Plato and the Ship of Fools

A boat crowded with people is a mental image bound to emerge in various different contexts. I imagine the first dwellers in America arriving over one hundred thousand years ago—yes, I support professor Niède Guidon’s thesis—exactly as I see boats full of refugees disembarking on European shores on papers. Although separated by a huge time lapse, those images correspond to actions prompted by survival. And when survival is the goal, everyone is by themselves—even though we are all in the same boat—sailing towards some desired, although uncertain, destination.

            The image of a boat crowded with people cutting ocean waters without a certain destination is one of the (few) allegories Plato evokes in The Republic, an extensive dialogue in which he presents the utopia of an ideal society. In the fourth volume of The Republic—to be more precise, on the passage from 488a to 489e—Plato describes a ship whose captain is a strong man; however, his sight and hearing are bad, and he does not master the art of sailing. His sailors are equally ignorant, but despite the fact they fight to decide who will steer the helm. Meanwhile, the ship is adrift. In Plato’s allegory, the ship is equal to the governing system and, in it, the captain represents the ship’s owner, who is the people—it is worth mentioning that Plato’s Athens was a democracy. Due to the captain’s incapacity, the sailors fight for the control of the ship that, unfortunately for everyone on board, may crash and sink.

            The allegory of a vessel adrift should not be understood as an apology of democratic government, far from it. Plato champions the idea of a stratified society where rulers are philosophers, people who have been educated from their earlier years to direct their choices by reason and unbiased search of the common good. For Plato, ruling is for highly capacitated people who have been imbued by the concept of justice. Not unexpectedly, his model of society is a utopia, something unattainable at any time or place.

            Plato’s utopia has been revisited many times through history. Just like Plato, other philosophers such as Thomas More or Campanella have proposed utopias and were literally killed because of that. In the 20th Century, distorted interpretations of Platonic thought inspired political authoritarianism on both extremes of the ideological-political thought.

Unknown, illustration for Sebastian Brandt’s book Das Narrenschiff, published in Basel in 1494. Translated into Latin by Jakob Locher in 1497 as Stultifera navis. Translated into English by Alexander Barclay in 1509 as The Ship of Fools

            Plato was an author much studied in the 15th and 16th centuries, a period when the great maritime expeditions happened, when the European discovered the so-called “new worlds.” Sebastian Brant, a renowned intellectual who lived in Strasbourg, recovered the allegory of the boat adrift on a poem entitled Das Narrenschiff, or The Ship of Fools, published for the first time in 1494 in German and largely shared in Latin and English translations through the 16thCentury. 

            From Brant, the theme of foolishness—craziness, unreason, as you may wish to call it—becomes recurring in Northern Europe at that moment preceding the Protestant Reformation. One of the period’s most well-known texts is In Praise of Folly, a satire to societies fostered on faith and superstition, written by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1508 during a stay in London with Thomas More. 

In Brant’s poem, the fools are followers of Saint Grobian, a fictional patron saint of vulgar people who obey him despite his foolishness. The success of the first edition, published in Basel, motivated the book’s editor to publish an illustrated Latin translation. This edition was introduced to the public in 1497, and most of the illustrations are attributed to Albrecht Dürer, the main name of the Renaissance in German countries.

Hieronymus Bosch, La neuf des fous, c. 1500. Oil on wood, 58 x 33 cm [22.8 x 13 in]. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Hieronymus Bosch painted his Ship of Fools On the tracks of Sebastian Brant’s poem success, around 1500. This painting, part of the Louvre collection, is the left wing of a triptych known as The Wayfarer, whose central panel was lost. Bosch was probably inspired by the (pseudo) Dürer’s engraving to compose this image in which various different characters are crowded into a tiny boat, chanting, eating, and drinking; in which religious men variously sin, and a buffoon perches on the Tree of Knowledge, carried by one of the passengers. In the water, people greedily try to catch the feast’s crumbs, while a character tries to recover a baked turkey from the top of the mast under a crescent banner, alluding to the capture of Constantinople by the “unfaithful” in 1453. Since there is no one at the helm, la nave va, at least until their euphoria ends or something disastrous comes to pass.

John Alexander, Ship of Fools, 2006-7. Oil on canvas, 243,8 x 193 cm [96 x 76 in] © 2007, John Alexander. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

In the early 2000s, John Alexander, from the US, revisited the theme in a great painting that is found at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The context in which Alexander created this artwork certainly is not theological-political such as the work from the 1700s, but it evokes an image both of individual and collective folly at a time when the US were inflating the financial bubble that in 2007-8 culminated in one of the worst recessions in the country’s history. John Alexander sees The Ship of Fools brimming over with masked or animal-like executives in the midst of a convulsing sea. In that scatological view, lethality is not a possible effect from bad government, but something that is necessary and concrete. There she is, at the top of the composition: Death, the passenger who is responsible for the story’s end.

In these three different ships, there is a place for damnation—in all senses of the word. In Katherine Anne Porter’s The Ship of Fools novel—published in 1962 and adapted into film in 1965 by Stanley Kramer—damnation is a consequence of the passengers’ frivolous behavior on a transatlantic cruise from Mexico to Germany during a journey where their lives are superimposed and mixed together. The story happens in 1933 in the context of Nazism’s emergence, which is banally referred to by one of the main female characters. Trivialities seem to be a lesser evil, but they comprise harm caused by ignorance, by giving our backs to reason, by succumbing to unstoppable greed. The fools in Porter’s Ship are exposing themselves to disaster, but not everything is lost, the only thing they have to do is think: “The place here you’re going does not exist yet, you must build it when you get to the right spot.”

Promotional poster for Stanley Kramer’s film The Ship of Fools (1965). Based on a novel by the same title by Katherine Anne Porter, published in 1962