THE REPUBLIC IN UNIT TWO: CONCLUDING
REMARKS
(all quotations from Plato's
Dialogues are taken from the translation of W.H.D. Rouse (© John
Cline Graves Rouse), published as a Signet Classic, Great Dialogues of Plato;
quotations from Thucydides' History
of the Peloponnesian War are taken from the translation of Rex
Warner ©, published in a revised edition by
Penguin Classics in 1972)
THE CONTEXT FOR OUR READING OF THE
REPUBLIC IN UNIT TWO
A few short sections of the Republic
and one class period cannot do
justice - no pun intended - to this complex work. My purpose, here, is
to point out crucial passages that continue and develop the debates
about law, society, and human conduct that we are following throughout
the course. Remember where we have come from...
In the Iliad,
Achilleus' concluding comments
on the "urns of Zeus" suggested that the gods were responsible for
human suffering and doled it out arbitrarily. The audience might
disagree and assign more responsibility to Achilleus and other mortals:
after all, it was Agamemnon's rough handling of Apollo's priest that
led to the plague and subsequent quarrel; it was Achilleus' own prayer
to Zeus and his quest for honor that brought suffering upon his Greek
comrades and led to the death of his friend, Patroklos. Nonetheless,
the gods and goddesses of the Iliad
hardly concern themselves with
principles of morality or justice: they instigate the breaking of oaths
to achieve their own goals, they readily employ deception themselves,
and the
divine enemies of the Trojans agree only reluctantly to the ransoming
of
Hektor's abused corpse.
In the Odyssey,
there
is a greater emphasis on explaining men's misfortunes as punishment
for misdeeds. Odysseus' slaughter of the suitors is an appropriate
response to their outrageous behavior. His own men lose their
homecoming because they disobeyed his command and ate the cattle of the
sun god. Aigisthos ignores the warnings of the gods, seduces
Klyaimestra (Agamemnon's wife), murders Agamemnon, and is eventually
killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes. A concern with order and disorder,
proper and improper conduct pervades the Odyssey: at one extreme, the
faraway land of the cultivated Phaiakians provides a model of right
conduct; at the other, the rude and cannibalistic Cyclops represent the
complete perversion of the norms of civilized life.
In the archaic period, we encountered diverse
attempts to find principles of order in the natural world, to make laws
for the new city-states, and to link the gods with human laws and an
ordered universe. Hesiod's Theogony
outlined the genealogy of the Olympian gods, and made the rule of Zeus
and his generation the culmination of an evolutionary process. The
Ionian philosophers - sometimes known as the "Pre-Socratics" - looked
for natural laws explaining the origins of the universe and governing
natural phenomena. At the beginning of the sixth century B.C., Solon
legislated for the Athenians, and his poetry invoked the gods as
guardians of justice, punishing individuals - or their descendants -
for their transgressions. The development of the architectural orders
and the importance of mathematical proportions in the design of the
Greek temple, the house of the god, were also signs of the Greek quest
to link the gods with an ordered universe.
Even these efforts, however, betrayed a
certain unease about the relationship between divine and human law. In
the Greek temple, for example, the REFINEMENTS
introduced subtle deviations: vertical elements, like the columns, were
slightly inclined; horizontal elements, like the stylobate, were
slightly curved; and regular dimensions like the width or spacing of
columns varied slightly. Whether these were intended as optical
corrections to compensate for our imperfect perception, or whether they
were meant to create a visible tension upsetting the regularity we
expect, it seems clear that the refinements emphasize the gap between
our perception and the divine order represented by the temple. In human
society, it is evident that the good sometimes suffer, and the wicked
sometimes escape
punishment. Solon's description of the gods' punishment explains this
through the concept of inherited responsibility:
"...others
altogether escape overtaking by the gods' doom;
but then it always come in aftertime, and the innocent
pay, the sons of the sinners or those born long afterward."
(Greek Lyrics, translated by
Richmond Lattimore©, U Chicago P, p. 19)
This solution, however, would not prove wholly satisfactory when
catastrophic events, like plague and war, suggested a gap between
divine and human morality, and challenged conventional standards of
conduct.
