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0:42 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 40 what is Justice? And what is the ideal type of government? We read Plato's Republic, focusing primarily but not exclusively on Books 1, 2 and 4. My name is Mark Lintonmeyer in Madison, Wisconsin.
1:04 Wes: And this is Wes Alwon in Boston, Massachusetts.
1:07 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey, also in Madison, Wisconsin.
1:10 Mark: Woo hoo.
1:11 Wes: But not in the same room.
1:14 Dylan: But not in the same room indeed.
1:16 Mark: We would not take advantage of proximity in that way. That would be cheating.
1:22 Wes: Yes, we would.
1:23 Mark: Being able to read people's facial expressions, that would be. That would make the conversation too rich and exclusively insider.
1:32 Wes: I would certainly feel left out.
1:34 Dylan: So did you like reading this book when you were at St. John's Wes? Was this the seminal experience? It was supposed to be.
1:40 Wes: Well, I was distracted by a lot of other things at that time.
1:44 Dylan: In the fall of your freshman year?
1:46 Wes: Yeah, I can't even remember, frankly, my experience. I was 17 years old, 22 years ago.
1:54 Mark: And that was the last time you read the book, right?
1:56 Wes: Yep. Until now I read sections probably in grad school and I read secondary literature about it. But as far as plowing through. And I only really got through the first six books this time, I mean, I remember much more reading the Symposium because I wrote my senior thesis on that and when I was a freshman, I think I wasn't that interested. It wasn't really until I was a senior, after reading Kant, that I returned to Plato and suddenly became really fascinated with Plato. And Plato was sort of lost on me early on.
2:25 Mark: Right, because he just comes off as a jackass. Right. I mean, proposing this crazy form of government. Like it's very easy to write off if you're not interested in him for the historical value and looking for the subtleties.
2:36 Wes: Yeah, exactly. This time I was just very, very into it, very pleased with it.
2:41 Mark: We are lucky to have Dylan here who has taught it several times recently. Right.
2:45 Dylan: Yeah, I guess last time I did freshman seminar. It's been a while since I did the Republic, but unlike Wes, when I read it as an undergrad, it was a huge experience for me. I read it in my sophomore year as part of a long course where we spent, I don't know, six weeks on it. And I followed the advice of my professor, which was that I should just blast through it once, then read it again with the class. So I had read it twice by the time I was done with that class. And then I guess I read it two or three times for St. John's but St. John's it's all conversations. It's not lecturing or anything like that.
3:20 Wes: Yeah.
3:20 Mark: So instead of reading expert secondary literature on it, you got to hear freshman.
3:25 Dylan: Exactly. There are expert freshman conversations now. I've read very little secondary literature. I did listen to some of the play doh. ITunes stuff that Mark had pointed out.
3:36 Mark: Yes, we'll put some stuff on the blog. So one was Stephen B. Smith.
3:40 Wes: Right.
3:40 Dylan: Which you should certainly follow Mark's advice and listen to it at double speed, because then it sounds normal.
3:47 Mark: Yeah. This is a lecture from Yale who just worships Plato. It's great to find somebody who's a complete Plato advocate and in fact, paints him as. No, he's not anti democracy, and he's not, you know, he's just like the modern thinkers of today.
4:01 Wes: I didn't listen to any of that. I looked at, though, the Stanford Encyclopedia article, Plato's Ethics and Politics in the Republic. Oh, it's a long and good overview of Plato, all the secondary literature debates, and then with a long bibliography. And I looked a little bit at the Cambridge Companion. I don't really have a high opinion, I think, now of the Cambridge companions. The articles seem kind of random. I don't know how that's supposed to be the introductory set of secondary readings to something. They just seem to be. Whoever's the editor. Oh, my friend wrote this, so I'm gonna throw that in.
4:32 Dylan: And then they don't have the disposition of an encyclopedia, probably.
4:36 Wes: Exactly.
4:38 Mark: Well, I read this for the first time. Some part of it. I don't know what part of it. In high school, I had a senior year political philosophy class. We read some Hobbes, we read some Rousseau, and this is what we started off with. So this, in fact, it didn't get me that excited about Plato in particular, although I always liked the style, but it sold me on philosophy period. This was my Introduction to Philosophy. And it is, I'm sure that's the case for a lot of people. This is the big book, not necessarily the whole thing. I don't know if I ever read the whole thing before this time. Frankly. I'm sure I did in some class, but I couldn't tell you. And there were definite parts toward very end of it where I was very surprised.
5:12 Dylan: You skimmed the Myth of Ur, didn't you?
5:14 Mark: No, I read the whole damn thing.
5:16 Dylan: You did? Wow.
5:18 Mark: Yeah, Definitely drags in some spots. Even just looking at the beginning. Right. I chose 1, 2 and 4 because 3 though interesting. Just goes on and on and on and on about a very small amount of material about how do we train the Guardian class. Should we let them learn minor chords or not?
5:36 Wes: I thought that would interest you. It doesn't need to be the Dorian and the Ophrygian.
5:41 Dylan: Yeah. What are the proper non corrupting chords and scales?
