This is one of five remarkable quotes on political philosophy by professor Steven B. Smith, from Yale. This one is on the greatest philosopher of all times, Plato.
On Plato
Socrates understands that those who want to reform others must reform themselves, but many who’ve tried to imitate him have been less careful. It is easy to confuse, as many people have done, the Republic, with a recipe for tyranny. The twentieth century, and even the beginnings of our own, is littered with the corpses of those who have set themselves up as philosopher-kings, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Khamenei, to name just some of the most obvious. But these men are not philosophers. Their professions to justice are just that, they are professions or pretensions expressing their vanity and their ambition.
For Plato, philosophy was in the first instance, a therapy for our passions in a way of setting limits to our desires. And this is precisely the opposite of the tyrant who Plato describes as a person of limitless desires who lacks the most rudimentary kind of governance, namely self-control. The difference between the philosopher and the tyrant illustrate two very different conceptions of philosophy. For some, philosophy represents a form of liberation from confusion, from unruly passions and prejudices, from incoherence. Again, a therapy of the soul that brings peace and contentment and a kind of justice. And yet for others, philosophy is the source of the desire to dominate. It is the basis of tyranny in the great age of ideologies through which we are still passing.
The question is that both tendencies are at work within philosophy and how do we encourage one side but not the other. As that great philosopher Karl Marx once asked, ”Who will educate the educators?” It’s the wisest thing he ever said. Who will educate the educators, who do we turn to for help? There is obviously no magic solution to this question but the best answer I know of is Socrates. He showed people how to live, and just as importantly, he showed them how to die. He lived and died not like most people but better, and even his most vehement critics will admit to that.
Wouldn’t the answer be ”more Karl Marx” then?