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Continuing our look at the lower utopia as it appears in the Republic, we see that Plato sets out to distinguish the Rulers from the Guardians in general by testing.

"So we must choose from among our guardians those who appear to us on observation to be most likely to devote their lives to doing what they judge to be in the interest of the community, and who are never prepared to act against it." [p178 412c-e]

Plato wants to identify those guardians who most perfectly identify with the city as its rulers. He uses the criteria of shared fate to define this identification. This reflects both ways. For the ruler we want the person who identifies the most with the fate of the community. But for the community, it is shared fate that gives it its unity, as well. In The Laws, it is shared fate of Athens under the threat of the Persian Empire that is seen by Plato as the root of democracy. Shared fate prevents civil strife. In the face of external threat, factions become submerged in the need to pull together for the common good. Shared fate is the criteria for the identity of the community. Those of the guardians who are closest to sharing that fate are singled out as the rulers from the rest of the guardians. Fate is most prominent for a city in war. Thus, the identity of the city is closely related to the reality of war. War is like a torture for the body politic. Parts of the body politic are torn off and destroyed, causing grief and suffering. Thus, war may be seen as the moment of truth for the polis. It becomes clear in this way how the three concepts that make up the supra concept of Being become intimately bound together in Plato's exposition. War is the test of the city, its ultimate reality check. War is the moment of truth. In war, the citizens most poignantly share each others' fates and exhibit their unity as a community. The citizens affirm their immediate relation to Being, that subtle clinging to existence, in their relation to each of these intertwined concepts: identity, truth, and reality. The three come together into a unity at the point where war threatens the viability of the polis. This unity is forged at the whitehot point of testing in war in which the clinging to existence is most desperate. At other times, the three concepts drift apart and form separate moments of the dialectical unfolding of the polis. The polis has an aspect of reality which admits diversity and the production of variety. The polis has an aspect of truth in which its deviation from the ideal city is exposed by its lack of justice. The polis may have an aspect of identity in which its internal differentiation leads to the creation of the difference between rulers and ruled. These moments of the unfolding of the city each manifest differently in the city which is not under threat. Plato wishes to tie them together when there is no threat in order to be prepared for the threat when it appears.

So the testing of the guardians that goes on continually is a means of bringing the external threat inside. That internalization of threat in each case confronts the different aspects of "Being" continuously. It makes Plato's lower utopia a place where "Being" is never forgotten. Remembering `Being' as a general concept is impossible. `Being' is everything. It is not possible to remember everything, either ontically or ontologically. Ontically, there are just too many aspects of Being to recollect. Ontologically, it is all too vague and indefinite to focus on. However, it is possible to remember the elements of Being: truth, identity, and reality. Plato would construct all kinds of artificial disturbing situations in which the good of the community is likely to be lost sight of by the guardians. These artificial disturbances are the elements of reality in which the guardians are immersed. In that immersion the true character of the guardians is manifest. This allows the rulers to be identified and distinguished from the rest of the guardians. In these contests, the necessity to cling to existence by the Polis is constantly being remembered and recollected within the polis. Plato gives a concrete example of how to prevent the forgetfulness of Being, which Heidegger bemoans in the history of Western Philosophy. But Plato improves on Heidegger's formulation by suggesting that in order to remember Being, we actually need to test the guardians, and that testing brings together the elements of Being in a constant process of revelation of the nature of the guardians. So the polis clings to existence by a process of continuously revealing the nature of its inhabitants. The polis is a proving ground for human beings which reveals the inner workings of their selves so that this knowledge can be used to save the city by putting those who prove true in charge of the whole of the city.

Plato enumerates voluntary force and witchcraft as ways in which the principle of always doing what is best for the community may be lost.

To go back to what I was saying, then, I continued, "We must look for the Guardians who will stick most firmly to the principle that they must always do what they think best for the community. We must watch them closely from their earliest years, and set them tasks in doing which they are most likely to forget or be led astray from this principle; and we must choose only those who don't forget and are not easily misled, Do you agree?"