5:47 Wes: I know that Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme song that's in Dorian. And then I realized that something said that that's actually the reverse. Like the Dorian in ancient Greece is now the Phrygian and the Phrygian is the Dorian. So the Dorian is the mode that he was recommending is sort of the martial military influence for the guardians or the auxiliaries. And then the Phrygian was the more peaceful. But in today's terms it would be listen to some Simon and Garfunkel to chill out and then listen to Bruckner. I think is a lot of that's in Phrygian.
6:23 Mark: So that little random bit from the middle of number three is the perfect introduction to people who have never even heard of this dialogue and don't know what it's about. So let's give the 2 second overview I gave what the questions are. So it just starts as a dialogue about what is justice. And they go through a lot of options. And then eventually he says, Socrates speaking for Plato, says instead of considering justice in the individual, let's make it easier to see by talking about it in the state. And he goes on to describe for a long, long, long, long, long time what the ideal state would be the ideal type of government.
And eventually he tracks back to making the analogy and it comes down to something of each type of person keeps to doing what they do best. And so the ruled by those who are most competent and most wise and most in touch with virtue, whereas the people who are dominated by desire should be carefully kept in check. And so that's the analogy for what justice is in the human being, is keeping the parts of your personality in check, of keeping your reason in control, as opposed to your fiery spirit, that is, has its place and has its purpose, but needs to be controlled, and your animal desires that themselves need to be even more heavily controlled.
7:35 Wes: Animal desires. You really did read the older translation, didn't you?
7:42 Mark: I'm paraphrasing. I don't know.
7:44 Dylan: That sounds right. In some ways, since we suggested that we read books 1, 2 and 4, it might be worthwhile talking a little bit in particular about book one, both because it's fairly long and it really sets things up for later on. I know that the next big transition then, of course, is to say, well, we're going to look at justice by drawing a correspondence between the justice in the city and the justice in the soul of the person. And that's worth talking about. That move by itself a bit. But maybe we could go through the cast of characters or something a little bit in book one and what they end up talking about.
8:19 Wes: Sure, yeah.
8:20 Mark: If you want details. That Stephen B. Smith lecture, he really goes.
8:26 Dylan: He does go through.
8:27 Mark: Book one is excited about what each of these interlocutors, because usually in one of these dialogues, it's Socrates and somebody else, and it's the person who it's named for. So you could name this whole thing the Glaucon, because most of it he's talking to Glaucon, who is actually, I guess in real life, one of the brothers of Plato. But in book one, Glaucon is not even talking yet. This is some other guys.
8:50 Wes: Right.
8:50 Mark: Socrates gets roped into first talking to this old guy who kind of is a rich guy that runs the house that he's at. And they're trying to figure out what is justice. Cephalus is the first guy, and his definition is speaking the truth and giving back what one takes.
9:06 Wes: Right.
9:07 Mark: Paying what you owe. That's what justice is. And he says, paying your dust. Yes. And according to Smith, he represents the conventional view, which is considered and then hastily discarded. And this character, in fact, leaves and is not heard from again. But he seems a nice enough guy.
9:24 Wes: Yeah, he goes off to tend to the sacrifices, as Smith says.
9:27 Dylan: He's sort of the quintessential patriarch.
9:29 Wes: Yeah.
9:30 Dylan: I think of him as Marlon Brando in the later years. The island of Dr. Moreau, where Marlon Brando is carried in on this throne with these white linen sheets billowing in the wind. That's Cephalus.
9:47 Mark: Kephalus. Okay.
9:48 Dylan: It could be Cephalus.
9:49 Wes: You can.
9:50 Dylan: Yeah, I Thought it was Polemarchus. Not Polemarchus. They seem to call him Polemarchus the Smith lecturer. Yeah. I always called him Polemachus, but I could be wrong. Yeah, I never stressed the R.
10:02 Wes: So
10:03 Mark: anyway, without being distracted, we could go
10:05 Wes: to the Ancient Greek and look that up.
10:07 Dylan: Yes, we could.
10:09 Mark: We want this to be listenable.
10:11 Wes: I have to say, it's probably Polemarchus.
10:14 Dylan: Polemarchus. It probably is Polemarchus because the R is long.
10:17 Wes: And then you can't go to the ante penultimate with the accent when the penultimate is long.
10:22 Mark: Are you trying to get me to edit this out?
10:25 Wes: Just giving you some things to edit out, Mark. I'm just. I actually spent a summer just concentrating on pronunciation of Ancient Greek. It's pretty sad. I know.
10:38 Mark: So this is speaking the truth and giving back what one takes. Hey, Kephalis, what about if some crazy guy has loaned you his weapon and he's asking for it back, and you think it's very likely that he'll kill himself or somebody else if you give it back? Shouldn't you? That shows that your definition. Speaking the truth and giving back what it takes is not all there is to justice. There are exceptions, so that is dispatched quickly.
11:01 Wes: Yeah. And he also uses the Nazi example. Right. This is the first use of the example of Nazis coming to your door looking for Anne Frank.
11:12 Dylan: Every conversation of the public involves that example. It always does that. Kant.
11:16 Wes: Yeah, it's a similar type of objection. You can't just say, always pay your debts in the same way that you can't just say, you must always tell the truth. Things get complicated.
11:24 Speaker: Right.
11:25 Mark: So we're looking for an exact definition, a set of necessary insufficient conditions. Something like that. And so the mantle is then taken by Polemarchus, son of Cephalus. Yes. Who says, eventually justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies.
