"We are the founders of a city" | Plato's Republic, Book 2

Last week, we saw Socrates arguing with Thrasymachus about the nature of justice.

Welcome to the second installment of our read-along of Plato’s Republic. Here’s the schedule:

• March 31: Book I

• April 7: Book II

• April 14: Book III

• April 21: Reading Week

• April 28: Book IV

• May 5: Book V

• May 8: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3PM Eastern

• May 12: Book VI

• May 18: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8PM Eastern

• May 19: Book VII

• May 26: Reading Week

• June 2: Book VIII

• June 9: Book IX

• June 16: Book X

• June 22: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8PM Eastern

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Last week, we saw Socrates arguing with Thrasymachus about the nature of justice. It was not a particularly insightful discussion, because Thrasymachus is not a particularly insightful interlocutor. (In the dialogues, Socrates is at his best when his interlocutors are themselves excellent.) But this week, we hear from Glaucon (and to a lesser extent his brother Adeimantus).

Glaucon is the superior philosopher to Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus is inconsistent, overly cynical, and generally unwilling to argue. While there may be some force to his critique of Socrates, it is also clear that he is not open to being persuaded. He responds in anger to being challenged, even when he is being blatantly inconsistent in his depiction of justice and injustice. Glaucon is more like the mirror of Socrates. He begins by enumerating three types of goods:

• Those which we value for their consequences, which we can call merely instrumental goods. Medical treatment and earning a living are examples.

• Those which we value for themselves but not for their consequences, which we can call merely intrinsic goods. Pleasure is Glaucon’s example. It is valued simply because it is good in itself.

• Those which we value for themselves and for their consequences, which we can call higher goods.¹ Thinking, seeing, and being healthy are what Glaucon cites.

Already, he is being more careful than Thrasymachus. And he makes clear his initial claim: justice is a merely instrumental good. It is not desirable for its own sake, but rather for its consequences. If we could, we would all act unjustly to get the better of one another. Glaucon says:

They say that this is the origin and essential nature of justice, that it is a compromise between the best case, which is doing wrong and getting away with it, and the worst case, which is being wronged and being unable to retaliate. Justice, being half-way between these two extremes, is not prized as a good; it finds its value merely in people’s want of power to do wrong. (359a-b)

To make his point, Glaucon gives two different arguments. First, he gives us the thought experiment of the Ring of Gyges (359c-360c). Second, he contrasts the perfectly just man with the perfectly unjust (360e-361d). It is the contrast with the perfectly just and unjust men that is the most interesting, because Glaucon makes the contentious but critical move of saying that the perfectly just man would enjoy none of the reputational benefits of being just; this would be a detriment to his perfect justice, Glaucon seems to say, and so:

• The perfectly unjust man enjoys all the benefits of injustice and all of the reputational benefits of justice. He even bribes the gods with sacrifices.

• The perfectly just man enjoys none of the benefits of justice but has the reputation of an unjust man.

Glaucon then asks which of these lives we would choose.

Quoting Hesiod, Glaucon’s brother Adeimantus joins in the argument:

There is much wickedness; it is never hard

To make that choice. The way is smooth, the goal

Lies near at hand. Virtue is out of reach

Without much toil. That is the gods’ decree.

Adaimantus’ basic point is that justice is thought of as something difficult. Justice requires self-discipline, while self-indulgence and injustice as pleasant and easy (364a). We all know this is the case, Socrates: everyone prefers injustice for themselves. We all want to get the better of each other. As see around 367, this is the challenge to Socrates. No one has ever shown that justice is good in itself, but only that being unjust leads to being thought poorly of. We condition the fittest and the strongest to act justly, perhaps, as a matter of self-interest.

Solar Law

Socrates is inspired by the brothers’ challenges, and so he begins his defense of justice. He proposes that instead of focusing initially on the individual, which has been the focus so far, we begin by articulating an ideal city. Then we can transfer lessons about this city to the individual, and hopefully we will be able to say that justice is a higher good, good for its consequences as well as for itself. Glaucon and Adeimantus, admirers of Socrates, agree to this method.

This city would first make provision for everyone’s basic needs: food, shelter, clothing, etc. It would allow workers to concentrate on their most suitable tasks and share the good of their work with others; this is superior to an arrangement where everyone provides for all of their own needs. This necessitates that the city has more and more people: a farmer needs someone to make plows, the builder needs someone to make tools. We’ll need additional farmers along with agents and merchants to trade, too. So now we need shipbuilders and sailors. We need dealers as a means of efficiency in trade, and laborers to be hired.

