Plato's 'Republic' E-Book

Sean McAleer

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

It is an excellent book – highly intelligent, interesting and original.  Expressing high philosophy in a readable form without trivialising it is a very difficult task and McAleer manages the task admirably. Plato is, yet again, intensely topical in the chaotic and confused world in which we are now living.
Philip Allott, Professor Emeritus of International Public Law at Cambridge University


This book is a lucid and accessible companion to Plato’s Republic, throwing light upon the text’s arguments and main themes, placing them in the wider context of the text’s structure. In its illumination of the philosophical ideas underpinning the work, it provides readers with an understanding and appreciation of the complexity and literary artistry of Plato’s Republic. McAleer not only unpacks the key overarching questions of the text – What is justice? And Is a just life happier than an unjust life? – but also highlights some fascinating, overlooked passages which contribute to our understanding of Plato’s philosophical thought.

Plato’s 'Republic': An Introduction offers a rigorous and thought-provoking analysis of the text, helping readers navigate one of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and political theory. With its approachable tone and clear presentation, it constitutes a welcome contribution to the field, and will be an indispensable resource for philosophy students and teachers, as well as general readers new to, or returning to, the text.

Leseprobe

PLATO’S REPUBLIC

Plato’s Republic

An Introduction

Sean McAleer

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2020 Sean McAleer

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Sean McAleer, Plato’s Republic: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0229

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800640535

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0229

Cover image: Anselm Feuerbach, The Symposium (1873). Berlin State Museum, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anselm_Feuerbach_-_Das_Gastmahl._Nach_Platon_(zweite_Fassung)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg. Public domain.

Cover design by Anna Gatti.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

xiii

1. Fathers and Sons

1

2. Taming the Beast: Socrates versus Thrasymachus

25

3. A Fresh Start

55

4. Blueprints for a Platonic Utopia: Education and Culture

75

5. Starting to Answer the First Question: The Political Virtues

93

6. The Republic’s First Question Answered at Last: Personal Justice

113

7. Questions about the Idea Polis: The Three Waves

131

8. Surfing the Third Wave: Plato’s Metaphysical Elevator, the Powers Argument, and the Infallibility of Knowledge

151

9. The Philosopher’s Virtues

175

10. Metaphors to Think by: The Sun and Divided Line Analogies

191

11. The Allegory of the Cave

211

12. The Decline and Fall of the Ideal City-Soul

229

13. The Republic’s Second Question Answered: Three and a Half Arguments that the Just Life is Happier

251

14. Are We There Yet? Tying up Loose Ends in Book X

275

Afterword

299

List of Illustrations

305

Bibliography

309

Index

313

Acknowledgments

This book springs from the happy confluence of two sources: my teaching the Republic every semester in PHIL 101 at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and my offering a three-session class on the Republic to Chippewa Valley Learning in Retirement in the fall of 2013. Dr Mike O’Halloran, the indefatigably cheerful and intellectually curious retiree who thought the group would enjoy a presentation on philosophy turned out to be correct: the sessions were well attended and well received—if subsequent requests for more philosophy sessions are any indication. Although some philosophical friends were skeptical at my plan to devote an entire ‘intro’ course to the Republic, many students seem to have found the experience worthwhile, so I have continued with this somewhat old-fashioned way of introducing students to philosophy. This book has been shaped by my experience with both kinds of audiences. I thank the students it has been my privilege to teach over the years and the CVLR audiences for their questions, feedback, criticisms, and their laughing at some of my jokes.

Many friends have helped in a variety of ways. Erica Benson, the life partner than which none greater could be conceived, provided insightful feedback on the entire manuscript, created the figures for the Divided Line, and talked me off the ledge more than once. Geoff Gorham has used parts of the manuscript in some of his courses and has given feedback and encouragement, as has his wife, the philosopher Amy Ihlan. Rod Cooke unwittingly served as a ‘responsibility buddy’ during a sabbatical, regularly asking me how it was going and when it might it be finished. My colleagues at UW–Eau Claire—Kristin Schaupp, Matt Meyer, and Steve Fink—models of collegiality all, have been sources of intellectual stimulation and delight during trying times in higher education. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire Faculty Sabbatical Leave Program, which supported me during the 2017–2018 academic year, during which time the bulk of this book was written. I conceived the book as a philosophical instance of The Wisconsin Idea, a guiding principle of the University of Wisconsin system, which bids faculty and staff to ‘extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus’. I have tried to do that here, to help general readers with little to no background in philosophy to understand this philosophical masterpiece. Thus I am most grateful to Open Book Publishers for publishing it, since I too believe that ‘knowledge is for sharing’. I thank Alessandra Tosi for her wisdom, guidance, and patience; the two readers for their helpful suggestions, Anna Gatti for designing the cover; and Melissa Purkiss for her careful proofreading and her excellent editorial judgment.

I have benefitted from some wonderful teachers over the years, starting in high school with Frank Townsend, who gave me my first glimpse of the life of the mind, continuing through my undergraduate education at Shimer College with Eileen Buchanan and Harold Stone, who provided such fine, living models of inquiry and engaged classrooms, and lastly in graduate school at Syracuse, where Michael Stocker and Jonathan Bennett showed me what doing excellent philosophy looks like. I am grateful to them all, and to all the other fine teachers I haven’t space to name individually.

I thank Hackett Publishing for their kind permission to quote so frequently from the Grube-Reeve translation of the Republic. Lastly, I thank the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at UW-Eau Claire for financial assistance with the publication of this book.

It is a good light, then, for those

That know the ultimate Plato,

Tranquillizing with this jewel

The torments of confusion.