11:39 Wes: And this guy, by the way, was killed. Right. During the 30 Tyrants takeover.
11:44 Mark: This character is based on a real person who was killed.
11:46 Dylan: Yes.
11:47 Wes: And Plato was related to some of these people who took over. There was a democracy and then the tyrants took over for a while and oligarchy, and they killed a few people. Socrates himself almost got killed, and then the democracy was restored. So Plato, you know, that's one of the. This talk about whether Plato is an authoritarian or not. He's often accused because of that association with the 30 tyrants. Although some will argue that he rejected the 30 tyrants just as much as he was critical of democracy.
12:14 Dylan: Yeah, they'll point to that seventh letter.
12:16 Wes: Yeah. Which is probably forged.
12:17 Mark: Just explain a little. And this was the first on listening to these Smith lectures, the first I heard about these letters supposedly from Plato. And one of them at least reflects back on writing the Republic. And so he wrote the Republic after all this stuff happened with the third tyrants.
12:32 Wes: Right, yeah.
12:33 Mark: And that was the evidence to say, really, Even though this whole thing sounds very anti democracy, Lee Smith was saying that. No, no, no, this letter, how he was so positive about how bad things went with the 30 tyrants compared to democracy. And the democracy was the golden age. Shows that, yes, Plato would like things to improve. And of course, anybody who's in favor of democracy would rather have the competent people win the elections or somehow get in power. Still, the. At least again, Smith's interpretation was that Plato had the common view.
Today, democracy is the worst possible form of government, except all the other ones that have been tried. And clearly he thinks tyranny is terrible from the Republic. He has more nasty things to say about tyranny than he does about democracy. It's not as good as the competent people being in charge. Having the people just by their whims be able to say to kill all the redheads if they hate them. You know, tyranny of the majority.
13:24 Dylan: Well, yeah, the problem is loaded because of course, we like to think of ourselves as having a democracy. So to have Plato come out against democracy. Your professors love saying this. You know, he's coming out against democracy and all of you students are lovers of democracy. So isn't it very provocative for you? But his understanding of what democracy is and the danger is no different than anybody who thought for a second about the problem of majority rule, even in the founding fathers. And the idea that unchecked rule of the majority can cause problems that are tyrannical is central to even our own version of democracy.
14:01 Wes: Right.
14:02 Dylan: I don't know much about the roots of the accusations against Plato being pro tyranny, but his criticism of the problems of democracy, they seem pretty straightforward.
14:13 Wes: Yeah. Less than the criticisms of democracy is just the picture he paints. The utopia itself can be kind of frightening.
14:23 Dylan: Yes. And I guess there it becomes a whole question of how does that utopia fit in with the dialogue as a whole. Some people, you can, on the one hand, take it very seriously as explicitly what he means. You could on the other hand, go a full ironic route and say that he means something completely different than that or something in between. You know, that it fits in with the dialogue as a whole. What he's trying to somehow educate Glaucon
14:48 Wes: about Yeah, it's meant to be a metaphor. Right. It's meant to be a way of getting at justice in the soul. And so how seriously we take it, whether it's possible, you know, he's sort of needled by Adeimantus and the rest of them about whether this is possible or not, whether this is just sort of a pie in the sky kind of idea, whether it's meant to be taken seriously. And I don't think he gives that direct an answer to that. But yeah, this is one of the big debates in scholarship is whether we see this as a serious political proposal or merely as a metaphor for the soul or somewhere in between. So yeah, we were introducing these characters, Paul and Marcus.
15:25 Mark: Yeah, justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies.
15:28 Wes: Right.
15:29 Mark: So that's supposed to be better than give to everyone what you owe them. It's give it to everyone what is
15:33 Dylan: fitting, but fitting in a particular way in which involves the just man harming people. Which is where Socrates goes after him on it. He brings him around to admitting that in his scenario, on the one hand it means the just man will harm people. That comes out at the beginning, but then brings them around to the notion that the just man wouldn't do any harm to anybody.
15:55 Wes: Right, because harming them would make them worse.
15:57 Dylan: Yes, exactly.
15:58 Wes: And less just. And a just person wouldn't go around making people less just, which seems like a good critique. Mark, you recently posted on. We both posted a little bit on this Eagleman guy who wrote a neuroscience book called Incognito and he's arguing for this completely non punitive criminal justice system. Plato is making the same argument here that justice is not properly thought of as punitive in any sense.
16:21 Mark: So if someone is doing unjust things, it's out of a defect on their part. I mean, Eagleman is explicit that there's something wrong with their brains. So if you're punishing them for that. Actually I don't see how that analogy completely works because you can't just say you're making their brains worse. You're not.
16:37 Wes: Well, he's arguing for rehabilitation. So you want to make the unjust more just by rehabilitative activities, not by sticking them in solitary confinement and turning them into an even worse person. The reason for putting someone behind bars is either just to make everyone else safe or to reform that person. The idea that there's anything just about the punitive aspect of that, about punishing someone because they're bad, is just a bit of nonsense under that view. So in this case also, you know, we're talking about the just man not inflicting harm on someone. And part of what's at stake here, of course, is the soul of the just man himself. Right. Which will turn out to involve this concept of these harmonized parts that fit together in the right way. And so whether or not doing harm, that kind of activity would unbalance the just person, that will become the primary consideration.
