Pursuit of the Good and the Noble Lie in Plato’s Republic

In Plato’s Republic, a dialogue between Socrates and several other thinkers concerns itself with the definition of justice on both a personal and socio-political level.  In doing so, the discussion is sidetracked to investigating The Good.  In this discussion, Socrates states that “every soul pursues the good,” a statement that conflicts with the other Platonic theory that social order must be gained through a “Noble Lie.” The puzzle is that if everyone pursues good, why is there any need for the Noble Lie?   

           

The existence of the Noble Lie leads modern readers one of two contradictory conclusions. The first is that the desire to know The Good is not as universal as Plato infers, thus making the Noble Lie a necessity in order to keep people from deviating from its pursuit. The other conclusion casts a more devious light on Plato’s entire philosophy, because if people really do pursue the good, then the Noble Lie implies that Plato’s ideal Republic is a façade disguising an institution of caste strictures, brainwashing, and totalitarianism.  

The Noble Lie is presented as a necessity of a stable government: “one noble falsehood that would, in the best case, persuade even the rulers, but if that’s not possible, then the others in the city.” This myth about certain people being made of gold, silver, and iron is imposed in order to explain the social roles people hold. In this way positions of authority remain stable, and those people under authority do not question its validity. 

The Noble Lie contradicts the assertion that “being deceived about the truth is a bad thing, while possessing the truth is good.” If individuals had the inherent desire to pursue The Good, they would not require a myth to keep them from questioning authority. Instead, the desire for good would be explanation enough for why some people are more capable of leadership than others. Something that needs to be taken into account when considering the contemporary beliefs of how the Noble Lie relates to The Good are the other main themes dealt with in the Republic. 

Source: https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/platoscave.gif

 The Allegory of the Cave, for example, is important in understanding how The Good and the pursuit of it are enacted in a practical sense. Like the Noble Lie, the Allegory of the Cave is another model which is affected by the concept of The Good. In this model, the majority of people are held captive, with their only concept of reality being shadows and echoing voices. Behind the prisoners are unknown manipulators of these images and sounds, and beyond them is the outside, representing The Good and all the Forms. However, instead of striving for The Good, these captives are apathetic to learning of the outside world. The captive who is freed from his chains exemplifies this indolence; it is by force he is removed from his lethargic state and coerced into the sunlight. When the enlightened captive returns to his fellow prisoners and attempts to show them the truth, they ridicule and refuse to listen to his account.

In Plato’s theory of good, there is no opposite “bad” force that is malignantly present in humans.  Rather, even humans who do “bad” things are only doing so out of an ignorant, misguided attempt at seeking The Good. One reason of why the Noble Lie is necessary even for people with the same goal of The Good is that people have different ideas of how to best gain it. Those who truly wished to attain The Good would welcome the leadership of those with more knowledge of it. But people’s interpretations of what is good are inevitably confused, and this requires the Noble Lie to provide a stabilizing force to make sure those who are confused are led by more clear-minded leaders. There are several instances where this variation of misinterpreting goodness is illustrated, since “the majority believe that pleasure is the good, while the most sophisticated believe that it is knowledge.”

One alternative interpretation of this puzzle is that The Noble Lie, instead of contradicting The Good, actually facilitates it by guiding ignorant people away from unjust actions. Plato infers that even if a person knows what The Good is, that person might not have the wisdom to know how to implement it. The ring of invisibility story—in which a man can do whatever he likes when he’s invisible—shows how people must be forced to act justly, saying “one is never just willingly but only when compelled to be [….] Indeed, every man believes that injustice is far more profitable to himself than justice.” Justice is “among the finest goods,” intimately connected to The Good and its attainment.

The function of the Noble Lie, then, is to ensure justice and The Good against any ignorant action the less sophisticated individuals might take. Like justice contributes to The Good, injustice is detrimental to the pursuit of it, and therefore people must be prevented from being unjust even in ignorance. 

The contradicting theories of the Noble Lie and the pursuit of The Good are perplexing because the Socratic Method generally doesn’t takes anything for granted, not even the definition of a word. Yet no one in this dialogue, not even Socrates himself, questions this incongruity. It must be presumed that this lack of questioning is itself significant to how the philosophers in Republic understand The Good themselves. The only circumstance in which the Noble Lie does not contradict the pursuit of The Good is when it contributes to that pursuit by preventing ignorant acts of injustice. 

Perhaps this puzzle then, although not exactly justified from a twenty-first century’s perspective, can be explained by considering the social psychology of Plato, Socrates and their fellow philosophers. As exemplified by their methodical rhetoric and systematic metaphors, the Platonic philosophers possessed an overall emphasis on structure in language, imagination, and society. The assumption that every individual pursues The Good is merely an extension of that structurally absolutist mindset. 

Plato’s absolutist perspective leads him to conclude that, in order to achieve fully knowledge of The Good, it must be pursued by any means necessary, even if those means require manipulating the citizens of the state for their own benefit. Ignorant people don’t know how to efficiently pursue goodness, and so such precautions as the Noble Lie and philosopher-leaders will be able to guide them towards The Good. If the people under leadership knew about the Noble Lie’s purpose, Plato thinks that they would understand its necessity in order to pursue The Good, because:

[Every soul] divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefit, if any, that event those other things may give.
           

An evaluation of Plato’s explanation shows that, although he claims that “the form of the good is the most important thing to learn about,” his methodology leads modern readers to question whether this claim is a guise of something more ominous. Even if everyone is searching for The Good, they are led astray from finding the truth by such strictures as the Noble Lie. An individual’s status—be it philosopher-leader, auxiliary, or worker—dictates exactly how much of The Good they are allowed to understand. Because of this constriction of knowledge, Plato’s Noble Lie in many ways threatens to hinder the common individual’s pursuit of The Good.