— Wallace Stevens, ‘Homunculus et La Belle Étoile’

For Erica, my SLPF

Attic Greek Black-figure Neck Amphora attributed to the Princeton Painter, ca. 550–540 BCE depicting an elderly king or man seated between two men and two women. Photograph by Aisha Abdel (2018), Wikimedia, Pulic Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terracotta_neck-amphora_of_Panathenaic_shape_(jar)_MET_DP161828_white_balanced_white_bg.png

Introduction

© Sean McAleer, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0229.16

Plato’s Republic is one of those books that most people have probably heard of, even if they have not actually read it. Even Bubbles, the good-hearted, bespectacled doofus of the long-running Canadian comedy Trailer Park Boys knows enough of the Republic to appeal to the famous Noble Lie in a conversation with another resident of Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

I first encountered the Republic like so many others have: in my first semester of college. This was many years ago, but my memory of the experience was one of feeling lost much of the time. I had a fine high school education, but philosophy was new to me, with its focus on big, abstract questions and especially on rigorous, rational arguments as the means to answering them. I did reasonably well in the course, but the Republic was tricky terrain, and I did not really know my way about. My aim in this book is to help readers traverse Plato’s philosophical masterpiece with fewer falls and less befuddled wandering than I experienced. I try to do this by pointing out important landmarks and interesting bits of topography, helping readers not to miss the forest for the trees, as the saying goes, but also to appreciate the importance of particular trees, hills, and streams. I consider objections to the views and arguments Plato has Socrates express and make. Thinking philosophically requires, among other things, stating arguments clearly and carefully, articulating assumptions that lurk in the background, and making judgments—hopefully, good judgments—about whether the reasons offered in support of a claim are good reasons.

The Republic’s Two Main Questions

The Republic addresses two overarching questions, What is justice? and Is a just life happier—more profitable or personally advantageous—than an unjust life? Plato addresses these questions in what is for modern readers an unexpected way: in dialogue form. Instead of writing an essay or a treatise directly arguing for his view, he gives us a philosophical drama, so to speak, a conversation between Socrates and several others in which answers are offered, discussed, and typically rejected. Plato wrote almost all of his philosophy as dialogues, most of them featuring Socrates talking with someone he would encounter in Athens (though Plato’s later dialogues no longer feature Socrates). Plato was not Socrates’ student in a formal sense, since Socrates himself wrote nothing and started no school—unlike Plato, who founded the Academy, where Aristotle studied before founding his own school, the Lyceum. But like many young men of his day, Plato was taken with Socrates, struck by his sharp and open mind and his fearless but often failed pursuit of knowledge. Whether the views the character Socrates expresses in the Republic are his own or whether Plato uses him to express his own views is an interesting issue, but it is not one that we need worry over to come to terms with the Republic. I will usually make no distinction between Plato and Socrates in this book, except when doing so helps our understanding, as when, for example, Socrates seems to make an error in reasoning or allows a crucial assumption to pass unquestioned. Is the mistake one that Plato himself does not recognize? Or does he intentionally have Socrates stumble or ‘pull a fast one’ because this is what actually happened in the conversation, of which the dialogue is a faithful but stylized representation? Or—more likely, I think—because he wants us, his readers, to engage in imaginary dialogue with Socrates, to raise objections and questions where the other characters are silent or too agreeable? That Plato writes philosophy in dialogue-form complicates the life of the reader, but it is a complication that is rich and rewarding, and also enables Plato to manifest respect for his readers. His aim is not the transmission of truth or doctrine from the knowing sage to a passive but receptive learner—indeed, in presenting the famous Allegory of the Cave he explicitly rejects the idea that education is ‘putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes’ (7.518b).1 Instead, we are expected to be active, engaged readers who wrestle with the questions and arguments for ourselves. Writing dialogues suggests that philosophy—which I take to be clear, rigorous thinking about those important questions that are outside the ambit of the natural or social sciences—is best done in conversation with others rather than alone in one’s study.

Readers with some familiarity with philosophy will not be surprised that one of our first tasks in trying to understand how Plato has Socrates answer the Republic’s two main questions is to question the questions themselves. What exactly does Plato mean when he asks about the nature of justice and whether it is ‘more profitable’ than injustice? An important point straightaway is that δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosunê), which is translated as ‘justice’, can have broader meaning than the English word ‘justice’ has, which typically involves fair distributions or the idea of rights. Dikaiosunê certainly has this narrower sense too; in Book V of his Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s student Aristotle distinguishes between specific and general senses of justice, where specific justice concerns what today we would call distributive justice (which asks whether a particular distribution of goods is fair) and retributive justice (which asks if and how wrongdoers should be punished). The broader sense that Plato has in mind connotes moral goodness more generally, a virtue of ‘doing the right thing’ (though we will ultimately see that for Plato justice is primarily about being a certain sort of person rather than doing certain kinds of things). Justice in this broad sense might be rendered by ‘righteousness’, but that seems rather archaic and can have misleading religious connotations. Aristotle suggests that justice in this general sense is ‘complete virtue’, the whole of virtue, of which the narrower kind of justice is a part.2 When Socrates asks what justice is, he is asking about the nature of moral goodness generally, asking what is it to be a good person.

The Republic’s second question asks whether being a good person makes one personally better off—whether it ‘would make living most worthwhile for each of us’ (1.344e). There is no question of whether a just life is a morally better than an unjust life; the issue the second question raises, by contrast, is whether a just life is prudentially better, as philosophers often put it—whether it is in one’s interest to be just and act justly. This question has great practical importance, given the overwhelmingly plausible assumption that each of us wants to be happy. As Socrates puts it, ‘the argument concerns no ordinary topic but the way we ought to live’ (1.352d). In ordinary English there is a subtle distinction between leading a good lifeand having a good life. At the funeral of a friend who was devoted to the wellbeing of others we expect the eulogy to focus on the former: they led a good life, helping others without thought of self and often to their own detriment. At the funeral of a friend devoted to the pleasures of the table and the bedroom we are likelier to hear that they had a good life. So the Republic’s second question inquires about the connection between leading a good life and having a good life. It is a comparative question, asking if the just person is happier than the unjust person. Socrates is not arguing that justice is sufficient for happiness, that being just alone makes for a happy life. Instead, he will argue that justice is necessary for happiness, that we cannot be happy without being just. Socrates thinks that justice alone will not guarantee happiness, since there may be external circumstances that make happiness impossible, even for the just person. But the just or morally good person will be as happy as it is possible to be in those circumstances and always be happier than the unjust person, since justice always makes one better off than injustice, he thinks. As we follow along, it will be helpful to bear in mind ways in which ‘happiness’ can be a misleading translation for the Greek word εὐδαιμονία(eudaimonia),which connotes flourishing or thriving, something deeper and longer lasting than the perhaps fleeting psychological state of enjoyment that we might associate with our word ‘happiness’. A flourishing person will typically enjoy their life, but the enjoyment is best thought of as a by-product of happiness rather than its essence.

