Plato vs. Machiavelli on Political Philosophy

[Music] foreign [Music] against Machiavelli I think the best summary of the history of Western philosophy is Alfred North whiteheads he says it is a series of footnotes to Plato Ralph Waldo Emerson said even more simply Plato is philosophy and philosophy is Plato Plato asked most of the great questions that other philosophers have dealt with down through the history of thought and gave his own classic answer I've taught philosophy to college freshmen for over 50 years in every possible way and even in some impossible ways and I found that by far the most effective way to begin this matchmaking this love affair with the love of wisdom is through the dialogues of Plato Plato's logic is not only deductive and inductive but also seductive he is both the chronologically first and the best writer in the history of philosophy amazingly no philosopher has ever had a more effective and more seductive and more winning writing style than Plato hisocratic dialogues are dramas dramas of ideas Plato puts Flesh on his ideas gives them legs to walk on and tongues to speak with that's true of all his characters but especially the character of Socrates if you take the figure of Socrates out of the dialogues of Plato and leave only the arguments what's left pretty much what's left in the gospels if you take Jesus out of them the preacher is even more impressive than the preaching the dialogues of Plato are psychologically profound as well as philosophically profound they teach you to know yourself as well as teaching you how to know other things they are lessons in logic yes but also lessons in looking into the mirror you see two characters in them Socrates and Socrates opponents because both of these characters are in you too among Plato's dialogues The Republic is the most famous the most influential and the most commented on book of philosophy ever written it's about Justice which Plato saw as the key virtue both politically and individually but the Greek word for justice like most Greek words meant something deeper and larger than that word means in Modern English it meant not just rewards and punishments from the law but rightness and righteousness both human and Cosmic fundamental moral order that's why the Republic is not just about ethics and politics but also about anthropology or philosophy of human nature because that's what is fulfilled and perfected by ethics and politics by individual Justice and social justice and it's also about metaphysics or philosophy of being because Justice is objective and Cosmic and real as well as human one poet wrote by Justice the stars are strong and the Republic is also about epistemology or philosophy of knowing because it's about how we can know Justice a well-known new york-born philosopher tells us in his autobiography that he used to skip classes in high school and educate himself by browsing through the great 42nd Street public library in New York City and one day on a friend's recommendation he read Plato's Republic and he says it changed his life he was instantly converted to philosophy especially when he came to the single most famous passage in the whole history of philosophy Plato's allegory of a cave he said he finally discovered himself and his purpose in life to be one of those prisoners who escaped from the cave of shadows out into the larger world of light with the help of Socrates one of my own students had the same life-changing experience with Plato's dialogue The Gorgeous which is essentially the Republic minus the politics an Aristotle wrote of a farmer that he heard of who became a philosopher through reading the gorgias so Plato can change your life and so can Machiavelli two thousand years later who in the prince explicitly set out to present the radical alternative to Plato especially to The Republic Machiavelli's contemporaries called him the son of the devil and one of the names for the devil in England was old Nick because Machiavelli's first name was Nick or Nicholas people were more outspoken and less worried about political correctness versus hate speech back then than they are now really misleading to compare Plato's Republic and Machiavelli's the prince because it's like comparing apples with triangles rather than Apples with oranges the Republic does not claim to be practically realizable it is a picture of the ideally just person and State it is a set of philosophical principles and the more it descends into detail the sillier it looks the prince on the other hand scorns all principles other than pragmatic ones and does not even care about Justice at all only about success yet it has implied philosophical principles and almost all of them are the opposite of Plato's as Plato was the founder of pre-modern political philosophy Machiavelli was the first founder of modern political philosophy nearly every other school of philosophy in ancient times beginning with Aristotle began with Plato accepting his fundamental principles and then modified him to varying degrees that's true of Aristotle of neoplatonism of cynicism of skepticism of stoicism and even somewhat of epicureanism similarly nearly every school of modern political philosophy begins with Machiavelli's fundamental principle and modifies it that's true especially if Hobbes Locke Rousseau and Marx so we need to try to find and Define and argue about what these