"We must also watch their reaction to the third kind of test -- witchcraft. If we want to find out if a colt is nervous, we expose him to alarming noises; so we must introduce our Guardians when they are young to fear and, by contrast, give them opportunities for pleasure, proving them far more rigorously than we prove gold in the furnace. If they bear themselves well and are not easily bewitched, if they show themselves able to maintain in all circumstances both their own integrity and the principles of balance and harmony they learned in their education, then they may be expected to be of the greatest service to the community as well as to themselves. And any Guardians who survive these continuous trials in childhood, youth, and manhood unscathed, shall be given authority in our state; he shall be honored during his lifetime, and when he is dead, shall have the tribute of a public funeral and appropriate memorial. Anyone who fails to survive them we must reject." [p180; 413 c-e]

This proving process, which uses the metaphor of the separation of dross from pure ore in a furnace, is an artificial process of manifestation. Normally it is circumstances which are unplanned that act to manifest the character of individuals. Plato wishes to take this process of human proving under control and make it a continual process of revelation or uncovering of the natural propensities buried within the human self.

We need to pause at this point and consider just how radical this idea of Plato's is. Plato is taking a very inhuman look at human beings. How many of us could submit to a lifelong series of tests that sought to reveal everything about us that we ourselves did not know and perhaps would never wish to know? It presupposes not only that human beings have many terrible secrets which they attempt to hide, but also it presupposes a part of the community that can administer such tests without them ever being compromised. We, of course, get exactly that picture when Plato relates his city to the individual. He attempts to prove that the soul is composed of several parts. One part is reason -- the tester -- and another is the desires, which is the part containing all the secrets. Between these two is anger, which acts like the auxiliary watchdog, allowing the self to fight itself. The image of the tester is the torturer, or inquisitor; it is reason without any emotion or desire. It is a part of humanity that becomes divorced from humanity and is able to act inhumanely toward other humans. This split of the psyche into the transcendent pure part (mind) and the transcended impure part (body) is characteristic of the entire development of the Western tradition. The pure part does violence to the impure part using a third part, which embodies violence -- the instrument of torture. This ability to separate the city into classes and to isolate the attributes of the different classes so that one does violence to the other -- this is an Indo-European motif which has very deep roots. Each caste within the tri-functional Indo-European societies is represented here. Dumezil has exposed these traits in many different indo-european societies. Plato has merely taken these same motifs and given them philosophical significance. Indo-European society is one that can turn back on itself and enslave itself. It produces, within itself, an inhuman part which has been purified from all the foibles of humanity that is capable of standing the intense glare of continuous revelation and testing. But does this not remind us of what we said before of the socio-technical system? That system focuses intensely on a particular part of the of the lifeworld. That focusing is like the testing of the guardians. The political system focuses on those who have the job of protecting the city to the exclusion of everyone else. That focusing distorts that part that is focused on -- in the case of the guardians purifying them from human foibles. The purification process separates the realm being purified into two realms -- that which is accepted from that which is rejected -- and these two realms are separated from that which is ignored. Once the distinctions have taken place, then the part which is accepted uses the part which has been rejected to control the part that is ignored. So not only are distinctions made, but also those distinctions are the basis of an inter-class dynamism of societal control which is ongoing like the testing. Thus, the two prongs of the process of separation which Plato specifies are the prong of testing, directed at the guardians and the prong of control, directed at the populace. Testing and control together are the processes by which the class structure is created and maintained. It is a peculiar process of manifestation. It is the upwelling of Being as presencing. Being is specifically this kind of artificially induced revelation that separates the hero from the non-heroic and sets up societal control between different parts of the artificially differentiated city. Being is not all presencing, but this kind of presencing peculiar to the Indo-European cultures. In this type of presencing, there is a specific kind of clinging to existence coming to the fore, one that exemplifies dynamic clinging rather than static clinging. A prerequisite to dynamic clinging is the separation of the pure from the impure. For dynamic clinging to exist, there must be an internal separation which allows the self to let go in order to hold on longer. The unified self cannot do this. The unified self does not have the ability to separate itself from what it has hold of long enough to realize that if it let go of that thing, it would actually be able to hold onto it more efficiently in the long run. Plato specifies, both in the city and in the individual, that part that is purified enough of its humanity to be able to pursue the higher good. Plato also specifies that part that can turn against itself to force the self to let go of what it desires in order to further the long-term goals of the whole system. It turns out that an individual who is split up in this way is exactly the kind of person who will do well at the tests that Plato proposes. It is not that the soul is split, but that some people are able to act schizophrenically and coherently at the same time. Those are the ones that Plato's system selects. The individuals within his society must realize the goal of their testing. The ones that can fix themselves on the goal of passing all the tests and can act coherently against their own desires, are the ones that will ultimately gain control. Thus, it is not that people are unified or non-unified in their nature. But the society posited by Plato is selecting for those who are best able to cling dynamically, and that those are the ones that are schizophrenic but able to act coherently in spite of the schizophrenia. If Deleuze and Guattari are right, there are only desiring machines and the socius. The individual and the city are artificial constructs. Plato is showing us how these artificial constructs are forged. The city is the socius reified and turned back on itself. The individual is the particular network of the desiring machines that purifies part of that network to act against the rest of the network. Both the city and the individual are paradoxes where the socius or desiring machines are turned back on itself in emulation of self-grounding transcendence -- ontological monism. The two systems (socius and desiring machines) turned back on themselves, intertwine to produce the paradox of the Western individual within the city state. That individual is tortured, so it tortures. That individual has been purified of body sensation, so it purifies the world, destroying everything it can in the name of ideology.

