The Art of Manliness - What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man

00:00:00.000 Hey, it's Brett. It is Memorial Day here in the United States. We're taking a vacation to spend

00:00:03.600 time with our family, eat some hamburgers. So we're doing a rebroadcast here of episode number

00:00:07.020 496, What Plato's Republic Has to Say About Being a Man. It's an interview I did with Professor

00:00:12.600 Jacob Howland back in 2019, one of our most popular episodes ever. Hope you enjoy it.

00:00:17.760 We'll be back on Wednesday with a new episode. See you then.

00:00:20.440 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Plato's Republic

00:00:32.600 is a simple treatise in Western political philosophy and thought. It hits on ideas we're

00:00:36.680 still grappling with in our own time, including the nature of justice and what the ideal political

00:00:40.800 system looks like. But my guest today argues that the Republic also has a lot to say about manliness,

00:00:45.660 character development, and education in our current climate of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

00:00:49.760 His name is Jacob Howland. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa and the

00:00:53.280 author of the recent book, Glaucon's Fate, History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic.

00:00:57.900 We begin our conversation with an outline of Plato's Republic and how it combines literature

00:01:01.400 and philosophy. Jacob then makes the case that in the Republic, Socrates was attempting to save the

00:01:05.920 soul of Plato's politically ambitious brother Glaucon and why he thinks Socrates failed. Along the way,

00:01:10.980 we discuss what Socrates' attempt to save Glaucon can teach us about Andrea or manliness and what it

00:01:15.580 means to seek the good in life. We end our conversation discussing the way the Republic

00:01:18.920 teaches us the need to possess not only physical courage, but the courage to think for oneself and

00:01:23.360 stand up for one's beliefs, courage that is tested in a time like our own where it can feel difficult

00:01:27.280 to ask hard questions and wrestle with thorny issues. After the show's over, check out the show notes

00:01:31.840 at aom.is slash republic.

00:01:44.060 All right, Jacob Howland, welcome to the show.

00:01:47.280 Oh, it's great to be here, Brett. It's an honor and a pleasure to be talking with you today.

00:01:51.060 Well, thanks for having me. We're actually at your office at the University of Tulsa. This is not very

00:01:55.020 often I get to do interviews live with the guests. Usually it's remote. So this is going to be a lot of

00:01:59.160 fun. So you are a professor and you've made an expertise, you've become an expert on Plato and

00:02:05.960 you spent a lot of your career writing and thinking about Plato. How did that happen? Did you read the

00:02:10.780 Republic in college and like you were just hooked since then?

00:02:14.140 Yeah, well, you know, when I was a freshman, actually first I thought I was going to be a

00:02:18.140 physics major and that kind of didn't pan out. And then I thought I was going to be an English major.

00:02:22.760 And in my sophomore, in my spring of my freshman year, I wandered into a philosophy course taught by

00:02:29.000 a guy named David Lochterman. And Lochterman was the most brilliant man, still is, that I've ever

00:02:34.000 known. And he had an incredible passion for philosophy. And it was an intro to philosophy

00:02:38.720 course. And, you know, you kind of get seduced by these really good teachers. And I thought,

00:02:44.020 well, if this guy is this bright and he thinks this subject is this important, I need to take more

00:02:48.980 of it. And then in my junior year, I took a seminar in ancient philosophy with him. And studying the

00:02:54.840 Greeks is really exciting because the world was new and fresh to them. You know, they're the ones

00:03:00.500 who came up with words like philosophy, love of wisdom, politics, athletics, agony, which is the

00:03:07.940 word agon means competition, right? And that's what an athlete feels when he's contesting for victory.

00:03:13.680 And so it's exciting to study the Greeks to begin with. But then we studied Plato.

00:03:19.280 And I remember reading Plato's Symposium, which is a dialogue about beauty. And in the Symposium,

00:03:25.360 the character of Socrates talks about being taught the mysteries of beauty and ascending a ladder,

00:03:30.980 sort of a divine ladder of ascent toward the beautiful with a capital B. And I was entranced

00:03:39.740 by the mystery of philosophy. I thought there was something deep there that I wanted to find out

00:03:46.000 more about and some deep meaning that I was convinced Plato alone could reveal. So that's

00:03:52.600 how I got started with Plato. And so it's been like that. So how long has that been?

00:03:56.900 Well, that was a long time ago. You know, it's impolite to ask somebody my age about how long it's

00:04:01.500 been, but that seminar was in 1978. So that's already 40 years now. Yeah.

00:04:07.700 So, okay, let's talk about Plato. I know a lot of our listeners have read Plato's Republic. Either

00:04:13.180 they did it in college in some sort of gen ed philosophy course they had to take, or they just

00:04:16.980 did it for pleasure. But there's some people who don't know a lot about Plato. Talk about,

00:04:21.360 there's a lot of Greek philosophers this time, the Axial Age. What made Plato unique as a philosopher

00:04:27.040 compared to like Xenophon or Aristotle and all these other guys?

00:04:31.220 Yeah. So Xenophon, who you just mentioned, was one of two very important students of the

00:04:39.820 philosopher Socrates, Plato being the other. And Plato's student was Aristotle. But it all started

00:04:46.220 with Socrates, who was a very charismatic personality. And I'll be talking more about him later in this

00:04:51.620 podcast. Plato is unique for a number of reasons. First of all, he wrote dialogues, what are usually

00:04:58.460 called Platonic dialogues? 35 of them. And we have all 35 dialogues that were attributed to Plato in

00:05:05.240 the ancient world, plus a number that were attributed to him, but are probably not by Plato.

00:05:10.780 And these dialogues are an entire sort of fictional world of the sort that only really the greatest

00:05:18.480 writers like Homer or Shakespeare might produce. And I mentioned Shakespeare because in terms of

00:05:24.520 the literary genre, the dialogues are closest to Greek drama. You know, you had these Athenian

00:05:29.460 dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, who wrote tragedies and comedies and weird little dramas

00:05:35.100 called Seder plays. So the Platonic dialogues are dramas in which we don't see the sorts of things we

00:05:41.980 get in Greek drama where people are killed and there's fighting and war and so forth. But what we see is

00:05:49.620 people arguing, having philosophical discussions and doing all the sorts of things that people do

00:05:54.480 in discussion, telling jokes, making little speeches, maybe getting angry, telling stories.

00:06:01.860 And in these dramas, Socrates, Plato's teacher, is the protagonist. He appears in almost every single

00:06:08.840 Platonic dialogues. And this is really unique in philosophy that what we have is a kind of story

00:06:14.840 making not philosophy, but the philosopher, the center of attention. So we get to see Socrates

00:06:21.620 as a whole human being. And we get to see him interacting in the historical circumstances of

00:06:28.920 his age with other Athenians. And one feature of Socrates that I want to mention, I'll talk about

00:06:34.940 this more later too, but he is a kind of new hero. He's a sort of new protagonist. You know that

00:06:40.900 the Greek dramas and Homer, they might have somebody like Achilles or Heracles. And these men were great

00:06:49.520 because they were courageous and they were victorious in battle and so forth. Socrates is a philosophical

00:06:55.420 warrior of sorts. And what makes him heroic is his integrity. I think that he shows us Socrates because

00:07:04.500 Socrates was a rare human being who lived up to his best understanding of things. He didn't just

00:07:10.700 talk the talk, which would be philosophy. He walked the walk. So he spoke about justice and courage and

00:07:16.980 virtue and making your soul as good as possible. And he lived that life. And that's what Plato wants

00:07:22.580 to present to us. So very different from, say, a philosophical treatise like Aristotle or Kant,

00:07:29.240 who basically engages in the analysis of phenomena, but doesn't give us a drama.

00:07:33.320 Yeah. That's what I've, uh, I love reading Plato. I'm drawn to Aristotelian virtue ethics,

00:07:38.860 but reading Aristotle is a slog because, you know, those are basically his like lecture notes.

00:07:43.900 Yeah. It's just like, if then, then this and blah, blah, blah. And it's just like, uh, but like

00:07:47.860 Plato, it's like, wow, I could just, you can, you can just read this for pleasure. Cause like you said,

00:07:52.960 it's like literature. It's like you're reading a novel drama. It's fantastic.

00:07:56.720 That's right. And you know, let's not, uh, let me put in a word for Aristotle. Um,

00:08:02.340 I mean, Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness and his, his demonstration that these things are

00:08:06.640 essentially coincident that to be the best human being and live the best life and realize your

00:08:11.940 human potential in the most excellent way possible. And that's what the Greek word virtue

00:08:15.860 means is coincident with happiness. That is the, the, the route to a deeply meaningful and flourishing

00:08:21.760 life. But that comes out of Plato because Plato shows us that in the character of Socrates.

00:08:27.680 Socrates is the man who values justice and goodness and virtue above all else,

00:08:33.820 and could even be said to have been happy, even though he's executed by the Athenians on the charge

00:08:39.340 of impiety and corrupting the young. So Aristotle grows out of Plato. Plato makes Aristotle possible.