opposite fundamental principles are one way of doing that would be the single word logos the most profound word in the Greek language or perhaps in any language it meant Cosmic order Cosmic reason objective reason the wisdom that gave you the real meaning and value of everything Plato like Socrates assumed and defended logos and Machiavelli like this office denied it and if logos is Christ in Disguise or Christ anonymously then essentially though not in every detail of course the argument between Plato and Machiavelli is the argument between the Son of God and the son of the devil the Republic is about politics but not only about politics for Plato politics follows ethics and is dependent on ethics what is good for society is simply what is good for man written large because Society is itself man written large there is no double standard for Plato because societies are made of men and by men and for men so the good society and the good man are mirror images of each other and as politics follows ethics ethics follows anthropology or philosophy of man Plato was the first to make a map of the human soul and discover its three essential Powers the mind or Reason the spirited part or will and the desires or emotions or appetites they are like organs in an organism and they can be either healthy and functioning rightly or diseased and dysfunctional thus the overall virtue of justice is the right functioning and ordering and Cooperative relationship among these three powers and the three other cardinal virtues that are the content of Justice are wisdom for the Mind courage for the will and moderation or self-control for the appetites each of us is like all three protagonists in The Wizard of Oz a scarecrow whose straw head needs a mind a Cowardly Lion who needs courage and a tin man who needs a human heart we need to become Wizards like Gandalf and Saints like Frodo and leaders like Aragorn in other words prophets priests and kings for Plato the just state has three classes of people which are natural because they perform the three essential natural functions of any society making and interpreting the laws and forcing the laws and living according to the laws the just State needs wisdom in its lawmakers courage in its law enforcers and moderation in its law abiders and Justice is the cooperation and Harmony of all three classes although the ideal state for Plato is a class system the classes for him are natural not artificial and they're inborn rather than hereditary and the relationship is Harmony and cooperation as it is in Confucius rather than oppression and competition as it is in Marx at the heart of the Republic is the proposal that might and right power and wisdom be joined by having philosophers rule the state but what Plato meant by the philosophers were not what we mean in our society today not academic Scholars not absent-minded professors God forbid I can think of hardly any more infallible recipe for chaos he meant real philosophers like Socrates problem I see with that is that Socrates like Jesus refused to go into politics for the same reason the Holy Spirit stopped him you could accuse Plato of correcting the Holy Spirit In The Republic in imagining what the state would be like if he had disobeyed his Divine voice the most important institution within Plato's just state is the educational system the school because it trains and produces wise men and women philosopher kings and queens once Socrates died Plato invented a machine for cloning new socrates's namely the University our word academic comes from the name of the world's first University Plato's Academy the essential structure of its curriculum as detailed in the Republic the Seven Liberal Arts or the Arts and Sciences remained in place for two thousand years in the West as a man is free and not a slave if he exists for himself as an end not only for another man as a means so education is free or liberal education if it exists for his own sake for the sake of knowing the truth rather than for the sake of anything else especially making money the money that comes from a career which is what modern universities usually offer since only 0.6 percent of their budget goes to the humanities or liberal arts today before Plato there already existed at Job education or apprenticeship in most of today's universities have reverted to that pre-platonic pragmatism except for the Maverick great books programs Plato oppose both tyranny and democracy and preferred aristocracy which means literally the rule by the best aristos means Excellence or the best and crossos means rule what Plato meant by the best were not the strongest or the richest but the wisest and the wise estimate not just the cleverest or those who knew the most facts but those who understood values those who knew the true good Ness was the fundamental reality for Plato the real and the good and thus metaphysics and ethics the science of the real and the science of the good are ultimately identical to get into Plato's politics is necessarily to get into his metaphysics for Plato's politics is based on his ethics and his ethics is based on his anthropology on the nature of man and that in turn is based on his metaphysics the science of the nature of things which is the ultimate foundation for everything so despite its notorious difficulty we have to try to understand Plato's metaphysics above all I will