In the fifth century B.C., these tensions came
to the fore. In Antigone, the
chorus presents a brilliant portrait of man's accomplishments in the Ode on Man, and Antigone herself
passionately defends the unwritten laws of the gods. The tragedy of the
play, however, lies in the inability of the characters to reconcile
these conflicting principles, and to achieve the harmony of "the laws
of the land and the justice of the gods" that the chorus calls for in
the Ode on Man. More
troublingly, the audience may wonder whether this is just the failure
of two uncompromising characters, or whether the principles of human
and divine law are simply irreconcilable. As presented in Antigone, human law involves
mastery and domination, breeds rebellion, and is subverted by the
passions. Divine law may be unknowable, and may have little to do with
the laws that cities make to regulate the lives of their citizens.
The gap between human and divine law is
further emphasized in Oedipus Rex.
Oedipus suffers the terrible and inescapable fate that was prophesied
for him before his birth. The truth of the gods' oracles and prophecies
is affirmed, and the consequences of this prophecy demonstrate the
gods' awesome power. In this respect, the prayer and questions of the
chorus (p. 210) are answered: their reverence for the gods is
justified, for the gods are certainly proven to be powerful. It is not
clear, however, that the chorus has any reason to be confident that the
gods will use this power, as they hope, to tear down proud tyrants.
Oedipus' fate, laid out before his birth, hardly seems deserved, and
Sophocles does not choose to emphasize any pattern of family
guilt that might make it more justifiable. The gods are powerful, but
the audience may legitimately wonder whether they are just - at least,
according to any human principles of justice.
Thucydides' History
of the Peloponnesian War provides numerous examples of how the
hardships and pressures of war weakened traditional notions of justice
and morality, and posed more insistent questions about the relationship
between divine and human law. He described how the plague in Athens led
some to lose their faith in the gods, and weakened the hold of the law
and commonplace notions of morality. Those who "made it a point of
honor" to visit and care for the sick were most likely to contract the
disease and die; the temples were filled with the corpses of those who
had sought relief from the gods - in vain. As he concludes, "As for the
gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or
not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscrimately." The grip
of human law was weakened because no one expected to live long enough
either to gain the honor that comes with proper conduct, or to suffer
the punishment that follows crime.
The notion of a harmony between divine and
human justice was shattered by the widespread violence and suffering
caused by the war, and intellectuals and politicans offered new
arguments to put law on a firmer footing or change the idea of law
altogether. The Melian Dialogue offers two competing visions of justice
that set the stage for the discussions in the first books of Plato's Republic. The Athenians are
demanding the surrender of the Melians, and they tell the Melians to
put aside empty arguments about principles and consider only the
practicalities of their situation. As they say,
"When these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of
justice depends on the equality of power to compel, and...in fact the
strong do what they have the power to and the weak accept what they
have to accept."
In effect, the Athenians are saying that laws are made by the powerful
in their own interest and imposed, to the degree their power permits,
upon the weak. When the Melians appeal to the gods, the Athenians take
their own view one step further:
"Our aims and our actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men
hold about the gods and with the principles which govern their own
conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to
conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule
whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we
the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in
existence, and we shall leave it to exist forever among those who come
after us."
We have come full circle: this view of the gods, acting to pursue their
self-interest and increase their own power, returns us to the amoral
gods of Homer's Iliad. Now,
however, the Athenians are using that amoral behavior as a
justification for following a "law of nature" that leads men "to rule
whatever one can." So, there is a new kind of harmony between divine
and human law: both are drived by an unbridled quest for power.
The Melians offer an alternative view of law
and a rational defense of more conventional notions of justice:
"...it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a principle
that is to the general good of all men - namely, that in the case of
all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and
just dealing...This is a principle which affects you as much as
anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible
vengeance and would be an example to the world."
In other words, laws exist to protect the weak and vulnerable. The
powerful adhere to the law out of self-interest, because, one day, they
may need to appeal to its protection. Thucydides himself offered this
view when he described the breakdown of law and morality in civil
conflicts like the civil war in Corcyra:
"...in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to
begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are
there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead
of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a
time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection."
What is crucial, here, is that the gods have been left aside entirely.
This is a purely rational defense of law as representing a compact
between the strong and the weak that is everyone's interest. Such
efforts to find a rational basis for justice in the face of the
collapse of conventional defenses of law and morality lie behind the
debates in the first two books of the Republic.
Against the background of
the political crises and intellectual debates of the fifth
century, Plato’s Republic
offers a reflective response to the breakdown of moral principles and
the failures of Athenian political
institutions.