00:08:46.100 So I think you mentioned this a bit, but what was Plato's big goal as a philosopher? Like,

00:08:50.900 what was he trying to accomplish? Well, that's a great, that's like a, that's an entire course

00:08:55.160 right there. No, that's a, that's a great question. So I'm going to speak to what I see

00:08:59.780 as sort of the center of the target with respect to what Plato is trying to do. And to do that,

00:09:04.860 I want to give a little bit of historical background. Plato was born maybe around 428 BC.

00:09:10.580 The Peloponnesian war, which had essentially been started by Pericles, who was practicing a kind

00:09:15.700 of politics of imperialist expansion, had begun in 431. The war lasted 27 years. It's called the

00:09:23.300 Peloponnesian war because the opponents of the Athenians were lived in the southern region of

00:09:29.000 Greek called the Peloponnesus, and their leader was the city of Sparta. And this was a long,

00:09:36.840 protracted, bloody war that the Athenians finally, against all odds, managed to lose.

00:09:42.800 They had the best military equipment. They had the best Navy in the world. They had a tremendous

00:09:49.660 amount of wealth, but they bungled it and they lost. So fast forward to 404 BC, the Spartans have

00:09:56.060 the city of Athens surrounded. They're starved into submission and they capitulate. Immediately

00:10:01.520 thereafter, the Spartans install a puppet government of Athenian aristocrats, really oligarchs, who then

00:10:09.000 established a regime. It lasts only eight or nine months. That was known as the regime of the 30

00:10:13.620 tyrants. And this regime proceeds to execute 1,500 of their fellow Athenians. They purge the city.

00:10:21.340 They are attacking their political opponents. A number of their political opponents, the Democratic

00:10:26.500 party goes into exile. They return. A huge civil war ensues. The Democrats regain power. And then they put

00:10:35.840 Socrates on trial. They're trying to settle old scores and they want to connect Socrates with

00:10:41.640 certain members of the 30 tyrants. And I'll talk about those connections a little bit down the line

00:10:46.460 as well. So he's executed. He's tried for impiety and corrupting the young. He's executed.

00:10:52.220 So here's Plato. Plato is Socrates' friend. He is his student. Socrates is his mentor. I've often put

00:10:59.760 myself in the position of Plato. What would I do if I saw my city collapse through foolish policies

00:11:06.400 and engage in a long war and it finally ends up with a bloody civil war and the death of my mentor?

00:11:14.200 I probably would just go off and weep or something, but Plato wrote 35 dialogues. He responds by

00:11:20.780 memorializing Socrates and in effect producing this curriculum, this educational materials,

00:11:28.260 these dialogues that are designed to try to save Athens and maybe to save the world from the sorts

00:11:34.840 of mistakes the Athenians made. Now, what does that salvation involve? I'll just say two things.

00:11:41.180 One is Plato looks at the causes of the war and the causes were really the sort of uncontrolled

00:11:48.500 passions for power and greed and wealth that caused the Athenians to get into the trouble that they

00:11:56.160 immerse themselves in. And Thucydides, the historian, wrote a history of the Pelophanesian War.

00:12:02.420 And in this history, he uses the word eros. Eros is a word that's the source of our word erotic. It

00:12:09.060 specifically refers to sexual passion, but it more generally refers to a very strong desire.

00:12:14.680 And in Thucydides, there are about six places the word eros shows up and it's always a dirty word

00:12:19.760 because the Athenians, for example, had an eros for going to Sicily, the Sicilian expedition,

00:12:26.140 and trying to conquer Sicily and then conquer Carthage and perhaps attack the Persians and so

00:12:32.380 forth. Plato realizes it's not passion. It's not strong desire that's the problem. It's the object

00:12:39.900 of our desires. And he teaches that the object of human desire should be what he calls the good.

00:12:47.200 The good, if you will, is Plato's version of God. It's the transcendent source of meaning and

00:12:53.220 goodness in the world. And coordinate with that, he believes that the soul that approaches the good

00:12:59.840 through philosophy will be the most integrated, wholesome, whole human soul, human being. So he wants

00:13:09.860 to present us with an idea of what it means to be a person of integrity and to be that kind of person

00:13:16.880 as exemplified by Socrates, we have to come into the presence of the highest transcendent

00:13:23.040 reality. He wants to remind human beings that the world is a big place and that there's something

00:13:29.520 above man. And to relate to that transcendent reality is to be fulfilled and be virtuous and

00:13:36.780 live a good human life. Long answer.

00:13:39.060 Well, yeah, that's a big goal. It's a hefty goal.

00:13:41.860 It's a huge goal.

00:13:42.620 All right. So he's written a lot of dialogue, but his seminal work is the Republic where he

00:13:48.180 really grapples with this issue. For those who aren't familiar with the Republic or maybe just

00:13:53.680 for a refresher, like what's the general outline?

00:13:56.960 Well, the Republic is set during the Peloponnesian War and basically it tells a story. Socrates goes

00:14:02.320 down to the seaport of Athens called the Piraeus with Plato's brother Glaucon. Really unusual thing

00:14:07.920 about the Republic is that Plato had two brothers, an older brother named Glaucon and his oldest

00:14:12.660 brother named Adamantus. And they play a very big role in this dialogue. They go down. It's a

00:14:17.460 religious festival. Socrates and Glaucon go down following this religious procession and they're

00:14:23.020 getting ready to go back to Athens and they run into Adamantus, a guy named Polemarchus, a bunch of

00:14:28.540 other younger men who say, stick around the Piraeus. As part of this festival, we're going to have

00:14:33.980 a sort of an all-night party. There'll be a torch race on horseback. They'll be drinking and so forth.

00:14:39.840 Well, Socrates being Socrates gets them involved in a discussion instead. And instead, they spend all

00:14:45.260 night talking about the best life and whether the best life is a life of tyranny, right? Tyrannical

00:14:53.400 power so you can get anything you want, kill anyone you want, become wealthy, right? No limits on your

00:14:59.820 desires. Or is it the life of philosophy and justice? And Plato has a couple of, well, we can

00:15:07.700 talk about some of the thought experiments. Do you want me to say a bit about that?

00:15:10.180 Yeah, let's go into this because there's a lot of like popular thought experience that people might

00:15:13.660 even know about but didn't know it comes from the Republic.

00:15:16.280 Sure. So I'll say a couple things about that. At one point, Glaucon, who is Socrates' main

00:15:22.160 conversation partner or interlocutor in the Republic, says, look, I want to tell a little story. It's a

00:15:28.040 thought experiment. And the thought experiment is designed to show that even people who are thought

00:15:34.660 to be just or think they're just are really at bottom unjust. And here's the experiment. What if

00:15:40.360 he had a ring that made you invisible? How would you behave? This is the story of Gaiji's ring,

00:15:46.720 the name for the guy who finds the ring. And he tells a little story about a shepherd of nobody,

00:15:52.340 barbarian shepherd in Lydia, who finds a ring that makes him invisible. And what does he do? Well,

00:15:58.040 he sneaks into the palace, he murders the king, he seduces the queen, and he becomes the ruler of

00:16:06.120 this barbarian kingdom. And he uses the ring opportunely to appear to be just while actually

00:16:13.320 being unjust. So he kills his political opponents and so on. So this is a very interesting challenge

00:16:18.240 because Glaucon says, anybody, even those who we think are just or who think themselves just,

00:16:23.260 if they had the ring, they would behave unjustly. And that proves that at bottom, we're all unjust.

00:16:30.380 Another famous, not exactly a thought experiment, but it's an image in the Republic is called the

00:16:34.440 cave image. I think it's a very powerful image. And so Socrates says, here's an image of what it would

00:16:41.020 mean to be educated. And he says, our initial condition is we're born into a cave. We don't know

00:16:46.680 it, but we're prisoners chained up in a dark cave and we're shown images cast on the back wall of the

00:16:52.900 cave, which are really shadows produced by puppets held in front of a fire way above and behind us.

00:16:58.800 We don't even know it's there. So it's something like watching a movie, right? And the prisoners in

00:17:03.460 the cave think that these shadows of artificial objects are what is real. And if you think about

00:17:10.320 what they're watching, it's a story. Socrates says they're men and animals and tools.

00:17:16.960 And the cave is an image of culture. Every culture, if you like, is a cave and people are born into it

00:17:23.040 and they're taught. These are the realities. And this is, for example, what it is to be manly. This

00:17:30.500 is what it is to be successful. This is what, this is who our gods are. And philosophy is getting

00:17:36.160 out of the cave into the sunlit uplands of truth and being where incidentally, one encounters the

00:17:43.680 highest principle of reality. According to Socrates, the good, which Socrates presents in an image as the

00:17:49.340 sun, the source of light and life. So education is getting out of the particular cave of our culture

00:17:55.580 and seeing things from the perspective of reality itself, the real world and liberating ourselves

00:18:02.160 from the prejudices and the short-sighted understanding of things in our culture.