ignore the details of Plato's supposedly ideal state in the Republic because most of them are Highly Questionable to put it mildly philosophers don't have a very good record of wisdom when they turn to politics in fact if you see a philosopher running for office I think you should run yourself in the opposite directions one array the Republic is a kind of extended apology or defense of Socrates at the heart of its prescription for the just state is the idea that philosophers should rule but what Plato meant by a philosopher was not an absent-minded professor of abstractions like myself but a Socrates that is a truly wise man one who knows what is man's true good depends on metaphysics because at the heart of Plato's metaphysics it says identification of the Supreme reality as the good or goodness itself that's Plato's big idea this is often called the idea of the good and it is the heart of Plato's famous theory of ideas but the word ideas is a very misleading term for it because in Modern English an idea is a subjective opinion existing in somebody's mind but what Plato meant by his ideas are objective realities existing independent of Minds like justice itself courage itself human nature itself triangularity itself greenness itself twoness itself hoarseness itself for Plato these forms or Natures or Essences or kinds or species were not just ideas in our minds that we're not our inventions our way of classifying things and we're not imposing class Concepts onto real things they were not thoughts but the real objects of thoughts nor were they merely the imperfect and changing qualities of imperfect and changing material things like the redness of red roses or the triangularity of teepees and pyramids or the humanity of imperfect humans they were the objective truths the forms the principles the essences which both subjective spiritual minds and objective material things were judged by one pyramid could be more triangular than another and one person's idea of what a triangle is could be truer than others only because there was an absolute perfect triangularity that was the standard and Touchstone for both and that also explained why both minds and material things could meet in knowing because the same light of Eternal truth shown on both changing minds and changing things because the same Divine Design could be found in both human minds and in the universe that's why our intelligence discovers intelligibility why when we look at the universe we see all kinds of intelligible order we find something spiritual something on our level Something akin to mind not just blind matter Plato's basic argument for the existence of these platonic ideas is quite simple we do in fact know and judge changing and imperfect and material things by these unchanging and perfect and mental standards if they're only our own invention then these judgments are not objectively true but they are or can be objectively true and that can only be because although both our minds and material things keep changing yet these truths these ideas these forms or Essences that we can know are real and do not change they are timeless pyramids wear away triangularity does not the Greek word for this world of Truth this kind of reality this intelligible order which is eternal because there is neither material nor subjective is logos that's the profoundest word in the Greek language perhaps in any language and when Christianity came into the world it claimed to reveal the ultimate origin of that logos the logos was the mind of God the thought of God the ideas of God the word of God it was with God and it was God from the beginning and the startlingly new claim of Christianity was not merely that it existed Plato knew that but that it became a human being in the Incarnation his human name was Jesus and his title was Messiah or anointed one promised one the early Christian Church fathers found that promise in Greek philosophy as well as in Jewish prophecy and the Fulfillment of both promises in Christ that's why Justin Martyr said in the second century that Socrates was a Christian we could say following Carl Rauner an anonymous Christian for just as God's presence in his created universe is usually Anonymous so is Christ's presence in the minds of wise and good men after all Saint John says he is the light that enlightens every man that comes into the world John 1 verse 9. the easiest way for Christians to understand Plato's theory of ideas or theory of forms is I think in three steps first begin with Christianity with Christ the god-man secondly imagine it is BC not A.D before the Incarnation not after it so that the mind of God the logos of God is only Eternal and divine not human and temporal the third step is then to subtract the personality of God from God to leave just the divine nature not the Divine persons to leave all the Divine ideas in reality without their home in God's mind and now you have Plato Plato's metaphysics underlies his anthropology because one example of the forms or ideas or Essences or universals or the nature of things is human nature the essential nature of man and what distinguishes the nature of man from the nature of everything else in the universe is reason not just reasoning arguing calculating but understanding reason rises above sensation and knows the universal knows the essential Natures of things sense experience does not that's