The Structure of the Republic

The Republic’s two main questions give it its structure, which I sketch here:

Book I introduces but ultimately fails to answer the Republic’s two main questions. Socrates discusses the nature and value of justice first with Cephalus and Polemarchus and then with Thrasymachus, a more sophisticated and less friendly interlocutor. Socrates initially thinks that he has refuted Thrasymachus’ view that the unjust life is happier than the just life, but he soon realizes that he has left the Republic’s first question unanswered and thus that he has not really answered the second question; how could he know which life is happier if he does not yet know what justice is?

Books II–IV answer the Republic’s first question, ‘What is justice?’.Socrates’ young friends Glaucon and Adeimantus (who in real life are Plato’s brothers) challenge Socrates to continue after the failure of Book I. They agree with him that the just life is happier than the unjust life, but they recognize that they cannot justify their view and thus do not really know that the just life is more profitable. They press Socrates to forgo the rapid-fire argumentation of Book I and to offer a more intuitive, accessible way of answering the Republic’s questions. Although these questions concern justice as a virtue of persons (which we’ll call personal justice), Socrates suggests that, since a polis (a Greek city-state) is just like a person, only bigger, the best way to figure out the nature of personal justice is to investigate justice in the polis (political justice) since it will be easier to find justice in the larger thing. Thus they set out to theoretically construct an ideal polis, which is completed by the end of Book III. And by the end of Book IV, Socrates thinks he has answered the first question and starts on the second.

In Books V–VII, Socrates answers questions about and objections to his answer to the Republic’s first question. These are dubbed ‘the Three Waves’, since they threaten to destroy the ideal city. The First Wave concerns whether women can be rulers in the ideal polis. Socrates’ view on this might surprise you. The second addresses the ideal city’s communal life, especially how children are to be raised—which seems to do away with the traditional family. The third and most threatening concerns the ideal polis itself: is their ideal city merely theoretical, or could it be realized in the actual world? Socrates thinks such a city can be realized only if it is ruled by philosophers, which leads to an investigation of what a philosopher is. This investigation will last through Book VII. In addressing the Third Wave, Plato has Socrates introduce the famous theory of the Forms and offer one of the Republic’s central arguments, the Powers Argument, in defense of this view; he presents the analogies of the Sun and the Divided Line in Book VI, and the famous Allegory of the Cave in Book VII, among other things.

Having addressed the Three Waves to the company’s satisfaction, in Books VIII-IX Socrates turns to the Republic’s second question, ‘Is the just life happier than the unjust life?’. Expanding on the psychology and political philosophy developed earlier, he distinguishes between five possible kinds of souls and city-states and argues that the just life is happier than the unjust life.

Having answered the Republic’s two questions, in Book X Socrates returns to the status of poetry, which featured prominently in the educational program sketched in Books II and III. Despite his love for poetry, especially the works of Homer, he argues that most poetry should not be allowed in the ideal city because of its power to corrupt us. He concludes with the intriguing Myth of Er, about the importance of choice in a happy, well-lived life.

Readers will often find it helpful to keep the Republic’s overall structure in mind while making their way through the text, since what a character is talking about often makes more sense when we understand why they are talking about it. So it can be helpful, when feeling a little lost, to orient oneself by asking which question of the Republic’s two main questions is being addressed—although it might take a bit of intellectual sleuthing to determine that. For example, the details of the educational program Socrates develops in Books II and III are interesting in their own right, but it is easy to lose sight of why he devotes so much time and intellectual energy to this topic. If we keep the Republic’s overall structure in mind, we can see that Socrates discusses education and culture because he is exploring what an ideal polis is like, which requires an understanding of how the polis’s rulers will be educated. And of course, he wants to create this ideal polis because the plan is to define political justice in order to define personal justice. And while the Republic’s first question about the nature of personal justice is interesting in its own right, Socrates wants to answer it because, as he realizes at the end of Book I, we cannot satisfactorily answer the Republic’s second question about whether the just life is happier until we know what justice is.

As orienting oneself by overall structure is an aid to understanding, I will try to offer signposts and reminders as we proceed through the Republic. Shortly I will offer more detail about what individual chapters of this book will contain, but before doing that I want to draw the reader’s attention to one more big-picture topic.

Arguing about Justice

Thrasymachus, Socrates’ main antagonist in the second half of Book I, thinks that justice and happiness are at odds with each other, that being just and acting justly leave one worse off. Socrates disagrees, and it is instructive to see what he does and does not do in the face of this disagreement. First, what he does not do: he does not insult Thrasymachus or impugn his intelligence or his motives. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Thrasymachus, who responds to Socrates’ arguments in a rather nasty way. Nor does Socrates shrug and say things like, ‘Everyone’s got a right to their opinion, I guess’ or ‘Who’s to say?’ or ‘That’s just your opinion, man’, like a Lebowski of classical antiquity who has traded his bathrobe for a chiton (the ancient Greeks did not wear togas; that was a Roman thing). Socrates does not think that reason merely sheds light on the Republic’s main questions, he thinks it can answer them. Some readers will be less confident in the power of rational argument and conceptual clarity; they may be more comfortable than Socrates and Plato are with there being more than one correct answer to these questions—or with there being none. But even though Socrates himself is not a moral pluralist, it is important to see that the method he employs in arguing against Thrasymachus is consistent with there being a plurality of answers to moral questions of the sort that the Republic devotes itself to. For while Socrates’ method of question-and-answer—formally called elenchus, a kind of cross-examination—is impersonal in the sense of focusing on principles rather than personalities, it is in another sense profoundly personal, for its focus is what the person he is engaging with thinks. The best way to investigate the nature of justice, he thinks, is to critically examine the views of someone who claims to know what justice is, to see if such a view can survive rigorous cross-examination and coherently hang together. So he proceeds from premises that his interlocutors endorse. Although Socrates thinks that there is an Archimedean point from which one can definitively settle moral questions, the Socratic method of question-and-answer does not presuppose this exalted view of reason. Its aim is more modest: to discover whether one’s philosophical and moral beliefs are internally consistent. While this method is no respecter of persons in that it does not defer to someone based upon their social class, etc., it is, I think, profoundly respectful of persons, since it takes seriously a person’s moral and philosophical views. Even though these views are usually found wanting, a willingness to examine a person’s views about the nature of justice or courage or knowledge or whatever is certainly a way of taking those views, and that person, seriously.

