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Entry: Noble Lies Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/noble_lies#27146 Post contents: Mr. Roach, Your view of The Republic as “totalitarian” follows the line of Karl Popper in his tendentious Open Society and its Enemies. This is as grotesque and reductive a deformation as Leo Strauss’s reading: Thrasymachus is right all the rest is Socrates’ gambit to get boys. The Noble Lie in The Republic is fairly transparent and anodyne: all men are brothers in their origin from the earth so to “manufacture assent” to the hierarchy the guardians are said to come from gold, the auxiliaries from silver, and the farmers and such from bronze. These are not castes since (unlike say, projects for the state’s manipulation of IQ data) there is no heredity involved. The guardians are not, (needless to say?), intellectual hustlers with high IQ s but those who have achieved the highest apperception of reality and its relation to the soul. The utopian aspect of The Republic is merely formal or heuristic rather than politically prescriptive. In Voegelin’s view The Republic it is a scientific (!) breakthrough in human self-knowledge: a differentiation of the soul in its relation to the transcendent ground of being. There are after all forms of knowledge, or science in the sense used by Plato and Aristotle beyond those permitted by positivism. Sent at: 2008 12 01