the essence of Plato's epistemology as the anthropology depends on the metaphysics the epistemology depends on the anthropology and ethics depends on this because the most important task of reason is moral reason the knowledge of the good the knowledge of the human good moral virtues and vices and the application of this ethics to politics flows from the fact that states are made of men and by men and for men and therefore must have the same four cardinal virtues as individual men in The Divine Comedy Dante moved from hell to heaven we must now move from Heaven to Hell In other words from Plato to Machiavelli the radical contrast between Plato's classic the Republic and Machiavelli's classic the prince is evident at every Point beginning with the titles Republic is English for race publica public things indicating that Plato wrote the Republic for everyone for the good of the whole society the prince is an individual and Machiavelli writes for him alone not for the common good there is no common good for Machiavelli since he is a metaphysical nominalist and believes that universals like human nature or human goodness or the common good are only names not realities nothing like Plato's forms or ideas or essences so Machiavelli's ideal Prince is a successful tyrant unlike Plato's ideal philosopher king who is a humble Socratic philosopher who altruistically returns to the cave of politics after escaping from it into the world of platonic forms and philosophical enlightenment he does this for the good of the whole state not for his own individual good although almost no one after Machiavelli exalts or justifies tyrants or tyranny Machiavelli is still the fundamental founder of modern political philosophy for all his successors begin with him and solve his assumptions and then modify him somewhat but not totally especially not in his metaphysical Foundation of nominalism for all of the most influential modern political philosophers the state is a man-made artificial creation a social contract not a given inhuman nature Aristotle like Plato said man is a political animal that the state or public civil society is as natural to man as the family but nearly all influential modern political philosophers say that it arose by Will Not By Nature by a social contract that's what's common to Machiavelli Hobbs Locke Rousseau can't Marx and John Rawls the most famous contemporary liberal political philosopher an exception is the writers of America's Declaration of Independence which begins with nature and Nature's God and with natural rights like life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that are not given by the state or by the human will or by contract but are Universal and inherent in the nature of man like a platonic idea Machiavelli's implicit metaphysics is also materialism every material thing is competitive since no two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time and therefore for Machiavelli all men are competitive they are potential enemies man is radically selfish and only force can compel him to act against his nature unselfishly and altruistically or for the common good the good of others or the good of all there is no innate moral virtue or urge to Virtue or power of virtue over the human soul finale is also an atheist at least in practice he explicitly says that there are only two forces in all of human life virutu and Fortuna virtue is human power and Fortuna is chance which is the power of unknown and Untamed nature over man there is no third Force there is no divine power no Divine will no divine revelation no Divine Providence no divine intervention in history or in human life so if God exists at all for Machiavelli he may as well not he is harmlessly distant and if nothing in human life is divine then there are no platonic ideas no Divine ideas no Eternal forms not even the form of the good the good can be created only by man in man's mind or will or desire which therefore cannot be judged by any higher good any real Universal authoritative and eternal good as in Plato the end of politics for Plato was goodness the good state for Plato was one that promoted human goodness Dorothy Day the American Mother Teresa loved to quote Peter Morin's simple definition of a good State the good state is one that makes it easy to be good but for Machiavelli power rules not goodness although he does not literally write these words his point is that might makes right that goodness or Justice is simply the label given to the will of the winners there's no higher standard other than success that can judge societies as good or bad better or worse as there is in Plato there's nothing like any platonic form of goodness Society invented morality for Machiavelli and therefore it cannot be judged by morality there is no natural moral law there are only human laws only the laws of men who have acquired the power to make the laws so morality is simply the will of the rulers to control the behavior of the world the Italian word for power or Force virtue sounds like the word Virtue and Machiavelli plays on this connotation to secure reader's approval for his power politics virtue and Fortuna are the two realities that divide all of human life from Machiavelli virtue is simply all that is under your power and Fortuna means all of it is not and Machiavelli claims to be the first to discover the science of success and