Innovation, Corruption and Rationality in Plato’s Republic

In book IV of The Republic, Socrates tells Adeimantus that in the ideal city wealth and poverty should be avoided because they lead to innovation (422a). A few sections later, Socrates says that innovation in gymnastics and music should be avoided so as not to corrupt the city (424b). This statement is counter-intuitive because innovation is usually thought of as opposed to corruption. One connotes disfunction, decline and decay where the other connotes newness, growth and creativity. It is also puzzling given that Plato holds reason as the most important part of the soul (441e). At first glance, we would think that reason and the ability to innovate would be intimately connected. They both involve investigation, questioning and figuring out how things work at a deeper level. Why does Plato view innovation as causing corruption and how is this related to his theory of reason? I will argue that Plato’s conflation of reasoning about action and reasoning about concepts leads him to wrongly view innovation as leading to the corruption of the city. This is an important question to answer because it will allow us to distinguish between two types of reasoning and it will help us to better understand by which means we can prevent our political institutions from becoming corrupt. I will begin by defining corruption and innovation and explaining how they are related. Then I will analyze Plato’s conception of reason arguing that he is conflating two types of reason. Lastly, I will show the implications of this conflation on Plato’s conception of corruption and innovation.

Plato thinks of corruption as being like a disease (426a). He views it as a lawlessness that, once installed in one particular sector of the city, immediately becomes a danger to the whole (424c-e). Plato is very skeptical about the ability of a ruler to effectively reform a corrupt city through its laws. Making laws only appear to solve issues without really affecting the fundamental causes of the problem (426e). This is because the problems of the city cannot be tackled in their particularities, rather they must be conceived of holistically where each part needs to be brought into harmony with all the others (519e-520a). Plato argues that in the ideal city each man takes his proper place in a integrated system of relations making the city into “one and not many” (423d). The relation between “one” and “many” means that any problem with the particular breaks the harmony of the whole and thus destroys the unity of the city. This explains the view that a city can only be made good through its proper founding and not afterwards (427e). Plato is not simply being cynical, he thinks that reform is genuinely difficult because of the numerous and complex interdependencies that must be brought into harmony with each other. Hence, corruption, on Plato’s account, can be understood as what breaks down the harmony which constitutes the city as a unified whole.

Plato uses the term “innovation” only twice in The Republic, and both mentions are centered around the fear of new things unsuspectingly being brought into the city (421e, 424c). In the second mention, it is specifically new things that could affect “gymnastics and music” (424b) which are the cornerstones of Plato’s education program for the city’s guardians (401a-410c). Plato’s does not see innovation as dangerous because it could be employed in the service of nefarious forces. The main example of innovation he gives is the seemingly innocuous one of musicians coming up with new styles of music (424c). What Plato is really concerned with is any deviation from the “established order” however insignificant it might appear (424b). Thus, we can see innovation as the introduction of new ways of doing things into the city.

The idea that the city should be a harmonious unity makes corruption and innovation two sides of the same coin. Plato’s understanding of corruption accords with his prioritization of education over legal reform. This is because a city can only be good if all its inhabitants are good in the first place. This is why education is the only path to making a city that is free from corruption (424a, 425a-c). We see in Plato’s discussion of the three forms of political regimes how each further corruption of the city passes through the children as each regime generates its corresponding individual types. The initial degradation of aristocracy into timocracy is due to the birth of children with a bad nature (546a-547a). When oligarchy devolves into democracy it is goaded on by the rulers who can no longer instill moderation in the youth (555c). The decay of democracy into tyranny is completed in part by the collapse of authority between fathers and children, teachers and students (562e-563b). Plato views raising children as the most dangerous point in the maintenance of an ideal city because it is the only time where it is forced to bring something new into its reaches. Hence, the importance of ensuring that this novelty is immediately assimilated. Plato even says that it is inevitable that even his ideal city would become corrupted eventually because “for everything that has come into being there is decay” (546a). This indicates that, for Plato, novelty is highly disruptive. If a city is a harmonious whole, then any genuine newness introduced into it is necessarily not harmonious with the whole. Innovation, by definition, breaks with the established order making it a form of disorder. Therefore, by introducing new things into the city, innovation is itself a form of corruption of the harmonious and unified whole.

