Bringing philosophy to life

Two Republics

BRINGING PHILOSOPHY TO LIFE

#30: Two Republics

The 19^th Century philosopher G.W.F Hegel placed philosophy outside of practical politics when he claimed that the “the sun must rise and set before the Owl of Minerva takes flight.” In other words, the purpose of philosophy is not to shape or change history but to understand it. This led another philosopher from that era, Karl Marx, to declare the opposite: The purpose of philosophy is not merely to interpret the world but to change it. This issue comes to mind as I reflect on the recent elections in the U.S., especially Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris. Unlike Marx, I do not think the proper role of philosophy is to change the world. When I seek to “bring philosophy to life,” my goal is to shed light on what is happening in the world through rational analysis and justification of fundamental principles that guide what we think, what we choose, and how we act. Consequently, I would suggest that both Hegel and Marx are right. We are free to think and choose the best ideas and actions we can muster, and some of those ideas are simply good for their own sake—understanding has intrinsic value. However, Marx is correct in thinking that the overall process demands action. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle clearly distinguished between theoria and praxis—theory and practice. The practical value of understanding is that if we try to change the world, we need to know what we are doing. As Alfred North Whitehead said, the ultimate value of reason is to promote “the art of life,” which includes decisions and actions that do, indeed, change the world.

Now that the sun has set on the November elections of 2024, the time has come to reflect on what the results show us about our current republic and how it might change in the future. Of special concern is what these developments mean for democracy, the topic that has shaped this series from its beginning one year ago. Plato, in Book Eight of The Republic, distinguishes five different forms that the republics frequently take: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. Other thinkers use other terms such as autocracy, totalitarianism, and pluralism, but Plato’s list of five seem to cover the most important variations. These different forms change over time, depending on the choices made by the people who bring them into existence and try to maintain them. None of them is ever pure in the actual world, but different characteristics dominate in each one.

Currently in the U.S., oligarchy is a dominant form, and the struggle between democracy and tyranny is capturing considerable public attention. Clear evidence of the role of oligarchy is presented by this excerpt from the front page of a recent Sunday edition of The New York Times:

The week after the November election, Present-elect Donald J. Trump gathered his top advisors in the tearoom at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the transition to his second term of government.

Mr. Trump had brought two of his most valued houseguests to the meeting: the billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk and the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison. The president-elect looked around the conference table and issued a joking-not-joking challenge.

“I brought the two richest people in the world today,” Mr. Trump told his advisors, according to a person who was in the room. “What did you bring”? (The New York Times,December 8, 2024).

The role of wealth in shaping the government is also captured by a recent Substack letter from the historian Heather Cox Richardson:

While the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million, Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report noted, a week ago she estimated the worth of Trump’s roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number did not include his pick for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find (Heather Cox Richardson, Substack, December 4, 2024).

Richardson is a historian who has gained a widespread following by integrating current news reports with historical accounts of similar events and actions. As dramatic as is her account of the wealth of Trump’s cabinet, the strategy of promoting division and polarization is not new but has dominated American politics in recent decades. Consider her reflection on the Nixon era that featured polarization of the populace as a major political tactic:

President Richard Nixon’s team pioneered this strategy before the 1970 midterm elections to rally wavering Republicans around the president’s party. Nixon had won election with a promise that he would end the war in Vietnam honorably, but had, in fact, increased the U.S. presence there. By the end of 1969, with opposition mounting, he insisted that a “silent majority” agreed with his Vietnam policies. Then, at the end of April 1970, he told the American people that he had sent ground troops into Vietnam’s neighbor Cambodia. Protests led to the killing of four college students at Ohio’s Kent State University. Members of Nixon’s key demographic, middle-class white Americans, threatened to abandon him.

Nixon’s advisors urged him to win his voters back by attacking their opponents as lazy, dangerous, and un-American. They called their strategy “positive polarization” because it stoked the anger they needed voters to feel in order to show up to vote, a development they saw as positive. Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon urging him to take much stronger control over the nation, to manipulate the media, and to go to war with his opponents, whom he considered illegitimate, warning: “[W]e are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise—it will be their kind of society or ours” Heather Cox Richardson, Substack, January 29, 2025).

