical themes (vii). It seems
that questions of authority and liberty are some of the deeper philosophical
issues raised by just the tendency in education I have deplored above. What
is the nature of education? Should the universities provide students with
what they want? Should they attempt to shape the minds of their charges?
Is there an alternative to the alternatives of unimpeded free choice and
careful programmatic control? In his chapter Education and the Life of
the Guardians specically, and more generally throughout, Sayers returns
to these questions several times. Asking the reader to consider Platos
approach in relation to our own, Sayers obliges us to adjust our perspective
back and forth. We do not merely assess Platos ideas from a detached and
remote historical distance, but adopt Platos perspective to assess our own.
We and our ideas, and not just Plato and his, are under critical scrutiny.
The purpose of Platos Republic, as Sayers demonstrates, is not simply
to describe a perfect society, but also to explore the idea of society and
criticise existing societies. The Republic holds up a curiously erce mirror
to our own ideas and practices, and this is the source of the compelling
interest it still holds for the thoughtful reader.
The aims of Sayers book are twofold: rst, to explain Platos philos-
ophy in the Republic and to locate his ideas in the context of current
debates; and second to assess critically this philosophy by defending it
where possible and criticising it where not (ix). Both of these aims are met
with more success than I have seen elsewhere. The projects of exposition
and evaluation are not pursued separately, but often woven together. The
fourteen chapters move from a general introduction to the text through
a discussion of the main themes of Platos text such as Communism
and the Individual and Philosophy and Society. These follow, gener-
ally but not precisely, the ten books in the Republic. Each chapter ends
with a helpful Guide to Further Reading containing evaluative as well as
DOING PLATO 297
descriptive comments on other texts. Chapters are short, on average about
twelve pages long, and Sayers does not go into great depth or attempt to
comment exhaustively; this is an introduction to the Republic, not the last
word in scholarship. Instead he deftly identies the signicant themes and
arguments and provides a reading which is sensitive to Platos meanings,
but captures the tensions within the text as well. He does this, as I have
remarked, by relating the arguments to contemporary themes and issues.
For example, writing on Justice in Society, we are taken from discussion
of Platos ideal of a harmony between individual interests and the social
interest to the remark that [M]odern socialism, by contrast, maintains
that class differences inevitably lead to class conict (66), which leads to
a discussion of the differences between Marxs vision of the elimination of
the division of labour and Platos wish to entrench hierarchies in society.
In this way, Sayers provides a commentary on current political ideologies,
their roots in Plato, and criticisms of both.
Sayers is not shy to make judgements about Platos arguments; this is
not a mere commentary. He will bluntly announce that a position is wrong,
and give reasons for this judgement. Platos critics are not spared either.
Isaiah Berlins attempt to smear Plato (together with Marx and Hegel)
by association with Nazism is disreputable (104). Yet Sayers goes on
to acknowledge that Berlin has a more substantial point in his rejection
of the Platonic vision of a harmonious society. The assumptions about
human nature in each account are teased out and left for the reader to
judge for themselves at this point. In this way then, a robust approach to
judgement and evaluation is combined above all with a reluctance to close
down the arguments. As well as being (overriding) strengths, the brevity
of the chapters enforces some limitations upon the text. For example, the
discussion of feminist criticism of Platos approach to sex roles leaves
much to be said. Sayers briey deals with the criticism that Platos aim
is to make women into men in a way which ignores what is distinctive
about womens identity, or feminine abilities and virtues. His response
is to outline the view that Platos purpose is not to force women to be
masculine, but rather to allow both women and men to become people who
can exercise their natural abilities whatever these may be to the full
(85). This exchange cannot capture what is at stake in the argument; the
representation of the feminist point is sketchy and could be misleading, and
Sayers response remains similarly vague. More attention needs paying
to the connections between Platos metaphysics, his view of nature and
culture, and the issue of feminine or female identity, upon each of
which something important in the Republic turns. But the fault is one of
too-brief discussion rather than awed discussion, and Sayers does make
298 CAROL JONES
an important point: that Platos aims (however radical) are not feminist
in any modern sense, neither granting rights to individuals equally, nor
making an appeal to identity politics. Again, he situates the argument
in both its historical and philosophical context and again, avoids closing
it down. In this way not only the question of women in the Republic
is raised, but also pressing and philosophical questions about feminism,
which becomes thereby more than simply a historical matter concerned
with the winning and granting of rights for women.
When Sayers turns to discuss Platos metaphysics and theory of art, he
continues to adopt the same approach, drawing the connections between
ancient and modern in a thought-provoking way. Discussion of Platos
view of poetry and representation yields insights into the debate between
analytic and modern European philosophy, and the relationship between
philosophy and literature. The theory of forms provokes comments on
the relationship between scientic fact and moral value, and on the
conservative and radical implications of contrasting metaphysical views.
Discussing Platos use of dialectic, Sayers again raises the issue of the
role of education for the young. Revealing the tension in Platos view
that dialectical thinking is the best technique for discussing and criticising
received opinion, whilst insisting that philosophy can be dangerous for
the young, Sayers points out that this is Platos conservatism at work.
Philosophy, he argues, can be particularly benecial to young people who
naturally start to question established ideas when they reach a certain age
(131). If this process of questioning is not to result in mere nihilism and
relativism on one hand, or the shutting down of enquiry on the other, it is
important to ensure that an approach like this is adopted. Merely decanting
educational material into the student is not education, and without a well-
developed range of critical skills and techniques the student is helpless
before the increasingly available mass of information. In other words,
Sayerss approach is one that attempts to make students think about, not
just learn about, Plato and the Republic.
The benet to the student of this approach is clear. Arguments are
assessed in a broad context, referring both to Platos Athens, and contem-
porary societies. Students are encouraged to make philosophical judgments
about the text (rather than merely trying to understand it), but not the
crude and dead-end Plato-is-a-fascist conclusions fostered by all too many
approaches to him. Instead, they will learn to consider the issues from
different perspectives, relating them to various assumptions about human
nature, sex-roles, political ideologies and so on. Students are not the
only beneciaries of this text. My colleagues and I (struggling to rescue
Plato from the ruins of the Republic left by vigorous twenty-rst century
DOING PLATO 299
barbarism) have found it an invaluable aid to teaching rst year under-
graduates. I can only hope that such courses, and such texts, do not become
outmoded in the future.
Philosophy Section
Cardiff University
PO Box 94
Cardiff CF10 3XB
UK
E-mail: carol@yasmine.org.uk