00:18:08.780 And in particular, the game that goes on in the cave, because every cultural cave,

00:18:14.160 in every cultural cave, there's a quest for power and a quest to try to be the person who manipulates

00:18:20.540 the images. And the people who are involved in that are often unaware that there's anything

00:18:24.820 outside of the cave. So those are two very interesting images.

00:18:29.340 Well, they are. And those, I mean, they creep up in pop culture today. So like Guy G's ring,

00:18:33.560 the Lord of the Rings, like that's-

00:18:35.560 Absolutely. Tolkien picks up on this. In fact, we can go back to Richard Wagner, who wrote

00:18:40.620 operas as part of what he called the ring cycle. It's the same idea. And then Tolkien picks up on this.

00:18:47.040 The cave image, incidentally, we see that, for example, in The Matrix.

00:18:51.940 That's what I was thinking.

00:18:52.580 Yeah. So The Matrix, you know, I mean, I tell my students, watch The Matrix. You only need to watch

00:18:57.640 the first one. By the third one, I was rooting for the machines. But if you haven't seen The Matrix,

00:19:02.440 it's we live in a world of illusion. That's essentially the cave. And some people get out

00:19:07.780 of that world of illusion and encounter reality. But there is one major difference I have to say

00:19:12.380 about The Matrix. For Plato, and this, by the way, is why the Christians and in general, and also the

00:19:19.880 Jews and the Muslims, they loved Plato because, again, he emphasized the good and this notion of

00:19:27.500 a transcendent source of being and life. And the fundamental idea there is that the created world

00:19:35.440 is good. The world is good. And that happiness and fulfillment comes through contact with reality

00:19:43.780 in all of its concreteness and in all of its vibrant life. The Matrix, it's sort of a more

00:19:50.100 modern view of reality or even postmodern. The only thing reality has to recommend it in that film

00:19:55.760 is that it's real. It's not particularly good because once you get out of that illusion, you realize

00:20:01.120 you're actually slaves. And, you know, the people who've gotten out of The Matrix are on some

00:20:06.120 spaceship. It probably smells horrible. The food isn't, it's a colorless environment. The food is some

00:20:12.380 nasty, cruel, but it's real. It's real. And that alone, human beings want to have contact with

00:20:19.180 reality. That's a platonic principle. That's what fulfills us.

00:20:22.440 Maybe The Matrix, like, is a Nietzschean version of Platonism?

00:20:25.780 I think that's right. Yeah. The Matrix is a kind of stripped down view. You know, in that film,

00:20:31.180 there's no God, there's no fundamental principle of nature and the goodness of nature, but it's still

00:20:36.820 real. And I think that the filmmakers and Plato and philosophers in general agree that the human

00:20:45.820 mind and the human soul needs to be coordinated with reality. Nietzsche, by the way, who, you know,

00:20:51.780 was sort of famously nihilistic and, you know, taught that God is dead and so forth. In the preface

00:20:57.340 to Beyond Good and Evil, he describes philosophers as we whose task is wakefulness itself. So, the idea of

00:21:04.740 waking up from a dream, a world of illusion coming out of the cave, that's essential to philosophy,

00:21:10.580 even if you're Nietzsche. So, but another big part of the Republic is this thought experiment,

00:21:17.780 a big one, is creating these cities in speech. So, Socrates, with his interlocutors, decides to

00:21:25.300 create these, like, imaginary cities. Why did he do that? What was he trying to do by creating

00:21:31.440 these imaginary cities? Yeah. So, again, I mentioned that the issue in the Republic is whether

00:21:38.120 the life of justice and virtue is preferable to the life of tyranny. And Socrates is asked at one

00:21:45.560 point to prove that it's better to be just than unjust. And so, he says, you know, the soul is a very

00:21:52.920 hard thing to see. He sort of says it's a very small thing. In fact, it's invisible, right? So, how do we

00:21:59.480 get to know someone's soul or character? Well, you can't look directly. I can't look directly into you,

00:22:04.220 Brad, and see what sort of person you are, but I can see what you do. I can see what you say. I can

00:22:08.780 see how you behave. But Socrates says, the city is the soul writ large. And if we look at a city,

00:22:16.020 which is, you know, an entire political community, we could get a better idea of what justice is. And so,

00:22:21.920 the city is an image of the soul. So, but in fact, Socrates then starts laying out these cities.

00:22:28.940 And each city teaches us something about a whole way of life. By the way, the word republic in Greek

00:22:35.520 is politeia. And that word means regime. And for the Greeks, a regime was an entire way of life.

00:22:41.980 So, we get a sequence of cities. The very first city is sort of designed to appeal to Glaucon and

00:22:48.660 Socrates' other interlocutors and kind of test them and see whether they respond to this vision

00:22:55.440 of what it would be to have a healthy community. The first city Socrates describes as true and

00:23:00.000 healthy. And it's a group of very moderate human beings who have little technological development.

00:23:07.400 They have a lot of leisure. They have a lot of leisure because they don't need to work too hard.

00:23:11.260 They don't have very expansive needs. And their life is spent basically in community with one

00:23:16.740 another and enjoying simple pleasures and simple food. Well, Glaucon looks at the city and he says,

00:23:23.060 they don't have any luxuries. They don't have painting. They don't have philosophy. This is

00:23:27.420 fit for pigs. So, Socrates says, oh, I see. You want a city where we've got, oh, we let our desires

00:23:33.220 grow and we can fill ourselves with luxuries. That city turns into what he calls the feverish city.

00:23:38.900 Then Socrates very wisely says, this city is sick. Okay. That first city was true and healthy,

00:23:43.840 but let's purge this city. Then he introduces another one that looks a lot like Sparta,

00:23:49.480 a much more sort of Spartan city, right? Moderation, kind of enforced moderation,

00:23:54.140 manliness, a regimen of physical exercise and spiritual toughening. And that looks pretty good.

00:24:00.200 And Glaucon's interested in that. But then his friend Polemarchus says, wait a second. Socrates

00:24:06.160 mentioned something about women and children. They're young men, so they want to know more about that.

00:24:10.940 And so then Socrates says, well, okay, I'll tell you about that. And the city then turns into what

00:24:17.720 will become at the end of its development, the city of philosopher kings in the Republic. That's

00:24:22.620 called the Callipolis. I think it's a somewhat ironic name. It means that the noble and beautiful

00:24:26.740 city. And each one of these cities is a sort of way of seeing whether Glaucon can be attuned to the

00:24:36.400 way of life that Socrates describes. And finally, that last city, the city of philosopher kings is

00:24:41.380 one that Glaucon finds extremely attractive. And I think it's got a kind of pedagogical function

00:24:46.420 because Socrates wants to see whether he can get Glaucon interested in philosophy. And so the

00:24:52.360 description of the cities is a way of getting issues of justice on the table and a way of

00:24:56.680 attracting Glaucon to what Socrates has to say to him. So I need to talk a little bit about Glaucon as

00:25:02.680 well. Yeah. So let's get it. So why did Plato pick his brother to be this main interlocutor with

00:25:08.780 Socrates? And like, what did he represent? And like, why wasn't in the Republic? Why wasn't Glaucon

00:25:15.280 initially interested in philosophy? And he found these other things interesting. Yeah. So we know

00:25:23.860 about Glaucon, who was a historical character, of course, one of Plato's brothers. Initially,

00:25:29.040 the earliest report of who Glaucon was comes from Xenophon. Xenophon was, again, another student

00:25:34.760 of Socrates. And in Xenophon's memorabilia, his recollections of Socrates, he tells a little story.

00:25:41.000 And the story is this. Glaucon, before he was even 20 years old, before he was even a citizen of the

00:25:47.420 Athenians, would go to the assembly and get up on the platform and harangue the Athenians. He was so

00:25:53.340 ambitious for power. And his relatives would pull him off of the platform because he was making a

00:26:01.700 fool of himself. And they couldn't get him under control. And so Xenophon says, for the sake of

00:26:08.800 Plato, who, by the way, at that time was probably like 12 or 13. I mean, he was just a boy. For the

00:26:14.520 sake of Plato, whom Socrates already knew, he went to talk to Glaucon. And what he said to Glaucon is,

00:26:19.940 well, you want to be a powerful man among the Athenians. Yes, I do. Well, you know, that's

00:26:25.240 wonderful. What do you know about economics? What do you know about military matters? And he shows him

00:26:30.560 that he doesn't really know anything. So that's our first introduction to Glaucon. And Glaucon is

00:26:35.880 particularly interested in impressing his relatives. He has two relatives in particular. One is named

00:26:42.120 Critias and one is named Carmides. These are names of notorious Athenians because they were two men who

00:26:51.940 were the leaders of the 30 tyrants, the oligarchy that took over Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian

00:26:57.220 War and executed all these fellow Athenian citizens. So Socrates is interested in Glaucon because he wants

00:27:04.480 to save Glaucon from the fate of pursuing power and glory and pursuing tyranny. Again, in the Republic,

00:27:14.460 Glaucon is the spokesman for tyranny. He's the guy who says people underneath are unjust. He's attracted

00:27:19.440 to power and rule. And it's clear that Socrates has a close relationship with Glaucon. He's with him at

00:27:26.020 the beginning of the dialogue and he speaks directly to him repeatedly in the myth of Ur at the end of the

00:27:31.320 dialogue. So there's a special issue there. Socrates wants to save Glaucon's soul from a life of

00:27:39.120 politics and injustice and turn him toward philosophy. But also Glaucon, as you allude in the

00:27:46.480 book, it sort of represents an ideal of manliness that was prominent in ancient Greek at the time.

