Plato’s tyrant is a man who is moves towards tyranny out of democracy, and does it of his own accord because he needs to fulfill his desires. When he becomes like this, he is a man wholly controlled by his own desires and he does whatever is necessary in order to keep up this lifestyle that he has created for himself. He is trapped because in this state, because he is trapped by his need for the pleasure that he gets from this way of living. The tyrant is connected to reason and passion, but because of the way that his world revolves around him constantly, he has no basis for knowing what is reasonable and what is not reasonable because he can’t base it off of others. Whatever he desires is reason in the tyranny. He is connected to passion, though, because as a political tyrant, he is driven by his passions and desires. In fact, he is controlled by them to the point where he breaks the bond of mutual love that is the reason that all government forms in the first place. This means that because he breaks the bond and is using his power for his own personal gain, then the people are justified in exacting punishment, and this severely restricts his movements. He is always afraid that he will be killed by one of his people or removed from power and therefore unable to get the desires he is reliant on. So both of these factors make up the components of a tyrant, but both are relative to what the tyrant thinks.
Thanks so much, Caroline; this is great!
ReplyDeleteAnother part of the passage that I thought was interesting was the idea that the tyrant can never achieve real happiness, even when he has absolute power over the state and all its resources. As you say, he is always afraid that those who keep him in power will turn against him. I would add, though, that even while they remain loyal to him he is miserable because he is a slave to his insatiable desires. When he indulges his whims, they"grow up many and formidable, and their demands are many" (Plato 573). They continue to torture him although "his revenues... are soon spent" (Plato 573). The more he indulges himself, the more he craves, and even at the height of his power he is not satisfied.
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ReplyDeleteThe unfortunate ending to this though, is often not a tyrant learning from his great mistakes. The ending is most often the end of that tyrants life. My question is: In the future, can we as a society take what we know from philosophers and poets and play writes and apply it to the struggles that our society, on earth, continually faces? How do we begin to do that? How can we push everyone in our world to educate others and themselves to learn these important lessons without repeating them?
ReplyDeleteI think you bring up a great point, Caroline and Emily. It would be horrendous to always have to be constantly vigilant-- that seems like it would almost be the worst part of being a tyrant. Unless you never let your guard down, everything you build will eventually erode away.
ReplyDeleteMaggie, I honestly don't know if we as a society can learn things, as opposed to just repeating them in perpetuity. Plato's vision of a tyrant, from 400 BC, seems exactly like the tyrant of the Last King of Scotland, or other recent tyrants. If we haven't learned these things in 2000 years, how can we now?
Do we want "real happiness," Emily? Can we all be "really happy"? What does that mean? Since tyranny presents such an unstable model (with the constant vigilance and the inescapable terror in the citizenry), should we just look toward a society that maximizes our real happiness? How does that work?
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ReplyDeleteBlogger Emily Reif said...
ReplyDeleteElise:
My definition of "real happiness" is fulfilling your needs and desires. For the average person in Plato's Republic, the two are the same because (using your example from class on Friday) the shoemaker wants nothing more in the world than to make shoes, and if he can do that he is satisfied. The problem is to be aware of these desires and know when they are becoming excessive, as in the case of the tyrant. He begins to want more than just the necessities and when he indulges himself, he wants exponentially more until he can no longer satisfy these desires.
I do think, then, that all individuals want to achieve "real happiness," and that the society should maximize the average happiness of its citizens. This does not mean giving them whatever they want, but it does mean creating an environment in which the citizens can work hard and prosper when they do. If the society achieves this, all the citizens could be happy.
Maggie/Hannah:
I agree almost completely on the point that if we haven't learned our lesson by now we never will. The one thing I'm potentially optimistic about is that, as a society, we are horrified by tyrants and at least attempt (sometimes) to stop them if they become too violent. Although the world of the 2000s is obviously far from perfect, it is better than an era when the slave trade was an accepted part of life and whole races were obliterated so that another race could claim a continent. At least we can now acknowledge that these things were terrible, and maybe the world can continue in a positive direction, although I doubt that a world without tyranny could ever actiually exist
Plato assumes that in all of us there are self-destructive passions that wants to get out but have to be controlled by reason. Is this really true?
ReplyDeleteFrom the start, he wants the happy (or at least content) man to be the temperate and just man guided by reason.