"Now I wonder if we could contrive one of those convenient stories we were talking about a few minutes ago," I asked, "some magnificent myth that would in itself carry conviction to our whole community, including, if possible, the Guardians themselves?"

"Nothing new -- a fairy story like those the poets tell and have persuaded people to believe about the sort of thing that often happened `once upon a time,' but never does now and is not likely to: indeed, it would need a lot of persuasion to get people to believe it."

"I will," I said, "though I don't know how I'm to find the courage or the words to do so. I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and Soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they are complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow-citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth.'

You are, all of you in this community, brothers. But when god fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other workers. Now since you are all of the same stock, though your children will commonly resemble their parents, occasionally a silver child will be born of golden parents, or a golden child of silver parents, and so on. Therefore the first and most important of god's commandments to the Rulers is that in the exercise of their function as Guardians, their principle care must be to watch the mixture of metals in the characters of their children. If one of their own children has traces of bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, assign it its proper value, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agriculture class where it properly belongs: similarly, if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its nature, they will promote it appropriately to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. And this they must do because there is a prophecy that the state will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze." [p182; 415a-d]

Here the class distinctions are specified with precision. In Indo-European society, the gold corresponds to the king and priestly class, the silver to the warriors, and the iron to the farmers who oversee the production processes related to agriculture. Those who pursue crafts other than farming are called bronze, and they would be classed as part of the great other which is outside the traditional Indo-European demarcations.

What is striking is the basic purpose of the myth to allow migration between castes based on the results of testing. This, of course, was never part of the operation of the basic Indo-European social structure which was hereditary. However, this very advance focuses us on the necessity for non-warriors to become warriors and warriors to become priests. And there is also the necessity to produce a king that unites all the functions by embodying them coherently within himself. This process that produces movement allows non-warriors to become warriors, warriors to become holy, and holy warriors to become kings must take place outside the city. It is a basic process of initiation that will become the focus of later parts of this study. At this point all that is necessary is for us to note that the basic structure of Indo-European castes is built into the structure posited by Plato as that of both the individual and the city. That structure has deep roots in the genesis of Indo-European cultures. As we said before, Plato brings the initiation ceremony that allows passage between the rigid segments within the polis that naturally occur outside the polis within the polis. So the continual testing of the Guardians to recognize the Rulers among them and to determine the nature of all the citizens, is this initiation ceremony as it appears within the Polis. Making the rites of passage between the various stages within the polis explicit, and making them occur at the center of the polis instead of beyond its periphery, is the basic point of Plato's innovation. He does not invent a completely new social structure so much as rearranging the components of those he has inherited. This is in line with much of what we see within Plato's work on cities which consciously harken back to his ancestor Solon and the ancient constitution of Athens. Here, too, the myth is "nothing new" but a restatement of the myth of the Athenians which says they arise from the earth. Plato is working within the basic limits and pattern of the Indo-European worldview, but is attempting to produce a new synthesis of those elements. A synthesis which gives us the possibility of a metaphysical stance within the arena already staked out by the mythopoietic.