00:27:53.860 So to be a man, to have, is it Andrea? Is it the Greek? Andrea. Andrea, you needed to have ambition

00:28:01.140 for power, seek glory, seek honor. So tell us more about ancient Greek manliness and how Glaucon

00:28:07.600 embodied that. Right. So ever since the time of Homer, I guess you could say that all young Greek

00:28:14.680 males wanted to be Achilles. Achilles is the most famous Greek warrior and cannot be defeated in battle.

00:28:21.260 I mean, of course he does ultimately die because he's shot by an arrow in his heel. That's a whole

00:28:25.960 nother story. Not one, by the way, that's told in Homer. And the, so the paradigm for manliness was

00:28:33.000 heroic manliness, deeds of valor and glory on the battlefield. The word Andrea means courage.

00:28:40.380 And what's interesting is that, well, let me say a little bit more about, about that ideal. I think

00:28:47.540 it's, it's reasonable to think of the Greeks as part of a sort of Mediterranean culture of manliness. I,

00:28:53.660 I would actually refer to the Sicilians here. If anyone knows the story of the Godfather. Okay.

00:28:59.140 In the beginning of the Republic, Polemarchus, who is one of Socrates interlocutors says justice is

00:29:05.680 harming enemies and helping friends. And the harming enemies part, Socrates argues against,

00:29:11.020 think about what it would mean to be a Godfather, this sort of Mediterranean and Sicilian idea of

00:29:17.700 manliness, which is very much like the Greek idea. You don't let people hurt you. You hurt them.

00:29:24.400 Revenge is a big, big thing. Okay. And so this is the sort of standard heroic ideal of manliness.

00:29:32.900 What's interesting about Socrates is that he represents a very different ideal. Socrates is

00:29:40.560 himself, and we know this is historically true. He was a distinguished warrior. Socrates was a poor man,

00:29:46.780 but somehow he acquired the money to buy the shield and greaves and spear and sword that would allow him

00:29:55.860 to be a hoplite warrior. Hoplite warriors were sort of the main warriors in ancient Greece. And he

00:30:02.800 distinguished himself on the field of battle. There's a dialogue called the Carmides in which

00:30:07.020 Socrates returns from a very bloody battle in which he saved Alcibiades, another famous Greek warrior,

00:30:13.160 and then turned down. We know this from the symposium. He turned down the awards. He said

00:30:17.540 Alcibiades should get the awards. So young men like Glaucon and Alcibiades and others were attracted

00:30:23.580 to Socrates in the first instance, because he was a famous warrior. He actually spent years on

00:30:29.160 campaign. There's a wonderful article called Socrates as hoplite published in the journal

00:30:33.700 ancient philosophy that details this, but I think that, so he had those ingredients,

00:30:39.540 but Socrates idea of manliness was very different from the classical Greek ideal because the fact is

00:30:48.880 that Greek manliness, which is the word for courage was actually rooted in cowardice. This is sort of the

00:30:55.440 dirty little secret. If we look at Homer, Hector, the great Trojan warrior is facing Achilles outside

00:31:03.240 the war of outside the walls of Troy, his mother and father, the king of queen of Troy have said,

00:31:08.500 come inside the wall. Achilles will kill you. And Hector doesn't do it because he doesn't want to be

00:31:13.220 called a coward. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean ethics that the citizen soldiers in Greeks in Greece

00:31:20.360 were motivated by the fear of shame. This is, for example, a major principle in Sparta. Sparta was

00:31:28.000 extremely hard on those who in any way were thought to be cowards. So the fear of disrepute is what drove

00:31:35.460 ancient Greek courage. Here comes Socrates. Socrates has a different idea of manliness. His idea is

00:31:42.100 the courage to do what is right and just, no matter what people think of you. And this comes to a head

00:31:50.000 in the case of the trial of Socrates. He's tried for impiety and corrupting the young. It is said by

00:31:56.040 his accusers that his philosophizing harms his fellow Athenians. And he says, no, I am all about

00:32:03.540 going around the city of Athens and telling you to care for your souls, to be the best human beings

00:32:08.480 possible. I will not stop philosophizing. And he's tried and executed on a capital crime.

00:32:14.660 What kind of courage does it take to stick to your convictions in that way? And not to be afraid

00:32:20.360 of disrepute, not to be afraid of being executed because you're doing something that to the best of

00:32:27.200 your knowledge is just and right. That's a new idea of heroism. We don't see that in the ancient Greek

00:32:32.940 heroes like Achilles. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:32:35.980 And now back to the show. And I think it was interesting too, you talk about in the book,

00:32:41.760 is that this ancient idea of Greek manliness, while it could spur individuals to strive for

00:32:48.600 greatness, erite, but in the end, all that striving came to log, like it would eventually destroy the

00:32:56.460 city, the city state. And like, that's kind of what, that's sort of the point of the Iliad,

00:33:00.400 right? Achilles' quest for glory, you know, and he felt he was being disrespected. Like,

00:33:05.400 he withheld his fighting ability and the Greeks got slaughtered. And so Homer was like, don't do

00:33:12.260 that. That's an example of what happens when you let glory and honor become your main purpose in

00:33:18.100 life. That's exactly right. I think the Iliad really is a fantastic story and has this really

00:33:23.940 critical edge. I mean, some might read the Iliad and say, look, it's celebrating these heroic

00:33:28.200 warriors. But the deeper, darker side is, what does the longing for glory and the fear of disrepute do to

00:33:34.400 you? So Achilles, you know, the Iliad begins with a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, who's the

00:33:39.480 chief general of the Greek forces. Achilles feels disrespected. And because his pride is wounded, he

00:33:47.240 withdraws from battle. And the real tragedy of that is not only are the Greeks basically being slaughtered

00:33:52.980 because they've lost their greatest warrior. Achilles' best friend, Patroclus, goes into battle

00:33:59.140 and is killed. And Achilles loses his friend because of his own withdrawal from battle and

00:34:05.480 because he's not there to protect him. And once that happens, he realizes, you know what? All this

00:34:11.140 glory stuff, it's nothing compared to my love of the man who died, my best friend. And then Achilles

00:34:19.640 goes and he, you know, he slaughters Hector. And it's not even a quest for glory anymore. It's pure

00:34:24.360 revenge. I'm going to kill the man who took the life of my friend. He learns too late what's valuable

00:34:29.600 in life. And Plato wants to teach us what's valuable. Virtue, friendship, which is extremely

00:34:35.060 important. Aristotle teaches that friendship is a virtue and involves virtue. It's an arena for

00:34:40.200 showing that you're a good human being, helping your friends. And harming your enemies and getting

00:34:45.400 revenge is not part of the philosophical life. But this is, the way Socrates does it, it's very subtle

00:34:50.800 because he could have done just be like, you know, bludgeoned them, ham-fisted, like you just need

00:34:54.820 to be a good guy. But he doesn't do that. So how does Socrates make philosophy appear manly to Glaucon?

