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.

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