17:29 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, for Socrates, in this little interaction with Polemarchus, that's really the death blow, the notion that doing harm to one's enemies is actually harmful to the one doing it. So part of the argument is that it's harmful to the goal involved. But in the end, the real problem is that's bad for the just man. And part of the way that argument works out is the version of doing good for one's friends and harm to one's enemies turns into. I'm moving to the very related one with thrasymachus. The advantage of the stronger, which is different. But.
18:08 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
18:08 Mark: Well, the movement through here, so it starts. It's just sort of pay what you owe, and then Paul Marcus, it's help your friends and harm your enemies. But then the question is, how do you know that who you think are your friends really are your friends? Not help who you think are your friends. It's help the people who are actually helping you. So that morphs very naturally into justice is helping the good, those who are actually good, and harming those who are actually not just seeming to be your enemies, but who are actually bad. Because otherwise, if you're just. Even if you're helping your true friends and harming your enemies, are your enemies.
18:39 Dylan: Yes.
18:39 Mark: Really, actually in themselves. Bad people, you know, and you're working against their interests. Isn't there something messed up about that?
18:46 Dylan: Yeah. If you make mistakes. Right. Your judgment about who are your enemies and who are your friends could be wrong.
18:51 Mark: Right. In fact, the way Plato wants to analyze it is that anybody that's doing bad things is not your friend, even if you have a history with them.
18:58 Dylan: Yep.
18:59 Mark: And anybody, conversely, then who is doing good things. Maybe historically this person has been your enemy, but it shouldn't be. That's what being the just person is, is recognizing those things and helping the causes that should be helped, not out of just the random situations of your circumstance and who you happen to be friends with, but through a rational analysis of what's going on, forwarding the good throughout here. This. I don't know, what do you call it? One dimensionality. In good and evil, even though he doesn't, you know, you might say evil is not the term that you'd want to use here.
But it always turns out that excellence in anything turns out to be part of the good to contribute to justice. Right. It's not the case that you could have, like for Nietzsche, say, you have all these different urges pulling you in different directions and sort of each one of them is in excellence, but yet they all contradict. There's no contradiction in the good according to Plato.
19:49 Dylan: I think this question is related to it. And I just want to pick a particular section where this happens. It's at 3.35C. It's at the end of where Socrates is talking to Polemarchus, where he starts talking about dogs and horses and horsemanship and stuff like that. And he says, right at 335B. Is it then the part of a just man to injure any human being whatsoever? Volemarchus replies, certainly bad men and enemies ought to be injured. And then he does this thing with the horses. He says, do horses that have been injured become better or worse? Worse with respect to the virtue of dogs or with respect to that of horses? And he says, are men skilled in horsemanship able to make men incompetent riders by horsemanship? And Paul Marcus says, that can't be. And when I was reading this again, I wondered if that was actually just not true.
20:41 Mark: So if you could teach somebody bad habits on purpose?
20:44 Dylan: Well, yeah. The way you would make a person incompetent in horsemanship was through horsemanship. Now, Plato would probably say, or Socrates, but surely that would be through bad horsemanship. But it's not clear that the teaching of horsemanship is the same as horsemanship. So there'd be a distinction between those two things. And it's also not clear to me that even if you were to teach bad or good horsemanship, that it wouldn't be through horsemanship itself, that you wouldn't do both of those things.
21:12 Mark: Right. This is getting exactly at, you know, so horsemanship is in excellence. So therefore, a priori in that very field of horsemanship, no wrong could come out of it.
21:21 Dylan: Yes. And when I read that, it made me remember or realize in a way that I hadn't realized before, how sort of mathematical and geometrical this is for Plato. I mean, there's a real reason why you have to be educated in the geometrical before going to Plato's academy. And it's because of this kind of thinking about the way one thing is, and that's the way it is, insofar as it is that way. This kind of argument is such a geometrical proof kind of argument that relies on there being no. How did you say it, Mark? You contrasted the understanding of the good in Plato with the understanding of the good in Nietzsche. You would have multiple goods in Nietzsche.
22:00 Mark: Multiple and potentially incompatible.
22:02 Dylan: Multiple potentially incompatible. And I think you're right for Plato. They just simply aren't incompatible. So when you do things that are wrong in Plato, you can never do something for the sake of it being bad. It might be bad, but the only way you do that is by mistaking what the good is. And once you got what was good, you would never be mistaken about that, or you would never be at war with it. The way you pointed out, you could be in nature. You could have wars between goods. You would never have multiple geometries that were themselves not consistent with one another.
22:37 Mark: Right. I want to read a little more of the passage you were looking at. So he's talking about the different kinds of excellence, right? A dog has a certain kind of excellence. What makes a great kind of dog? What makes a great kind of horse. This should sound very familiar to anybody that's listened to our Aristotle on Virtue ethics episode long ago. So he continues at 335C. Should we not assert the same of human beings that when they are harmed, they become worse with respect to human virtue? Well, certainly. But isn't justice human virtue? That's also necessary then, my friend, human beings who have been harmed necessarily become more unjust? It seems so. I mean, just listen to really, human beings who are harmed necessarily become more unjust. That seems extremely counterintuitive. And it makes me wonder if this is an issue of translation somehow, that this is not just.
