The first half of this essay can be read here.
Aristotle ties this quest for happiness into an exploration of those virtues specific to human beings. Virtue, or the fullest expression of a things potential, can be found in every thing, living or otherwise, and many virtues are shared in common between them. The task then, according to Aristotle, is to separate out those virtues exhibited by humanity and humanity alone from those of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdom. While some functions (like growth or perception) are shared by all forms of life to one degree or another, others (like reason or piety) are assumed by Aristotle to be uniquely human and therefore reside in the soul.
Scientific data collected since Aristotle’s time have shown that the gap in some reasoning skills between humans and their animal and vegetable cohabitants is not so wide as he assumes as fact. Though the idea that certain behaviors or experiences are unique to the human animal carries some water, it seems more defensible to point to the unique interplay of higher levels of consciousness at work in humanity as the source of that singularity than it does to posit that, if souls exist, then animals don’t have one. The latter view is one nearly unique to Western culture while the former is ubiquitous worldwide.
Setting aside our quibbles with Aristotle’s anthropocentric worldview, it is difficult to argue with his methodology for arriving at happiness as the chief good. In section eight, Aristotle restates his proof in order to move on to a secondary set of observations about its nature. Paraphrased, it can be understood most succinctly as follows.
1. Happiness is the chief good.
2. Goods which are sought for their own sake are better than those sought for the ends they produce as the end is always better than the good itself.
3. Happiness may be sought by means valued for their intrinsic merits or by external means sought for their own end.
4. Therefore, Happiness sought by means valued for their intrinsic merits are distinguishable and indeed superior to those which seek it in the ends of those means.
Once having established happiness as the chief good and, indeed, the fullest expression of human virtue, Aristotle pragmatically asks, “Well, if happiness is so good, then surely we must identify the means to acquire it?” After ticking off a list of possibilities that includes learning, habit and training, he turns to belief, rather than knowledge, to explain the transcendent qualities of happiness, noting that “if there is any gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things insamuch as it is the best” [344].
This speculation that the gods are in some way responsible for happiness harmonizes with another theme that Aristotle explores in Ethics; namely, that happiness is not immune to external pressures. Events like war and illness may greatly influence an individual’s peace of mind and hamper his or her ability to reach the full potential of their happiness. Moreover, happiness may be earned through diligent effort but it is sometimes also simply received by good fortune; an accident of birth or changing political tides. For Aristotle, the former trumps the latter in value as “to entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement” [344].
This idea is broadened later as Aristotle considers the thorny question of when a person might be adequately described as happy. At what point can one truly say that someone is happy as a measure of their life rather than as a snapshot of a single moment within it? If someone can only be said to be truly happy when they have gone beyond external threats to that happiness, then we are led to believe that only the gods and the dead may know it. Furthermore, if the dead may be said to be aware of this state, then musn’t they also be aware of the misfortunes and indignities suffered by their offspring unto infinity thus damaging their hard-earned happiness?
If we are to deny the living true happiness on the basis that we cannot know what may yet happen, happiness seeks nothing but death. If we are to describe the living as happy, then it may not be a sort of happiness dependent on external circumstances else the chief good be achievable only in fits and spurts if at all. Aristotle’s solution is to consider the internal and external factors for happiness as two separate entities. Though he concedes that external events can maim the potential for happiness, “even in these, nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many great misfortunes, not through insensibility of pain but through nobility and greatness of soul” [346].
Returning, at least in spirit, to Socrates’ question (posed in the opening book of Plato’s Republic) of whether a poor good man could enjoy the end of life as much as a wealthy one, Aristotle suggests that each individual must first to decide whether to seek happiness or misery and then hope that fortune turns more often in their favor than not. Happy people, then, beset by ill fortune are still happy but if their fortunes are good, then they are said to be blessed. Those embracing misery, but whom otherwise experience good fortune, will still be miserable but should those fortunes turn against them, then they embody the lowest expression of human potential, wretchedness.
As a final argument to differentiate Happiness from other types of the good, Aristotle observes that as the chief Good, Happiness should elicit something more than praise which is rightly given over to lesser goods. “No one,” he suggests, “praises happiness as he does justice, but rather calls it blessed, as being something divine and better” [347]. Happiness, then, is the chief Good and the standard by which other virtues are measured just as divinity is the standard by which the mortal existence is judged.