DEFINING JUSTICE: A DEAD END?
In the Republic, as in most of Plato’s
dialogues, Plato uses a character named Socrates. Whereas the
Apology described a public
event and probably provided a somewhat accurate portrayal of the
historical Socrates, the dialogues are fictional conversations. In the
earlier dialogues, scholars generally believe
that Plato is using a character who, to some extent, represents the
historical Socrates and employs his characteristic question and answer
method of cross-examination, the elenchus. The first book of Plato’s Republic is often grouped
with these. Like many of the early dialogues, it centers on an
effort to define a term, justice. After the failure
of this effort, the character of Socrates shifts and, in the remaining
books of the Republic, he serves merely as a mouthpiece for the
exposition of Plato’s own philosophy.
We are not reading the
first book, but I have outlined some of the key positions and
arguments presented by Socrates and the other participants in the
effort to define justice. These complex discussions do not achieve a
satisfactory definition of justice, but they do demonstrate some
things. First, they show that conventional moral beliefs - the ideas of
the "man
in the street", as represented by POLEMARCHOS
- are not well-thought-out and do not withstand close examination or
testing. What happens in the dialogue as these definitions fall, one by
one, parallels what happened in Athens, as the pressures of war and
plague eroded traditional religious beliefs, standards of conduct, and
respect for the law. It is no accident that these simple definitions of
justice (“justice
is helping your friends and hurting your enemies”) are often based on
the commonplaces of poetry, for Plato will return to the poets in book
two and offer a radical solution for what he sees as their negative
impact on public morality.
Plato not only shows the weaknesses of
conventional notions of
justice and morality. By using Socrates as a character employing the
characteristic elenchus of the historical Socrates, he exposes some of
the
inadequacies of his own teacher’s approach. The elenchus - and
Socrates’ ironic professions of ignorance - do not provide a
satisfactory
alternative, and are not capable of standing up effectively to the most
dangerous arguments of his time, like those represented by
the Sophist, THRASYMACHOS. He
argues that “Justice is merely the interest of the
stronger party”: in other words, all of our actions are dictated by
self-interest, and we all try (and should try) to get what
we can. Significantly, Thrasymachos is not only describing what
many people do - act in their own self-interest (there’s no news in
that), but he is elevating this natural law of conduct into a “moral”
principle. With this, he is presenting a position very like that
advanced by the Athenians in Thucydides' account of the Melian
Dialogue. This is the background to the definition that Thrasymachos
proposes in the Republic, namely, that what we term justice is really
nothing but the will of the stronger party. Socrates is able to
undermine this definition by relying upon conventional definitions of
justice that associate it with other virtues. In simple terms, you
might think of
the underlying argument as something like this: even if laws are
made in the interest of established governments and individuals who
hold power, when we talk about “justice” we do not normally mean “the
interest of the stronger party”. Instead we mean something closer
to the conventional notions of fairness and equity that the dialogue
began with. Of course, Thrasymachos' radicial revision of justice is an
example of what Thucydides himself had described as a consequence of
bitter political strife, like the civil war in Corcyra, "To fit in with
the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings."
Thrasymachos, though, eventually concedes the point, and, accepting
conventional
views of justice, makes his final argument that the life of the unjust
man is better than the life of the just man. Whether Socrates
wins this argument or simply wearies Thrasymachos may be debated, but
what is clear is that Socrates
concludes book one by conceding that he still hasn’t come up with a
definition of justice!
CONVENTIONAL VIEWS OF JUSTICE
To combat those ideas and to put justice on a
firmer footing, Socrates - now shifting to a character who merely
serves as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas - begins his exposition in
book two, in response to the pleas of his friends. They argue that
people
do not view justice as a good in itself, but only as something they
must
do to avoid harm or punishment, and to win a good reputation (p. 155).
They present three important arguments about justice that, in their
opinion, represent the widespread beliefs that they hope Socrates will
refute. First, they suggest that people make a kind of social
contract, agreeing to respect laws of conduct only because they realize
that, if everyone were to act based on self-interest, most people would
find themselves with more to lose than to gain:
"They say, then, that to be unjust is good, and to suffer injustice is
bad, and the excess of evil in suffering injustice is greater than the
excess of good in being unjust; so that when people do and suffer
injustice in dealing with one another, and taste both, those who cannot
both escape the one and take the other think it profitable to make an
agreement neither to do nor to suffer injustice; from this they begin
to make laws and compacts among themselves."
