Clas 161/Phil 108 Plato

Notes to Dominic Scott's "The Republic" in The Oxford Handbook of Plato, Gail Fine, ed., 2008, p. 360ff.

• Nutshell View of Plato's Republic
• An investigation of what justice is and why one is better off having justice than anything else, even if one lacks all other goods.
• Along the way:
• A psychology is developed: one that says the human psyche has three parts: the desiring part, the emotional part, and the rational part.
• An epistemology is developed: one that says that there are Forms which explain why things in the world are what they are. These Forms are unchanging and knowable: knowability >> epistemology.
  
• A political theory is developed: one that condemns democracy and suggests that experts should be in control (this view has many nuances and should  not be rejected outright because it is paternalistic, tyrannical, or anti-democratic, although those are reasons to reject a view, and it is those, in ways).
  
• Bird's Eye View of the Republic
• Book I investigates justice from the individual's perspective
• Thrasymachus says that justice is benefitting others at one's own expense
• Socrates refutes that idea, sort of, but it's aporetic.
• Book II: Glaucon's Challenge
  
• Glaucon and Adeimantus are not satisfied with Socrates' refutation of Thrasymachus' idea, so they sharpen the challenge.
• They suggest that the real task is to say why one should choose justice EVEN IF one does not have the conventional rewards of justice (reputation, goods, etc.): why is justice good for the just person in and of itself? Why is it better for that person than injustice, EVEN IF the unjust person gets all the rewards and the just person does not?
• "Gyges ring": there's a magic ring that enables one to "get away with" injustice: a thought experiment conceit, but is it implausible? don't evildoers usually believe they won't be caught?
  
• The choice of lives: take two people, one just, one unjust, one who gets nothing but justice, no honor, no worldly goods; the unjust one, on the other hand, gets everything he/she thinks desirable: why choose to be the just one?
• Socrates accepts the challenge: the rest of the Republic is his answer.
• First, he suggests proceeding methodically
• Justice will be easier to see in a larger context, that of a city, than within an individual
• This marks a MAJOR SHIFT in the dialogue: ethics is put aside in favor of politics for the time being
• The city:
• Has three classes: one for the material needs of the state, one for security, the third to rule.
• Each has a function and does not interfere with the others' function
• Education is carefully organized and regulated: what they read, see, do, is all prescribed.
• Shift back to the individual (Book IV: 434d)
• Justice in the city is the harmony of its classes
• If the analogy holds, justice in an individual will be harmony of the parts of the individual psyche.
• Reason directs: it determines the individual's overall good
  
• The emotional/thumetic part enforces reason's dictates
• It's domain is anger, pride, shame, and other feelings
  
• The desires obey
• Physical desires need to be kept carefully in check
  
• Injustice, on the other hand, is any other psychic arrangement
• If the desires or the thumetic part get the upper hand
• Glaucon's challenge is now answered! justice is good for one's soul (445a-b), and one's soul just is one's self.
• Socrates wants to continue to investigate injustice, and his interlocutors want to hear more about his stray remark that women and children will be held in common (i.e. no nuclear family) (423e-424a)
• Socrates says that's not all: he would also allow women to be rulers
• And Philosophers would be rulers: the rest of book V and much of book 6 defend this idea.
• First, Philosophers will need knowledge of justice and other things: the essence of justice, the one thing that makes all just things just, its Form, which can only be grasped by the mind, the intellect.
• The culmination of the Philosopher's education will be knowledge of the Form of the Good.
• The sun, the divided line, and the cave analogies are designed to illustrate these ideas: they are famous.
• The education of the philosophers will last 30 years, starting at the age of 20 after they have had the normal Greek education.
• They will study math for 10 years, dialectic for 5, military and other tasks for 10 years!
• In Book VIII and IX, Socrates describes the various varieties of vice and injustice.
• Timocracy (aims at honor: military holds power: instability ensues) degenerates into
• Oligarchy (aims at wealth: rich and poor sharply divided: civil war results) degenerates into
• Democracy (aims at freedom: too much freedom leads to rise of a demagogue who convinces citizens to elect him: abuse of power) degenerates into
• Tyranny (aims at satisfying all of tyrant's desires: citizens become slaves)
• In the individual:
• Timocratic soul: spirit dominates over reason and desire
• Oligarch: bodily health desires dominates
• Democratic: all sorts of desires pursued, nothing dominates
• Tyrant: lawless appetites are in charge
• The tyrant is the most miserable
• After death, souls are apportioned to what they deserve based on how life was lived. Philosophers have chance to escape the cycle.
  
