If there is an ideal city-and it is by no means clear that Plato believed in its possibility-then it can and must be ruled by philosophers. In this case alone, the philosopher must live a double life (as it were): he will practice philosophy and serve as a ruler. To qualify for this position, an individual must possess theoretical wisdom and practical virtue; in addition, he or she must not want to rule or lead a political life (347c-d, 521a-b). A person who does want to rule is, by definition, not a true philosopher and thus disqualified from ruling. The philosopher in the ideal city, however, will agree to rule, in spite of his disinclination, to do so. Since he is a “just” person responding to a “just command,” the philosopher is “willing” to return and rule the city (520d-e).32
This is all the more odd because, as Nightingale notes, the philosopher remains a foreigner in his own city, a “non-mercenary mercenary,” who is supported but not paid, can own nothing, and can never touch gold or silver. Many scholars have been puzzled by this situation, but Nightingale, drawing on the work of Christopher Gill, points out that simply because they are “‘just men obeying just commands,’ they are eager to pay back their city for the education and rearing that has been granted them.“33 And remember that it had been the obligation of the ritual theoros to return and give an account of what he had seen to his fellow citizens.
The rulers, or, as they are often called, the “guardians,” are an ascetic lot, and have been compared to a monastic order. Not only are they committed to a life of poverty (they live on what the city gives them, not on anything of their own, and can be considered in a way to be beggars), but their sexual life is so regulated that, though they have children, they have no family life, no personal household: the children are raised in common. They embody the virtue of wisdom, but they preside over a city that is characterized by the virtues of justice and moderation, and, not insignificantly, where there are no slaves. A democracy the ideal city is not, and I’m sure we wouldn’t want to live in it, and perhaps even Plato would have had his doubts. In any case there are no examples of the ideal city ever existing.
In books 8 and 9 of the Republic Plato describes a steady decline from a mythical first regime that is a version of his ideal city, a decline that begins because some of the guardians go astray, desiring personal enrichment, even though that involves, for the first time, the enslavement of fellow citizens. This produces timocracy, the rule of honor, with Sparta as an actual example. But unchecked desires lead to a further downward spiral, first to oligarchy and then democracy. Although Plato’s argument compels him to say that democracy is the worst regime short of tyranny, he also says it is the freest of regimes, and the freedom of democracy is what makes it the only regime where philosophy is possible. Within the multicolored variety of democratic ways of life, the philosophical life can be pursued, at least until the democratic lack of self-control leads to tyranny, the worst of all possible regimes. Outside the rigid logic of decline, it would seem that Plato has more sympathy with democracy than he admits. In any case, in the greatest of the few dialogues where someone else takes the part of Socrates, the Laws, the central character is an Athenian philosopher, not a Spartan, that is, someone from what in the scheme of decline should have been a better city than Athens. But then, there were no philosophers in Sparta, and besides, no Spartan could ever have talked as much as the Athenian in the Laws.
Compared to the cities of his day, Plato was holding up an ideal. It has often been called an aristocratic ideal, but aristocrats on the whole favored oligarchy, which Plato despised, and Nightingale argues that Plato used aristocratic ideals against the aristocrats, who were not “real” aristocrats in his eyes, just as the Buddha criticized the Brahmins for not being “real” Brahmins.
Which takes us to the Buddhist case, where religious reform and political criticism also went hand in hand. I have been presenting a more Buddhist Plato than usual before turning to the Buddha himself. There are some interesting parallels between them: recent revisions of the dates of the Buddha bring him into the fourth century BCE, and make the Buddha and Plato possible contemporaries. One striking parallel is the degree to which each one threw out his respective inherited tradition and attempted to replace it with an entirely new one. I noted in Chapter 7 that Plato composed a huge corpus intended to replace the entire poetic, dramatic, and wisdom traditions that preceded him. Fortunately he did not succeed in eliminating his forbears, but start a new tradition he did, as the famous quip of Alfred North Whitehead indicates (the European philosophical tradition is a series of footnotes to Plato). The Buddha similarly threw out the entire Vedic tradition, from the Rig Veda to the Upanishads, and in its place left us with a collection of sermons and dialogues, the Buddhist canon, which is several times bigger than Plato’s complete works. We can be relatively sure that all that is attributed to the Buddha is not his, that successive generations added to the tradition in his name. It is not improbable that the Platonic corpus is similarly layered. But here we are interested in the degree to which both men succeeded in starting something quite new.
