Citizens of an Impossible City

Untimely Meditations on Plato's Republic

In numbered paragraph form, because, why not?

1. Plato’s Republic¹ is his most famous dialogue. It’s known for it’s allegory of the cave, where Socrates compares ordinary social life as the life of (unwitting) prisoners whose life consists of shadows flitting on a cave wall that they think are real things (!).² It’s also known for the outlandish “city in speech” that Socrates founds with his interlocutors. What begins the discussion however, is a discussion of justice, and three separate challenges to justice. Socrates faces three interlocutors who make a case against justice; more specifically, they argue that justice is not good for its possessor - or when it is good, it is good as an otherwise undesirable means to other good ends. So Socrates is challenged by Plato’s two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, to defend the value of justice: “do not merely demonstrate to us by argument that justice is stronger than injustice, but tell us what each one itself does, because of itself, to someone who possesses it, that makes the one bad and the other good.” (367b).

2. Socrates accepts the challenge. This seems unusual, because Socrates usually took the role of questioning others on their views about issues such as justice. I want to pursue a line of thought that Socrates accepts the challenge, but does not abandon his practice of inviting others to engage in searching inquiry for themselves about how to live. I suggest that as long and complicated as it is, the Republic is still an inconclusive “Socratic” dialogue, that is as much a defense of the task of philosophy and Socratic dialogue as it is about the question at issue. How so?

3. The dialogue ends inconclusively. This is not as evident as in other Socratic dialogues, but I think it’s true, and important for understanding the dialogue, and Plato’s intentions.

4. Socrates recognizes that he can’t defend justice by making an argument, however complex, that the just life is better than the unjust life. So despite all the theorizing and creative proposals, Socrates does not intend to teach his interlocutors (particularly Glaucon and Adeimantus) this; he intends to invite them to dialogue as a path to discovering for themselves both what is involved in the question, and to discover the goodness of justice (as wells as the good of philosophical dialogue - more on that below) for themselves.

5. The dialogue is a defense of the way of philosophy as the only way to discover something as important as the goodness of justice. Any other way of proceeding might persuade Glaucon and Adeimantus that they should be just; but it cannot lead them to love justice for its own sake. They would be persuaded as Sophists and demagogues persuade their listeners, but they would not know the goodness of justice.

6. Socrates presents seeing the form of the Good as the culmination of both philosophy and the quest for justice. But the form of the Good is “beyond being and knowing.” If vision of the good is the “end of all our striving” this vision might deliver both happiness and with it the knowledge of why the life in pursuit of goodness is a just life and better than an unjust life. But we are not given that vision in the dialogue. Socrates does argue in favor of a life of justice. But do we know he is right? We can’t know that he is right.

7. So, while we haven’t been taught that justice is better than injustice, we have been drawn into philosophical dialogue with Socrates. Since we can’t be shown the form of the good, Plato’s only stand in is the person of Socrates himself.

I’d like to develop these core points below to see where it takes us in reading Plato’s Republic.

8. Socrates accepts the challenge of defending justice from the charges that it is bad for its possessor, or at best a means to other goods, but in itself not choiceworthy (as many might view kale as a means to good health, but undesirable in itself, such that if health could be obtained without kale, we’d abandon eating kale).

9. This seems to be a departure from the more familiar Socratic procedure; Socrates does not typically venture his own arguments and views, but instead investigates the views of his interlocutors. But has Socrates really departed from his commitment to interrogate rather than teach? I don’t think he has. Here’s my thought.

10. I think Socrates recognizes that there’s a dilemma he faces if he chooses to defend justice: Justice, like music, friendship, conversation, contemplation is an activity you have to inhabit before you can appreciate it. For one, this is because of the rich, distinctive goodness of these activities, goodness that is not simply replaceable by another activity.³ You can’t see its goodness “from the outside” so to speak, because what you would be seeing is not the distinctive goodness of this activity.

11. So suppose someone is skeptical about the goodness of music and whether it’s “worth it” to devote time and energy to appreciating music? If I want to defend music, I can’t appeal to the person’s existing desires for several reasons. First, I might only succeed in showing them the instrumental value of music. I might entice them to see music as good only by seeing it as potentially serving some other desire that the person has. Not only would that not be showing them the good of music. It would also corrupt their conception of music by seeing it only as something useful to this other end.

12. I could try to show that they have some, perhaps nascent, aspiration to enjoy what music in fact has to offer. But if they don’t already see that, I can’t give them an argument to convince them; I can only invite them to try appreciating music to see what it has to offer.