• Book X returns to revisit the role of poetry in the ideal state: most of it is censored, including all imitative poetry: it corrupts the audience's souls
• Note that the dialogue began as an investigation into justice and the individual. Politics was introduced as a device to explore justice and the individual. Then for a while politics became interesting in its own right.
• But politics deepens Plato's ethics.
• At first, politics is an extended analogy, but it morphs into the context within which the individual can attain his or her good.

• The defence of justice: Conventional Justice versus Platonic Justice
  
• Glaucon's challenge says that in and of itself, justice is not choiceworthy, but we choose it nonetheless because we are afraid of others' injustice. If we could pull it off, we would be unjust.
  
• It's important to note that Glaucon and Adeimantus' challenge is that Socrates should defend justice as it is usually understood, not some Socratic redefinition of it into soul harmony.
• If Socrates' soul harmony does not overlap significantly with conventional justice, he will not have met the challenge.
• Also note that Glaucon's challenge suggests that being just and the usual rewards of justice (a good reputation, material rewards) are detachable from each other.
• Somewhat implausible, but a useful thought experiment: it isolates the material and immaterial consequences of justice from the internal consequences of justice.
  
• Note that when Glaucon and Adeimantus are done in Book II, they have demanded that Socrates prove that justice is the sort of thing that no other good things can hold a candle to: they just cannot compensate for the lack of justice.
  
• Socrates' answer is to argue that justice is psychic harmony, and that amounts to the health of one's self.
• What if that is not conventional justice, but just psychic harmony? That is, what if the psychically harmonious individual can harmoniously commit conventional injustice?
• Conventional justice involves other people, not harmony in one's self, an internal state.
• Socrates is aware of this distinction, but what if psychic harmony and conventional justice do not overlap?
• Psychological defense of justice
• The psychically harmonious person has, by the very definition of being a psychically harmonious individual, reined in her appetites, and her spirit is acting subordinately to her rational part to keep those appetites in line with reason.
• Lack of psychic harmony means that either one's spirit (anger, pride, shame) has more power than reason or that one's desires have more power than reason. Both of those situations are not controllable: the spirit and desires are the sort of things that grow the more you satisfy them (echoes of Callicles in the Gorgias), and so eventually they will lead to conventional injustice. That will make a person untrustworthy, true-friend-less, etc., and so that person will be less happy and less just than the psychically harmonious person.
• Reason is what can limit the desires that lead to conventional injustice, and so making reason be in charge of my psyche will make me conventionally just as well as Platonically just.
• Also, when the rational part is in charge, we have certain appetites, which are satisfiable and reasonable and even admirable, but when the desirous or spirited part of our soul is in charge, our appetites are not just stronger, they are different in kind: we have different desires, ones that are insatiable, destructive, and lead to misery.
• The rational part has desires of its own: it wants truth, beauty, and understanding, and wants other to share them.
• Also, some types of desire threaten our autonomy as independent agents: if the desirous or spirited part is in charge, they can come to the fore and thus threaten our autonomy, but reason helps keep such desires from growing or manifesting.
• What is more, the philosopher will be repelled by failures to be just, because they are failures to follow the Form of the Good. The philosopher's life will be consumed by desire to pursue and instantiate the Form of the Good, and the desires that lead to injustice will have no chance: it's like a rushing torrent carrying all in its path (485d).
  