Of course, the Buddha, like Plato, owed a great deal to his predecessors and is inconceivable without them. But as Richard Gombrich has pointed out, those who see Buddhism simply as a later school of Brahmanism and those who see it as a totally new conception are equally mistaken: Buddhism is a reformulation of Brahmanism so radical that it began a new and enor mously influential tradition, even though it did not survive in India. Both men could be seen as in some ways visionaries; both also as great rationalists, adept in argument, superb in dialogue; and both were before all else teachers, and-though we often fail to see this side of Plato, because of the quite artificial distinction we make between philosophy and religion, or that we project back into premodern times-both were teachers of salvation.
The Buddhist version of the Myth of the Cave is in an important sense the whole elaborate story of the Buddha’s life as the tradition handed it down. Just as the philosopher had to leave his oikos and his polis, so the Buddha had to leave his oikos and his polis, or rather his kingdom, the rule of which should have come to him. But seeing sickness, old age, and death, the Buddha wanted to leave that cave, and spent years of suffering and deprivation trying to do so. In the end, however, he found a middle way between the sensual indulgence of the world and the harsh austerities of the renouncers who preceded him, a way in which serene meditation could lead him to the truth and to the release he sought.
It was during his meditation under the Bodhi tree that he famously attained his vision of the truth and his release from the wheel of samsara, the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. Sometime later when he was considering what to do next, he almost concluded that there was no use in trying to teach what he had learned to a world filled with lust and hate. But just then he was approached by the deity Sahampati, who implored him to return to the world after all, as we saw in Chapter 9:
And so the Buddha undertook, out of compassion for all sentient beings, forty-five years of itinerant preaching to make sure that the truth he had seen would not be lost to the world.31
Followers of the Buddha, like those of Plato, knew a lot about the legitimation crisis of axial-age society, as is evident in many texts. Following Steven Collins, we can take a particularly vivid example from one of the Jataka stories (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, one of the most widely known genres of the Buddhist canon), a story that is long and fascinating, which I will all too briefly summarize.35 “Once upon a time there was a king of Benares who ruled justly (dhammena). He had sixteen thousand women, but did not obtain a son or daughter from any of them.“36 Indra, the king of the gods, took pity on him and sent the future Buddha to be born as a son to his chief queen. The child was named Temiya, and his father was delighted with him. When he was a month old he was dressed up and brought to his father, who was so pleased with him that he held him in his lap as he held court. Just then four criminals were brought in, and the king sentenced one of them to be impriso
ned, two to be lashed or struck with swords, and one to be impaled on a stake. Temiya was extremely upset and worried that his father would go to hell for his terrible deeds. The next day Temiya remembered his previous births, including that in the past he had been king of this very city and that, as a result of his actions, he subsequently spent 80,000 years in an especially terrible hell, where he had been cooked on hot metal in excruciating pain the whole time. He determined that this would not happen again, so he pretended to be lame, deaf, and dumb, so that he could not succeed to the kingship.
Because he was beautiful and had a perfectly formed body, people found it hard to believe in his defects, but because he was a future Buddha, he was able to resist all temptations to give himself away, whether with loud noises, terrifying snakes, or beautiful girls. When he was 16 the soothsayers told the king that he would bring bad luck to the royal house and should be killed. His mother begged him to save himself by showing that he was without defect, but knowing what his fate would be if he succeeded to the kingship, he refused. Temiya was sent in his chariot to the charnel ground, where he was to be killed, but the gods saw to it that the charioteer took him to the forest instead. At that point Temiya revealed his true self, showing himself strong and fit. His charioteer offered to take him back to the city so he could claim his succession to the throne, but Temiya explained to him the dreadful fate in hell that awaited him if he did so and declared his intention to become an ascetic instead. At that point, “the chariot driver, seeing that Temiya had cast kingship aside `as if it were a dead body,’ wanted to become an ascetic also.“37 Temiya ordered him instead to return to the city and tell his parents what had happened.