The notion of the city as a harmonious unified whole explains the link between corruption and innovation but Plato admits that the city can never live up to this ideal. Raising the question: Should we understand the city as a harmonious whole even though this harmony is but a fading ideal? I will answer this question but beforehand, Plato’s conception of rationality needs to be analyzed to see how it is linked to his concepts of corruption and innovation.

I will now define Plato’s view of rationality. Plato never uses the word “rationality”, however I will use the term to designate two concepts which Plato views as intimately interrelated, the calculating part of the soul and mathematical calculation. Plato argues that the calculating part of the soul is what controls each part of the soul such that harmony can reign throughout all the other parts making the soul unified and just (441c-443d). Plato starts by arguing that what is irrational is related to the part of the soul that is moved by emotions and desires (439d-e). He then posits the existence of the rational part of the soul on the basis that there is a force which can oppose impulses from the desiring part (439c-d). Plato argues that the calculating part should rule over the desiring part because it is “wise and has forethought about all the soul” (441e). He then adds to this that the calculating part knows what is good for the other parts of the soul and for the whole (442c). In book VII of The Republic, Plato discusses intelligence which he views as being intimately related with the calculating part of the soul. Intelligence is a form of perception analogous to the senses, but which functions by interpreting the world through abstract concepts (523a-525a). It is intelligence which allows individuals to grasp abstract mathematical concepts like arithmetic and geometry in a way that is independent from the constantly changing empirical world (525a-b). Plato groups the calculating part of the soul and mathematics under rationality because they both involve the individual transcending the mutability and plurality of the empirical world to arrive at unity, stability and harmony.

However, Plato is actually combining two very distinct concepts of reason together without acknowledging how they diverge. One involves thinking about one’s actions and the other involves conceptual thinking. The calculating part of the mind which restrains desires is doing something categorically different from the part of reason involved in mathematical calculation. Restraint is a kind of action because it involves an individual doing something that results in a change in the empirical world. Whereas calculation only involves the use of concepts which exist only in the mind and are perceived through intelligence. Just thinking that two times two is equal to four does not result in any change in the world, it occurs on a purely conceptual basis. One might object to this by saying that desires can be conceived of as immaterial where they would belong exclusively to the domain of the mind and hence would not imply a change in the world. However, Plato does not view desires like this. For Plato, control over the desires clearly implies a change of behavior on the part of the individual. He argues that someone who’s calculating part masters their desiring part will not be tempted by wealth, would not steal, betray or commit adultery (442b-443b). Moreover, Plato claims that individuals should act such as to maintain the harmony of the soul (443e). Demonstrating that he views the soul as directing actions taken in the empirical world. In fact, his description of the calculating part of the soul in Book IV clearly deals with reasoning about actions. The ideas of “forethought” and “knowing what is good for” imply change and the ability to project one’s thinking into the future. This means that the calculating part must be able to grasp principles and ideas about how the world works and make plans on the basis of them. This type of reasoning presupposes the ability to act on the basis of information gathered about the world. This is different from mathematical thinking which involves concepts which are static and independent of of the world. Essentially Plato is saying that we should treat the kind of reasoning we would use to get through our day as the same as the type of reasoning we would use to calculate the circumference of a circle. Therefore, Plato is clearly combining two distinct types of reason in his theory of rationality.

