Any notion that Plato’s
Republic is to be read as a practical political program is contrary to the
plain statements of the text. Rather, the Republic is an exploration of
statecraft from first principles. The overall schema is to describe the ideal
or perfect polity – as divined from said first principles – and then to
describe its decay through the passage of time. The design of the dialogue is
to describe the model and then to describe the ways in which progressive copies
of the model fall short of that original ideal. This decay is framed by the
idea of the Great Year – that is, the fullness of time. The Ideal Polity is
pristine, but temporal polities fall short of such perfection, necessarily, and
as time goes on and the ages pass, and as forgetfulness sets in, the political
life of men becomes more and more aberrant and decadent. Finally, when all
vestiges of the cosmic ideal are lost, everything falls into chaos until the
cycle is restored and everything begins again.
It should be noted, though, that all of this is actually a secondary conern of the dialogue. In fact, the quest is to find the good man, the virtuous man, the just man or, we might say, the justified man. It is in this quest that Socrates proposes that he and his interlocutors consider the Man-Writ-Large, and it is axiomatic for them that this is the Polis. The entire dialogue, therefore, is built upon the traditional parallel between microcosm and macrocosm. The state is the organic parallel to the man. By finding justice in the state we can find justice in the man. What we can say of one we can extrapolate to the other. We can be sure that this – the Just Man - is the principle concern of the work because it concludes with the Myth of Er, a myth regarding the karmic destiny of individual souls through cycles of incarnations, again mapped onto astronomical time.
Famously, or infamously, Plato provides an exact mathematical account of the underlying cycles that cause Justice to decline in both the hearts of men and in their political institutions. This is the so-called Nuptial Number. Socrates’ account of it is absurdly opaque, but there is some agreement that the number in question is 12,960,000. It’s significance, though, is that it is the number in which a certain class of arithmetic calculations are all resolved. Specifically, it points to an entire group of numbers in a scale that is base 60. Thus, the Nuptial Number is 60 x 60 x 60 x 60. Factors in this scale are all significant in calculations. The number 360 is part of these calculations, for instance. In any case, Plato believes that this sexigesimal mathematics controls the cycles of time. This idea remains with us still – sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute, and so on. 12,960,000 is, in fact, the number of days in a Great Year. As this duration passes the quality of souls declines and accordingly the political life of men falls into deeper and deeper confusion.
* * *
Exactly the same doctrine is found in the Chinese tradition, although in a radically different mode. Namely, the same ideas and concerns, and structures, are to be found in the I Ching, the Book of Changes. This is the real key to this book. An extraordinary amount of nonsense has been written about the I Ching, not least because of its oracular uses, largely because the very nature of the work has been forgotten. It’s concerns are precisely the same as Plato’s Republic: the Virtuous Man and the exercise of statecraft through the vicissitudes and conditions of time.
New Age and psychological readings of the I Ching often overlook the fact that it is primarily a political text. It is a work about statecraft, first and foremost.
The mathematical structure
predominates in the I Ching. It is obviously not a Greek dialogue. It is a
series of sixty-four hexagrams. The book explores their permutations then
illuminated by poetic imagery, and sagacious commentary explaining how a wise
man will act in certain circumstances or how a wise ruler will rule in certain
circumstances. The thing to note, though, is that its mathematics is part of
the same mathematics as the Nuptial Number. (again, the Nuptial Number is the
resolution of a whole group of numbers necessary for the calculation of the
cycles of the Great Year.) In the case of the I Ching the equation 8 x 8 = 64
represents the totality of the cycle. This is the same maths as the chess board
which expresses the totality spatially rather than temporally. A chess board (8
x 8) represents Manifestation – what the oriental traditions (using numerical
hyperbole) refer to as the Ten Thousand Things. Similarly, the 64 hexagrams of
the I Ching represent the totality of Time. Time is its metaphysical theme,
with CHANGE as the primary characteristic of time. Changes are not haphazrd,
though. The cycle has a mathematical structure that unfolds and decays. Each
hexagram, therefore, represents a certain point in the cycle, and even more, so
too does each line of each hexagram.
This might not be
immediately apparent because the original sequence of the hexagrams has been
lost, and the current sequence, it is universally agreed, has been created
according to different (albeit hard to discern) criteria. Nonetheless, this is
a key: the hexagrams represent the Great Year (the fullness of Time) – and all
the permutations and possibilities therein – and so specific hexagrams and
specific lines within hexagrams correspond to specific points within the
passage of the Great Year. As conditions change, so does the Great Man modify
his behavior, and the Wise King (the Philosopher King) modifies his rulership.
The way to approach the
oracular uses of the I Ching is this:
The hexagram and the lines
given are comparing the situation to conditions that prevail at certain points
in the cycles of Time.
It is as though the I Ching
is saying to the querent in a given inquiry:
Your situation is like the
point in the cycle when confusion reigns and the Ideal State (The Rule of
Heaven) has become remote from men.
It then advises on an
appropriate (archetypal) strategy in those circumstances. Every strategy
conforms to the needs and properties of that moment.