Having marched his way across numerous minefields to reach a place of rest, Aristotle closes the first book of Ethics with a concise summation of his inquiry into happiness (designed no doubt as the take-away from the lecture), describing it as “an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue” [347] . Before closing, he touches briefly on an interesting observation that is prescient in its anticipation of forays into psychology in the 20th century.
There seems to be also another irrational element in the soul—one which in a sense, however, shares in a rational principle…another element naturally opposed to the rational principle, which fights against and resists that principle…That the irrational principle is in some sense persuaded by the rational principle is indicated also by the giving of advice and by all reproof and exhortation. And if this element also must be said to have a rational principle, that which has a rational principle (as well as that which has not) will be two-fold, one subdivision having it in the strict sense and in itself, and the other having a tendency to obey as one does one’s father.
While Aristotle’s language is clumsy in its exploration of largely uncharted waters, this passage does show already a tendency in human thought to compartmentalize the drives that influence behavior and view their interaction as complementary rather than unilateral.
Showing posts with label Virtue and Vice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virtue and Vice. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Great Books: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Book One (part 1 of 2)
Nicomachean Ethics, Book One
Composed by Aristotle presumably between 336-323 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
The complete text for the W.D. Ross translation of Nicomachean Ethics used in this essay can be read online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/nicomachean/ though page citations listed correspond to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World set.
“When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge Of one of many circles.”- Wallace Stevens
The title for this collection of essays, Nicomachean Ethics, is often shortened to just Ethics. Nicomachus was Aristotle’s son and it is assumed that his inclusion in the title is due to the fact that the work was either dictated to or dedicated to him. How ever one prefers to spin it, these are the words of a father to his son on the ethics of being a good human being. Book One (the subject of our response here) focuses entirely on the chief good, happiness, and sets out in a meticulous way to define its parameters and defend its position as the chief good.
The first thing that one notices when reading Aristotle after Plato is the shift in approach between them. Plato endeavors to be invisible in his own work; placing his ideas in the mouths of the dead through formally constructed dialogues that give voice to both argument and rebuttal. Aristotle, in contrast, is a one man band. There is no dialogue; only discourse. He argues with ideas, not people. Where Plato’s Socrates is at once probing and conciliatory, Aristotle is methodical and unyielding. If Plato’s dialogues are a record of ideas in the process of formulation, Aristotle’s essays are a snapshot of those same ideas codifying and becoming something more permanent than speculation.
Aristotle begins the essay by suggesting that the good “has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim” [339]. Good, in this sense, does not mean well-behaved or helpful, but is an abstract idea that encompasses a right outcome, a successful action or the achievement of virtue. Thus, even if invaders enter your homeland, burn down your house, and kill you, there is a good that is achieved; namely, good warfare. The idea is that no one sets out in earnest to do anything badly and, whatever moral or ethical shortcomings may be attached to a particular action, a successful implementation is a good one.
All goods, according to Aristotle, are not born equal. He segregates the good into two separate camps; those goods which are sought for their own sake and those which are sought for the end that they produce. In the latter case, the ends always trump the goods themselves. Health is better than medicine. Sex is better than seduction and pizza, one would assume, is better than cooking. Those goods that are sought for their own merits are then identifiably better than their ends-based counterparts because they have no ends to which they are eventually subordinate.
He goes on to suggest that Politics is highest good which is sought for a particular end. It subsumes all other kinds of knowledge in its quest to seek out that which is best for humanity. In order to justify a statement like this, one must accept Aristotle’s definition of politics as studying “what we are to do and what we are to abstain from [as] the end of this science…must be for the good of all man” [339] as a description of the virtue of Politics while also accepting that the more cynical and common view of Politics as that which is not “good for all man” would represent its complementary aspect of Vice.
The end of political science, then, “aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action” [342] or, as Aristotle deems it, happiness. In an earlier passage, he warns that abstract ideas like Virtue and Good are derived from human behavior rather than from nature and, as such, must be considered in context with the ambiguity that is presupposed by the plastic nature of the subjects in question. Happiness exhibits the same kind of elusiveness as Aristotle concedes that the “general run of men…think it is some plain and obvious thing, like pleasure, wealth or honor” (bound to that which they suppose they lack most) while “people of superior refinement…proclaim some great ideal” [340].