What to Expect in this Book

This book is not a line-by-line commentary of the Republic, but it hews closely to the main contours of the Republic. I intend it as an aid to reading the Republic rather than as a substitute for doing so. In the chapters to come I try to guide readers, especially those new to the Republic or returning to it after a long absence, to a clear understanding of the Republic’s main themes and distinctive arguments. But we will also pause to linger over details that are interesting in themselves and which contribute to a nuanced understanding of Plato’s philosophical thought and literary artistry. I will try to clearly and accurately spell out the arguments Plato has Socrates offer and then critically reflect on them, asking questions such as ‘Does the conclusion logically follow from the premises?’ and ‘Do we have good reasons to think the premises are true?’ and ‘What assumptions are driving the argument?’, etc. We will see that Socrates’ interlocutors often accept arguments that they have good reason to doubt. This is something most of us do, especially when we think the conclusion is true, but setting aside one’s belief in a conclusion and querying the quality of the reasons offered in support of it is the hallmark of good critical thinking. I will try to model that in the pages to come and hopefully help readers sharpen their own philosophical skills. Since one of Plato’s aims is for us, his readers, to think philosophically for ourselves, nothing would delight me more than readers disagreeing with and arguing against claims, interpretations, and assessments I make. Needless to say, there is a lot I will leave out as we proceed through the Republic, but by the end readers should have a good sense of the main themes and arguments of the Republic and of some of the philosophical problems with them. Here is a chapter-by-chapter rundown of the main issues to be discussed.

Chapter One, ‘Fathers and Sons’, covers the first half of Book I of the Republic, where Socrates raises the Republic’s first question about the nature of justice at the home of Cephalus, a wealthy merchant who lives in a suburb of Athens. Cephalus suggests that justice is paying one’s debts and telling the truth, but Socrates thinks this cannot be the essence of justice, since there are times when one should not return what one has borrowed. This alerts us to an important fact about what Socrates is looking for in an account of justice: the account should be unconditionally correct, with no ifs, ands, or buts. Cephalus’ son Polemarchus jumps into the conversation and offers a revision of his father’s definition, suggesting that justice—right conduct, generally—is benefiting one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Socrates finds this account has implications that Polemarchus himself cannot accept, so the chapter explores Socrates’ reasoning, especially the assumption that justice, a virtue of character, is a craft or skill. We then discuss Socrates’ more direct argument against Polemarchus’ account, that the just person would not harm anyone.

Chapter Two, ‘Taming the Beast: Socrates versus Thrasymachus’, is devoted to Socrates’ encounter with the sophist Thrasymachus in the second half of Book I. Thrasymachus’ answers to the Republic’s main questions are a provocative challenge to the reverential attitude Socrates has toward justice in particular and virtue in general. Thrasymachus defines justice as whatever benefits the politically powerful and argues that a conventionally just person lives less happily than their unjust counterpart. Socrates offers five different arguments against Thrasymachus’ views, which are spelled out clearly and evaluated carefully, with attention paid to the connections between them and to the crucial concepts around which they orbit (e.g., the notion of a virtue). Socrates’ arguments fall short of the mark, and we will examine why this is the case, exploring avenues of response that Thrasymachus could but does not take. By the close of Book I, Socrates realizes that he has not answered the Republic’s second question because he has not yet answered the first: we cannot know whether the just life is happier until we first know what justice is.

Chapter Three, ‘A Fresh Start’, explores the way in which Socrates tries to address the Republic’s two questions, ‘What is justice?’ and ‘Is the just life happier than the unjust life?’. Rather than offering a battery of arguments as he did in Book I, Socrates offers an analogy between the polis (the Greek city-state) and the psychê (individual soul) that will structure the rest of the Republic. The plan is to first discover the nature of justice as a political virtue—as a virtue of the polis—and then apply this to the individual soul in order to discover the nature of personal justice.

Chapter Four, ‘Blueprints for a Platonic Utopia: Education and Culture’, examines Socrates’ account of education in the ideal polis, focusing especially on informal, cultural education in music and poetry. We will explore the fascinating connections Socrates draws between aesthetic and moral development, especially the role that poetic and musical style play over and above content. We then discuss Socrates’ rather disturbing attitude toward disabled citizens before focusing on the famous Noble Falsehood, which concludes Book III, discussing the role that myth, especially myths of origin, play in civic self-understanding.

Chapter Five, ‘Starting to Answer the First Question: The Political Virtues’, focuses on the first third of Book IV. The ideal polis complete, Socrates and company investigate the political virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, defining each and discussing their location in the polis. We will explore these accounts and the issues they raise, for example how the kind of agreement that constitutes political moderation differs from the idea of consent in modern liberal political thought, and the question of whether there are other virtues in addition to the four cardinal virtues.

We continue discussing Book IV of the Republic in Chapter Six, ‘The Republic’s First Question Answered at Last: Personal Justice’. We first attend to Plato’s foray into psychology (literally, his account (logos) of the soul (psuchê)) in which he tries to justify the analogy between city and soul that has shaped the Republic. By appealing to the idea that the same thing cannot simultaneously undergo or perform opposite states or activities (dubbed the Opposition Principle), Socrates argues that the soul has a three-part structure, just as the city does: a rational part, which corresponds to the guardian-rulers in the polis; a spirited part (the seat of anger and pride), which corresponds to the soldierly auxiliaries of the polis; and an appetitive part, which corresponds to the craftspeople. Socrates then derives the personal virtues by applying the political virtues to the soul. The most important personal virtue, of course, is justice, which he conceives of as each part of the soul doing its own work: reason, not appetite or spirit, governs the just soul. We will pay attention to important features of this account, for example how it differs from Cephalus’ and Polemarchus’, for whom justice is a matter of interpersonal, external doing (of how one treats one’s fellows), while for Socrates and Plato is it a matter of intrapersonal, internal being, of what one’s soul is like.