even to put it into a formula the formula for success is the conquest of fortuna by virtue the war virtue and the less Fortuna the more success for the prospective Prince or ruler the ruler by the way does not have to be an individual as it always is for Machiavelli it could be a group an aristocracy or even simply a majority in a democracy or it even could be that vague abstraction that Rousseau calls the general will the Zeitgeist the spirit of the times which for Rousseau is infallible and authoritative subject to no higher standard thus Machiavelli's principles could be applied to democracy too as the talk Bill perceived in his classic Democracy in America Rousseau like Brave New World is a good example of what to talk about called Soft totalitarianism since virtue is power rather than virtue its method for Success follows from its nature it is not the attraction of moral ideals not final causality not teleology but the force or compulsion of efficient causality in other words it's not a pull but a push not a platonic ideal ahead and above but a force behind and below in fact Machiavelli's concluding image of success in the prince is shocking he writes Fortune is a woman and to master her it is necessary to beat her and strike her the image is strikingly similar to that of Francis Bacon when he announces the new post-religious Simon bonum or greatest good for Western Civilization he says that the highest purpose of man on Earth is not as the naive and inefficient medieval thought to conform the mind to Truth by contemplation and to conform the will to Virtue by holiness not to conform the human soul to an objective reality that is platonic and eternal but rather to force nature to conform to the will of Man by applied science that is technology he called it man's conquest of nature and bacon used an image for that success which is strikingly similar to the one Machiavelli uses it is literally striking that is hitting beating he says that science must learn to put nature to the torture rack and compel her to come out with her secrets now bacon was not advocating literally torturing women since Mother Nature was only a myth to him and he merely meant by the torture rack only controlled experiments but the image he deliberately uses is very significant similarly Machiavelli was not advising men to literally beat their women but the image he chooses is significant in both cases power replaces virtue push replaces pull Force replaces moral appeal efficient and material causes replace final and formal causes by the way if you don't know Aristotle's famous distinction between the four causes final causes are Goods formal causes are essences these are what Plato sought in each of his dialogues which ask the question what is it what is its Essence and what above all is the good the end the value both formal causes and final causes have been dropped from most modern philosophy and increasingly from Modern consciousness and the reason is that they have proved distracting in modern science which Deals Only with material causes and efficient causes or forces pushing from below and behind rather than final causes which are ideals attracting us with their beauty and goodness and truth from above and ahead our modern Western Civilization has been spectacularly successful in science and technology in producing new bacons and machiavellis and an equally unsuccessful in producing new Plato's Machiavelli's contrast to Plato was deliberate in fact he deliberately references Plato in criticizing the Ancients who write about impossible Utopias because the good which for Plato was the Supreme reality is from Machiavelli not real at all but only imaginary he writes I thought it's sensible for me to go straight to a discussion of how things are in real life and not waste time with a discussion of an imaginary world for many authors have constructed imaginary republics as if Plato was writing a practical manual for Success instead of an account of an ideal that was eternally real no matter how poorly we came up to it in fact what we're doing here is unfair to both Plato and Machiavelli as I said before it's not like comparing apples with oranges which is possible since both are fruits it's like comparing apples with triangles Plato was not trying to give us rules for Success only wisdom and virtue and Machiavelli was trying to give us the opposite one principle of Machiavelli's by the way is very true and useful for everybody quite independent of all the rest of his philosophy in fact loud too mentions the same principle in his idealistic and mystical Dao de Jing it is that there are two kinds of power or virtue mental and physical and the mental power of foresight can often substitute most efficiently for the physical power of military force Machiavelli was a historian and he learned very much from the most successful political rulers in history the Romans he wrote the Romans did what all wise rulers ought to do to pay attention not only to immediate crises but to foresee those that will come for in this matter it is as doctors say in the beginning the disease is easy to cure and difficult to diagnose but after a while if it has not been diagnosed and treated early it becomes easy to diagnose and hard to cure Plato would certainly agree with that but he would add that it also requires the knowledge of the ideal and the trans temporal and the