In an interesting twist, Aristotle bases his assertion that happiness is the highest good upon his disagreement with a fundamental tenet of Platonic thought, namely that everything exists in at least two modes of being, one Ideal and the other, Actual. While it is clear to him that there is good in many things, it is difficult (if not impossible), using only the tools of reason, to identify the one Good that unifies all others. A traditional Platonist would argue that the Ideal of Good is sought for its own sake and those which seek to somehow to store up that good or prevent its lack from occurring are in service not to an Ideal but to a secondary form of Good. Aristotle notes that even those goods thought to be Good in themselves, many (honor, intelligence) still seek a particular end and, among the more vaguely conceived in the remainder, little accord is to be found as to why they are good.
The good, therefore, is not some common element answering to one idea…and if there is some one good which is universally predicable of goods or is capable of separate and independent existence, clearly it could not be achieved or attained by man. [342]
The good, then, that is sought for its own end is more final than that those sought for their outcomes and that good which is sought only for its own sake and never for another purpose is the most final and therefore, the best.
Composed by Aristotle presumably between 336-323 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
The complete text for the W.D. Ross translation of Nicomachean Ethics used in this essay can be read online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/nicomachean/ though page citations listed correspond to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World set.
“When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge Of one of many circles.”- Wallace Stevens
The title for this collection of essays, Nicomachean Ethics, is often shortened to just Ethics. Nicomachus was Aristotle’s son and it is assumed that his inclusion in the title is due to the fact that the work was either dictated to or dedicated to him. How ever one prefers to spin it, these are the words of a father to his son on the ethics of being a good human being. Book One (the subject of our response here) focuses entirely on the chief good, happiness, and sets out in a meticulous way to define its parameters and defend its position as the chief good.
The first thing that one notices when reading Aristotle after Plato is the shift in approach between them. Plato endeavors to be invisible in his own work; placing his ideas in the mouths of the dead through formally constructed dialogues that give voice to both argument and rebuttal. Aristotle, in contrast, is a one man band. There is no dialogue; only discourse. He argues with ideas, not people. Where Plato’s Socrates is at once probing and conciliatory, Aristotle is methodical and unyielding. If Plato’s dialogues are a record of ideas in the process of formulation, Aristotle’s essays are a snapshot of those same ideas codifying and becoming something more permanent than speculation.
Aristotle begins the essay by suggesting that the good “has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim” [339]. Good, in this sense, does not mean well-behaved or helpful, but is an abstract idea that encompasses a right outcome, a successful action or the achievement of virtue. Thus, even if invaders enter your homeland, burn down your house, and kill you, there is a good that is achieved; namely, good warfare. The idea is that no one sets out in earnest to do anything badly and, whatever moral or ethical shortcomings may be attached to a particular action, a successful implementation is a good one.
All goods, according to Aristotle, are not born equal. He segregates the good into two separate camps; those goods which are sought for their own sake and those which are sought for the end that they produce. In the latter case, the ends always trump the goods themselves. Health is better than medicine. Sex is better than seduction and pizza, one would assume, is better than cooking. Those goods that are sought for their own merits are then identifiably better than their ends-based counterparts because they have no ends to which they are eventually subordinate.
He goes on to suggest that Politics is highest good which is sought for a particular end. It subsumes all other kinds of knowledge in its quest to seek out that which is best for humanity. In order to justify a statement like this, one must accept Aristotle’s definition of politics as studying “what we are to do and what we are to abstain from [as] the end of this science…must be for the good of all man” [339] as a description of the virtue of Politics while also accepting that the more cynical and common view of Politics as that which is not “good for all man” would represent its complementary aspect of Vice.
The end of political science, then, “aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action” [342] or, as Aristotle deems it, happiness. In an earlier passage, he warns that abstract ideas like Virtue and Good are derived from human behavior rather than from nature and, as such, must be considered in context with the ambiguity that is presupposed by the plastic nature of the subjects in question. Happiness exhibits the same kind of elusiveness as Aristotle concedes that the “general run of men…think it is some plain and obvious thing, like pleasure, wealth or honor” (bound to that which they suppose they lack most) while “people of superior refinement…proclaim some great ideal” [340].