In Chapter Seven, ‘Questions about the Ideal Polis: The Three Waves’, we see Polemarchus and Adeimantus begin Book V by putting the brakes on Socrates’ attempt to immediately begin answering the Republic’s second question, whether living a morally good life is good forthe person living it. They raise questions about and objections to the ideal polis, known as ‘the Three Waves’, which is an apt metaphor for a sea-faring culture. The First Wave concerns the question of whether women can be guardian-rulers in the ideal city. Socrates’ affirmative answer—surprising to his companions and to many readers alike (though for different reasons)—raises the question of whether Plato is a feminist. The Second Wave concerns the ideal city’s communal living arrangements, especially child-rearing. Socrates argues that not only is the abolition of the traditional family possible, it is beneficial. The Third Wave is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter Eight, ‘Surfing the Third Wave: Plato’s Metaphysical Elevator, the Powers Argument, and the Infallibility of Knowledge’, focuses on the Third Wave, which concerns the very possibility of the ideal city. Socrates famously claims that the ideal city can be made real only if philosophers rule. This leads him to explore how philosophers differ from non-philosophers, which will guide the last part of Book V as well as Books VI and VII. A crucial point of difference is that philosophers have knowledge while non-philosophers merely have belief, a distinction which is explored in some depth and detail. We devote special attention to one of the Republic’s most crucial arguments, the Powers Argument, in which Socrates argues for the existence of the Forms, the mind-independently real, timeless essences of the many particular things that populate the everyday world of our senses. The reality of the Forms is perhaps Plato’s most distinctive metaphysical view, so we devote quite a bit of attention to stating, explaining, and evaluating the Powers Argument, and to discussing the implications of its being seriously flawed.

Chapter Nine, ‘The Philosopher’s Virtues’, continues to explore the distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers, focusing on their different characters. Central to the discussion is the distinction between virtues of character (for example, justice), intellectual virtues (for example, a good memory), and virtues of personal style (for example, grace and elegance), attending to the light this last category sheds on Plato’s moral vision. As a prelude to the key analogies of Book VI, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the interesting analogies Socrates appeals to in addressing features of the Third Wave.

Chapter Ten, ‘Metaphors to Think By: The Sun and Divided Line Analogies’, is devoted to the marquee analogies of Book VI, both of which address the Third Wave by developing the distinction between the sensible world of concrete particular things and the intelligible world of the Forms. Having suggested that the Form of the good is even more important than justice, Socrates cannot or will not say what the good is, but he does say what he thinks it is like: the good plays the same role in the intelligible world as the sun plays in the visible world. In the Analogy of the Divided Line, Socrates further develops the distinction between belief, which is appropriate to the sensible, visible world, and knowledge, which is appropriate to the intelligible world of the Forms. By exploring the role that hypotheses play in reasoning, he distinguishes philosophical knowledge from mathematical knowledge, somewhat surprisingly taking the former to be more rigorous.

True to its name, Chapter Eleven, ‘Shedding Light on the Allegory of the Cave’, devotes itself to exploring the famous Allegory of the Cave from Book VII of the Republic, carefully considering its various stages and themes before examining the issue posed by the enlightened philosopher’s return to the Cave. As Socrates describes it, the enlightened philosopher descends back into the Cave not because they want to, but because they recognize that justice requires them to do so. This raises an issue for discussion that Socrates does not seem to notice: the enlightened philosopher would be happier if they ignored the demands of justice and remained in the intelligible world of the Forms, which suggests that, contrary to Socrates’ view, the just life is not happier than the unjust life.

In Chapter Twelve, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Ideal City-Soul’, we begin exploring Socrates’ answer to the Republic’s second question. In Books VIII and IX, Socrates sketches five kinds of cities and souls, noting what each takes as its primary end or goal and which part or class governs the soul and city, respectively. We trace the decay from the best city-soul to the worst, attending to the role that changes to education play and to interesting features of each stage, and discuss at some length Plato’s distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires.

Chapter Thirteen, ‘The Republic’s Second Question Answered: Three and a Half Arguments that the Just Life is Happier’, explores the arguments Socrates gives in Book IX that the just life is happier—indeed, 729 times happier—than the unjust life. There are fascinating features of the first two arguments, for example that the tyrannical person is incapable of friendship and that each part of the soul has a distinctive kind of pleasure. The third argument, the Metaphysics of Pleasure Argument, argues that since what is more filling is more pleasant and what is more real is more filling, the Forms, being the most real things, ground the most pleasant pleasures. We discuss this argument at some length, noting its dependence on the Powers Argument but also exploring ways in which Socrates seems to anticipate and preemptively respond to objections. In the last argument, which Socrates does not identify as such (hence the ‘half’), is a metaphorical argument which, despite its being less philosophically rigorous than the Metaphysics of Pleasure Argument, is more intuitively persuasive and in no way relies on the problematic Powers Argument. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Plato’s paternalism: his view that most of us, being incapable of the philosophical wisdom that consists of knowledge of the good, are incapable of good self-governance, so we are all better off being governed by someone else’s (i.e., a philosopher-king’s or -queen’s) reason.

Chapter Fourteen, ‘Are We There Yet? Tying up Loose Ends in Book X’, explores the three topics of the Republic’s final book, Book X. The first is the status of poetry, which Socrates wants to revisit since he now has a psychology (the three-part soul) that he lacked when poetry was first discussed. He concludes, quite reluctantly, that very little poetry will be allowed in the ideal city, mainly because of its power to corrupt us: we give ourselves over to emotion and thus dethrone reason from its rightful place. After exploring his arguments for this view, we turn to his argument for the immortality of the soul, which Socrates offers in the context of showing the external advantages of living a just life (namely, having a reputation for justice), which were set aside to answer Glaucon’s and Adeimantus’ challenge of showing that justice was intrinsically good—that all by itself it made its possessor better off. Lastly, we attend to the Myth of Er, with which the Republic ends. Er’s story is an allegory about the importance of careful choice in living justly and thus happily. It is a fascinating way to end the Republic, in terms of both content and style; we briefly explore what philosophical points Plato might be making by ending a work of philosophy this way.

