This is POL167, cassette 4, the second on Plato. Last week we began looking at Plato's Republic. I summarised book I, and you read the challenge issued at the beginning of book II to Socrates by Glaucon and Adeimantus. They wanted Socrates to show that it is sensible to be just, not in terms of the material benefits of having a good reputation, but in terms of the effects of being just on the soul of the just person. To deal with this challenge, Socrates begins to construct an imaginary city, in the hope of being able to understand the point of justice in a city, and argue from there to the point of justice for an individual. Socrates goes on Republic 369 ff to sketch out the founding of a new city (the idea of deliberately founding a city was familiar -- many cities had been founded as colonies). 'Society originates... because the individual is not self-sufficient, but has many needs which he can't supply himself'. Socrates suggests division of labour, specialisation: The things needed are 'more easily produced when a man specializes appropriatedly on a single job for which he is naturally fitted'. The city must therefore include specialist farmers, builders, weavers, toolmakers, merchants, etc. But these trades would support only a very basic society. As civilization progresses beyond the mere necessities specialists in other arts will be added: sculptors, playwrights, confectioners, doctors. As wealth grows this city and the neighboring cities may come to war, and military specialists will also be needed.
So now we are ready to go back to the question What is Justice? (427d)
Wisdom is a skill in doing good exercised not on behalf of any particular interest but for the benefit of the city as a whole.
Courage is an ability, retained in all circumstances, to judge rightly about the nature and extent of dangers.
Discipline is an order and control of certain desires and appetites; self-discipline exists when the better element in the person's character rules the worse. A city has discipline when the desires of the majority are controlled by the desires and wisdom of the superior minority.
The city's wisdom is the skill of the Guardians, and the city's bravery is the bravery of the Guardians and Auxiliaries. But the city's discipline is not a quality of part of the population, but 'operates by being diffused throughout the whole' -- it is an 'agreement between higher and lower about which of them is to rule' (431-2).
So what is the city's justice?
Read 433a-34d
The modern idea of social justice is that each section of the population should get its proper share, or an equal share, of whatever there is to be had. Plato's is that justice requires each section to contribute what it should contribute -- and that no section should try to perform the role assigned to another. How is this justice different from discipline?
So much for justice in the city. What about --
(Is it satisfactory to say that the working part of the population corresponds to the desires? See Williams 'The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato's Republic', in E.N.Lee et al. (eds.), Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos (Assen, 1973) (B171.E9).
Read 441c-445b
Note at the end of this passage the brief reference to the question raised by Glaucon and Adeimantus -- whether there is good reason to be just. This topic will reappear later (580b-92). Socrates is about to continue with an analysis of injustice and of defective cities when Adeimantus asks him to elaborate an earlier remark, that the Guardians will have 'all things in common', including women and children.
Read 453a-456c.
The Guardians and Auxiliaries are to have no private property or private houses, and are to mess together (416-7). This will apply also to the women; they are not divided into families. The Rulers will regulate their mating. 'Our Rulers will have to employ a great deal of fiction and deceit for the benefit of their subjects' (459c; cf. 389b, 414b). The Rulers will mate the best men with the best women, giving out that they drew their mates by lot. The children will be brought up by nurses and attendants, and the parents will not know which child is whose.
Read 462a-464b
There follows a discussion of military training, and of the laws of war (e.g. that when they fight other cities they should fight in the hope of coming to terms, instead of inflicting death and slavery); see (469-71).
Who is to establish this city? This brings us to --
Next topic,
For each class (set whose members are alike) of sensible things there is one form which all the members of the class have in common. For example, the many beautiful things of the sensible world share in the one form of beauty. (Other expressions used by translators for Plato's various Greek expressions for the 'form' (eidos) of beauty are: 'the idea of beauty', 'beauty itself', 'absolute beauty', 'the essential nature of beauty', 'the beautiful'. Other terms for 'share' are 'have in common', 'participate', 'imitate', 'reflect'.)
Unlike the sensible things which share in them, each form is one, and not mutable but unchanging and eternal (the nature of beauty does not change, though particular things become or cease to be beautiful).
Plato takes unity and permanence as marks of reality, and takes reality as being the same as intelligibility. The forms are therefore more real and more intelligible than sensibles. We can have fluctuating beliefs or opinions about sensible things, but settled knowledge is only of the forms.
Plato believed that in successive lives the soul migrates from one body to another (metempsychosis). The soul acquires knowledge of the forms between lives, before birth; at birth it forgets, but can be reminded of the forms by the imitations of them which it perceives through the senses: thus learning is 'recollection', in Greek anamnesis.
On the theory of forms, see W.D. Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas (B398.I3R6).
("Theory of Ideas" is equivalent to "Theory of Forms". The term "idea" in this context may cause confusion, so I prefer to use "form". Until the 17th century "idea" never meant a thought in the mind of a human being. Plato's forms or ideas are realities, not merely human thoughts. Our thought of justice reflects the Form of justice which is separate from our minds, just as it is separate from just cities and individuals.)
Read 487e-9b,491a-5a.
Compare Gorgias 481c-482c, 510a-e, 512e-513c. These passages are arguments against democracy.
Socrates continues with various other topics relating to philosophy and the theory of ideas.
The real things are the forms, the shadows are the sensible things which imitate the forms. The prisoner who goes above-ground is the philosopher. At 518bc there is an allusion to the idea that learning is recollection. Note the idea of conversion, literally 'turning round'.
Socrates goes on (521d-535a) to describe the education of the future philosopher-rulers in mathematics and dialectic. Philosophical training is to be given to selected Auxiliaries in their thirties; they will then 'go back down into the cave', i.e. to military and governmental duties, until age 50, when, if they have done well in all tests, they will become philosopher rulers, Guardians in the full sense. 'And some of them will be women... All I have said applies equally to women' (540c). If philosophers ever came to power in an existing city, 'They would begin by sending away into the country all citizens over the age of ten; having thus removed the children from the influence of their parents' present way of life, they would bring them up on their own methods and rules, which we have described' (541a).