In an interesting twist, Aristotle bases his assertion that happiness is the highest good upon his disagreement with a fundamental tenet of Platonic thought, namely that everything exists in at least two modes of being, one Ideal and the other, Actual. While it is clear to him that there is good in many things, it is difficult (if not impossible), using only the tools of reason, to identify the one Good that unifies all others. A traditional Platonist would argue that the Ideal of Good is sought for its own sake and those which seek to somehow to store up that good or prevent its lack from occurring are in service not to an Ideal but to a secondary form of Good. Aristotle notes that even those goods thought to be Good in themselves, many (honor, intelligence) still seek a particular end and, among the more vaguely conceived in the remainder, little accord is to be found as to why they are good.
The good, therefore, is not some common element answering to one idea…and if there is some one good which is universally predicable of goods or is capable of separate and independent existence, clearly it could not be achieved or attained by man. [342]
The good, then, that is sought for its own end is more final than that those sought for their outcomes and that good which is sought only for its own sake and never for another purpose is the most final and therefore, the best.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Great Books: Plato's Republic Books One and Two (Part Two)
The first part of this essay can be read here
To appreciate how an extended conversation presumably only about Justice might include inquiry related to Virtue and Vice, we must appreciate that Justice is recognized throughout (at least by Socrates) as a type of virtue or, perhaps more specifically, as a component of human virtue. Virtue (from the Greek arete) was considered the complete fulfillment of a thing or potential. If that thing was a Greek man, he might exhibit a number of virtues including excellence in sport and war, able management of his inheritance without resorting to something so crass as labor or mercantilism, and a wide variety of other measurements of a man’s cut (including his desire to behave justly) that all contributed to his overall Virtue or successful fulfillment of his ultimate purpose. So as the conversation turns towards a discussion of individual behavior, the question of Virtue and Vice become central to the inquiry.
Near the conclusion of his argument with Thrasymachus, Socrates draws an analogy between that which is just and good with virtue and, conversely, that which is unjust and evil with vice. This idea becomes magnified in the beginning of Book Two when Glaucon, playing the Devil’s Advocate, takes up the vanquished Thrasymachus’ argument that injustice is, in fact, good and virtuous. Glaucon begins his argument by retelling the story of Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a magic ring that renders him invisible. In the story, Gyges uses the ring to first gain advantage over his fellow shepherds and, ultimately, to murder the King and take his kingdom. Glaucon ties this story in with their current inquiry by taking it one step further.
Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that we would stand fast in justice…Then the action of the just would be as the actions of the unjust…And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. [312]
Glaucon’s argument is carried one step further by his brother, Adeimantus who points out that “the universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honorable, but grievous, toilsome, and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment and are only censured by law and opinion” [313].
In order to test the validity of their argument (something Socrates himself doesn’t get to in books one and two of the Republic), we must have some certainty about the meaning of the terms under consideration. Virtue and Vice are too easily mistaken for doing good or doing bad. The trouble with the shallow, contemporary reading is that good and bad are merely polar markers that delineate a wide range of behavior that is rarely all one to the exclusion of the others. A man who, for example, robs a bank in order to feed his family has clearly committed a crime but his actions are neither fully good nor fully evil; if, then, the road to hell is paved with good intentions so also would the banister on the stairway to heaven be gilded with evil.
Fortunately, Virtue, in the Greek mode of thinking, has nothing to do with any of these nebulous and unknowable quantities. When Plato speaks of Justice being a Virtue, it is understood that he is saying Justice is but one component of the state of Human Virtue. Justice alone will not make someone virtuous but it may be said that no true Virtue might be complete without it. If we are to accept the proposition that humanity is somehow unique among the animal kingdom from which we arose (hardly a settled matter but I think Socrates and Plato would agree), then we must also accept that the Virtue of a Human Being is unique as well and might well be recognized, as someone once said, by the fruit that it bears. When humanity does as Thrasymachus and the sons of Ariston suggest, practice injustice in whatever degree it can be perpetuated without being punished, it is no different from the law of the jungle where the strongest and smartest flourish at the expense of the weaker and not-so-smartest. If one can suppose that all culture, all faith, all love, all art, all whatever makes us human, can be boiled down to mere elaborations on our biological scripts (the same scripts that every other living thing on Earth is exercising right alongside us), then perhaps this is the more persuasive argument. In fact, regardless of what other baggage we may or may not have picked up along our evolutionary journey, those impulses certainly still exist within us and, at times, may still dominate our behavior.
