Plato’s ‘γενναῖον ψεῦδος’

According to a common interpretation, in Republic Socrates says that the rulers of the city should employ a ‘Noble Lie’ to persuade their subjects that their position in the social order is fixed by nature (by the type of ‘metal’ forged in their souls). So widely is this believed, that it came as a surprise to me to find that the phrase ‘Noble Lie’, supposedly translating γενναῖον ψεῦδος [gennaion pseudos], does not appear in the text of the Republic at all.

The phrase is supposed to appear in Book III 414b‒c:

τίς ἂν οὖν ἡμῖν, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, μηχανὴ γένοιτο τῶν ψευδῶν τῶν ἐν δέοντι γιγνομένων, ὧν δὴ νῦν ἐλέγομεν, γενναῖόν τι ἓν ψευδομένους πεῖσαι μάλιστα μὲν καὶ αὐτοὺς τοὺς ἄρχοντας, εἰ δὲ μή, τὴν ἄλλην πόλιν; [Republic Book III 414b‒c]

[‘Might some scheme present itself to us’, I said, ‘from among those falsehoods that present themselves in case of need, as we were speaking about just now, one noble thing whereby deceivingly to convince even the leaders themselves, and, if not, then the rest of the city?’]

But here there is no γενναῖον ψεῦδος, ‘noble lie’, but rather a γενναῖόν τι ἓν, ‘one noble thing’, which seems to be used to perpetrate a deception. It might be fair enough to understand this as a scheme to secure social stability on the basis of a Noble Lie. But Christopher S. Morrissey declares this to be a perversion of Plato’s thought: the ‘one noble thing’ is better understood as ‘a tradition that all the citizens have come to see, on the basis of their shared experience, as best approximating the hard-to-discern fullness of truth about their place in the world’ [The Truth About Plato’s ‘Noble Lie’].

This is an improvement on the received wisdom, especially in that he acknowledges that the deception (if we can call it that) is meant to take in the leaders themselves; whereas the established interpretation, on which the leaders perpetrate the Lie, has to ignore this phrase.

For myself, though, being influenced by Jacob Needleman’s reminder in The Heart of Philosophy that the Republic is not primarily about politics at all, but the means of perfection of the Self, I suspect that the ‘one noble thing’ must symbolize something completely different—what, I am not sure; but perhaps an optimistic story we tell ourselves to begin to bring order to a disordered mind.

[I am grateful to the client whose excellent work prompted me to look up γενναῖον ψεῦδος, only to find it was not in the text.]