Needless to say, I have not mentioned everything we will discuss, but this should give readers a good sense of the main contours of the Republic and a decent idea of what is to come. Now, on to the Republic!

1 I will cite the Republic in this way. ‘7.518b’ means that the passage quoted is in Book VII of the Republic at page 518 in the standard Greek text of Plato’s work, section b (about one-fifth of the way down that page). Thus, regardless of which translation readers have before them, we can all quite literally ‘be on the same page’, so long as the translation provides the ‘Stephanus numbers’—named after a sixteenth-century editor of Plato’s works—in the margins. I will quote from G.M.A. Grube’s translation, as revised by C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), which is excellent and inexpensive.

2Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by W. D. Ross and rev. by J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle(Revised Oxford Translation), ed. by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1783 [Book V, Chapter 1, Bekker page 1129b25]. All translations of Aristotle will be drawn from The Complete Works and will be cited by title, book and chapter, and Bekker page (the Aristotelian analog of the Platonic ‘Stephanus’ numbers), thus: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.1 1129b25.

Theodoor van Thulden, Telemachus and Ulysses Meet in Eumaeus’ Hut (1632–1633). Photograph by Mr. Nostalgic (2019), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odysseus_en_Telemachus_in_de_hut_van_Eumaeus_De_werken_van_Odysseus_(serietitel),_RP-P-OB-66.764.jpg

1. Fathers and Sons: Book I

© Sean McAleer, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0229.01

Plato packs a lot into the Republic’s first book, so we will have an easier time of it if we break the discussion into two chapters. In this chapter we will examine Socrates’ conversations with Cephalus and then with Cephalus’ son, Polemarchus. In the next chapter we will explore Socrates’ encounter with Thrasymachus.

The ever-curious Socrates wants to know what justice is not simply for its own sake but to determine whether a just life—a morally good life—is happier than an unjust one. As mentioned in the Introduction, the Greek word δικαιοσύνη(dikaiosunê)is broader in meaning than the English word ‘justice’, which often suggests fair distributions or the idea of rights. I will continue to use it, but I will often also use synonyms such as ‘right’ and ‘moral goodness’ and their ilk. ‘Righteousness’ seems a bit archaic and can have religious connotations that can be misleading. It is often thought that Book I of the Republic was initially a stand-alone dialogue as it ends, like so many of Plato’s other dialogues do, without an answer to its central question. Most of these dialogues have Socrates asking, ‘What is ____?’ where an important notion like justice, knowledge, or courage fills in the blank. Socrates examines the answers his companions propose but typically finds them wanting, usually because they conflict with other beliefs held by the interlocutor. While not knowing what something is can be frustrating, knowing what it is not is often a helpful kind of knowledge, as it narrows the field and leaves us a bit closer to knowing what the thing—here, justice—is. Though Book I ends without a satisfactory answer to its central question, rather than the discussants going their separate ways, as usually happens in Plato’s dialogues, two of the participants, Glaucon and Adeimantus (Plato’s real-life brothers) insist that Socrates continues, that he shares his beliefs about the nature and value of justice, even if he cannot in good conscience claim to know its nature and value.

Polemarchus Wants You to Wait (1.327a–328c)

One of the many rewards of reading Plato is the literary quality of the dialogues, which are extraordinarily well crafted. That Plato writes dialogues rather than straightforward essays suggests that he regards philosophy as essentially conversational, that it involves back-and-forth, give-and-take, that two (or three) heads are better than one when addressing philosophical topics like the nature of justice. The dialogue form also invites us to be active rather than passive readers, to engage in the dialogue by thinking of responses and questions that the people on the page do not make. In addition to Plato’s making a philosophical point by writing in dialogue form, his writing this way allows him to raise themes and issues that are at work in the background, where the conversation he is depicting is in the foreground. The opening lines of the Republic are an excellent example of this.

The Republic is Socrates’ first-person account of a long conversation about the nature and value of justice that he has at the house of Cephalus, a wealthy merchant who lives in the Piraeus, the port of Athens. Plato’s situating the conversation outside of Athens might be his way of suggesting that the ideal city Socrates and his friends will imaginatively construct is an alternative to Athens; he is not offering suggestions for ways in which Athens might change for the better but instead offers a different political arrangement entirely.

It is worth noting that the Republic is written around 380 bce, in the shadow of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War about twenty years previously. The conversation depicted takes place well before that, though scholars disagree about the dialogue’s dramatic date. One likely candidate is 421 bce, during ‘the optimistic springtime Peace of Nicias’, the truce marking the end of the first phase of the War; another is 411 bce, after the War has resumed and is going quite badly for Athens, ‘a gloomy, violence-torn, pessimistic time’.1 Plato’s contemporaries would know—and many contemporary readers will know—that Socrates was tried, convicted, and executed in 399 bce for corrupting the youth and introducing false gods. Few contemporary readers, by contrast, will know that Polemarchus, who features prominently in Book I, was executed by the so-called Thirty Tyrants, who, installed by Sparta at the War’s end, ruled briefly and bloodily in 404 bce.

Socrates’ reason for venturing out of Athens—to attend a religious festival and ‘offer up my prayers to the goddess’ (1.327a)—is a good example of Plato’s subtle authorial artistry. As we noted above, the historical Socrates was tried, convicted, and put to death by the citizens of Athens for impiety and corrupting the youth. Plato memorably recounts Socrates’ defense speech in the Apology (a title that will seem odd, given how unapologetic Socrates is in it, until we realize that apologia is Greek for defense). So Plato’s depiction of Socrates’ conventional piety at the very outset of the Republic provides an ironic take on then-recent Athenian history that would not be lost on any of Plato’s contemporaries.