If, however, we are to consider ourselves as something other than just unusually adaptive primates that exploited the right niche at the right time and accidentally wound up dominating the entire planet, we must also accept the possibility that our Virtue, the full expression of our purpose, might reflect the awesome responsibility of this higher consciousness. These components of Virtue (Justice, Mercy, Love, Reason, pick three of your own, etc), in contrast to the Virtue of any given animal, including the one we used to be, would seem alien and counterproductive. Their relative youth in comparison to the many calls of the wild that reside within in would also render them relatively fragile. Plato quotes Hesiod in observing that “Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her dwelling place is near. But before Virtue the gods have set toil.”
The message is clear. Virtue is an attainment of distinctly human potential while Vice, in whatever form it might take, embraces the old laws of survival that come so easily to us but which we execute with a savagery and wanton destructiveness without peer among forms of life we consider to be less evolved.
To appreciate how an extended conversation presumably only about Justice might include inquiry related to Virtue and Vice, we must appreciate that Justice is recognized throughout (at least by Socrates) as a type of virtue or, perhaps more specifically, as a component of human virtue. Virtue (from the Greek arete) was considered the complete fulfillment of a thing or potential. If that thing was a Greek man, he might exhibit a number of virtues including excellence in sport and war, able management of his inheritance without resorting to something so crass as labor or mercantilism, and a wide variety of other measurements of a man’s cut (including his desire to behave justly) that all contributed to his overall Virtue or successful fulfillment of his ultimate purpose. So as the conversation turns towards a discussion of individual behavior, the question of Virtue and Vice become central to the inquiry.
Near the conclusion of his argument with Thrasymachus, Socrates draws an analogy between that which is just and good with virtue and, conversely, that which is unjust and evil with vice. This idea becomes magnified in the beginning of Book Two when Glaucon, playing the Devil’s Advocate, takes up the vanquished Thrasymachus’ argument that injustice is, in fact, good and virtuous. Glaucon begins his argument by retelling the story of Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a magic ring that renders him invisible. In the story, Gyges uses the ring to first gain advantage over his fellow shepherds and, ultimately, to murder the King and take his kingdom. Glaucon ties this story in with their current inquiry by taking it one step further.
Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that we would stand fast in justice…Then the action of the just would be as the actions of the unjust…And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. [312]
Glaucon’s argument is carried one step further by his brother, Adeimantus who points out that “the universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honorable, but grievous, toilsome, and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment and are only censured by law and opinion” [313].
In order to test the validity of their argument (something Socrates himself doesn’t get to in books one and two of the Republic), we must have some certainty about the meaning of the terms under consideration. Virtue and Vice are too easily mistaken for doing good or doing bad. The trouble with the shallow, contemporary reading is that good and bad are merely polar markers that delineate a wide range of behavior that is rarely all one to the exclusion of the others. A man who, for example, robs a bank in order to feed his family has clearly committed a crime but his actions are neither fully good nor fully evil; if, then, the road to hell is paved with good intentions so also would the banister on the stairway to heaven be gilded with evil.
Fortunately, Virtue, in the Greek mode of thinking, has nothing to do with any of these nebulous and unknowable quantities. When Plato speaks of Justice being a Virtue, it is understood that he is saying Justice is but one component of the state of Human Virtue. Justice alone will not make someone virtuous but it may be said that no true Virtue might be complete without it. If we are to accept the proposition that humanity is somehow unique among the animal kingdom from which we arose (hardly a settled matter but I think Socrates and Plato would agree), then we must also accept that the Virtue of a Human Being is unique as well and might well be recognized, as someone once said, by the fruit that it bears. When humanity does as Thrasymachus and the sons of Ariston suggest, practice injustice in whatever degree it can be perpetuated without being punished, it is no different from the law of the jungle where the strongest and smartest flourish at the expense of the weaker and not-so-smartest. If one can suppose that all culture, all faith, all love, all art, all whatever makes us human, can be boiled down to mere elaborations on our biological scripts (the same scripts that every other living thing on Earth is exercising right alongside us), then perhaps this is the more persuasive argument. In fact, regardless of what other baggage we may or may not have picked up along our evolutionary journey, those impulses certainly still exist within us and, at times, may still dominate our behavior.