13. Whatever tack I try, it’s important that it’s the goodness of music I’m commending, and not the goodness of some other thing that I’m appealing to as a substitute for the good of music.

14. Finally, commending music (I think) is commending an activity that itself has the power to transform. Its own distinctive beauty can prompt love for it, rather than just appeal to existing desires. It can also identify our aspirations, and invites us to further learn and appreciate music in response to those aspirations, and to music. As Alexander Nehamas says of beauty,

Beauty is the name we give to attractiveness when what we already know...seems too complex for us to be able to describe what it is and valuable enough to promise that what we haven't yet learned is worth even more, perhaps worth changing ourselves in order to come to see and appreciate it. (Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness)

15. What I’ve said about music, Socrates thinks about justice. When he accepts the challenge of defending the just life, he sets out to do so aware of the challenges I just enumerated about defending the value of such an activity. So he won’t take the following path, which is the path of Sophist rhetoric, but not philosophy (indeed, Plato sees Sophist rhetoric as a counterfeit of philosophy):

16. He won’t accept his challengers’ existing conception of justice and he won’t appeal to their existing motivations. That is extremely Socratic. He won’t tell tales about what justice is or how it serves one’s life that are calculated to convince, regardless of whether the hearer has genuinely grasped the goodness of justice.

17. Socrates has to invite his interlocutors to both the transformative journey of living justice that will both change their existing conceptions and motivations about justice.

18. But how will Socrates convince them to embark on this journey? I think he does it by accepting the challenge to defend justice. The philosophical journey they embark on is the beginning of the journey of being shown and appreciating justice.

19. Here’s one thing to notice about the beginning of the journey. Socrates does not need his interlocutors to have pure motives for embarking on this investigation. They don’t need to begin by pursuing investigation of justice for all the right reasons. But if Socrates can continue to engage them in philosophical dialogue, they just might undergo the transformation it can effect which, according to Socrates, is the same transformation needed to know and love justice.

20. Socrates’ interlocutors can begin the journey of philosophy with whatever motives they bring to it, provided that they continue in their philosophical journey on its own terms. In order to meet the demands of continuing their philosophical pursuits, they will have to undergo a gradual transformation of their motives. The initial motives do not corrupt the pursuit of philosophy as long as the participants start to become enchanted by or delighted by or committed to the activity. Rhetoric on the other hand lacks the power to persuade by transforming the hearers motivations in light of goodness. It can only flatter.

21. Initial motives can be a problem if they keep one from meeting the demands of philosophy (or music, or friendship) on its own terms.⁴ But this kind of start⁵ can develop into transformative participation in the activity, and it can do so because of the power of the activity - power simply due to its goodness, attractivenes due to its goodness, and no other kind of spurious power or attractiveness.

22. Paradox: Socrates thinks this this is the only approach that avoids illusions about justice or indoctrination about justice without a real encounter with its goodness - indoctrination without knowledge. But you have to commit to this journey of philosophy and transformation, sometimes for bad reasons, before you know the goodness of either. So why should you have any confidence that the supposed transformation that allows you to just “see” the goodness of justice isn’t just one more illusion?⁶

23. Socrates not only recognizes this problem, he exacerbates it. The philosophical journey is commended because by interrogating and examining justice we can move beyond illusion and indoctrination. But we succeed in this task by seeing the idea of the good, which is “beyond being and knowing” - beyond saying and intelligibility because it is what renders all else intelligible:

You must say that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the idea of the good…you should say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their existence and being are also due to it; although the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power. (508e-509b, Reeve translation, modified)

Now this is what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything. The soul divines that it is something but is at a loss about it and unable to get a sufficient grasp of just what it is. (505e)

24. So neither Socrates nor Plato can show us goodness, and without it, they can’t bring their defense of justice and the philosophical investigation of justice to completion. Plato’s only recourse, I think, is to present us with the figure of Socrates himself. We can’t directly encounter goodness and the goodness of philosophy, but we can encounter the figure of Socrates.⁷

25. The figure of Socrates is all over the Republic, particularly the central books, as an icon to draw us into the journey into philosophy and justice to which he is inviting his interlocutors, and to which Plato is inviting us. Many of these images are given to us as part of Socrates’ answer to Adeimantus who argued that those who ‘linger in philosophy’ become “strange or vicious or useless to the cities.” (see footnote 3 for the relevant passage). Consider the images of Socrates we get in response to this charge:

    1. Consider this happening on many ships or one…The sailors are quarreling about the piloting, each supposing he ought to pilot, although he has never learned the art, and can’t produce his teacher…Besides this, they praise and call ‘skilled sailor, ‘pilot,’ and ‘knower of the ship’s business’ the man who is clever at figuring out how they will get the rule, either by persuading or forcing the shipowner, while the man who is not of this sort they blame as useless. They don’t know that for the true pilot it is necessary to pay careful attention to the year, seasons, heavens, stars, winds, and everything that’s proper to the art…So with such things happening on the ships, don’t you believe that the true pilot will be called a stargazer, a prater, and useless to them by those who sail on ships run like this?⁸ (488b-e)

    2. Now those who whave become members of this small band [of philosophers] have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession it is. At the same time, they have seen sufficiently that…no one who minds the business of the cities does virtually anything sound, and that ther is no ally with whom one could go to the aid of justice and be preserved. Rather—just like a human being who has fallen in with wild beasts and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficient as one man to resist…one would perish before he has been of any use to the city or friends and be of no profit to himself and others... Seeing others filled full of lawfulness, he is content if somehow he can live his life here pure of injustice and unholy deeds, and take his leave from it graciously and cheerfully with fair hope.⁹ (496d-e)

26. My undergraduate professorMichael Coulter taught me that all of Plato’s dialogues were an apology (defense) of Socrates. My reading of the Republic highlights just how much the central philosophical questions of Plato’s dialogues orbit around encountering and coming to terms with the person of Socrates.¹⁰

27. I think this kind of reading of Plato’s dialogues can better help us understand the vision in ancient philosophy of Philosophy as a “way of life,” an idea I’d like to explore more in future posts.

1. For quotes from the Republic, I use Alan Bloom’s translation (Basic Books, 1968) unless otherwise noted

2. I won’t belabor the obvious relevance of Socrates’ parable to the digital age.

3. My thinking on these kinds of activities draws on the following: Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of practices in After Virtue (2nd edition, Notre Dame Press, 1984); Talbot Brewer’s discussion of “dialectical activities” in The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009); Josef Pieper’s discussion of leisure in Leisure the Basis of Culture (Ignatius Press, 2009).

4. I think this is one reason Plato is concerned with counterfeit activities - activities that masquerade as genuine human practices such as philosophy, but are really false substitutes (he views rhetoric as practiced by Sophists as a counterfeit of philosophy). These counterfeits take hold by instrumentalizing the genuine activity to serve desires that the activity pursued for its own sake would interrogate and transform.

The issue of inadequate starting motives also makes Plato interested in the causes of departing from philosophy (paralleled by his discussion in the Republic of the degeneration of regimes).

Plato allows Socrates to explore this by having Adeimantus challenge the goodness of continuing in philosophy: “Now someone might say in speech that he can’t contradict you…but in deed he sees that of all those who start out on philosophy—not those who take it up for the sake of getting educated when they are young, then drop it, but those who linger in it for a longer time—most become quite strange, not to say completely vicious; while the ones who seem perfectly decent, do nevertheless suffer at least one consequence of the practice you are praising—they become useless to the cities.” (487d)

MacIntyre has a well-known discussion of beginning an activity with one set of motivations, but having those motivations transformed through participation in the activity. See After Virtue, p. 188-189.

5. arché in Greek - beginning, but also principle, or rule (!) as I’ve belabored to my students. Its a term whose conceptual pair is telos - end, goal, completion.

6. I sometimes call this the “Karate Kid” problem. Miyagi tells Daniel that there are no bad students, only bad teachers. But when he agrees to teach Daniel, Miyagi begins by making a sacred pact: he promises to teach karate, Daniel promises to learn. “I say, you do, no questions.” After Miyagi has warned Daniel to be on guard against bad teachers, he says he can’t start learning karate without trusting Miyagi implicitly. But Miyagi knows if Daniel is looking for assurance that Miyagi is a good teacher before he commits to learning, he will never learn what Miyagi has to teach.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings have most influenced my thinking on these kinds of issues. See, for example, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame Press, 1990).

7. But mediated through Plato’s writing in the dialogues!

8. Here and in many other places in the dialogues, Plato has Socrates address the charges against him in his trial for which he was put to death by the Athenians.

9. The apparently quietist implications here should be balanced by what Socrates says elsewhere about determining to be a gadfly in the city rather than participate in politics as it was conducted in Athens (compare the ship parable again) for the good of the city; and his claim that this is the true practice of politics.

10. My two favorite pieces on the figure of Socrates: David K. O’Connor, “The Seductions of Socrates,” First Things, June 2001; Pierre Hadot, “The Figure of Socrates” in Philosophy as a Way of Life. (Blackwell, 1997)