00:35:04.940 Because that's what he's trying to do, right? Yeah. I mean, this is right. So the way I read the

00:35:12.580 Republic is that he is trying to bring Glaucon permanently into his orbit. He wants Glaucon

00:35:19.960 to become a student of philosophy and to spend his life philosophizing. And in the Republic,

00:35:26.460 by the way, Socrates says that philosophy is a lifelong quest. Philosophy, as he says famously in

00:35:32.180 the Apology, is the examined life. And Socrates says the unexamined life is not worth living for a human

00:35:37.560 being. But so we know that Glaucon has spent time with Socrates, but Socrates feels he's not really

00:35:44.420 permanently attached to him. And really the tragedy of the Republic in a way is that Glaucon is caught

00:35:50.660 between Socrates, whom he admires and respects as a warrior, as a man of intellect. And Glaucon is

00:35:57.240 schooled in mathematics. He's poetically gifted. He's an educated guy on the one hand, and the pull of

00:36:04.480 his relatives, Critias and Carmides, whom I said earlier, we see as early as the story Xenophon

00:36:10.640 tells about him before he's 20, he wants to impress. He's very drawn toward the political life that's

00:36:15.820 represented by Plato's relatives, Critias and Carmides. So Socrates wants to pull him away from

00:36:21.900 those seductions, which are really a sort of life in the cave, and bring him into philosophy. How does he

00:36:28.040 do that? Well, he presents this city called Callipolis, in which the greatest warriors are

00:36:36.260 going to achieve the greatest honor. He describes an army training of warriors, both male and female,

00:36:42.660 who will protect the city, who will maintain civic order. And then the best of those warriors,

00:36:49.980 who are also the best in study and in learning, and Glaucon is again, very bright and intelligent,

00:36:55.440 will be promoted to the level of philosopher kings. And I should say, we know that Glaucon is

00:37:01.580 mainly because early in the Republic, Socrates quotes a poem made by Glaucon's unnamed lover,

00:37:07.940 who weirdly enough, some have attributed to the poem to Critias, right? Saying that Glaucon was a very

00:37:17.440 bold and courageous warrior. So I think he tries to lay out this city of philosopher kings as a way of

00:37:24.200 hooking Glaucon. Here's a regime you could imagine yourself in. And if you're great in battle,

00:37:30.660 you'll get all these honors and power and so forth. And if you're even, if you're the best of the best,

00:37:35.840 you could become a philosopher king. And then, so the idea would then be that if Glaucon gets

00:37:40.700 interested in this regime, which he is very interested, he might hang around with Socrates

00:37:45.640 and pursue philosophy. I think that's the gamble that Socrates is taking. So yeah, he tries to hook

00:37:54.120 him with this idea of what could be in store for a guy like Glaucon.

00:38:00.360 So he's using that passion for glory and honor, sort of nudging him in a different direction

00:38:07.100 towards something more positive.

00:38:08.780 Right, right.

00:38:09.600 And in addition to that, you also talk about how Socrates makes all these references to

00:38:15.680 the Greek epics, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, where sort of subtly saying like, you know,

00:38:23.280 showing like looking to these guys and saying, you can do that, but also be like a philosopher.

00:38:27.280 Yes.

00:38:27.920 Like Odysseus or like Iliad or like Achilles, have the courage of Achilles, but you know,

00:38:33.660 towards philosophy.

00:38:34.520 Right, exactly. So this latest book is called Glaucon's Fate, History, Myth and Character

00:38:40.800 in Plato's Republic. But my first book, which Brett has already read, you already read, is

00:38:46.800 called The Republic, the Odyssey of Philosophy. And that book read Plato's Republic as a kind

00:38:52.080 of philosophical odyssey. And in fact, in other dialogues as well, philosophy is presented

00:38:58.340 as a kind of odyssey and quest. So what's the odyssey? Well, you know, Odysseus leaves home,

00:39:02.500 has all these adventures, finally returns home. And in the Republic, it's presented as a kind

00:39:08.640 of journey. I mean, Socrates and Glaucon at one point, you know, they're said to be sort

00:39:12.640 of at sea and they have to jump into the sea and swim. And so, and one can find specific

00:39:18.480 parallels that I won't go into to Homer's Odyssey. But the idea is that it's an intellectual

00:39:23.860 odyssey and a spiritual odyssey, right? You could also think of coming out of the cave

00:39:28.680 as a kind of odyssey of the soul. So there's clearly something about manliness or courage

00:39:36.240 that is reflected in the use of a character like Odysseus. By the way, in the Apology,

00:39:43.320 Socrates compares himself to Achilles. He compares himself to Heracles, whom we know as Hercules,

00:39:48.500 who went around the world killing monsters and sort of saving civilization.

00:39:53.260 And then the question becomes, well, you know, what exactly is the role of courage in philosophy?

00:40:00.360 And again, I think manliness, Andrea, courage plays a central role because at the end of the day,

00:40:07.620 I think what Plato wanted to show us in Socrates is what it means to be a person of integrity.

00:40:14.000 We might say a self, an active, reflective, responsible individual.

00:40:19.760 Not to be swept up in the passions of your community, like Athens and the Peloponnesian War,

00:40:27.000 not to be swept up in whatever values your particular cave of culture might be promoting,

00:40:32.960 but to be your own person, to be reflective, to be deliberate, to understand what is right and good,

00:40:39.400 and to do it. And by the way, Socrates was famously a man of integrity. Kierkegaard,

00:40:44.940 the 19th century Christian philosopher who loved Socrates and modeled himself,

00:40:49.960 he thought of himself as a Christian Socrates, actually suggests in his journals and notebooks

00:40:54.840 that Socrates is the only person outside of Christianity who is without sin.

00:40:59.900 And what he means by that is he says, he walks the walk and he talks the talk. There's no gap

00:41:05.360 between his knowledge of what is right and good and his action. And that is, that requires manliness.

00:41:12.820 Yes, that requires courage. Because to be a good person at all times is difficult because we are

00:41:20.160 surrounded, you know, by many mediocre individuals and some bad ones. And the just man in unjust times

00:41:26.660 will not be lauded and not be approved. And so you've got to have the courage of your convictions,

00:41:32.040 but your convictions also have to be right and good. And that's what philosophy is about,

00:41:37.000 is understanding how to live. And then the deep secret is that's the source of happiness.

00:41:43.680 That's what makes a human life deeply fulfilling and meaningful, is having the courage to be the

00:41:50.040 best individual you can be, regardless of whether people look at you as eccentric or weird or strange,

00:41:56.760 or they're hostile to you as they were to Socrates.

00:41:58.900 Okay. So let's, let's kind of recap here what we've talked about so far and then get into whether

00:42:04.640 Socrates was successful with Glaucon. So Glaucon had this idea of Greek manliness where it meant to

00:42:10.880 be, you sought glory, power, and you wanted to be in the public arena. That's where that's,

00:42:16.860 and you showed courage that way on the battlefield, et cetera. Socrates was coming along and say,

00:42:21.800 well, no, that can lead to disaster both for the individual and for the city state. So he came up with

00:42:28.080 this new like Socratic manhood where you had Andrea or courage, but for the philosophical life.

00:42:34.220 That's right.

00:42:34.660 So then Socrates creates this perfect city that was sort of drawing on, you know, appealing to

00:42:40.020 Glaucon's love of glory and power, but then nudging him slightly towards the philosophical life.

00:42:47.000 Did it work? Did, did, did that, that city state that Socrates created,

00:42:52.340 did it help Glaucon go over to the world of philosophy?

00:42:55.360 Well, that's a good question. I need to say something more about this city because I have a

00:43:00.180 somewhat individual take on, on, on this city called Callipolis, the noble and beautiful city.

00:43:07.080 So let me say this, the logician and philosopher scientist, the British thinker, Karl Popper wrote

00:43:13.340 a book during the second world war called the open society and its enemies. And it was an attack on

00:43:18.840 totalitarianism. And in this book, Popper argues that the regime of philosopher kings in Plato's

00:43:26.040 Republic is a totalitarian regime. That's the one called Callipolis. And I have to say, I agree

00:43:33.360 with Karl Popper. So let me tell you, first of all, this is a very strange thing because

00:43:37.720 Socrates presents it. He expresses admiration for this regime, which...

00:43:42.120 Yeah. You read it and it sounds terrible. You have no privacy. That's right.

00:43:45.160 You don't, you don't have your own family. Like you don't even know if your kids are your kids.

00:43:49.640 That's right.

00:43:50.200 It's terrible.

00:43:50.840 Right. So there, there are a lot of interesting levels here, but let me say a little bit about

00:43:55.620 the origin of this. As I said, Glaucon tells this myth of Gyge's ring, the ring of invisibility.

00:44:01.000 And there is a deep problem here. I believe that this myth actually is a response to something that

00:44:09.700 his relative, his older cousin, Critias, who was the leader of the 30 tyrants, wrote in a play.

00:44:15.100 It's called the Sisyphus Fragment. And in this little story about Sisyphus, Critias tells the

00:44:21.540 following story that looks a lot like the story Glaucon tells before he tells his ring myth. And that is

00:44:27.060 this. People were lawless and unjust until laws were made, but then people figured out that you

00:44:33.840 could commit injustice in secret. And Critias says, and by the way, Critias was a radical thinker.

00:44:39.580 That's when human beings invented the gods and said that the gods know everything we do,

00:44:46.220 even secret injustice. Okay. And the Sisyphus myth ends with Critias saying, and that's how

00:44:52.420 human beings put an end to injustice because they got people to believe in these all seeing gods.