If, however, we are to consider ourselves as something other than just unusually adaptive primates that exploited the right niche at the right time and accidentally wound up dominating the entire planet, we must also accept the possibility that our Virtue, the full expression of our purpose, might reflect the awesome responsibility of this higher consciousness. These components of Virtue (Justice, Mercy, Love, Reason, pick three of your own, etc), in contrast to the Virtue of any given animal, including the one we used to be, would seem alien and counterproductive. Their relative youth in comparison to the many calls of the wild that reside within in would also render them relatively fragile. Plato quotes Hesiod in observing that “Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her dwelling place is near. But before Virtue the gods have set toil.”
The message is clear. Virtue is an attainment of distinctly human potential while Vice, in whatever form it might take, embraces the old laws of survival that come so easily to us but which we execute with a savagery and wanton destructiveness without peer among forms of life we consider to be less evolved.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Great Books: Plato's Republic Books One and Two (Part 1)
The Republic, Books One and Two
Written by Plato circa 385 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Justice, Vice and Virtue, State
The complete text of the Republic can be read online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html for free. It uses the same Benjamin Jowett translation that is cited in this work, though page citations given for quoted material corresponds to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World set.
Unlike the emotional rollercoaster of Plato’s trilogy on the Trial and Execution of Socrates, The Republic is, in many ways, more typical of Plato’s work as a whole. It presents, in written form, a fictional conversation in dialogue form between Socrates and a number of other Greek men as they ponder a variety of philosophical issues. The Republic stands out as notable, if not unique, among Plato’s writings because of the expanse of topics methodically dissected within its narrative, the universal nature of the questions under consideration, as well as the exhaustive insights it provides into the worldview of both its writer and the audiences for whom it was intended.
One of the great questions in reading the Republic is, “How fictionalized is Plato’s version of Socrates anyway?” We know that Plato was a student, admirer, and probably friend to Socrates. We also know that, as a scholar, Plato would have to have been as comfortable retaining information taken in via the oral tradition as he was learning information from written sources. Put plainly, there is more evidence suggesting the veracity of Plato’s account of Socrates’ ideas than that of the writers of the Gospels in regards to the life of Jesus Christ. If Plato’s descriptions were, indeed, intended as transmissions from his master, they would be as close to direct as possible without being penned by Socrates’ own hand.
As tempting as this idea of an untainted glimpse into the mind of one of humanity’s great thinkers may seem, we must consider the possibility that Plato does not intend these “utterings” of Socrates to be mistaken for truth nor did the original audience have any expectation that they might be. It was custom among members of a particular tradition to attribute any knowledge acquired to the source of that tradition. By this mechanism, Pythagoras continued to gain attributions to his reputation for decades if not centuries after his death. Old ideas were the most valuable and, pragmatically, ideas would circulate further under these acknowledged information brands than they would as the crackpot theory of whatever scholar might have actually had them. We know that, in addition to his studies with Socrates, Plato was trained in a number of other schools including that of the Pythagoreans and Heraclitean. So, it is not unreasonable to posit that Plato’s writing would be a filter through which the sum of his knowledge, including much of what he learned directly from Socrates might find a more permanent home than the lecture room.
The two books of the Republic under consideration here can be broken into a series of debates over the nature of justice in which Socrates is called upon to fully defend its virtues over the spoils of injustice. The bad news is that he never even comes close in these first two books (of ten) to completing that argument. His solution to the problem of first defining and the defending justice is to create an ideal state and then contrast it with existing governments in order to see justice in those differences. In all honesty, The Republic, at times, reads like a Dungeons and Dragons manual with its careful classifications of like and unlike things (a nasty habit that will only prove more intolerable in the hands of Plato’s student, Aristotle). The good news is that those first two books alone are so pithy that they provide ample material to assess what Plato might have thought about three of the Great Ideas; in particular, Justice, Vice and Virtue, and the State.
This whole imaginary conversation begins as Socrates and his companions are detained by friends after attending a public ritual and pressed into returning to their villa to rest before the night’s festivities. Upon arriving, Socrates engages in a conversation with their father, Cephalus about the process of aging, asking him, “Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?” After establishing that how someone lives (happy, sad, angry etc) is the greatest indicator of how they will approach death, Socrates suggests that Cephalus’ relative wealth may skew his impression of how life’s end is for all who approach it by age. Agreeing that a happy man with wealth fares better in the end of his life than a happy man with none, Socrates asks him, “What do you consider the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?” After some consideration, Cephalus tells him that his wealth has allowed him to deal with men in an honorable way (ie without lying to them) and keep from dying knowing that he owed someone something he was unable to pay. When Socrates challenges him on these criteria as the foundation for a just man’s actions, Cephalus gently begs out of the conversation and hands it off to his son, Polemarchus.