• The biggest problem with this defense may be that the philosopher will have to interrupt the pursuit of the Forms to administer the state: they will have to be compelled (501d, 520e, 540b). Socrates says it would be unjust for the philosopher not to administer the state. And yet, how can administering the state benefit the administrator, who would rather be contemplating Forms? The more the philosopher is drawn to and consumed by the truth of the Forms (i.e. the more philosophical the philosopher becomes), the less it seems to benefit her to rule.
  
• Metaphysical defense of justice
• This defense of justice is never explicitly mounted by Plato, but we have hints about a "longer, better" path to defending justice, and many interpreters think that the pursuit of the form of the good is it.
• The platonically just person understands the Forms, including the Form of the Good. The good is the sort of thing one cannot understand without being attracted to it and wanting to create it in one's life and those around one (500c).
  
• The biggest problem with this defense is that the Form of the Good is not argued for, described, or discussed enough to really understand how it might work in the Republic (Socrates says he does not know it at 506b-e).

• Politics
• Authoritarianism
  
• When we cross over to the other side of the soul-state analogy, namely the State, we find Authoritarianism: if the philosophers are in charge and the spirited and appetitive elements have no say in what happens, they are ruled by an authoritarian state and have no autonomy, no self-determination.
• Karl Popper's Book The Open Society and its Enemies: volume 1 the Spell of Plato attacks Plato vigorously. It is a great read, a compelling read, a page-turner for political philosophers. Read it. It has been called neo-liberal, however (Popper was a friend of Hayek, I believe).
• But beware: it's perhaps not entirely fair to Plato. It was written in the shadow of Hitler and Mussolini and WWII.
  
• Popper says Plato believes that
  
• the state is an end in itself, something greater than or at least distinct from the sum of its parts, and that
• the interests of the state come before those of the individual.
• This Popper calls the "organic theory" of the state.
• It relies on pushing the soul-state analogy in the Republic (farther than Plato does?): we don't know where the analogy is meant to end, but we know it is meant to end somewhere.
• Sometimes Plato talks of individual happiness being sacrificed for the greater good (420b-421c).
• Perhaps this is merely a matter of one individual's happiness being sacrificed for greater happiness of many individuals: that is not the state coming before individuals, but rather individuals coming before individuals.
• Scott argues that in fact, what Plato puts forth is the idea not that the state takes priority as the occasion demands over individual interests, but rather that the unity of the state takes precedence over individual interests: the individuals are there and are benefited by the state in order to unify the state and so the state's unity takes precedence over the individual's interests. (420b-421c and especially 519e-520a).
• Still controversial, but not Popper's more extreme authoritarianism.
• Critique of Democracy
• Main Theoretical critique
  
• In Book II, the Principle of Specialization is introduced: each citizen does one job only, and that leads to the three different classes in the state, a ruler class, a permanent professional military class, and a producer class (how is the producer class analogous to the desirous part of the state? it's not clear to me that workers somehow represent desires or have uncontrolled desires or what makes then the counterpart of the desiring part of the individual)
• The Principle of Specialization rules out democracy: only the rulers know the Good.
• Why the principle of Specialization?
• because of the uneven distribution of natural talents
• efficiency
• That first reason only works as an objection to democracy if the skills and insights required to rule well are unevenly distributed.
• In the Protagoras, the character Protagoras suggests that the ability and knowledge to make decisions and rule is distributed to all humans, not just a few.
• Books II-IV apparently assume that Protagoras' position is wrong.
• no argument for that at first
• Book V says that knowledge of Forms is necessary for good ruling
• The guardians' education will take 30 years: thus a long education is necessary to acquire the knowledge of the Form of the Good plus the other skills, some of which involve experience.
• Those who support something like Protagoras' view must refute the implicit and explicit claims of the central books of the Republic about ruling ability and its development.
• Critique of actual democracy in Athens
• VI  488c-495c: ship of state analogy
  
• the state is like a ship whose owner is big and strong and wealthy, but not too bright, can't hear or see well, and is not a good sailor.
• those who want to rule the state are like sailors vying for the owner's favor: to get control, they do what it takes to please the owner, not what it takes to sail well.
  
