Plato's STATESMAN and Torture
Longish post. Bear with me - I'm working on this for part of a job talk.
One of the questions I've been concerned in my work on the STATESMAN is the question of the conceptual function of the statesman. It seems to me quite clear that the statesman of the dialogue is a logical construction: it answers the question concerning the shape of the kind of knowledge that would actually be able to care properly for human beings, but the dialogue resolutely refuses to say whether such knowledge is actually achievable by any form of education, and indeed strongly suggests that it is not. The figure of the statesman who rules without law thus appears as a standard by which to evaluate practice, and in particular the law, not as a plausible alternative to the rule of law. It is a normative, not a positive concept, to put the point in modern terminology.
This point comes to mind in part because of the recent debates on torture. As the Eleatic Stranger tells young Socrates (293dff), somebody who ruled a city with this kind of complete wisdom could kill and maim anybody, without regard for any written rules, so long as the act was for the good of the city. The Stranger of course abstracts from the idea that the good of the parts and the good of the whole may differ, and in comparing the city to a swarm of bees points to the fact that this person would have to be as superior to the ruled as a queen bee is in respect to the other bees (cf. also 301d-e, where the comparison to the bees is even more explicit), but we may assume for the sake of argument that the point holds, i.e., that there is some unique way of measuring the good of the whole such that violence against particular people appears as necessary and justified.
This argument would thus clearly justify torture - which in the dialogue is clearly one of those forms of violence that would disgust young Socrates and the Athenians- under some unspecified circumstances for the sake of the good of the city, assuming the statesman possesses this special knowledge. If this assumption is not met, the Stranger suggests, there can be no justification for the kind of violence he described (a violence that would eo ipso be against the law, which is conceived as the repository of those practices that have worked well for our own care as human beings). In fact, the point goes deeper: it's not so much that there would be no "justification" (a word which brings with it the idea of law, which does not apply to the statesman, who is above all law), but that it is only when such violence is applied with complete knowledge that it would be objectively good. And any sort of violence is otherwise impious (except in very narrowly defined cases), as Plato (or some near contemporary follower) says explicitly in the SEVENTH LETTER (331cff).
One interesting thing about the debate on torture now is that it is (in part) about what necessity authorizes people in positions of authority to do. The question is not so much, or at least not very explicitly, what kind of knowledge they have (though there is of course debate on whether there is a real techne of interrogation that includes the use of physical violence as a way to reliably obtain true information, a question whose answer seems to be negative, for reasons Hobbes pointed out), but what kind of thing are they authorized to do. The debate thus has roots in modern political philosophy - in Locke's discussion of prerogative, or, as Scott Horton points out in an interesting post over at Balkinization, in Carl Schmitt. While Locke and Schmitt are very different - I don't think there's an idea of a social contract in Schmitt, though perhaps Jeremy can help me here - both argue about authorization rather than knowledge, and in this respect their idea of an unconstrained executive acting for the good (or merely the self-preservation) of the community is strikingly different from the Platonic argument. It illustrates the divide between ancient and modern political philosophy quite nicely, it seems to me.
Necessity, in the STATESMAN, does not appear to authorize anything (only knowledge does); it is better for the city to perish than for its rulers to break the law without true knowledge. The point, indeed, is not about authorization but about the objective good of the polis; and since this objective good cannot be reliably determined without an impossible sort of knowledge, then no one in effect can really be authorized to contravene the laws, which are the closest the city gets to knowledge. The city is simply not made to be flexible; but its inflexibility is part of its dignity.
One of the questions I've been concerned in my work on the STATESMAN is the question of the conceptual function of the statesman. It seems to me quite clear that the statesman of the dialogue is a logical construction: it answers the question concerning the shape of the kind of knowledge that would actually be able to care properly for human beings, but the dialogue resolutely refuses to say whether such knowledge is actually achievable by any form of education, and indeed strongly suggests that it is not. The figure of the statesman who rules without law thus appears as a standard by which to evaluate practice, and in particular the law, not as a plausible alternative to the rule of law. It is a normative, not a positive concept, to put the point in modern terminology.
This point comes to mind in part because of the recent debates on torture. As the Eleatic Stranger tells young Socrates (293dff), somebody who ruled a city with this kind of complete wisdom could kill and maim anybody, without regard for any written rules, so long as the act was for the good of the city. The Stranger of course abstracts from the idea that the good of the parts and the good of the whole may differ, and in comparing the city to a swarm of bees points to the fact that this person would have to be as superior to the ruled as a queen bee is in respect to the other bees (cf. also 301d-e, where the comparison to the bees is even more explicit), but we may assume for the sake of argument that the point holds, i.e., that there is some unique way of measuring the good of the whole such that violence against particular people appears as necessary and justified.
This argument would thus clearly justify torture - which in the dialogue is clearly one of those forms of violence that would disgust young Socrates and the Athenians- under some unspecified circumstances for the sake of the good of the city, assuming the statesman possesses this special knowledge. If this assumption is not met, the Stranger suggests, there can be no justification for the kind of violence he described (a violence that would eo ipso be against the law, which is conceived as the repository of those practices that have worked well for our own care as human beings). In fact, the point goes deeper: it's not so much that there would be no "justification" (a word which brings with it the idea of law, which does not apply to the statesman, who is above all law), but that it is only when such violence is applied with complete knowledge that it would be objectively good. And any sort of violence is otherwise impious (except in very narrowly defined cases), as Plato (or some near contemporary follower) says explicitly in the SEVENTH LETTER (331cff).