00:44:58.840 And by the way, Zeus in Homer, for example, is said to wander the cities and observe the unjust deeds

00:45:04.320 of human beings. Well, if Glaucon is right about the ring myth, what needs to be said here, by the way,

00:45:11.420 is that the guy who discovers the ring, an ancestor of a fellow named Gyges, isn't afraid of the gods. He

00:45:17.340 doesn't believe in them. And he goes under the ground and he steals a ring from a corpse, which is a

00:45:22.780 very impious thing to do. Grave robbery was a very serious sin, if you will. So what that story is

00:45:30.540 pointing to is that those people who don't actually believe in an all-knowing God will continue to be

00:45:37.820 unjust and commit injustice in secret. The only way to stop that kind of injustice is therefore to design

00:45:45.540 a city in which everyone is spied on at all times. And that is what happens in the city of

00:45:51.580 philosopher kings called Callipolis. Anyone can go into anyone's room at any time. All the poetry is

00:45:58.860 censored. Poets produce state mandated content. There's no privacy. And so on one level, what this

00:46:05.880 city is, is a regime that is designed to root out injustice everywhere. And it does so by essentially

00:46:15.540 engaging in a kind of totalitarian monitoring of all the citizens. It's a very ugly regime.

00:46:21.040 That's not my only criticism of the regime. So then we have this question, what's going on

00:46:25.720 with this story? Now, on the one hand, I've suggested that it's designed to attract Glaucon

00:46:32.220 because it's a city in which Glaucon feels he could be at home. He could be a big shot. He would be a big

00:46:38.560 warrior and he could even be a philosopher king. It's also a city. And here's where things get really

00:46:45.160 complicated. That looks a lot like the regime of the 30 tyrants that was established by Glaucon's

00:46:51.300 relative, Critias. And so, you know, there's a lot to untangle here. Why would Socrates present this

00:46:57.860 city? Well, on one level, he's trying to attract Glaucon to a life of philosophy because it's a regime

00:47:03.040 in which Glaucon believes he could be a philosopher king. But on another level, and the republic has many

00:47:09.100 levels, it is a demonstration of what would be needed if you absolutely wanted to root out

00:47:17.160 injustice everywhere. And what would be needed is an unjust regime. That's the problem. And Karl

00:47:24.120 Popper is right, actually, that one can see in that city of the republic a kind of prototype of later

00:47:31.360 totalitarian regimes. And in fact, later totalitarian regimes have modeled themselves on

00:47:37.440 that regime in the republic, the Khmer Rouge and the regime of revolutionary Iran set up by the

00:47:43.780 Ayatollah Khomeini. Believe it or not, Khomeini had studied Plato's republic. If you look at the

00:47:47.780 structure of that regime, there's a council of guardians. He, you know, and he regards himself

00:47:52.180 as a kind of philosopher king, a sort of religious philosopher king. So the history of the republic,

00:47:57.640 the effect of the republic on human history has not been great. But I actually regard all of this

00:48:04.160 as a kind of misreading of what's happening. But it raises big questions, which is what

00:48:09.440 responsibility did Socrates have for Glaucon's fate? Did he tell this story because he was,

00:48:16.100 he knew that Glaucon was already familiar with that kind of regime, having spent time with his

00:48:20.340 relative Critias? On the other hand, did Critias get his ideas for the sort of tyrannical regime he

00:48:26.820 sets up from this Callipolis in the republic? These are big questions.

00:48:31.500 Yeah. And I thought it was interesting too, you make this really great point that in

00:48:36.420 Callipolis, there's the guardian, like, so you're sort of sorted out, you know, like you were either

00:48:41.240 bronze, silver, gold, right? And then depending on where you were, you'll get put into like the

00:48:45.660 school for guardians, right? And you're going to be trained in philosophy, but a state sort of

00:48:50.580 mandated philosophy. And then if you're good enough, then you'll be, you know, moved over to the

00:48:55.180 philosopher king and be trained for that. And it looks like Socrates is like, hey, this is a way

00:48:59.840 where you can sort of do philosophy, but like, it isn't philosophy, right? Because like, you're just,

00:49:04.820 you're told the answers and you just sort of spit out the answers over and over. And so it's not

00:49:09.000 really philosophy.

00:49:09.940 Yeah, that's right. You know, it's absolutely fascinating because in the republic, when Socrates

00:49:15.300 introduces the philosopher, it's quite remarkable because Socrates says at one point, you know,

00:49:21.380 the, the ills of human life will not be solved and the ills of communities, war and discord and so

00:49:30.080 forth will not be overcome unless philosophers rule. And Glaucon says, hey, what are you talking

00:49:36.780 about? Many people will be angry with you when you say that. And Socrates says, well, maybe you don't

00:49:41.400 know what a philosopher is. And then he lays out what a philosopher is. And in this part of the dialogue,

00:49:46.260 I think we hear Socrates genuine voice and he said, he doesn't talk about the mind or the intellect.

00:49:52.160 He says, the philosopher is somebody who is supremely erotic, super passionate, but not about

00:49:59.080 glory, not about honor, not about sex, not about material rewards, about wisdom. The philosopher loves

00:50:06.660 wisdom and his desire is to come into the presence of the truth. Uh, by the way, this is, you know,

00:50:13.800 this platonic idea, very attractive to religious thinkers, because what has happened is from a religious

00:50:19.560 perspective, being in the presence of God, right? You know, the exile from Eden is, is a curse because

00:50:25.900 you're no longer in the presence of God. So in any case, what happens as he then lays out the regime

00:50:31.760 is that erotic philosopher kind of disappears and is replaced by a dogmatic philosopher. Um, and essentially

00:50:39.980 the state has sort of one version of philosophy and there's a long training in metaphysics and in

00:50:46.820 analytical thinking and so forth. And there's no debate. We don't have Socratic dialogue. If you sort

00:50:53.860 of ask, would Socrates be happy in this regime? If Socrates lived in this regime, he would be asking

00:50:58.480 questions as he always does. He would be questioning the philosopher Kings. They would not take kindly to

00:51:04.000 it because they are part of a school of philosophy. So it is a kind of calcified, uh, version of

00:51:10.800 philosophy in, in the Calipolis. And what's interesting is in book seven of the Republic,

00:51:15.200 Socrates lays out the whole curriculum for the philosopher Kings. The word Eros never shows up.

00:51:19.940 It's not erotic. It's, it's, it's compared to gymnastic, which means exercise in Greek. It's a grind.

00:51:26.260 It's very strange.

00:51:27.060 You know, it made me think when I was reading that, that part in the Republic and then also in your book,

00:51:30.660 it made me think of like, just sort of like how a school is for a lot of people, young people today,

00:51:35.740 right? You don't go because of the love of learning. You just go through these hoops. I got to jump

00:51:39.920 through in order to get the degree so I can get the nice job that will pay for whatever, like

00:51:44.140 that, that idea that Socrates is putting out there for the education of a philosopher King,

00:51:49.060 like it reminded me of that for some reason. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think you're

00:51:54.400 pointing to a very serious problem because I guess I would say that what we see in the

00:52:00.500 Republic, what, what substitutes for philosophy is something more like ideology. That is to say,

00:52:06.340 if we go back and look at the totalitarian character of the regime, one of the reasons

00:52:11.320 that they're spying on everyone is they don't want challenges to their authority. And it's a very

00:52:16.440 kind of abstract thinking. Socrates, so to sort of go back to why Plato wrote dialogues,

00:52:22.880 they're very concrete. Every discussion in a platonic dialogue starts out in an ordinary human

00:52:28.680 context and returns to that context. There's a dollar called the Lockies, for example, where the

00:52:32.920 issue is courage. And the question of what courage is comes up because a couple of men are asking

00:52:37.960 Socrates how to, whether their sons should study a certain technique of fighting in armor. And that

00:52:43.620 quickly leads into the discussion of what is courage. The philosophy, the philosophical regime in the

00:52:48.880 Republic is characterized by a very abstract thought. It's not connected with the concrete character of

00:52:55.140 everyday life. And I think our education today is, is often sort of imposed from above in very abstract

00:53:05.260 categories. It doesn't appeal to the concrete desires of existing human beings and doesn't really nurture

00:53:13.320 their longing to explore and discover, doesn't stimulate their passion. So there is a sense in which

00:53:21.340 the kinds of mistakes that we see being played out in the Republic of sort of abstract thinking and a kind

00:53:29.260 of one size fits all implementation from above state mandated content and so forth are being repeated

00:53:35.880 today. I don't know if that's very clear, but that's my sense. That's what I think. And this goes to

00:53:41.040 show like how, like how the Republic is still relevant today. Like, I mean, we are still grappling with

00:53:47.200 this idea of what does it mean to be a man. Um, and is it, does it mean to sort of that Homeric

00:53:52.220 manliness where it's like bravery on the battlefield and having a love of honor and glory, or is it

00:53:57.300 something different? And if it is something different, how do you nudge men in that, that,

00:54:02.320 that way without, uh, you know, being condescending and making it so unattractive. Like, I don't want to

00:54:08.460 like, so like, you know, like the whole new man thing of the 1960s and seventies ponytail guy,

00:54:13.000 you know, that didn't work and we're still grappling with that issue today.

