THE LAWS

Noble Lies in the Laws by Plato



Noble Lies in the Laws by Plato

Introduction

Plato was the first ancient Greek political philosopher and indeed the first philosopher to leave a large and systematic body of work exploring the relationship between ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Plato has expounded the notion of the Noble Lie in a stately manner in his various literary works such as “The Laws”. His importance is such that Alfred North Whitehead famously described all European philosophy as a series of “footnotes to Plato” (1978, p. 39); he also founded the first prototype of the modern university, known as the Academy, where Aristotle studied under him. He is often seen as the founder of utopianism, though the word was invented by the sixteenth-century humanist and Platonist Thomas more, and so it is in precise terms an anachronism to use it of Plato.

The Law and Noble Lie

Consisting of 12 books and apparently unfinished, The Laws is a vast and complex work than other his other major works that explicate the concept of the noble lie. The concept of the Noble lie by Plato is rigorously defined by Thomas Pangle in his book. The Laws is one that until recently has been sorely neglected in modern discussions of Platonic political theory (Pangle, 1988). Socrates makes no appearance in it. Instead, the discussion is led by an Athenian Stranger who is making a pilgrimage on Crete with two other elderly men, one a Cretan and one a Spartan (Ober, 1998). Thus, the dialogue is framed by an acknowledgment of the presence of the gods, and this theocratic framework is carried over into the constitutional arrangements they propose for the city of Magnesia (a city that the Cretan has purportedly been invited to help found and lead as a new colony). Various depiction of it represents various concepts of the noble lie.

Three Classes of Humanity

Plato's own example of this is the famous (for philosophers, anyway) “Noble Lie" — the story of how all humanity is divided into three classes of people whose souls are composed of dissimilar metals — gold, silver, and bronze; the leaders of the ideal state should tell this story to both themselves and the people of the state, over successive generations, so that all come eventually to accept the social order as a given and definite structure. There is a third level of damage, at once both individual and social. People who routinely lie do not only make their acquaintances mistrust them; they learn to tolerate themselves by normalizing their behavior, and so begin to assume that everyone else is lying as well thus making all human interaction illusory, a mockery of itself.

Certainly this is what Plato had in mind when he endorsed the propagation of a 'noble lie' concerning the origin of human differences and their embodiment in the division of political labor outlined in The Laws. The idea of a 'social contract' performs the same function in the modern era, which rests on a civic ...