23:20 Wes: Why is that counterintuitive, that people who are abused become poor in character?
23:25 Mark: Anyone who has harmed becomes more unjust? I mean, we have this vision of the innocent, helpless, but completely virtuous, the child or the saint who walks through the world and injustice is heaped upon the person. But the person maintains that hope and vision and is not harmed by this? I mean, that's at least one of the archetypes that is in Disney movies and things.
23:53 Wes: Isn't it also an intuition, though, that people's characters are degraded by being harmed? You know, I mean, the prototypical cases of children who have been abused, who can become abusers themselves or they, at the very least, they'll have lots of problems with character, which is another way of talking about virtue, the word that Plato's using I think Plato would have
24:12 Mark: a lot of difficulty. For instance, if you have an abused kid who yet still looks up to and loves the parent. Right, because it's dependent upon the parent. It seems like you'd have trouble getting his head around that. Like if you're being harmed, then it should in some sense be obvious to you that you are harmed. Right, because you are harmed in very obvious ways. You are harmed in every way. And this brings me back to our very first podcast when we covered the apology and one of his Socrates is about to be condemned to death and he says, look, I've been accused of corrupting the youth, but really that's not even possible because look, all these youth keep coming to me, they come back to me.
They wouldn't be coming back to me and thanking me if they'd been corrupted because corrupting is bad. You know, again, denying any sort of multi dimensional or difference in opinion regarding these different things that oh, if I'm corrupting you, then I must be corrupting you in a very obvious way.
25:05 Wes: What are you claiming here?
25:07 Mark: It seems very intuitively obvious to me that somebody could be corrupted and not realize that or be corrupted in not have it be, you know, so I'm brought up as a thief, my parents were thieves and they trained me to be a thief. And maybe even I have a loving home that in my thievery that has been brought about to me and so I become part of the organized crime family here. This would be inconceivable to Socrates because according to him, if somebody is training me to do something bad, then they are hurting me and the hurting is going to show up in obvious ways. It's like my very soul and my body are all decaying because of this hurt, my soul.
25:47 Wes: He does talk about the sort of honor among bands of criminals who must behave in an organized way and justly towards each other at some point. Right, so you're saying this is an uncomplex view, Mark?
26:00 Mark: Well, yeah, I remember him making references. I mean that's his ultimate argument against one of his arguments against having a society of people who are unjust. There's no way they can cooperate because being unjust means you can't cooperate.
26:12 Wes: So it seems like there's room for degrees of justice and then those sorts of complications. Even though it may look simplistic here,
26:19 Dylan: though, when I read that line, human beings who have been injured necessarily become more unjust. I take them as understanding that injuries lead to that injustice. But you may be mistaken about whether you've been injured or not. There's this whole problem of making mistakes and what kind of recognition there is about the world. I mean, ultimately that leads to the allegory of the cave and all that business. So it's not the case that you would necessarily recognize being educated improperly.
26:47 Wes: This is something I would defend, you know, as a general principle. It's not the case that every time someone is harmed or injured, and by the way, injured here means it's something done by another human being unjustly to you.
26:59 Mark: It does seem following sort of the geometrical model that Dylan has suggested. So he has this metaphysics that he works up to. And again, it's unclear how seriously to take some of these metaphysical claims. Like is he just sort of putting a metaphor out out there to characterize a principle that's underlying these empirical observations, or is he really saying this is at bottom what reality is metaphysically like and thus it's going to appear that way on the surface to a greater or lesser extent. And in particular, what I mean to say is that he's got this idea, for instance, of the perfect forms.
So that's really what justice is written into nature, that an excellence is. It's not just like for Aristotle, the excellence of a dog is healthy and hunting well and doing whatever it is we think a dog is supposed to do, or whatever it is, just observing it, it looks like it's supposed to do. But really there is an ideal dog sort of written into nature that is just like there's an ideal triangle that we can never actually draw because we can't draw lines with no width and with the sides all exactly the same. So comparably, just for everything, there is a perfection to it that exists in some ideal realm.
And whether it's a real metaphysical existence or this is a phenomenological feature of whenever we think of things, we can always think of what would a better one be? What would a better one be? And what are we doing that we're referring to some kind of absolute standard that is out there?
28:25 Wes: His argument is not entirely dependent on that metaphysics. Right. Because you can still get a virtue ethics going the more Aristotelian route, which in many ways. Sure, you know, the metaphysics comes later in this book and early on it's got a very Aristotelian feel to it. So the idea of virtue, Right. And this idea of talking about the virtue of dogs, the idea is that for any organism there's a sort of built in function, there's organs and there's all kinds of work and activity going on that this organism does just to maintain itself as such, right.
The alternative is dying and immediately decaying. And there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into just being for an organism. So all those functions, and there are many of them. So the idea is that those functions in a way tell us that there's this attempt going on to do certain things. And so there's an implicit goal there with those functions. And there's an implicit best way to be for a dog, because you just have to look at what all these functions are trying to do and you can tell when something has failed and when a dog is not being fully a dog or its leg is broken or those sorts of intuitive ideas.