He continues, adding luxuries and other skills which need to be provided. Soon, this city is quite large. So large, in fact, that it begins to need more territory. Socrates says they have discovered the origins of war (373e). Now, the city needs soldiers — citizens won’t do, as everyone must focus on a single skill. Socrates thus introduces the guardians, freed from all necessities and focused on the highest level of training (374e). These guardians are compared several times to pure-bred dogs who are both spirited and gentle. They react with hostility to those which they do not know, and they are gentle with those they know. (Dogs, thus, are lovers of knowledge and wisdom.)

Swift Dog Strikes an Enemy

Socrates then turns to the education of the guardians, focusing on the stories they are told as youth. These stories must be strictly controlled, especially those that would give a wrong impression of the gods (377e). Even stories that may be true, like Ouranos’ treatment by Kronos, must be regulated:

When the young are listening, they are not to be told that if they committed the most horrible crimes they wouldn’t be doing anything out of the ordinary, not even if they inflicted every kind of punishment on a father who treated them badly. We won’t tell them that they would merely be acting like the first and greatest of the gods. (378b)

In fact, these stories should say that god is responsible for nothing bad (379c).² This is one of the fundamental patterns the poets must follow that the founders lay down.³ Another of these patterns is that god contains and produces no falsehoods.

Adeimantus agrees with Socrates that these should be placed into law, and the book concludes.

Wine Drinking in a Spring Garden

I was very pleased with the level of comments in last week’s post. I hope we can maintain this standard. I want to highlight some of my favorite comments; perhaps I can do that going forward, highlighting some of the best comments in each subsequent week’s post.

Philip writes on the foreshadowing in Book 1:

Many commentators have recognized an additional example of dramatic foreshadowing here in Book 1. Socrates and company have gone "down" to the Piraeus, a seedy port town, for a festival to a "new" god. When his friends catch up to him and compel him to stay, they speak to him of a torch race on horseback in the night that he simply must stay to see. In a couple different ways, Plato seems to be evoking for us the later allegory of the cave. Socrates has descended into a dark place with torches casting shadows, and will begin the process of leading his interlocutors out of shadowy darkness into light. Even the playful threats and compulsion of his friends is echoed in the allegory: Socrates later will tell us that those who have left the cave and gazed on the world illuminated by the sun may need to be compelled to return into the cave to share his knowledge (but will be persecuted for doing so).

Brock wrote on the meaning of ‘justice’ in the original Greek (I’ve cut quite a bit from his comment):

The interpretive issue I've been thinking about a lot is how broadly we should understand the word "justice" in The Republic.

We now don't usually apply the adjective "just" to an individual person. We speak of "just laws" or a "just society", but if we speak of a just person, this person is usually someone who makes, enforces, or interprets laws.

But justice (dikaiosune in Greek) was one of the four cardinal virtues of individuals in ancient Greece, along with courage, temperance, and wisdom. Plato is going to consider it as a virtue of society later in The Republic, but it's still a virtue of individuals as well.

I don't know when we stopped using the term "just" as an adjective for individuals. Maybe it's due to Plato's influence that we now use the word mainly for societies.

But since the word "just" is not one we usually apply to individuals, but for Plato it is, how are we to understand it? I feel like I don't even have a good grasp of the concept that Plato is wanting to define in The Republic.

In the version published by Oxford, Robin Waterfield translates dikaiosune as "morality", opting for a maximally broad reading. I'm not 100% comfortable with this, because that threatens to swallow the other virtues as well, except perhaps for wisdom.

David remarked on our reading order:

I love that we've read this achronologically, in that we did Aristotle's Ethics first because it shows a couple things. One, that even among the progenitors of modern Western philosophy as we know it, it took a few generations to try to wrap their heads around definitively defining justice, virtue, etc. It's humbling in that respect. Two, it's also giving me a lens to view these things, like how justice is not a virtue itself but the goal of living virtuously.

EncryptedLore gave their own definition of justice (and received extended replies in the comments!):

Justice is about fixing wrongs. A just person when doing wrong to someone else, consciously or not, will try to fix it. If the wrong can't be fixed, the just wrongdoer will try to compensate for the damage done.

And Elenna gives a brief defense of Socrates’ argumentative techniques:

I don't think Socrates' point was winning, or he would have passed to history as a sophist. What makes him vaguely digestable to me as a character is the earnest quest for an elusive answer that I feel in his dialogues. I defined him a cheeky bastard in a comment above, bit it's also true that he cares, and he is truly open to admit that he does not have the answers himself

1. Is there better terminology for this? I don’t want to write ‘instrumental and intrinsic goods’ each time.

2. The text switches from ‘gods’ to ‘god’ with little explanation.

3. I wonder if this point is Plato’s critique of the democracy that would kill his teacher. Socrates is charged with impiety, but Plato seems to say that much popular morality, poetry, and theology is impious.