Socrates’ opening words, ‘I went down’, which translate the Greek κατέβην (katabên), seem an unremarkable way to begin a remarkable book. But we will appreciate their significance and Plato’s subtle authorial artistry later in the Republic, when, in the famous Allegory of the Cave, Socrates insists that the enlightened philosophers ‘go down again’ into the cave to govern its benighted prisoners and free those who are capable of making it out. It is the same verb in both cases, and in subtly drawing this parallel Plato seems to be telling us that Socrates’ interlocutors—and by extension, us, his readers, whatever our accomplishments and pretension—do indeed live in the darkness of the Cave. ‘It’s a strange image you are describing’, says Glaucon, ‘and strange prisoners’. ‘They are like us’, Socrates replies. (7.515a)

Socrates tells his unnamed audience that Polemarchus’ slave tugged on his cloak and asked him to wait. The casual invocation of slavery may bring many contemporary readers up short. Slavery was a fact of life in the Greek world, and lovers of Plato and other great classical authors such as Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Aristotle, to name just three near the beginning of the alphabet, should at the very least pause at the possibility that the cultural achievement of classical Athens was possible only because it was a slave society. Although the claim is not uncontroversial, the consensus of contemporary scholars is that there is slavery in Plato’s ideal polis. We may have occasion to investigate this later, but for now we might just note the fact that Polemarchus’ slave is the first person Socrates quotes in the Republic. Although Athenian slavery might partially frame the Republic for modern readers, Plato does not seem to raise it as a background issue worthy of philosophical attention and there is no explicit discussion of its nature or moral status. Plato seems to accept it as something natural (later, he suggests that an individual might be ‘by nature suited to be a slave’ (4.444b), an idea Aristotle develops in the first book of his Politics) but subject to moral constraint—for example, we are told that Greeks should not enslave other Greeks (5.469c) and that rather than being harsh with his slaves, a good and properly educated person will merely look down on them (8.549a).

When Polemarchus finally catches up to Socrates he tells him, ‘You must either prove stronger than we are or you will have to stay here’ (1.327c). This sounds ominous, but it is just an innocent pun on Socrates’ name, the central element of which is κράτος(cratos), meaning ‘strength’ or ‘power’. One suspects this is not the first time Socrates has endured this rather lame pun, but he replies graciously and without groaning, asking if there is not another alternative, ‘that we persuade you to let us go’ (1.327c). This little exchange is Plato’s way of raising an important theme of the Republic: the opposition between force and persuasion, between the irrational and the rational. The conflict sometimes comes to the surface, for example, in the Cave Allegory mentioned above. Education, as Plato conceives of it, involves quite a bit of force: the freed prisoner is ‘compelled to stand up, turn his head […] and look up toward the light’ (7.515c) and is ‘dragged […] from there by force, up the rough, steep path’ and then ‘dragged […] into the sunlight’ (7.515e). Though the enlightened philosophers would rather remain above, they return to the cave—not because they are physically or psychologically compelled to do so, but because they are persuaded to.

In response to Socrates’ appeal to persuasion, Polemarchus jokingly plays a trump card: ‘But could you persuade us, if we won’t listen?’ (1.327e). Here Plato is recognizing a practical limit to the power of rational persuasion: people who refuse to listen cannot be persuaded. Most of us have probably encountered people who seem impervious to evidence and argument. More chillingly, the psychologists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have identified what they call the backfire effect: some of us are psychologically constituted so as to not merely remain unpersuaded by evidence and reasons that should lead us to give up certain beliefs, but actually tend to hold such beliefs even more strongly in the face of such evidence—so attempts to persuade the other by appeals to good evidence are likely to backfire.2 Plato is reminding us that genuine discussion and dialogue, as opposed to dueling monologues, cannot occur when we refuse to entertain reasons and evidence that go against our views. He is raising an important theme that will be at work in the background of the Republic, and raising it in the subtle way skilled literary artists do.

There is more we could say about the subtleties of the Republic’s opening, however the goal was not an exhaustive—and exhausting—catalog and discussion of them but rather to help the reader begin to appreciate the literary quality of the Republic and how inseparable its literary and philosophical aspects are for Plato.

Cephalus: Justice is Paying Your Debts and Telling the Truth (1.328c–331d)

The entire conversation that is the Republic takes place at the suburban home of Cephalus, a wealthy merchant, whose son, Polemarchus, has a keen interest in philosophy. Cephalus likes Socrates, and Socrates clearly likes him. Nowadays telling someone that you enjoy talking to them because you ‘enjoy talking with the very old’ (1.328d) is unlikely to be well received, but Cephalus does not mind, in part because of the association of age and wisdom: since Cephalus is farther along the road of life, he might have some insight about whether that road is ‘rough and difficult or smooth and easy’ (1.328e). The metaphor of the road or path is one we will see elsewhere in the Republic.

Cephalus is a fine spokesperson for moral common sense; his idea of a good life is not a life of ‘sex, drinking parties, [and] feasts’ (1.329a) but rather one of moderation. Being wealthy does not hurt, he admits, but all by itself material comfort is not sufficient for living well. ‘A good person would not easily bear old age if he were poor’, he remarks, ‘but a bad one would not be at peace with himself, even if he were wealthy’ (1.330a). Despite his conventional decency, Cephalus is not especially reflective and when the discussion turns philosophical, he congenially excuses himself to take care of a religious sacrifice. Cephalus exhibits an attractive kind of humility, as he is sufficiently self-aware to recognize that external factors play an important role in his being morally decent and thus that he himself is not the sole cause of his goodness. Plato is deftly setting up a contrast between character and circumstance, between the inner and the outer, that will come into play later in the Republic as he addresses the question of whether one can cultivate one’s soul in such a way that one is more or less impervious to external forces that can lead one to act unjustly.

Before Cephalus leaves, Socrates pursues this question of wealth a bit further, asking Cephalus what the greatest good that his wealth has brought him is. Cephalus’ answer is a bit surprising (and is no doubt part of why Socrates likes him). It is not that it enables a life of self-indulgence, cushy comfort, and lots of toys. Rather, it is that wealth is a kind of buffer against moral temptation: ‘Wealth can do a lot to save us from having to cheat and deceive’ (1.331b), Cephalus says, and thus it allows a person to face the afterlife without trepidation, since it enables one to live ‘a just and pious life’ (1.331a).