So analogously to human beings, there's what it means to be a human being and to be that most effectively, essentially. So the idea of justice is important here is because the idea is that the different functioning parts can conflict with each other. I mean, you're right about the whole Nietzsche thing where he's not saying that they inevitably conflict, but they can conflict. So for instance, if the desiring or the appetitive part of the soul takes over and tries to run things, gets in the way of the other parts of the soul, ideally, all those parts of the soul, the spirited, the desiring and the rational, do their thing and they don't screw up the functioning of the other parts.
And that ultimately is what justice turns out to be. I think you can do all of that without the metaphysics, without the saying. It's sort of written into an otherworldly idea. Does that make sense?
30:22 Mark: Well, I'm letting myself be convinced because I like interpreting Plato better the way you're describing.
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31:03 Dylan: Lapse.
Well, since there has been no discussion on arguably the most influential philosophical work in history, I’ll put forward the following:
Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy made the following statement: “And now what shall we say of Plato’s Utopia?”…”Has it ever or in any place or measure been realized?” Durant’s answer was yes, for a thousand years in the Middle Ages, i.e. medieval Christianity. I suspect even Durant would say this is a simplification, however, there’s no doubt that Augustine’s neoplatonism had tremendous influence, but was medieval Europe really modeled on Plato’s Republic?
Speaking as an individual with Christian sympathies, it’s impossible for me to overlook the parallels: Church hierarchy/priests (guardians), religion/Christianity (noble lie or magical myth), and surely there are more.
Comments?
It can be read either way but I prefer to see The Republic as a description of the soul by analogy to the State. Maybe there’s not an important difference between the two but it’s just so awful as a political statement. It’s a caste system written by snob who couldn’t stand to get his hands dirty. This so-called “utopia” makes me shudder. But as a picture of human nature, it just means that we should be guided by intellect rather than our biological appetites or the quest for fame and fortune. That’s not crazy. It might be a bit too prudish and tightly wrapped, but it’s not exactly totalitarianism.
One of the things overlooked in the discussion was that all the prior ethical systems were very flawed. The classic example of this is in Homer’s “Iliad”.
It is essentially the story of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. Agamemnon had offend Apollo by treating the priest Chryses rudely and refusing to return his daughter. So Apollo sent a plague on the Achaean’s camp. Agamemnon initially forbids the soldiers to draw lots to determine who brought the plague upon them, but Achilles because of his excellence (i.e. was really good at fighting) had the moral authority to draw lots and find out that Agamemnon had cause the plague.
Once this was known, the other leaders were able to force Agamemnon to return Chryseis to her father. In this Achilles acted “ethically” or “morally”. However, Agamemnon was rather angry and punished Achilles by taking the prisoner Briseis from him.
Nestor the old and wise leader urged Agamemnon not to do this: not because Agamemnon would be doing the wrong thing, because he was within his rights to do so, but because it would enrage Achilles, which it did.
The problem here is that both parties acted within their rights and were both “ethical”: however, it lead to a very serious conflict. So the question is what is the resolution? How could this ethical system be consistent.
So Plato was attempting to find a consistent ethical/moral system. This is why he is dismissing all previous moral accounts at the start of the book.
The vital part however is that Achilles had the favour of Zeus, though Zeus did it in his time not Achilles.
“The problem here is that both parties acted within their rights and were both “ethical”
The real issue is that all party’s are wrong here! If they stayed with their own business than there would be no problem in the first time. So no, they’re all acted outside their god given rights and were all unethical stupid. No one has no business to intervene in someone else their business and that is the only good and wise conclusion here.
I wanted to pick up on an issue that was raised a couple times in the podcast. Namely, does harming someone make them more unjust, and is that intuitively obvious or even reasonably justified.
It seems like by Socrates definitions and the reoccuring theme of his reasoning that if what one “conventionally” means by “harm” is done to an individual, and produces “good” results (i.e. makes them more disciplined, well behaved, perhaps even more just), than it isn’t actually harm that was done.
And this seems to be a problem over and over again in the dialogues, where seemingly intended meanings of words switch from conventional definitions, to re-worked definitions, or even to circular ones.
Hence, harming someone makes them more unjust because it’s unjust to harm someone. I’m probably missing out on much of the subtlety and sophistication here, but it seems like all Plato is really able to put forward is that there is a thing called “justice” and it is related to “harmony.”
Harmony of what and in what way seems impossible to figure out. So we end up with the Socratic hit’n run, where we have to admit that, of course the best would be the best.
For instance, toward the end of my undergrad I became more sympathetic to the “ideal” republic put forth by Socrates, thinking that, well, if things are really as he says, than I don’t see why that wouldn’t be a great place to live. Because if everyone does what is “best” for them to do, well, how could that be “bad?” WilI really be harmed by a lie just by virtue of it being a lie?
Of course, perhaps Socrates sows the seeds of his Republic’s own folly when having the guardians lie, after having claimed earlier that committing injustice harms he/she who committs it even more than those it is committed upon, leaving the guardians as a necessarily corrupt since their very duties require them to do things that harm their character. Maybe a way around this would be to replace the guardians regularly enough so that the ones who have had to lie for so long, and begin to believe that they should lie about other things as a result of the self-inflicted moral decay, can be removed from office.