Let us revisit that myth of the earth born for a moment, and explore its significance. Hephaestus was in love with Athena and tried to rape her. She escaped and wiped the semen from her thigh which fell to earth. The first Athenian was the result of this coitus interruptus, who was born from the earth and then raised by Athena. The child was said to be half man half snake, and the progenitor of the Athenians. The fact that the guardians spring full blown from the earth reminds us of the autopoietic unity. The autopoietic unity must pop into existence; it cannot come into being in stages. The autopoietic unity is the very image of transcendence grounding itself. It is the image of the snake eating its own tail. The autopoietic unity embodies the special self-reproducing structure which Plato's lower utopia represents before the complete fusion of the higher utopia. We suspect that it is the very class structure which Plato would have inaugurated that allows this autopoietic network to exist as an embodiment of the form of ontological monism.

Hephaestus and Athena are the two gods of craftsmanship. Hephaestus is the god of metalwork, and Athena the crafts associated with women and agricultural production such as weaving. The fact that these two gods of crafts cannot unite and that their aborted seed springs full blown from the earth, is significant. The seed comes from Hephaestus and is cared for after birth by Athena. But the intervening time within the womb is displaced into the earth. This gives an inhuman aura to the offspring. We have already noted that the results of the constant testing Plato proposes must produce inhuman results. The soldiers sprung from earth can be expected to show no mercy because they do not recognize kinship ties. They do not have the burden of their mothers' grief. They are the product of incompatible opposites -- the non-agricultural craftsman who is always seen as deformed -- but the source of technological power and the agricultural craftswoman who has a bounty of intelligence and is related to the management of the fertility of the earth. Like bringing the same poles of a magnet in contact, there is repulsion, but out of the repulsion a certain formation is created which is somehow the opposite of the naturally born human. The purified human which has not touched the womb of woman, lacks the foibles that Pandora brings. The earth is pure and parthenogenetic. Hephaestus is the abortive creation of Hera alone, which she rejected because of his imperfection. Athena is the creation of Zeus alone, who along with Dionysus, represents the nihilistic opposites. Hephaestus is the embodiment of technological prowess. He produces fantastic mechanical apparatuses like the bed with which he trapped Ares and Aphrodite. Nihilism is the essence of technology. Here, in myth, we can almost see this statement being enacted as the offspring from the Greatest of the Gods acting separately, instead of in harmony, produce the great disease that has plagued Western civilization. Zeus produces the nihilistic opposites, acting without his wife. Hera produces the maimed craftsman, the technologist, equally acting by herself. On the other hand, when they harmonize, they produce ARES (War). This suggests that the relation between technology and nihilism is somehow the obverse of war which we know as the prototype for reality. Of course, Zeus and Hera also produced Hebe, the wife of Hercules, from their union. Hebe was the cupbearer of the gods before Gandymeade. Thus, as cupbearer she was the active agent of harmony among the gods. War and the harmony of the assembly of the Gods are certainly opposites. War with the Giants unites the Gods and tests their fitness to rule. War, as it is visited on humans, is also the producer of the shared fate that binds together communities. In both cases, war produces harmony as its equal and opposite reaction symbolized by Hebe.