I will argue that the combination of conceptual reasoning with reasoning about action raises some major problems for Plato’s theory of reason. Plato’s opposition between one and many can be defended for purely mathematical concepts because they are independent from the empirical world. The problem is that Plato insists on pushing this idea of unity from mathematical concepts into human behavior where it is on the level of human actions. However, actions necessarily influence the empirical world and thus influences other individuals in the city and as Plato himself admits the city can never be brought into a state of perfect harmony because it is in constant flux between corruption and innovation. The idea of perfect harmony or unity does not make sense when applied to human actions. The restraint of desires does not base itself on any concept of unity. Desires are restrained by grasping general but imperfect principles that guide behavior. For instance, I keep myself from eating sugary foods because I know they are unhealthy. These principles are not based on a notion of harmony independent of the world, they refer to higher order desires which are related to the world, in this case, wanting to live a long and healthy life. These general principles are not universally true and can come into conflict with each other never constituting a perfectly integrated and unified whole. While Plato is correct to see restraint as rising above the fluctuations of immediate desires it does not arrive any sort of unity. Hence, Plato cannot justify his theory of rationality through his principle of opposition between the one and the many because human actions can never produce anything resembling “one”. Thus, the concepts of unity and harmony while they can be the basis for mathematical thinking cannot be used to guide reasoning about actions.

I will argue that Plato’s confusion surrounding the distinction between reasoning about action and reasoning about concepts leads him to misunderstand the relation between innovation and corruption in the city. By removing the contradiction between corruption and innovation through the idea of perfect unity Plato has effectively pushed this contradiction into his theory of reason. Unity cannot guide reasoning about action meaning that it cannot guide the reasoning about the organization of the city which is in the constantly changing empirical world. As we discussed, giving up the principle of perfect harmony does not imply that individuals can’t rise above particularities of the world and act on the basis of general rules and principles. However, Plato’s commitment to the idea of a perfectly harmonious whole keeps him from giving us appropriate principles for guiding our actions in the changing world of the city. By relying on this model of ideal unity we are losing one of the most important tools to prevent the corruption of the political realm, that is innovation. Instead of trying to resist the flux inherent in the affairs of the city our conception of politics should take into account. If a city is able to create new laws, institutions and norms it can adapt and prevent itself from falling into total corruption. For instance, looking at the civil rights movements in the United States we can see how it led a country to better respect the ordering principles which were supposed to be at its core. Hence, the civil rights movement was able to mitigate the decay of some American political institutions through social and political change. While in the short term this change created disorder, in the long term it actually reduced the disorder that could have arisen if the country drifted further away from its principles and citizens grew even more discontent with their political system. Plato is correct to think that political innovation is difficult to apply from the top-down but perhaps what he is lacking is an account of how reform can be brought about from the bottom-up. What we can take from Plato’s view is that too much innovation can lead to chaos. While the city does not form a perfectly harmonious whole it does have some harmonious properties since its many parts are interdependent and thus form a disunited whole. Plato is right to argue for the fragility of these complex interdependencies which are maintained by individuals restraining their passions and respecting rules. Too much innovation would weaken the respect for norms and institutions which hold the city together and could lead to its collapse into total chaos. One way to partially amend Plato’s view would be to suggest that the correct principles for guiding politics in the city is a balance between innovation and harmony rather than striving for a perfectly unified harmony.

Plato views innovation and corruption as synonymous because they led to the decay of the city as a harmonious unity. This concept of unity is what holds together Plato’s theory of rationality as it explains why we should think of reasoning about action and reasoning about mathematics in the same way. However, Plato is wrong to think that the concept of harmonious unity can be applied to reasoning about action, he does not see that reasoning about action is of a fundamentally different character then reasoning about mathematical concepts because actions must be grounded in the changing empirical world. Since Plato’s idea of unity cannot be applied to reasoning about action then it cannot be used to inform our thinking about the corruption of institutions in the city. In our effort to keep the city from becoming corrupt we need not thrown out the concept of harmony as long as we accept that it is an imperfect harmony that needs to be balanced against the need for innovation.

Bibliography

Plato. (1968). The Republic (A. Bloom, Trans.). In The Republic of Plato. New York: Basic Books.