In Plato’s language we might
say that a certain situation corresponds to, say, a point in the age of the democratic constitution (the age of maximum confusion) and strategies must
therefore be appropriate to such conditions. How would the Wise Man act at this
point in the cycle?
We must recall that the
entire cycle is implicit in every point in the cycle, that there is in reality only one
point, that change is an illusion and that everything is perfectly matched by
its opposite: yang changes into yin.
Assuredly, the Chinese work
is replete with an entirely different order of symbolism to anything found in
Plato (this is merely to say that the Chinese were Chinese and Plato wasn’t) but
the two texts are still parallel in important ways: the virtuous citizen of the
Celestial Kingdom and the rule of the Philosopher King are the abiding themes,
mutatus mutandus, in each case. All the same, the Chinese symbolism is not in
any way inconsistent with Plato. For example, the I Ching relates military
stratagems throughout. Plato doesn’t do this, but he certainly values the
military arts and military prowess as much as the ancient Chinese. Similarly,
the I Ching makes extensive use of the governance of the family as an arena of
justice, whereas Socrates – hardly a family man – does not, although we can be
sure that Plato would not have been indifferent to good order within families. We must forgive Plato for not being Confucius.
One matter that is related
to this, however, presents a parallel of particular importance. The Nuptial
Number is so-called because it is supposedly used to calculate the best times
for marriages. This is a constant concern for the I Ching as well. There are
good and bad times to marry. In traditional societies, right up to modern
times, this was almost as important a question to put to an oracle as who to
marry – indeed, in the case of arranged marriages, even more so. It is
significant that modern people rarely consult the oracle for this purpose
anymore. Such matters have thoroughly degenerated into calculations of “luck”
and “propitious days” in the Chinese tradition – Chinese metaphysics decays
into “luck” – with the deeper significances lost and forgotten through the
amnesia of time. But in fact there are questions of “alignment to Heaven” in
unions and offspring and, as Plato has it, it is the neglect of this that
causes the gradual decline of souls, the slow erosion of souls, through the
ages.
The Platonic system is, as
always, based upon a model/copy analogy. There is the paradigm, and then there
are increasingly inferior copies, versions that fall away from the paradigm. It
is a craft analogy. It is entirely typical of Plato’s whole thought. The
Chinese text does not use a craft analogy in this way, but there is still a
celestial or primordial order to which wisdom adheres and from which folly
flees. The movements of change are signally graphically by the descent of the
moving line into darkness and its reemergence into light. The hexagrams move
and transmute in cycles.
Perhaps it is necessary to
underline the parallel between Plato’s Ideal Polis (The Republic) and Chinese notions
of the celestial order, Heaven, the Celestial City. The idea of paradigmatic
reality being a City, an Imperial City, a Kingdom, extends throughout Chinese
thought, religion and symbolism. Deities are envisaged as officials in a
celestial administration. In the Republic we are clearly told that the Ideal
State exists not on Earth but in the stars. First, Socrates takes us from a
consideration of justice in an individual soul to a consideration of justice in
the state, but then he places his Just State in the heavens, thereby extending
the parallelisms to the cosmic order. Man = State = Cosmos are in parallel.
These same parallels are woven through or implicit in the I Ching too (with the additional but entirely consistent parallel of nature.)
* * *
The Myth of Er features
a symbolic device Plato calls the Spindle of Necessity. He means a wool spindle (again, a
craft analogy), and he uses it as a model of the heavens. Various “whirls” set
around the spindle are the planets. The spindle itself is the axis mundi.
The I Ching is associated
with the sacred yarrow plant. The long dried stalks of the yarrow are used for
the cultivation of hexagrams when consulting the oracle according to the more
traditional, ritualistic methods. The significance of the yarrow stalks is that
they represent the axis mundi. The symbolism of the whole herb illustrates this
clearly. Yarrow is (quite conspicuously) an herb in the umbelliferae family.
The flowering head forms a type of “umbrella” speckled with tiny flowers. Thus:
This is the plant's characteristic gesture. The form of the plant is
therefore a long straight vertical stalk surmounted by a dome of stars. To the
traditional eye this bears the imprint of a certain feature of the cosmic
order, namely the axis mundi and the heavens, the axis mundi (the stalk)
extending from heaven (flowers) to earth (roots). It is a simple symbolism, but
overlooked. The vertical descent from Heaven is typical of the Chinese
tradition. The Chinese script is (traditionally) written down the page, not
across, as if the characters are falling from Heaven. In the case of the I
Ching, the sacred herb invokes the axis mundi, which is both the hermetic avenue
for oracles from heaven to earth and is also the Unmoving Pole, the most
important coordinate in the Chinese traditional universe.
Once more we might be
tempted to apologize for Plato’s Republic and the I Ching being such utterly
different works, but on top of thematic consonances and a shared mathematics
there is also a common axial symbolism. This is to say nothing of corresponding schemes of caste and social stratification found in both works.
It is productive to read the Republic and the I Ching together.
Harper McAlpine Black
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