Reading this statement reminded me of the most recent xkcd strip. Viewing this the other day I thought to myself: you know, this is probably how new religions start…
http://xkcd.com/927/
Hey, just wanted to register my appreciation for this! It’s helping me revise for an Ancient Ethics exam – and easing my guilt of doing the housework/other chores when I’m meant to be studying!
Thanks Hannah!
I think that there is some repression going on when you “harm” someone when you supposedly make them more disciplined in the sense that you are causing them to be more depressed and have a lower value of themselves when you do that. Now there must be some discipline in order for a society to function, but relating back to the Nietzsche discussion, I believe that individuals should have the right to express themselves and “channel their aggression” (Robert Greeene) in order to have a healthy psychic and not have some mental dysfunction problems.
Ethics comes into this when you realize that “harming” someone in the terms mentioned does correlate to the means of doing some emotional damage.Now, on the contrary, you could say, oh, it’s not harming anyone but it’s good for them so they develop this discipline or whatever you call it. There is no purpose in doing it in a harmful way. One can inspire rather than “discipline” and show the student the effects of the studies, show them some influential figures that have risen from the position the student is currently in to a high-level position and so on.
In my view it’s a law of human nature that whoever is disciplined by someone will want to revenge in some way. The repression of this urge will make the person “tied” psychologically since a person has to show out his feelings. Now rather showing the young adult an ideal or giving him a brighter view of himself and his future ought to make things better without “harm”.
I can’t seem to get past why the issue of ‘eugenics'( in any form, truly, but my perspective comes from my background as an advocate/educational consultant for people with disabilities) is so lightly passed over and/or rationalized when discussing the utopian society? I have not read the book, and so do wonder if this is the case in the writing of Plato.
Can you tell me?
This eugenics issue came up in the feminism ep too. If we breeze over or make light of an issue like this, or slavery (in the Foucault episode), or racism or totalitarianism or whatever, it’s because these are clearly not live moral issues for us or, presumably, you listeners. I don’t think there was any rationalizing of this; it’s just evil. At the same time, that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the rest of what someone with an evil view in some area has to say about the rest of it, or if the evil view betrays some fundamental flaw that goes through the rest of the person’s thinking, we can still get something out of it as a historical lesson. I’ve not made up my mind whether any kind of utopianism is coherent w/o some kind of reprogramming or eugenics or something like that… if people being fundamentally crappy is going to muck up any utopia, and any potential methods for changing it are rightly off the table, then that makes the view pretty hopeless. In the case of Plato’s Republic, the viability of his utopia is of secondary interest to me when compared with his take on the conflicted human soul and all that, though even that is pretty naive and oversimplified.
yes. i do not mean that you, in the podcast, rationalized the evil. it is just that i don’t fully agree with your thought that ‘that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the rest of what someone with an evil view in some area has to say about the rest of it…’, or that these are dead moral issues.
while i know that, in effect, that would mean we should not appreciate the beauty of, say, the ceiling of the sistine chapel because it was commissioned by a catholic church that engaged in torture and molestation, or benefit in any humane way from medical advances discovered during the holocaust’s prisoner experiments, or take pride in a country founded on the backs of slavery and decimation of native peoples, this actually is what i DO believe.
makes it hard to swallow. that’s all.
thanks for the response.
the excellent series the Digital Dialogue takes a look at Plato’s Philosophers:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/digitaldialogue/2012/03/digital-dialogue-54-platos-philosophers.html
Great episode as ever. I would lobby hard that this work is, indeed, meant to be taken as an internal inventory of the soul. The ideal state is the ideal state of an individual, with all different parts firing on all cylinders. It’s clearly stated (forgive my laziness for not going over to the bookshelf to grab my old copy and cite the passage..oy), that the entire reason we are talking of the state is so that we can examine a (hu)man writ large.
Given that, there are many interesting propositions/assumptions to ponder…what parts of myself, say, can make shoes? What parts of myself can ponder the Good (which would include of course questioning whether the Good–or any Form–exists). How do I order this complex cacaphony of people that all head up under the title of me?
The other political questions are infinitely fascinating and important. As Mark noted, the very act of envisioning an ideal state is inspiring and much needed in this day/age. But my reading of this text is actually akin to how I would read a Buddhist text; that is, as a theoretical framework for self knowledge/improvement.
Ok…longwinded commentary over. Now, a question: I certainly can get a sense of the discontent with Plato’s Forms as a metaphysical framework. Criticism has been leveled at this in several episodes and I’m sympathetic to what I’ve heard thus far. However, I can’t quite wrap my mind around what sort of solution there could be to, say, the case of a triangle or any geometric shape, *without* the idea of an eternal Form of a Triangle, er, informing my little drawing. Has this been addressed head on in any of the episodes, or can anyone shed light on alternative Platonic metaphysics?