A Timarchy is a military aristocracy, ambitious of Honour (time in Greek), like Sparta. The ideal city might decay into a timocracy by dissension among the Guardians, if some of them sought private property and wanted to reduce the other classes to slavery; they would neglect education and distrust intelligence. The corresponding 'timarchic' individual is competitive, arrogant, dictatorial, harsh to slaves, respectful to those above him, ambitious for promotion -- an 'authoritarian' personality.
Oligarchy is literally government by the few, but always understood of the few rich. The accumulation of wealth in private hands converts a timarchy into oligarchy; the poor are despised, or become clients (followers) of the rich. The corresponding individual is a money-maker who represses all his other desires as pointless.
Democracy develops because the oligarchs let their sons go into debt, some are reduced to poverty, and to escape debt or poverty some of them seek political power by appealing to the lower classes. Tyranny develops out of democracy.
Read 557-568a
The tyrannical character is one in whom the democratic equality of desires ruling in turn is replaced by one overmastering criminal passion.
The money-maker does not value honour or knowledge unless they convert to cash; the seeker of honour does not value money or knowledge unless they bring fame; the philosopher neglects money and honours. Who is to judge between them? Philosophers, since they have experience of the other ways of life before they become philosophers.
Other pleasures, besides those of knowledge, are mixed with pain (cf. Gorgias 496c-497e; see Philebus 51a-52c). The pleasures of the mind are more real, just as its objects (the forms) are more real than bodies.
I think... we may venture to conclude that if our desire for gain and our ambition will follow the guidance of knowledge and reason, and choose to pursue only such pleasures as wisdom indicates, the pleasures they achieve will be the truest... If the mind as a whole will follow the lead of its philosophic element, without internal division, each element will be rightly performing its own function, and in addition will enjoy its own particular pleasures, which are the best and truest available to it' (586). --... how can we possibly argue that it pays a man to be unjust or self-indulgent or do anything base that will bring him more money and power but make him a worse man?... And how can it pay him to escape the punishment of wrongdoing by not being found out? If he escapes doesn't he merely become worse? And if he's caught and punished isn't the beast in him calmed and tamed, and his humaner part set free? And doesn't that mean that he is making the best of his natural gifts, and, by forming a character in which self-control and fair-mindedness are combined, getting something worth more than physical strength and health and good looks, just as the mind is worth more than the body? (591; cf. Gorgias 477-9).
This completes the answer to Glaucon and Adeimantus. There follows another discussion of art and poetry, and the book ends with a myth or story worth reading, 614a-, of souls about to be reborn choosing the life they want -- some choose well, some badly.
In the earlier dialogues Socrates sometimes says that no one who knows what is good will do evil. 'No one does wrong willingly', only by mistaking the means to his ends (Gorgias 509e; cf. Protagoras, 345e, 357cd, 358d, 360cd). In The Republic Socrates acknowledges that there may be inner conflict -- we may know we should not do something, yet do it. See the story of Leontion, 439e.
The ideal city is only possible therefore when the Rulers command both political power and philosophy.
In vol. 3 of the course materials see the reading guides to Plato's Gorgias, Statesman, and Phaedrus. See also the articles by White and Morrow.
A topic you might look at futher is rhetoric. Socrates seems to disparage rhetoric (the art of speech-making), and instead puts forward an art of rational conversation. The Protagoras includes a good deal on how to carry on discussion, or the art of conversation. See 329ab, 331c, 333c, 334d, 336a-d, 347c-348a, 360e-361e. See also the Gorgias, 449bc, 453bc, 454c, 457c-458c, 461c-462a, 465e-466a, 471e-472d, 474ab, 475e, 486d-487b, 505e-506a, 509a.) Later, however, in the Statesman, Plato included Rhetoric among the subordinate arts serving the philosophical ruler; he seems to have abandoned Socrates' view that rhetoric could not be a genuine art. Plato's pupil, Aristotle, wrote a treatise on Rhetoric. So you might ask yourself: Why was Socrates against rhetoric? Why did Plato come to accept it?
2. 'Minding one's own business' has conservative implications if government is the business of a select few. Is specialisation of functions the basic principle in social life?
3. Plato justifies justice in terms of its effects on the individual who is just. Could it be justified in terms of its contribution to the welfare of other people? Do we care about other people? Would we care if we were completely rational?
4. What do you think of Plato's views on women?
5. Are rulers justified in telling lies?
6. Plato does not say much about what sort of life the majority of the population will lead under the guidance of their philosopher rulers. Apart from producing and eating food, etc., what will they do? What would make their lives worthwhile?
Man's life is a business which does not deserve to be taken too seriously; yet we cannot help being in earnest with it, and there's the pity. Still, as we are here in this world, no doubt, for us the becoming thing is to show this earnestness in a suitable way... I mean we should keep our seriousness for serious things, and not waste it on trifles... while God is the real goal of all beneficent serious endeavor, man... has been constructed as a toy for God, and this is, in fact, the finest thing about him. All of us, men and women alike, must fall in with our role and spend life in making our play as perfect as possible... What, then, is our right course? We should pass our lives in the playing of games -- certain games, that is, sacrifice, song, and dance... [Mankind should] live out their lives as what they really are -- puppets in the main, though with some touch of reality about them, too' (Plato, The Laws, 803-4, tr. A.E. Taylor, in Hamilton and Cairns).The Greek cities put high value on religious ceremonies, dramatic performances, sporting contests. Is play the meaning of life?
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