When Temiya’s parents received the news, they rushed to the forest where he was, and overwhelmed with his new self, proceeded to renounce the world themselves. Soon the whole city had come out to the forest and everyone became a renouncer. They left gold and jewels in the streets of the city as of no more use. Soon a neighboring king, hearing what had happened, decided to annex Benares and scoop up the gold and jewels, but once in the city he felt an overwhelming impulse to find the ascetic prince and his parents. Upon finding them, he, too, and his subjects following him, became renouncers. Another king followed his example. Soon it was clear that Temiya was, after all, a cakravartin, a universal ruler, though his rule was renunciation.
Collins sums up by saying, “It is difficult to imagine a more explicit condemnation of kingship: despite the narrative voice’s assertion in the first sentence that Temiya’s father ruled justly, or `in accordance with what is right’ (dhammena).“38 Collins points out that dhamma is used in two senses, worldly dhamma and buddhadhamma, and that it is the former that the kingdom embodied and the latter that it drastically violated. Temiya’s father’s kingdom represented what Peter Brown, the great historian of late classical antiquity, described as “the more predictable, but no less overbearing `gentle violence’ of a stable social order.“39 In a class society, even if those who serve and are never served are not beaten or hungry, as in fact they often are, they are always at the whim of those they serve; they have no control over their own lives. If it is unlikely that Plato ever imagined that his ideal city could be realized, it is very clear that in this Buddhist story Temiya’s universal empire of renunciation could never be realized on this earth: it would involve not only the absence of violence; it would involve the absence of sex. Nonetheless, as with all the great axial utopias, it stands as a measure of just how short life in this world falls compared to what it ought to be.
Axial Utopias and Play
It may not be easy to bring the thought of the great axial thinkers into the realm of play, but it is worth considering. Plato, as noted near the end of Chapter 2, took play very seriously as a way in which men and gods interact. For him the freedom of play was linked to another realm where necessity does not reign. The Parable of the Cave has an element of play in that it involves a release from its starting point, life in the cave, which is a realm of coercion: its inhabitants are chained. When the protagonist is released from his chains and turns around, leaves the cave, and finds himself in the open air with the sun above, he is at first anxious. He is free and he doesn’t know what to do with his freedom-it has been a long time since he experienced the world of play, if he ever had-so he is even half inclined to return to the cave. But what he actually does is ascend to the vision of the form of the good, a joyous, overwhelming experience of being and meaning. Is that so far from play at its best? Can we not see a play element at the climax of Plato’s central narrative? And though, at least in the texts I have read, the Buddha doesn’t talk about play, is there not a wonderful atmosphere of play at the climax of the story of Temiya? When Temiya’s parents, the king and queen of Benares, are so overwhelmed with joy that they too become renouncers and then the citizens of Benares and of the neighboring kingdoms too are all swept away in this joyous transformation, is there not something like play going on? Have we not seen that play is possible only in a relaxed field where the pressures of the struggle for existence are in abeyance, and is this not what we find in these two great narratives?
It would even be possible to press the analogy one step further. Aren’t all utopias a kind of pretend play where one can imagine a world that is itself a relaxed field where the ordinary pressures of life are suspended? If we can imagine a world of Buddhist renouncers, it would be a world of sheer joy, where the sufferings and desires of this world have been left behind, where there is no coercion of any kind, interior or exterior. There is a marvelous description of something surprisingly similar in Second Isaiah. After a fairly bloody description of what will happen to sinners, there is a picture of the end of times that is a relaxed field indeed:
What we see here is a world of absolute nonviolence, but also of social justice: the rich and powerful will not take away the houses or the harvests of the poor, but ordinary people shall long enjoy the work of their hands. This utopia even seems to be vegetarian, given the diet of the lion; and the serpent, though still accursed with bad food, is not to be killed. Above all it is a world of rejoicing where the sound of weeping and the cry of distress will no longer be heard. The legitimation crisis of the axial age is solved, even if only at the end of times.