Wow. Wes, that’s absolutely fascinating what you had to say about the whole “Gay Girl in Damascus” thing. I’m an English guy living in Hungary, and in Europe at least there has been a whole huge propaganda campaign to drum up support in the LGBT and women’s rights political communities for the NATO backed Al-Qaeda affiliated largely external neo-colonial destabilisation/regime-change campaign in Syria, of which I am not a major fan. This is not to say that I think Assad is wonderful guy or something, (nor was I ever an apologist for Saddam Hussein in Iraq), but the one sidededness of media coverage over here been to say the least disgraceful. The sad thing is, I know some really good guys in the LGBT community here who have bought into the Hillary state-department viewpoint hook line and sinker, to the extent that I can only consider them ‘Useful Idiots’ and ‘Fellow Travelers’ for the neoliberal regional economic agenda. The joke is that should a Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda regime ever be installed in Damascus by the West, they are unlikely to be sympathetic to gay rights comparing with the Assad regime, which despite it’s inadequacies is at least broadly secular. This is quite indicative of the essential difference between a republican administration, which wants to bomb middle eastern regimes into the stone age because “Jesus said so”, compared with a democrat regime, which wants to do the same thing, so that their “gays can get married”. Ok that’s somewhat of an un-nuanced caricature of the co-opting of the liberal agenda, I know, and it’s not my intent to cause offence in a forum that should be more or less apolitical, but caught between the bigotry of the right, and the hypocrisy of the left, sometimes I despair and end up preferring the bigotry of the right, despite myself!
In all honesty, I can say that I hope the guy can never write for a living again. I can say with a reasonable degree of epistemic certainty that he has helped solicit donations that have gone towards providing materiel support, (possibly even arms) to one side in a conflict that has a very real impact on ordinary families, both sunni and shia, in the region. I hope he has a level of knowledge and engagement in the region and it’s situation that could give him grounds for justifying his taking such a strong partisan pro-western stance in the situation, especially given that his work was presented to the public as a 100% authentic ‘Syrian voice’, and was used to bolster support for a particular political agenda there.
Dangerous stuff. It’s not my intent to turn this thread into a political discussion, or to take sides in the Syrian situation, but well, Wes, you brought it up and I feel strongly about it, and what is political philosophy for, if it has be carefully sanitised and detached from relating to actual contemporary politics?
Oh man… Book 1. The Sophist’s argument was that justice is an idea (not a real thing – per se) and serves those in power. Socrates’ (plato’s) was that there is a true form called Justice, The Just. The dialogue fails even to open a true discussion of those points of views. Mark was frustrated with this. Plato continually skirts the real issue because he BELIEVES in Justice as a Form and therefore always has Socrates “outsmarting” Thrasymachus with some ridiculous argument. Yea, if I wrote a book and wanted to prove my point I could have any other character with an opposing view come off childish. The real argument a Sophist would have had would have been that whether or not an action is right or wrong is less important than whether or not it benefits the interests of the agent. Many argued that there were no such things as right and wrong—that objective moral standards did not exist. Some denied any possibility of objective truth and scoffed at the idea of objective knowledge. They claimed that morality is a convention imposed by the rulers of societies upon their subjects. Okay – I’m a Sophist. Sorry Plato, thanks to you we had to go through Christianity and we see where that has brought us – right back to the Existentialists 2500 years later. I think the real Socrates was more interested in testing beliefs. Not proving them. I enjoyed your conversation, always do.. There where some good ideas floating around from reading the Republic but not necessarily having to do with the validity of it’s thesis. ciao
Hey guys, great podcast series and as an autodidact I’m enjoying going through them.
I have one thing to point out though, and that’s the reading of Plato apart from the view of say, a classicist. You guys have identified a lot of the concerns with language and translation, but some of the deeper cultural institutions are not really present in the discussion.
For instance the eugenics-y practice of leaving babies out in the elements to die – this is not a shocking thing to the ancient Greeks, nor an introduction by Plato. While Sparta may have been unusual in the selection of babies for the good of the state, this was practiced at the discretion of the family unit everywhere in the Greek world.
In the same way, although Plato tries to align to needs of the polis to this perfect function of the whole, the concept of the polis and a man’s unwavering service to it is not a new thought. Even the unusual method of heavy infantry combat that the Greeks engaged in can perhaps be attributed to this dedication to the polis – not even Athens was any different in this area. Men’s farms were their source of freedom, and their farms were protected by the city-state – thus service to the polis was a way of securing their own individual freedom. This framework was a pre-existing one.
So this is just to say that when you separate Plato from his culture, what you end up doing is sometimes ascribing general, ingrained Greek cultural concepts to Plato himself. Moreover as a practical political philosophy this makes some sense if you are trying to build a polis – but not when you try to apply this to France. Right? It certainly makes more sense to have a dedicated warrior class when it’s a reality that everyone in the polis might be enslaved or murdered or otherwise dishonoured politically (say, forced to pay tribute or contribute military forces to the Spartans or Athenians as a subjugated people). If that warrior class fails, it’s actually a reality that this would lead to everyone else in the polis being killed.
In this way I think it needs to be remembered that ancient Greece was a very, very different place. It’s almost another planet. So I start to have a problem when parts of Plato are dismissed because he is constructing a philosophy for a framework that was receptive to these ideals, but this framework is different today – and so the conclusion is that Plato is talking out of his ass.; Well, no, he was talking about establishing a Greek polis – not the United States. Surely if Plato were aware of the United States, he would have had something different to say. So that’s just my two-cents, if you guys get email notifications for old podcast comments – if you guys approach ancient philosophy in the future I think there should be a conversation on this importance of historicity, and how effectively a philosophy can be translated while avoiding a transplant.