This view of a social contract and of the utility of law is not unlike
that advanced by Thucydides in his comments on the civil war in Corcyra
or by the Melians in their debate with the Athenians. Next, Socrates'
friends tell the story of GYGES
and the ring (p. 157). The shepherd, Gyges, a servant of the Lydian
king, finds a ring that makes him invisible. Possessed of this power,
he "seduced the king's wife, and with her set upon the king, and killed
him, and seized the empire." The lesson here is plain: "no one is just
willingly but only under compulsion". If we had the power to advance
our self-interest by performing acts of injustice without fear of
punishment, we would do so. Finally, Socrates' friends argue that
the unjust lead better lives than the just, and that justice is a hard
course to follow. To support this popular belief, they cite the advice
of parents' to the children, the verses of the poets, and even the
example of the gods.
PLATO'S REPLY
The thrust of Socrates’ reply - now speaking
for Plato - will be to
describe a society in which people will follow moral principles because
they genuinely believe that they are good for them. He lays out
key points early on: first (p. 165), he
describes the reason why cities come into being: “A city...comes into
being because each of us is not self-sufficient but needs many
things.” Once we accept that, it becomes necessary to accept
principles of behavior - what we call justice - that govern
relationships among people, because we all need one another for our own
well-being. Incidentally, we see here a shift away from the
intense individualism that has characterized many of the Greek works
we have discussed to a greater concern with the individual’s
responsibilities within a larger community.
To ensure that we understand why we need - for
our own good - to accept principles of right conduct or justice
governing our relationships with others, Plato places the greatest
emphasis
on exercising control over education, poetry and religion - and today
he would have added mass
media. He wants to ensure that, from the beginning, all of these
provide models
that will reinforce and encourage standards of good conduct. Most
interesting here, perhaps, is his treatment of the gods, for Plato
provides a new answer to earlier debates over the conflict between the
laws of men and the laws of the gods. In Plato’s Republic, people decide how it is
best for them to live together as a
society, and they “re-create” the gods in their image to be consistent
with those beliefs. Man, then, comes first, and the stories that
Plato introduces in other sections of the Republic show that he
recognizes the power of art and storytelling to shape people’s
behavior. For this reason, Plato "censors" the poets, and he rejects,
for example, the descriptions of the gods in Homer that show them as
immoral. In fact, he specifically cites the story of the "urns of Zeus"
(p. 177) and condemns it: the gods who, by definition, must be
described as "good" cannot be the sources of evil.
There is, however, one telling problem.
When Socrates has sketched his ideal city, one of his friends objects
(p. 169) that he has created a "city of pigs". What he means is
that Socrates’ city has made no provision for people’s desires for more
than the basic necessities of life. Socrates - perhaps unwisely -
then proceeds to modify his description to create what he calls a
“luxurious” city, an “unhealthy” one with a “high fever”. It is
in this city that we have the beginnings of war, because each city must
expand at the expense of its neighbors to satisfy the desires of its
citizens. In making this shift, Plato may be acknowledging
aspects of human nature that would undermine his own philosophy. After
all, up until now, he - like Socrates in the Apology - has argued
essentially that if we knew what was right - if we were properly taught
through our parents, through the state, through poetry and religion -
we would act well. In recognizing the place of human desires - as
well as the intellect - Plato is laying the groundwork for those who
would later argue - as we will see in Roman and early Christian writers
- that knowing what is right may not
be enough, that the passions and emotions play a powerful - and untamed
- role in human actions. In the Aeneid,
the Roman poet, Virgil,
will explore the destructive role of the passions and the struggle to
dominate them, and, in his Confessions,
St. Augustine, will probe the
nature of evil from a Christian perspective, grounded in St. Paul’s
paradoxical statement about the human will (Romans 7: 15, 19): "For I
do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate...For I do not the
good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do". Finally, Plato
looks ahead in another way, too, when, in the MYTH OF ER, he employs poetic
language to extend his vision to the afterlife with a story of
reincarnation. With this moralizing tale, he suggests that the full
measure of justice extends beyond the
span of an individual life, and he offers another twist on the issue of
fate and human choice, by showing that what appears to be our fate or
destiny is, in fact, determined by the choices we have made in
previous lives.