One interesting thing about the debate on torture now is that it is (in part) about what necessity authorizes people in positions of authority to do. The question is not so much, or at least not very explicitly, what kind of knowledge they have (though there is of course debate on whether there is a real techne of interrogation that includes the use of physical violence as a way to reliably obtain true information, a question whose answer seems to be negative, for reasons Hobbes pointed out), but what kind of thing are they authorized to do. The debate thus has roots in modern political philosophy - in Locke's discussion of prerogative, or, as Scott Horton points out in an interesting post over at Balkinization, in Carl Schmitt. While Locke and Schmitt are very different - I don't think there's an idea of a social contract in Schmitt, though perhaps Jeremy can help me here - both argue about authorization rather than knowledge, and in this respect their idea of an unconstrained executive acting for the good (or merely the self-preservation) of the community is strikingly different from the Platonic argument. It illustrates the divide between ancient and modern political philosophy quite nicely, it seems to me.
Necessity, in the STATESMAN, does not appear to authorize anything (only knowledge does); it is better for the city to perish than for its rulers to break the law without true knowledge. The point, indeed, is not about authorization but about the objective good of the polis; and since this objective good cannot be reliably determined without an impossible sort of knowledge, then no one in effect can really be authorized to contravene the laws, which are the closest the city gets to knowledge. The city is simply not made to be flexible; but its inflexibility is part of its dignity.
posted by Xavier Marquez @ 2:53 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
All these are good points. There is a confusion in the post about authority and necessity, though I think I would say that in modern times the emphasis is on necessity granting authority, while in Plato the emphasis is on knowledge granting authority. Though even this formulation seems to me to be slightly misleading, since there's really not a lot of emphasis in Plato on questions of authority and authorization. Locke and other modern philosophers spend a great deal of time, by contrast, on the question of what authorizes whom to do a range of actions X, some of which may later be found to be objectively bad but otherwise authorized.
One may put the general point thus: in much modern philosophy, one of the main political problems is about whether properly authorized actions will always be objectively "right," whereas in Plato at least what is authorized is simply what is right, i.e., the congruence of the objectively right and the properly authorized is simply assumed by definition.
Your point about the ambiguity of the appeal to necessity is well taken, though I suspect b) is not really an appeal to necessity but to opportunity. I take it, though, that the argument of the STATESMAN is indifferent to all those senses of necessity, and in particular to the distinction between necessity in foreign and domestic politics. The argument is presented by means of a story that dramatizes "internal" politics, but the concept of law that is invoked is indifferent as to its provenance, because the authority of law (to use modern language) depends not on the community that consents to it but on its being a distillation of experience, a plausible subtitute for the care of human beings. In other words, even though the argument of the STATESMAN is indeed presented in terms of "domestic" law, there is no reason in the argument itself not to apply it to "international" law, and Platonic arguments elsewhere make no distinction between laws that are created by an assembly and laws that form part of the broader cultural heritage or divine laws applying to all of Hellas.
The argument of the STATESMAN, however, is importantly about written law, to which custom is (imperfectly) assimilated, so in some ways it would apply more clearly to modern societies than to some ancient societies (especially preliterate societies, in which "law" could not possibly be especially fixed, due to the vagaries of human memory).
The last point - about the abiding possibility of chaos - seems to me compatible with the argument of the STATESMAN, which prefers a conservatism of even bad law to the destruction of law in general. The point is precisely that if the consequences of error are large (anarchy, the destruction of social order, civil war) and your only sources of knowledge about political life are experiential, it is almost always better to stick to the codified solutions based on these experiences (law) than to attempt something different without adequate theoretical knowledge. (A bit like Hobbes' argument for the preferability of absolute rule over anarchy in Leviathan, though of course Plato is concerned with different problems). I am not sure the existential threat of disorder was any less clear to the Greeks of Plato's time, who were witnesses to the disintegration of the polis by internal and external war, than to Hobbes.
Kevin:
I think that logically speaking the argument does not give us enough to determine whether the Stranger would be OK with a law that allowed torture, though his "rhetoric" would seem to argue against it.
Such a law, if it existed, would have to be some sort of distillation of experience - that is, a polis would have to see that torture as a practice has in fact helped them or some other polis to care for themselves. This could very well be the case.
Historically speaking, of course, torture was the instrument of choice in eliciting confessions from slaves. The main distinction in this respect in the ancient polis was not between foreigners and citizens (though that is an important one) but between citizens and slaves. A slave was in fact assumed to give truthful confessions only under torture in Athenian law (I think Finley talks about this in his "The Servile Statuses of Antiquity").
I do not know that there is any Platonic text, however, that speaks directly to this point. The comments of the Athenian Stranger on slaves at LAWS 777 or so and elsewhere (don't have the exact citation in hand) suggest that in some respects he didn't think slaves should be treated as harshly as they were in fact treated in Athens, but in other respects they should be treated even more harshly than they were treated in Athens, though I don't remember if torture was acceptable for the Athenian. It is certainly an interesting question - maybe I'll look into it and post something later.
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