• someone who does know how to sail well will probably not please the owner at all.
• The owner is the people
• the sailors vying for control are the demagogues and charlatans
• the philosophers are the ones who really know how to sail
• in trying to curry the owner's favor, the sailors adopt the owner's values and abandon whatever ones they have of their own, inevitably.
• Further theoretical critique of democracy in Book VIII (557a-558c)
• This democracy is extreme democracy, not a tempered or mixed democracy with elements of other systems
• Pure democracy aims at maximum freedom, freedom to do as one chooses, which involves maximal tolerance.
• Think libertarianism combined with extreme participation in government?
  
• Leaders selected by lot: change from day to day
• The problem is instability:
  
• if the democracy realizes its ideals of freedom and tolerance, they become the source of the unraveling of the system
• criminal elements can grow strong, create their own militia/bodyguards, and ultimately replace democracy with tyranny
• or a demagogue may come to the fore and convince the people to hand over power to her/him, which will corrupt her/him, and tyranny will result.
• Note that this is not a criticism of every or even any existent democracy
• Rather, it is a criticism of the logical consequences of pursuing democracy's core values of freedom and toleration

• Philosophy in the central books of the Republic.
• The sun, the divided line, and the cave analogies
• The sun is meant to illustrate the power of the Form of the Good
• The divided line shows the four stages of cognition which the guardians must go through on the way to acquiring knowledge of the Form of the Good.
• The cave illustrates our situation and the transition from it to that of a philosopher
• Outside-the-cave represents the intelligible world, inside-the-cave represents the sensible world. The bonds which hold us down represent our faith in sensibles. The fire and shadows represent the limited cognition we get from sensibles.
  
• Philosophy is defined relative to the Forms, its object. Philosophy is not a process or approach or way of thinking: it is a metaphysical stance, pursuit of the Forms.
  
• The Forms and the "Sight lovers"
• The sight lovers deny that there are Forms, the Forms which are permanent, stable, unchanging, and intelligible only by the intellect and which explain sensible phenomena.
• Sight lovers have no knowledge of things such as beauty, only opinions.
• So how do sight lovers have any opinion of beauty or justice if they have no knowledge?
• latent knowledge? might they have a rudimentary grasp of forms without being aware of it or that they are Forms?
• Controversial, because Socrates nowhere suggests that.
• perhaps they acquire notions of beauty and justice, etc. purely from experience.
• In the Phaedo 68d-69b, Socrates says non-philosophers have a grasp of virtues such as justice
  
• they think of it as a balance of burdens and benefits
• it is informed by experience, not knowledge of the explanatory force of the Forms
• compare Glaucon's suggestion that people are just because by agreeing to be just they buy protection against other people's injustices.
• this all suggests that it is possible to form concepts of things like justice without the Forms
• How different are the philosophers from the non-philosophers and how crisp is the boundary between them?
• If non-philosophers have an experience-based grasp of things such as justice, beauty, etc., why shouldn't they be able to contribute something valuable to political processes?
• How can one move from the sensible world to the intelligible world?
• the prisoners in the cave are epistemologically imprisoned: the chains binding them are their perceptions of what is real, the sensible and emotional input they get.
• to get out of the cave, the guardians have to undergo 30 years of schooling: 10 years of math, 5 years of dialectic, etc.
• 531c says that harmonics are useful for understanding beauty and goodness: perhaps it gives one insight into the underlying explanation of what a harmony is
• so perhaps math and other study enables one to see the unified explanation for the many-formed beauty, justice, etc. in the world
• but Socrates wants more: he wants to gain insight into math itself: perhaps the Form of the Good, the Beautiful, etc. accomplish that.
• thus philosophy involves completely re-orienting one's life and pursuits
• but what does that say about the Republic and Plato and Socrates: they have not undergone the 30 years training, which in fact is not available. Who would teach it? Socrates says he does not know the Form of the Good at one point!
• Thus by Socrates' own standards, the Republic is not philosophical, because it is not written by someone who knows the form of the good.