00:54:17.700 That's right. You know, and I, I think a lot of categories are confused here, as you know,

00:54:22.280 Brett, there's a lot of discussion of toxic masculinity and, and obviously there are,

00:54:26.440 there are forms of masculinity. I would say that, uh, Greek heroic traditional masculinity is toxic

00:54:31.760 in the sense that it involves a competition for glory and power. And, uh, that's very destructive

00:54:38.380 of, of human communities and, and of individuals. But I don't want to get lost in, in all this

00:54:45.720 discussion of toxic masculinity, the models of good masculinity. And I think Socrates is trying

00:54:51.440 to model that. And, you know, masculinity is, I mean, I'm probably preaching to the choir here,

00:54:59.040 but this is not a bad thing because courage is not a bad thing. And, and standing up for what is right

00:55:05.740 and taking, taking account as Socrates says in the apology, by the way, he imagined someone saying

00:55:10.800 to him, aren't you ashamed of doing something that could result in your being executed? And Socrates

00:55:15.960 says, not at all. The only thing you should care about is being the best human being you can.

00:55:21.460 You should care about justice. You could care, should care about your soul being in the best

00:55:24.700 condition possible. There are a lot of forces in contemporary society that pull us in other

00:55:30.760 directions that distract us, that seduce us with promises of pleasure and entertainment and wealth

00:55:36.540 and power and turn us away from the question of being the best people we can be. And frankly,

00:55:42.800 it takes courage to pursue that goal often in society and to turn away from, from these seductions.

00:55:50.980 I think C.S. Lewis said that every virtue at the breaking point turns into courage, right?

00:55:56.540 Because you have to take a stand. And, you know, one of the things that I think that Socrates stood for

00:56:03.260 is, is cultivating the individual as an individual. You know, Socratic education,

00:56:11.420 Socrates believed that we don't really know anything that we haven't worked out for ourselves.

00:56:16.340 Education is not pouring water from an empty cup, from a full cup into an empty cup.

00:56:21.020 We need to be active participants in our own learning. And one of the great things that comes

00:56:28.220 out of that is discovering who we are. Self-knowledge was a big element of, major element

00:56:34.520 of Socratic philosophizing. So discovering who you are as an individual and what it is that makes

00:56:42.520 your life fulfilling and rich and not wavering from that, right? Not being swept away in social

00:56:50.180 currents or fashion. And there is a kind of manliness that is required to pursue that kind

00:56:58.800 of path. So I don't think we're doing a particularly good job of, of educating young men to manliness

00:57:05.260 or even defending manliness, good manliness today, because we, because we don't educate people

00:57:11.500 Socratically. You know, I, I think sort of the individual attention and the excitement of

00:57:18.520 learning are things we need to recover because that's the route to virtue, opening the mind to

00:57:23.840 the world, opening the mind to reality and showing young people the joys of learning and letting them

00:57:31.560 become confident about their beliefs and their opinions. Well, so, I mean, like, how do, how do we

00:57:36.880 do that? So obviously, you know, Calipolis didn't work where you sort of come up with this like

00:57:40.900 curriculum, um, where you say, here's what you need to learn. Like, how do you inculcate that love,

00:57:46.800 that desire to just learn and be playful? I mean, that's another thing about Socrates. Socrates is

00:57:50.820 very playful. Right. Um, we know, I feel like we've lost that playfulness in education and I don't,

00:57:56.740 I mean, from reading the, the Republic, I don't know if it's possible to sort of mandate that from

00:58:02.220 above, right? No, I don't think you can. Um, you know, anyone who, who has, has observed little

00:58:09.560 children sees their, their playfulness and their curiosity. I happen to have a three and a half

00:58:14.480 year old granddaughter and, and she's just incredibly curious and, and playful. So what

00:58:20.620 happens? Kids go to school and it somehow gets knocked out of them. And I think part of this is

00:58:26.600 a reflection of, of the kinds of tendencies we see in, for example, Calipolis, there's centralization,

00:58:32.860 right? We have these big school districts and the, and, and, and, and the school districts mandate

00:58:37.620 certain kinds of teaching and, and, and, and mandate certain kinds of, um, evaluation and testing and

00:58:45.200 so forth. And, and, and somehow, um, this playfulness and this curiosity is lost. The only way to really,

00:58:54.380 I think Socrates is right about this. His education was one-on-one. When Socrates was talking to

00:59:00.320 somebody, they were the center of the world for him. He paid attention. He looked them in the eye

00:59:04.360 and he asked them questions and he put them on the spot. And another thing here, by the way,

00:59:08.860 and I think this is also relevant to the question of courage and manliness, he asked tough questions.

00:59:14.180 He didn't cut people breaks. It wasn't particularly pleasant to talk to Socrates because what he did is

00:59:19.440 he showed you that you probably didn't know what you were talking about. And that's the first

00:59:24.000 thing you need to do. If you're going to learn something is realize that you're ignorant.

00:59:28.700 Socrates was sort of the school of tough love in education. A lot of educational philosophy today

00:59:35.300 is trying to find the strengths of students and not challenge them, right? So if someone is,

00:59:43.260 let's say they learn better by listening than by reading, then we should provide them with

00:59:49.380 opportunities where they get most of their content through listening. I think Socrates would say,

00:59:53.580 well, if you have difficulty learning through reading, then we should make you read more,

00:59:57.300 you see? So somehow to combine those challenges with a sense of fun. Socrates is very funny,

01:00:04.240 actually. So we have to recover that. But the key here is it's one person at a time.

01:00:11.540 You know, I've been teaching at the University of Tulsa for 31 years and every day that teaching and

01:00:16.340 learning occurs in my class is a good day. And it occurs one student at a time, right? I mean,

01:00:22.040 I'll have a class with a bunch of students, but it's individual students I'm teaching. And they're

01:00:25.500 the ones that come up to me and say, that's interesting what you said. I want to learn more

01:00:29.160 about that. One little victory at a time.

01:00:31.900 As you were talking, do you think it's harder to ask questions and be playful with ideas in today's

01:00:39.080 world? Or is it actually easier compared to Socrates' time?

01:00:42.440 I think it's actually harder to ask questions because we've been talking about shame and fear

01:00:48.940 of public opinion. I said that Greek heroism was rooted in that, in that fear, especially even

01:00:55.820 more than in the love of glory. And today, you know, there are certain subjects that professors

01:01:04.660 have to be fairly intrepid to even raise in class. Certain issues having to do with sexuality

01:01:10.820 or religion or minority groups and so forth. And a lot of professors really shy away from those

01:01:17.800 sorts of issues. One way to approach them, by the way, and this is why I think studying the

01:01:21.900 ancients, for example, is a wonderful thing, is through reading books like The Republic. I mean,

01:01:26.220 one thing about The Republic is it's very interesting on the question of males and females and,

01:01:30.680 you know, roles of women and men in society and so forth. And you can approach these issues if

01:01:38.640 you're talking about another text, not necessarily directly addressing questions in contemporary

01:01:44.940 culture. Because frankly, there's a lot of pressure. I think students have complained about

01:01:50.120 this as well as professors. What if I voice an opinion that people might take the wrong way?

01:01:54.920 What if I say something that might offend somebody? And in fact, at our university,

01:02:00.260 there is an anonymous online bias reporting system, which, you know, to report bias. So you

01:02:08.200 can imagine that students and professors alike are pretty cautious about asking questions and raising

01:02:14.320 topics. And the fact is that we need to be able to talk about everything. I mean, philosophy shouldn't

01:02:19.540 shy away from anything. That's the way that we're educated. And this is not a question of taking

01:02:25.300 political sides. If you have a certain kind of belief, the best way to strengthen your understanding

01:02:31.120 is to expose it to contrary opinions and come up with arguments against other positions. So the sort

01:02:40.040 of public pressure, and by the way, that's multiplied by things like Facebook and Twitter and so forth,

01:02:46.180 because it's very easy for a large group of people who have the same kind of opinion to gang up and

01:02:51.540 attack. So it actually takes a certain amount of courage to be a Socratic thinker in today's world.

01:02:59.720 You know, Socrates was never afraid of saying what he thought. In fact, he thought he was obliged to

01:03:03.600 say what he thought. Very few people are completely open about their views in a public context today.

01:03:09.680 Yeah. So I mean, that bias outline sounds like Kallipolis, right? No privacy.

01:03:13.180 Just kidding. It's a problem. It's a problem. And I think that people need to learn to be tough.

01:03:22.640 You know, Plato loves to compare the body and the soul. How do you get a healthy body? Well,

01:03:29.280 one thing is exercise. What is exercise? It is putting your body in a position where you are

01:03:34.880 overcoming resistance. What does a healthy soul look like? A healthy mind. Putting yourself in a

01:03:40.660 position where you're overcoming resistance. That means there has to be resistance. That means there

01:03:44.520 have to be ideas that are anathema to you when you first look at them, right? Only then do you

01:03:50.400 develop the kinds of intellectual virtues and strengths that can allow you to have a better

01:03:56.780 understanding of your views, a better understanding of other views. And, you know, I think, I mean,

01:04:02.740 the promotion of honesty and public discourse is absolutely crucial, but it requires people who

01:04:09.380 are prepared to engage in that kind of often rough and tumble debate. And I don't think we do our

01:04:15.220 students a service by shielding them and coddling them and making sure that we don't step on their

01:04:19.720 toes because they're not going to learn those kinds of skills. And they're not going to develop the

01:04:26.000 confidence in their individual selves as active, reflective centers of thought and action. And that's

01:04:34.580 what it means to be a fully flourishing human being from the Socratic perspective.