As I said, my goal in bringing philosophy to life is not to serve a political goal by choosing a specific party, propagating an ideology, or fostering some other form of practical action. The purpose of philosophy is to provide rational analysis and justification for fundamental principles, concepts, decisions, and actions. Such analysis is prior to practical political action and, for that reason, is presupposed by any such action. The current polarization in the United States and throughout the globe tends to follow one or the other of two profoundly different views of the world. One worldview places money and power at its center and promotes what it considers to be in the interest of a specific individual, a particular family or tribe, a single nation, or some other favored group. The other one seeks the common good, which integrates fundamental principles that apply to everyone. Here, once again, this analysis was already stated clearly in one of Plato’s dialogues. Socrates and Adeimantus are considering the precise division we are confronting today:

Socrates: The more success they have in business, the more they value it and the less they value goodness. When riches and goodness are placed on the scales of a balance, the one rises as the other falls.

Adeimantus: That’s true. [551]

Socrates: So, as wealth and wealthy people are honored in a republic, goodness and good people are dishonored.

Adeimantus: Clearly.

Socrates: And what is honored is cultivated, and what has no honor is neglected.

Adeimantus: That’s right.

Socrates: And finally, instead of loving competition and glory, people become lovers of business and money. They honor and worship the rich, putting them in office, but they despise the poor.

Adeimantus: That’s exactly how it happens (Plato’s Republic, Agora Publications, Kindle Edition, pages 550-551).

Socrates continues the exchange by examining what is wrong with oligarchy as a form of government. One of those defects is especially relevant today:

Adeimantus: Which one do you have in mind?

Socrates: Such a republic will always be divided, being not one but two—one of the poor and the other of the rich. They dwell together, but they will always be plotting against each other.

These two contrasting ways of thinking about human existence have been identified and analyzed in this series during the past year as I focused on the nature of democracy and its presence or absence in the contemporary political scene throughout the world. Now it seems likely that for at least the next two years much of our public discourse will be devoted to the success or failure of the first of these two worldviews as President Trump and his party seek to implement it on a scale that goes far beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime, especially since the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan at the end of World War 2. Given my view of philosophy, I think it is time to step back and consider some of the other aspects of philosophical reflection that focus on topics other than political economy and the practical political issues that are grounded in that aspect of human life. We are political animals, as Aristotle put it, but there are other dimensions of our life that also benefit from bringing philosophy to life.

I will begin with the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being. If there is more to life than acquiring money and power, what are those ideas and values and why should they direct our practical lives? One of the contemporary philosophers I most respect is Vandana Shiva. Her book, Oneness vs. the 1%, provides a helpful account of what it means to be a human being. She begins, as I do, in the biological realm, offering a worldview that grows out of science but evolves into the world of the mind that is central to our being in the world. She quotes Carl R. Woese, who she calls “one of the most important microbiologists of our times.”

Society cannot tolerate a biology whose metaphysical base is outmoded and misleading: society desperately needs to live in harmony with the rest of the living world, not with a biology that is a distorted and [an] incomplete reflection of that world. Because it has been taught to accept the above hierarchy of the sciences, society today perceives biology as here to solve its problems, to change the living world…society will come to see that biology is here to understand the world, not primarily to change it. Biology’s primary job is to teach us. In that realization lies our hope of learning to live in harmony with our planet (Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%, Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition, pp. 66-67).

The history of modern European philosophy, which began in the 17^th century, was shaped by a mighty battle between the natural sciences, especially physics and astronomy, and the Roman Catholic Church. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because of his worldview—he contended that the universe is infinite. Galileo was placed under house arrest and forbidden to publish his ideas about the structure of the universe. Imposing as it may sound, metaphysics is simply the form of inquiry that comes after physics, as Aristotle put it. Metaphysics is not opposed to physics but is built on it and on all other forms of rational inquiry, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, psychology, history, and the so-called social sciences. I would also add ethics and politics to that list. Metaphysics is a comprehensive study that seeks the fundamental principles of all aspects of being. For that reason, it is often synonymous with ontology (the study of being itself). Biology took center stage in the 19^th century when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, an attempt to integrate the evolution of all biological species, including homo sapiens, in a unified view of the world.

In the next episode of this series, I will look more closely at the metaphysical foundations of the second worldview I have linked to Vandana Shiva, what she calls “oneness.” I will also attempt to show why that worldview is far superior to the irrational and chaotic approach that that is currently receiving so much attention in the media and which threatens to bring an end to human existence as we know it.