essential to diagnose both good and evil health and disease in Souls as well as in bodies one of Machiavelli's most notorious examples of appealing to efficient causes instead of final causes to force and fear instead of ideals and love is his argument that it is better to be feared than to be loved for men will love you when they will but they will fear you when you will since men decide for themselves whom they love and rulers decide whom they fear a wise ruler should rely on the emotion he can control not on the one he cannot fear and force appeal to Virtue which you can control love appeals to Fortuna which you cannot control Machiavelli says for love attaches Men by ties of obligation which since men are wicked they break whenever their interests are at stake but fear restrains men because of their fear of punishment and this fear never leaves them notice by the way his simplistic anthropology men are merely selfish never unselfish that's hardly practical or realistic one example of Machiavelli's principle of relying on virtue rather than Fortuna is prioritizing appearances rather than reality soccer Asian Plato deliberately questioned appearances to find the reality behind them Machiavelli like this office disagrees and says to pay attention to appearances which you can control rather than to reality which you cannot he writes a ruler need not really have all the positive qualities but he must seem to have them for everyone sees what you seem to be but only few have experience of who you really are in other words as advertisers say image is everything as I said before advertising is the world's oldest profession it was invented in the Garden of Eden by Machiavelli's father Machiavelli reveals the identity of his father when he says that other treatises on ethics and politics teach you how to be good but he will teach the prospective Prince how not to be good since anyone who wants to act the part of a good man in all circumstances will bring about his own ruin so it is necessary for a ruler if he wants to hold on to power to learn how not to be good guess who teaches that Machiavelli cynicism is based on his reading of History he says all armed prophets succeed or unarmed prophets fail is that true let's look the two greatest examples of unarmed prophets or Socrates and Jesus we might add Buddha did they fail did Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin succeed how did each one end here's a supreme irony Machiavelli is a utilitarian and believes that there are no intrinsically good or bad Acts he believes the end or the success justifies the means and the irony is that he gives us examples to follow whose lives all ended in failure and misery while Plato gives us the example of Socrates who even in death was happy in a sense his wisdom and virtue conquered even death which is Fortune's trump card for death did not change the meaning of Socrates Socrates changed the meaning of death if you read the death scene at the end of Plato's fatal you see that the idea of death and the idea of Socrates meet in your mind when you read that scene and when that happens it is the idea of death that changes not the idea of Socrates Machiavelli accuses Plato of naive optimism but it is machiavellio is naive for Plato knows evil as well as good Vice as well as virtue and he gives a full and realistic account of both in the Republic while Machiavelli ignores half of human nature Plato knows the darkness of the Shadows in the cave the world that martyred his master Socrates just as a Christian knows the depths of the evil in the human heart that martyred God himself when he became a man but he also knows the light and a Christian knows the source of that light and that is true realism one lesson of that light is the lesson that Plato teaches in the Republic that goodness does not need the Force of Arms to destroy evil evil destroys itself that's the point of the greatest book of the 20th century the Lord of the Rings which gets its inspiration from a story in Plato's Republic both from the symbol of the ring and the figure of gaijis the Sauron figure who wields the ring and the foolishness and hopelessness of the relativistic subjectivistic and utilitarian philosophy that motivates him the Lord of the Rings also draws from the Republic the final practical conclusion that Justice or righteousness or goodness is always in the end more profitable than Injustice or wickedness both in every individual and in every state in human history in other words Plato is saying something very close to what another great and wise philosopher once said which is my candidate for the most practical sentence ever uttered what does it profit a man or a state if he gained the whole world but lose his own soul [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Keywords: peter kreeft, dr. peter kreeft, dr. kreeft, philosophy, dr. kreeft on philosphy, dr. kreeft and philosophy, word on fire, word on fire institute, bishop barron, plato, machiavelli, plato's republic, machiavelli's the prince, machiavellianism, plato phil, political philosophy, political philosophy lecture, political philosophy talk, philosophy lecture, kreeft, kreeft philosophy, peter kreeft talk, plato lecture, machiavelli lecture, plato political philosophy, philosophy tube

Id: tB5kj-Lyn-w

Length: 39min 17sec (2357 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023