The relation between War and internal harmony is written in the offspring between Hera and Zeus. This relation underwrites Plato's lower utopia which is totally organized to survive war and which is optimized to create unity among the citizens symbolized by the cupbearer Hebe. But Plato's lower utopia has, as its internal structure, the inverse of Ares and Hebe. That inverse is the relation between Hephaestus and the nihilistic opposites of Athena/Dionysus. Plato's city has as its keynote the excellence produced by limiting each man to one job in hopes that each will become a master of that craft. The excellence at techne in all crafts is raised to a higher order with the instilling of excellence in the Guardians by lifelong testing. Human excellence, as craftsmen, is mirrored by the excellence of the rulers which is excellence of character achieved through myriad tests designed to expose their weakness. The excellence of the rulers, culled from the guardians and the rest of the citizens, reminds us of the purity of Athena herself. They are the shining ones who appear over the background of the darkness of Dionysus. Dionysus aptly symbolizes the flawed stock of humanity itself from which the excellence of the rulers is culled. Dionysus is the river of humanity as a species and the schizophrenia that underlies reason. In the higher utopia, this dionysian element is driven out from the city whereas in the lower utopia it has its own place identified with the elder chorus. In The Laws, Apollo stands in for Athena as the harbinger of Light and Reason that appears against the Dionysian background. But between the two nihilistic opposites of overly light, too pure, and overly dark, too impure, lies Hephaestus the mechanic. The mechanical is not the organic flow of reproduction that gives the species immortality. The mechanical is heavy in the way it embodies the cleverness of Athena in non-organic crafts. The mechanic is the offspring of Hera alone. It is not the shepherded life of the crafts related to agriculture, such as weaving. It is not the unbridled life of the wild associated with Dionysus/Shiva. The mechanic harnesses the forces of nature in moving structures which represent men's intentionality projected beyond himself. Hephaestus has much in common with Promentheus who gave fire to man. Hephaestus harnesses that fire through the use of the intellect.

Hephaestus and Dionysus both have in common that they were protected and nursed by Thetis, the mother of Achilles and wife of Peleus. The technological and the anti-technological are both sheltered in the sea by the goddess who transforms and who is married to a mortal.

The wife of Hephaestus was Aprhodite. The lover of Aphrodite was Ares. Hephaestus caught them in a compromising position, using one of these clever machines. He displayed them thus for all the gods to see. The relation between love and war and why it is illicit needs little explanation. They are opposites, and opposites attract. But here we have an interesting juxtaposition between Ares and Hephaestus, and Hephaestus and Aprhodite, that seems to have no real explanation. Hephaestus was thrown out of Olympus by both Zeus and Hera. Hephaestus is the rejected one. Aphrodite is the epitome of acceptance with her smiles. Acceptance and rejection are married; they belong together. Beyond that Aphrodite is the sign of the autopoietic ring. That ring is a special kind of machine that does not run down. It is the perpetual motion machine like soliton waves in a circular tube. Thus, Aphrodite represents an inner possibility of the machinist's art. Hephaestus created mechanical women who moved and helped him in his workshop. He created the mechanical guardian dogs that Odysseus saw on Scheria. Hephaestus produced machines that had life. It is exactly this that autopoietic systems are seen as by Maturna and Varela. Thus, the highest of the art of craftsmanship is to produce the self-producing which is exactly the marriage between Aphrodite and Hephaestus. The affair of Aphrodite and Ares is an example of the connection between anti-production and self-production. This connection was exposed by Hephaestus himself as the ridiculous. It is precisely this connection that Plato makes by orienting his utopias toward war, but attempting to model them on autopoietic unities.

Plato finishes his description of the Guardians by saying that they should own no property and be furnished with exactly what they need, no more, no less. This causes the question to arise whether they might possibly be happy since they get no benefit from the state. Plato has Socrates say that we are designing the just state and not trying to make one particular class happy, but instead are trying to make the whole state happy. This lack of property on the part of the Guardians is accompanied by the lack of poverty or wealth in the state as a whole. Plato says of Wealth and Poverty: "One produces luxury and idleness and a desire for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and the desire for revolution." [p188; 422a] He goes on to speak of the role of poverty and wealth within the real cities:

"Each of them is, as the proverb says, not so much a single state as a collection of states. For it always contains at least two states, the rich and the poor, at enmity with each other; each of these in turn has many subdivisions, and it is a complete mistake to treat them all as a unity. Treat them as a plurality; offer to hand over the property or power or the persons of one section to another, and you will have allies in plenty and very few enemies. As long as your state maintains the discipline we have laid down, it will remain supreme, I don't mean in common estimation, but in real truth, even though it has only a thousand defenders. You won't easily find a single state so great anywhere among the Greeks or barbarians, though you'll find many, many times its size, that are thought much greater. Or do you disagree?"