01:04:38.700 You need Andrea. It all goes back to manliness. It goes back to courage. So what do you think

01:04:43.140 happens to Glaucon? Do you think, I mean, I know that maybe this is sort of killing the, you know, but

01:04:47.080 like, what do you, do you think Socrates was successful? He realized, oh man, this little gamble I took in

01:04:51.620 making this thing that appealed to Glaucon, um, it actually backfired. And he was like,

01:04:58.540 right. So first of all, in Socrates defense, let me say this. Uh, I think this was a gamble

01:05:03.980 dangling a city like Callipolis before him. And however, had Socrates not intervened with Glaucon,

01:05:11.760 there's no question that he would have joined the regime of the 30 tyrants and participated in,

01:05:18.020 in that tyrannical oligarchy and engaged in many unjust deeds as a result. Why is there no question?

01:05:24.660 Well, Plato leaves a letter called the seventh letter. And in the seventh letter, he explains

01:05:29.560 his own experience. Now, Plato was the youngest brother. Adamantus was the oldest. Glaucon was

01:05:33.920 the middle brother. Glaucon, we know, had already established himself as a brave warrior and a very

01:05:39.340 bright young man by the time of 404. Plato would have been about 24 years old. Glaucon may be closer to 30.

01:05:45.920 Plato writes in the seventh letter, I was invited by my relatives. They took over in Athens at the

01:05:51.400 end of the war and they, um, promised to restore the city to virtue and justice. And, um, and he

01:06:00.720 indicates that basically he was on board and he began to participate. And he said, but I quickly

01:06:05.680 realized that the previous regime was a thing of gold compared to these guys. And he talks about how

01:06:12.080 they persecuted Socrates. They actually made a law, right? They didn't like Socrates because he asked

01:06:16.340 questions and, and, and naturally Socrates was anti-tyrannical. And so they made a law. Socrates

01:06:22.800 can't talk to anyone under the age of 30 and you can't teach the art of speech and so forth.

01:06:27.780 Glaucon would certainly have been invited to join this regime. Adamantus would have been invited to

01:06:33.660 join the regime. We know that Adamantus didn't. There are various clues in the Republic,

01:06:38.040 but one major clue is he is present at the trial of Socrates as somebody who can vouch for Socrates.

01:06:45.820 Had he been a member of the oligarchy, the regime of the 30 tyrants, he would not have been present

01:06:52.100 at a trial under the newly restored democracy when Socrates is being tried in part because of his

01:06:58.100 connections with Critias and Carmody's, by the way, because these are Plato's relatives. These are

01:07:03.040 people that Socrates talks to in the dialogues. Glaucon does not show up in the apology. He

01:07:08.900 disappears from the historical record. And I always assumed when I wrote my first book on the Republic

01:07:14.740 that at the end of the dialogue, I took Glaucon at face value. He says to Socrates, I'm convinced

01:07:20.340 the life of philosophy is better than the life of tyranny. And I believe he was convinced at that time,

01:07:26.140 but things change. And I was reading a book years ago. I never thought about it. I thought he's

01:07:32.640 convinced. A number of years ago, I picked up a wonderful book by a historian named Mark Munn

01:07:37.320 called the School of History, Athens in the Age of Socrates. And Munn pointed out a couple of things

01:07:42.320 just in passing that really got me thinking. He said, I think Glaucon joined the 30. And I think

01:07:48.200 he died in the decisive battle in which Critias and Carmody's were killed by the returning Democrats.

01:07:53.720 And this battle took place in the Piraeus. He says, Glaucon doesn't show up in the apology. He

01:07:59.160 disappears. More interestingly, the battle took place on the very road at pretty much the exact

01:08:06.140 place where Glaucon and Socrates are stopped going back up to Athens at the beginning of the Republic.

01:08:12.300 That's the location of the battle. And there were a couple of other things that he mentioned. I started

01:08:17.100 thinking about it. And I realized that there are lots of clues in the Republic. There's all this kind of

01:08:22.400 deep, tragic, dramatic undertones associated with Glaucons. And so, and I won't go through all

01:08:31.440 the clues. I won't say anything else about that right now. But I make the case in this book that

01:08:35.500 Munn is probably right. That the suggestion is that Glaucon did join the regime of the 30 and did

01:08:42.080 die fighting for them, most likely. And that means Socrates failed. And that means, and this is where it

01:08:47.820 really gets interesting, that Socrates, the age's most competent and capable spokesman for virtue and

01:08:53.420 philosophy, couldn't save Plato's beloved brother. It's a tragedy. Why is that? Why couldn't he save

01:09:01.720 him? And one of the things that points out is how very difficult it is to overcome the socially

01:09:07.760 inculcated values, this idea of Greek manliness and glory and power and ambition that Glaucon absorbed,

01:09:16.780 as it were, with his mother's milk. How do you overcome those forces and set somebody on the path

01:09:23.100 to virtue and wisdom? Socrates couldn't do it with Glaucon. He did it with Plato. He did it with Xenophon.

01:09:29.340 And those are two major, major accomplishments. But as the case in many other platonic dialogues,

01:09:35.620 he fails. He fails with the people he talks to. Yeah. So it's risky. Dialogue is risky.

01:09:41.720 It is very risky. Philosophy is risky. Philosophy is very risky.

01:09:45.040 It's, but according to Socrates, you know, the examined life is the life to goodness and virtue

01:09:53.880 and happiness. And it's a risk we have to take. By the way, in the cave image, the prisoners,

01:09:58.980 when they're, Socrates says, if somebody unchained one of these prisoners and turned them around and

01:10:02.380 brought them up, the first thing they realize as they go up out of the cave is all these things I

01:10:08.160 thought were real are just shadows projected on the wall by the guardians of this culture,

01:10:14.640 these puppeteers. So the first step in philosophy is calling into question the things that you have

01:10:21.140 unreflectively been taught, the things that you assumed were true. The first step in philosophy

01:10:25.880 is negative. And that's dangerous because if you stop there, you can end up being a nihilist,

01:10:31.820 right? You can say, what have I learned? And by the way, I think that's a big problem today.

01:10:35.800 We're in an age of deconstruction and postmodernism. As the word deconstruction suggests,

01:10:40.800 we're taking apart the views and the traditions that we've been taught. We're very good at that,

01:10:46.620 but what do we replace it with? And someone can easily develop the cynical view that each culture,

01:10:53.360 each society, maybe even in each individual has their own views. There's no truth. There's no outside

01:10:59.180 of the cave, if you will. So that negative moment is very dangerous. Glaucon stopped too early.

01:11:05.800 He should have continued with Socrates. And I'm convinced that if he had finally come into the

01:11:12.800 presence of the good more closely, come into the presence of the goodness at the heart of creation,

01:11:17.780 at the heart of the world, that he would have had the fulfillment that Socrates described in the

01:11:22.920 Republic. Socrates describes that happiness at the end of the philosophical quest. I'm convinced that

01:11:28.780 Socrates had it. And it would have been Glaucon's salvation, but my guess is he didn't save him.

01:11:36.580 Didn't work. Well, Jacob, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go

01:11:39.860 to learn more about the book and your work?

01:11:41.440 Sure. Well, I mean, you can, you can, I actually have a website. I think it's called jacobhowland.com.

01:11:48.140 I say, I think it's called, cause I don't really look at it a lot, but you can look at my book,

01:11:53.140 my book, Glaucon's fate, history, myth and character in Plato's Republic on Amazon. There,

01:11:59.800 there is a review coming out in the Claremont review of books, and there should be a review in

01:12:03.660 city journal online in a month or two. So, but check it out on Amazon. There are a couple of reviews.

01:12:09.480 You can, you can look at it there. And, and I hope that interested listeners will,

01:12:14.660 will buy the book and find out more about this sort of historical mystery.

01:12:19.840 Right. Well, Jacob Howland, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

01:12:21.920 Thank you so much, Brett. I really appreciate your talking with me.

01:12:24.940 My guest today was Jacob Howland. He is the author of the book Glaucon's fate. It's available

01:12:28.820 on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is

01:12:32.940 slash republic where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

01:12:39.480 Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast. Check out our website at

01:12:47.600 artofmanliness.com where you find all the podcast archives. We've got almost 500 episodes there

01:12:51.640 coming up on 500. Also, we have thousands of articles that we've written over the years

01:12:54.960 about personal finance, social skills, physical fitness, you name it, we've got it. And if you

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01:13:37.020 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man

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