Plato’s Republic (and even more the city described in the Laws) is more “realistic” than the Buddhist utopia-life in the real polis had too strong a hold on Plato for it to be otherwise. The basic idea is a society created by educational play and moral example, but hierarchy and coercion enter because some prove immune to such teaching. So even violence is necessary, at least at first before the ethical life has been fully internalized by the population. The hallmark of Confucian utopianism was the rule of virtue by ritual and example, which would ultimately replace the rule of war and punishment, though, as in the case of Plato, the Confucians recognized that punishment might have to be phased out gradually.
Ritual is central in each of these examples. In the Buddhist utopia it would take the form of meditation.40 The Confucian utopia would be above all the expression of ritual, li, though a form of ritual expanded beyond the ancient form to include the whole of humanity. In Plato one could see the vision of the good itself as a kind of ritual, and there are ritual aspects to Plato’s thought in many dialogues. And even in the end time we can imagine that the ritual prescriptions of the Torah would still be binding. But if we think of any of these utopias realistically, as their authors usually did, we can see that they would never work. We live in a world where the struggle for existence still dominates and is not about to transform itself completely into a relaxed field.
Overlapping Fields
Yet the presence of relaxed fields is not without its influence on the world of the struggle for existence. In life and clearly in human culture there are no impenetrable boundaries and no fields that aren’t overlapping. Indeed, play can be sucked into the world of daily life, can become part of the struggle for existence. I mentioned above the relatio
n between play and practice for battle in aristocratic societies. In the modern military we have things called “war games,” and the term is not without meaning. We have leaders of nationstates enmeshed in their own fantasy games of what will happen if, say, they invade Iraq-play fantasies that prove impervious to all the advice they receive about what will really happen. 4’ And where does play end and work begin in the world of professional sports, so pervasive in much of the modern world? The players are indeed hired, sometimes at exorbitant salaries, though we should not forget those who are paid less, work only a few years, and sometimes suffer debilitating injuries while “at work.” On the other hand, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, even in professional sports, participation in the game can become an end in itself, a player can be “in the zone,” fully at one with what he or she is doing.
But if play can get sucked into the world of daily life, work, in the sense of overcoming deficiency, can sometimes be transformed into forms of play. Art, which is linked to play, also involves a kind of work. Kant, in his description of art as play that stimulated Schiller’s complex reflections, noted that art involves work as well. He says that though the spirit of art must be free, there is something compulsory that is always required, without which the art “would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate,” and he gives the example of “correctness and richness of diction as well as prosody and meter” in the art of poetry.42 We surely know that practice, which we noticed was going on in preparation for the great rituals among the Kalapalo, is often very hard work, as every dancer and musician knows, and this work makes the freedom of art, the play element, possible.
But I think we need to take these examples one step further and ask when ordinary work (that is, not work that is a professionalized form of play or work that is an inevitable part of art) can become play or have an aspect of play. Let us back up a minute to remember Burghardt’s Genesis of Animal Play. Burghardt notes that although the primary function of play is the sheer joyous expression of play itself, the play will be ruined if the players don’t follow the rules governing the game. those rules are at least incipiently ethical because they involve the protection of equality between the players, what we now refer to as “fair play” or “a level playing field.” But play, according to Burghardt, can also take on secondary and tertiary functions. Hans Joas, in his book The Creativity ofAction, which has a great deal to say about play in its many forms, reminds us of some of the ways in which play has the secondary function of pulling children out of their early fusion of subjectivity and objectivity into an increasingly differentiated view of the world. He cites the interesting work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott on transitional objects in infancy, things like security blankets, that combine features of selfhood and otherness but allow exploration of the world without loss of the security of the mother.43 George Herbert Mead, one of the great writers on play, particularly the role of play in the ethical development of the child, analyzed the capacity of children, when playing team sports, to imagine themselves in every role in the game, not only their own, and thus to “take the role of the other,” a crucial capacity in human understanding.” Joas quotes John Dewey, another major American pragmatist along with Mead, as saying that work and play are “equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor.“45 But here Dewey was engaging in social criticism, because he knew well that what he called “false economic conditions” were the norm for his own society and historic societies in general. As in the axial age, the overlapping of fields has ethical implications.
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