"So we add to the instructions we shall give our Guardians one to the effect that they are to avoid at all costs either making the state too small or relying on apparent size. but keep it adequate in scale and a unity."

Real states have no unity. They are really a plurality of states so that the ideal state may easily stand against their contradictory interests. The ideal state must be kept to the right size and not allowed to grow uncontrollably. The limit on growth is a sign of the autopoietic system. All autopoietic systems, like living organisms, seek out their right size and maintain that size after the initial spurt of growth. Real cities do not know how to limit growth. They do not know how to foster unity within their endless variety production. They do not know how to separate their rulers from wealth for the common good. For if the rulers cannot control their own desire for wealth, how can they control wealth and poverty within the city to avoid extremes.

Plato goes on to reinterate the principle of one man, one job. He says that the mainstay of the state is the educational system that must be preserved at all costs. Then he mentions in passing the concept of women and children being held in common between friends. This latter suggestion will become the next major topic in the Republic. It is the topic of the second wave of the argument. In it we depart from the lower utopia to the higher utopia which erases all differences between the guardians. So we will not deal with that argument here. We are interested in the lower utopia for the moment and need to return to the Laws in order to pursue that line of reasoning as it is further developed there. In the republic, Plato has Socrates say that "Good men need no orders" and they will discover it all themselves. Of course, Plato could not resist spelling out what he meant by the lower utopian form. The indicator that there is a natural break between the two forms of utopia is that the argument for the relation between the individual and society appears before the second wave is breached. This argument is incredibly clever in its proof that the soul is actually made up of several parts, like the city, instead of being a unity or an unlimited plurality. The identity between the individual and the city occurs before going on to erase all the differences between the guardians or describing the education of the philosopher king. As we see, the divisions between the functions in Indo-European society deal with not just warriors, but also the reproductive function and the king. Thus, Plato's argument for the rest of the Republic deals with the other two important functions in the Indo-European worldview. The importance of this three-fold structure cast over and against the Other cannot be underestimated, as it not only produces the internal articulation of the castes within the city, but the soul within each individual, as well as giving structure to the three waves of Plato's argument. Plato is articulating the structure of the basic structures of the Indo-European worldview for us. We need to pay attention to this structure because it is the archeology of this very structure that will provide our major insights into the roots of the Western worldview.

What we have learned so far is that the lower utopia in which property is shared by men has been set out very clearly in the Republic. As soon as this structure is described, it is safe to show the parallels between the internal structure of the individual and the city. But we see clearly that when the common property is expanded to include women and children, and when the women are given equality to men, Plato has gone beyond this lower utopian vision to a vision of complete identity that destroys the household. When that destruction has occurred, it is possible to describe the education of the ruler. The king that unites all the functions of Indo-European society in himself and he is the ultimate icon of unity. At the level of the lower utopia there is an isomorphism between the structure of the individual and the utopian city. The structure that supports this isomorphism prevents complete unity in which all structure should disappear. The destruction of the difference between male and female destroys the internal articulation of the city into households, and destroys the internal articulation of the individual by taking away its most important characteristic. The ruler who is no longer differentiated as male or female ,is the non-human center of excellence which has survived all the trials and tests of initiation unscathed. That ruler is an undifferentiated unity at the center of the higher utopia who has risen above all appearances toward true knowledge and is fit to see the form of the Good.

The higher utopia is said by Plato to be the best, while the lower utopia is only second best. The lower utopia does not achieve complete unity in which the inner structure of the city and the individual disappear, and the city and the ruler become ONE. But the lower utopia remains interesting because it displays that autopoietic structure that appears as Primordial Being collapses into Conceptual Being. In our tradition, this intermediary stage of collapse has been completely ignored so that the nature of fused Being cannot be fully appreciated. In this study, there is an attempt to right this balance to some degree by emphasizing the Laws over the Republic. However, the inner connection between the Laws and the Republic must also be appreciated, and that is why we have dwelled on the presentation of the lower utopia in the Republic in these last two chapters.