Most of us will agree that wealth is merely instrumentally and not intrinsically valuable—that it is not good in itself, but rather it is good as a means to something else. Cephalus is making a related but subtly different point about the sort of value wealth possesses, that wealth is conditionally good: its goodness depends not just upon the use to which it is put, but on who is doing the putting—on whose wealth it is. If my wealth enables my pursuing pleasures that are ultimately self-destructive, then my being wealthy is bad for me. A ‘decent and orderly’ (1.331a) person will benefit from their wealth, since they will use it well.

This distinction between conditional and unconditional value provides a nice segue to a distinctively philosophical turn in the conversation. Though Cephalus has not himself offered a definition of justice, Socrates hears one lurking beneath the surface and asks, ‘But speaking of this very thing itself, namely, justice, are we to say unconditionally that it is speaking the truth and paying whatever debts one has incurred? Or is doing these things sometimes just, sometimes unjust?’ (1.331c) It is important to understand that Socrates is not looking for a verbal definition of ‘justice’ here, the sort of thing that one can look up in a dictionary or use to explain its meaning to someone learning one’s language. He is looking for the real definition of justice, for an account of the thing itself. (Here ‘real’ does not contrast with ‘fake’ or ‘imaginary’ but with ‘verbal’; etymologically ‘real’ derives from the Latin word ‘res’, which means ‘thing’ or ‘matter’.) There is no question about the verbal definition of dikaiosunê, the word we are translating ‘justice’: it means morally right conduct generally. But exactly what morally right conduct is is what Socrates wants to know. Trying to get clear about everyday concepts like justice, courage, knowledge, etc., by making explicit what is usually left implicit is one of philosophy’s main tasks, for Plato. Plato’s dialogues typically consist of Socrates encountering someone who claims to know the real definition of a virtue like justice or courage or temperance. But after some Socratic question and answer, it becomes clear that the proposed definition will not work, usually because it is inconsistent with other things his interlocutor believes, and that is what happens here. Most of the dialogues end without a definition being arrived at—they end in what scholars call ἀπορία (aporia) difficulty, perplexity.

On Cephalus’ definition of justice (more accurately, the definition Socrates attributes to him) justice is telling the truth and paying one’s debts. It is instructive to note what Socrates does not do here. He does not shrug and offer a relativistic platitude such as, ‘well, everyone’s got a right to their opinion’. Socrates does not think that questions like the one he is asking are mere matters of taste, and there would be little point in discussing them if they were. If you think broccoli is delicious and I cannot stand it, an argument about who is right is pointless, since there is no fact of the matter about whether broccoli is delicious—hence the maxim de gustibus non est disputandem: there is no disputing about matters of taste. If, by contrast, we disagree about the cube root of 729, at least one of us is wrong. Philosophical questions about the nature of justice (and knowledge, courage, temperance, love, etc.) will seem to many thoughtful people to fall somewhere in between these extremes, not mere matters of taste but not as certain as truths of mathematics.

Socrates thinks that there is a correct answer to his question about the nature of justice (and about knowledge, courage, temperance, etc.), so in one sense of the term, he is a realist: he thinks there really is a fact of the matter of what justice is, a way things are that is independent of what we might think, which is the very thing the relativist denies. When Hamlet, by contrast, says that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (Hamlet, II.2.244–45), he is expressing an antirealist view about the nature of goodness: things are not mind-independently good or bad; their being good or bad is determined by our attitudes toward them. Realism is not an all-or-nothing affair: one can be a realist about morality, thinking that there really are moral facts such as ‘murder is wrong’ and ‘kindness is good’, but an anti-realist about aesthetics, thinking that beauty really is just in the eye of the beholder. While many readers will be leery about Socrates’ moral realism, an attractive feature of his method of rigorous cross-examination is that it does not depend on his realism, for it aims to discover whether someone’s view is consistent with other things they believe. So the elenchus aims to lead the cross-examined party not to the unvarnished moral truth but rather to intellectual self-awareness—and, hopefully, to intellectual humility if, as is often the case, one recognizes that one’s beliefs do not hang together consistently.

Having noted what Socrates does not do in his conversation with Cephalus, let us look at what he does do. He argues that if Cephalus’ definition of justice is correct, then it would be just to return a borrowed weapon when its now-deranged owner asks for it back. But Cephalus himself does not think this. Since his definition implies something that he thinks is false, Cephalus should think that his definition is false. This form of argument is as common in everyday life as it is in philosophy. If A implies B and B is false, A must be false too. Any argument that fits this pattern is valid: if its premises are true then its conclusion must be true. If it is true that the sidewalk gets wet if it rains and it is true that the sidewalk is not getting wet, then it must also be true that it is not raining—for if it were raining, the sidewalk would be getting wet, and it is not; thus, it cannot be raining. If my aggrieved friend says, ‘if (A) you were a good friend, then (B) you would have helped me move’, I know how the rest of the argument goes even if they do not spell it out: (not-B) you did not help me move; therefore (not-A) you are not a good friend. I might reply by hanging my head in shame and conceding that I am not a good friend. That is, I take the argument to be not only logically valid (in other words, its conclusion must be true if its premises are true) but sound as well: it is valid and its premises are in fact true. But I might also reply by insisting that while the argument is logically valid, it is not sound, since its first premise is false. While it is generally true that a good friend will help one move, it is not true without exception. If I was in the hospital donating a kidney to another friend and was unable to help you move, my not helping does not imply that I am not a good friend. A more plausible version of the first premise would be ‘if (A) you were a good friend and (C) were able to help me move, then (B) you would have done so.’ On this more nuanced version of the argument, the conclusion to draw from the fact that I did not help is that either (not-A) I am not a good friend or (not-C) I was not able to help. I do not want us to get too bogged down in detail, but attention to the logic of the arguments offered is crucial to doing philosophy in general and to understanding the Republic