Plato's Political Philosophy

CHAPTER 9 Knowledge and Politics: The Statesman

CHAPTER 9 Knowledge and Politics The Statesman The Statesman directly follows the Sophist. Its purpose is to define the politikos, whom we may call the statesman, the political man, the political scientist, or the political knower.1 It means especially to explore the place of knowledge in political life—in human life—and the ways to combine things, politically and more generally.2 The Statesman The Statesman’s opening prefigures much in the dialogue.3 Socrates rebukes Theodorus for suggesting implicitly that sophist, statesman, and philosopher “are of equal worth,” for “in honor they stand farther apart from one another than according to the proportion of your art.” Later in the dialogue, proper measuring becomes crucial, and throughout it the Stranger’s classifications seem to ignore honor or rank.4 Socrates says that the two young interlocutors are his kin, because Theatetus “appears similar to me in the nature of his face,” and young Socrates “has the same name.” The connection between members of a pair, and between nature and convention, is later central to the discussion 242 Politics and Knowledge of virtue. Finally, the Stranger chooses that the “pair of us” now seek the statesman (not the philosopher) because “it is necessary, it appears to me.” Unexplained choice that accords with necessity prefigures the rule of the knowing statesman over ignorant but willing citizens.5 I The Stranger and young Socrates begin to search for the statesman by agreeing that he is characterized by knowledge or art. What, then, defines his art as opposed to other arts? They first divide all knowledge into practical and cognitive science, and, surprisingly, place the statesman in the cognitive half.6 Practical arts such as carpentry “possess their science as if it naturally inheres in their actions,” completing through their actions new bodies. Cognitive arts such as arithmetic furnish only knowledge.7 This classification means that the Stranger conceives statesmanship, as such, apart from molding or acquiring political bodies, that is, apart from, say, the ruler’s own persuading and warring. The Stranger, therefore, also says that the advisor who knows how to rule is as much a political scientist as the ruler himself.8 This further means, as the Stranger develops his point, that statesmen do not differ from kings, tyrants, or slave masters. (If rule is cognitive and only cognitive, nonknowers have no claim to participate in ruling through, say, election or heredity.)9 The Stranger even suggests, further, that political science and household management are the same, because “the figure of a large household and the bulk of a small city” do not differ in point of rule.10 Statesmen may not be practical, but they are also not geometers or other mathematicians. What is the difference? We can divide cognitive artists into those who merely discriminate (or judge) the things they know and those who, having “made a discrimination,” are not finished but “charge each of the workmen with that which befits them, until they’ve produced whatever’s been charged to them.”11 Statesmen, like master builders, belong to the injunctive or commanding branch of cognitive art.12 Cognitive commanders include more than statesmen. How do we separate them, so that we continue to isolate the statesman? The next step is to split those who issue their own commands from those who transmit others’ commands , such as interpreters, coxswains, diviners, and heralds. Kings issue their own commands; they are in this respect like gods.13 Up to now the Stranger has divided arts by differences in knowing but not by differences in subject or material.14 He now completes his first definition of Knowledge and Politics 243 political science by moving in this direction. As opposed to other cognitive commanders, the statesman’s commands enjoin for the sake of what has a soul, not other things that become. Of these ensouled things, he deals with herd animals, not single ones, and of these, animals who are landed, pedestrial , hornless, breeders only with their own kind (featherless), and two rather than four footed. The political scientist or royal ruler issues commands that concern nurturing human beings.15 I A The chief meaning of these further divisions (and of the hesitations, peculiarities , and corrections with which young Socrates and the Stranger make them in the conversation itself) is to show with ever-greater specificity what humans must be to...