In Book VI of one of his most famous yet often misinterpreted dialogues, The Republic, Plato invites us to think on the conditions of possibility of living together. The expression “living together” is ours. Plato’s own is politike dynamis, which co-implies and thereby refers to three correlative things: the capacity of being together, the knowledge that enables us to do so, and the dynamics required for it.
But what is living together based on? Care. Living together demands care, mutual care. Care, then, not only towards what manages to come into being – or into the light, to use a beautiful Ancient-Greek expression – so as to help it be and flourish by allowing everyone to express and explore their own potential, for instance. For mutual care has to do with the compossibility (to use a Leibnizian concept), this is to say, with the coming-and-being-together of what there is, which necessarily implies to choose and to prioritise.
Why care? Because life and death cannot be confused. Life and death co-imply one another, as there is neither life without death nor death without life. But they do not form a harmonious cycle. They are in permanent tension. One day this eyes which I love will be no more, this lips I kissed will die. Everything will go back into non-being and darkness. And this is a tragedy. Not a drama (which can always be emended) but a tragedy (which cannot be emended, like Greek tragedy teaches). Why care then? Because life must be praised and sustained while it lasts(*).
Let’s now go back to Plato. We know that living together demands care, as otherwise living together would prove impossible. But is it not then, asks Plato, that this, in turn, presupposes beforehand the idea of “good,” to agathon in Greek? For what else could inspire care but a kind of a priori idea of the “good?” Thus Plato’s metaphor of the sunlight, which cannot be seen but makes possible all seeing.
There can be two objections to this.
First, one may object that those things that seem to us to be bad are never bad by nature, that there is nothing good or bad in itself. But Plato is not elaborating an ontology, he is thinking on the conditions of possibility of living together, and it goes without saying that there is no possible living together without care and without rules, however flexible we may want to fancy them.
Secondly, one can object that in the name of the “good” many atrocities have been committed. True. But Plato takes care to underline that politicians and warriors are usually incapable of knowing anything about the politike dynamis. There is, furthermore, no politike dynamis without engaged thought, that is to say, without philosophy. The traditional caricature of Plato has him say that philosophers must rule, but as usual, this reading of Plato pays no attention to his rhetoric and nuances. Philosophy – that is, the free exercise of thought and open discussion – and women – an issue largely and symptomatically ignored by most commentators – and only them, states Plato provokingly, happen to know something about caring and the good, which cannot be one and the same in every occasion (for it has to be immanent in every circumstance), but must always prove good (and can only prove good if it contributes to livability).
We need a postconventional recovery of Plato’s philosophy against its idealist appropriation and against those who deny any principle in the name of an anarchy that proves to be the reverse of the very Christian (and modern) prison they pretend to escape; or in the name of Nietzsche’s attempt to move beyond good and evil in moral terms. For one should not confuse morality and livability, which is the quality of a flourishing living together in mutual care.
In a word, living together demands care, and care can only take place under a certain idea of good. In Nietzsche’s times the challenge was to get rid of morality. The challenge today is to find out under which principle of good we can live together in a world in which care has been lost and the term goodness is used for evil purposes. The challenge today is to rethink goodness.
Further reading: Sean D. Kirkland, The Ontology of the Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues; Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study; Thom van Dooren, “Care.”
(*) This is what, in slightly different ways, Ancient Greece and Ancient Persia teach us – unlike India, were the effort is put into escaping from the cycle of life and death into an allegedly deeper, impersonal level of being from which Greece and Persia both refused. Thus, for example, the contrast between the figures of the Persian knight-poet or javanmard, who fights for the cosmos to remain as much as possible in the domain of light by bringing youth to it, and the Hindu asceticist who, uninterested in the forms of this world which he regards as illusory, recites mantras to unite his spirit or atman to the brahman or universal spirit that lies beyond all forms.