Before looking at what ideas regarding justice spring out of this continued debate, let’s take just a moment to see what role Plato plays in constructing this dialogue. Socrates is depicted as having great zeal in worshipping the gods, having left his home and traveled some distance to attend a new Thracian variation on a festival honoring Artemis. This supports Plato’s narrative begun in Apology that Socrates was a deeply pious man despite the charge that got him executed, advocating for the worship of foreign or otherwise improper gods. Secondly, as he arrives at Polemarchus’ house, he is met warmly by Cephalus, a respected elder who admonishes him for not coming by to teach more frequently. This also reinforces Socrates’ posthumous defense against the charge of corrupting the youth as what father would welcome a teacher into his home that he knew taught things that were unwise or untrue? If Plato’s writing is seen as building upon the reputation of his teacher, the responsibility of burnishing that legacy belongs to him as well.
Polemarchus’ defense of his father’s definition of just action is something of a rhetorical dead-end. After some positioning on semantics, Polemarchus refines it to suggest that justice is “the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt” [298]. This allows for justice to be given to both those deemed as friends and those as enemies. Socrates counters with the idea that committing evil against one’s enemies is not just, but unjust regardless of the circumstances, asserting that:
…if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and that good is the debt which a man owes to his friends, and evil the debt which he owes to his enemies—to say this is clearly not wise for it is not true, if, has been clearly shown, the injustice of another can be in no way just. [300]
While Polemarchus seems content to leave the inquiry at that, Thrasymachus, another visitor to the home is not. In Book One of the Republic, he gleefully plays the role of the skeptic, not merely of the nature of justice but indeed of Socrates’ method of argument. The descriptions that Plato includes to add some kind of tension to the narrative borders on hysterical. Thrasymachus (in “Socrates’” words) “came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us,” also noting that:
I was panic-stricken by his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed, I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first and was therefore able to reply to him. [300]
Thrasymachus charges that none of the men have any interest in learning anything about the nature of justice, only in agreeing with one another. After mocking Socrates’ method of inquiry, Thrasymachus finally puts in his own two cents about the nature of justice, describing it as “nothing else than the interest of the stronger” [301]. When pressed by Socrates to expound on this, he goes on further, suggesting that:
…in all states there is the same principle of Justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only responsible conclusion is that everywhere there is one principle of Justice, which is the interest of the stronger. [301].
While the conversation begins with how a particular person might practice just living in relation to those in his community, Thrasymachus steers it now towards how the idea of Justice might define not only the relationship of the individual to his peers, but also a state to its citizenry. Once arrived, he presents a view of the world that, while cynical, is difficult to deny as too often reflecting our own.
…my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men…that is to say, tyranny, which by fraud or force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale…for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetuating any of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace…But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of this having achieved the consummation of injustice. [304].
Rather than addressing this otherwise common sense observation directly, Socrates attacks Thrasymachus’ argument at its core, that justice represents the interests of the stronger over the weaker. Using a series of analogies, Socrates proves to his own satisfaction that justice is, in fact, more concerned with the interests of the weaker over the stronger. “Governments,” he asserts:
…rule and provide for the interest of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger…And this is the reason…why…no one is willing to govern [without payment]; because no one likes to take in hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without remuneration…and therefore in order that rulers may be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment, money, or honor or a penalty for refusing [306].
He follows this up with a second analogy that ties the qualities of the just and unjust man with that of wisdom/goodness and evil/ignorance respectively. In the former, wisdom and goodness are predisposed towards cooperation with their like and conflict with that which they are unlike. In the latter, evil and ignorance will attempt to vanquish all competitors, good and evil alike. Socrates finishes the analogy by demonstrating that justice also cooperates with its like and against its unlike, whereas injustice seeks injustice for all. Seeing no way out of the rhetorical trap that Socrates has put him in, Thrasymachus concedes the point with as much grace as he can muster and leaves the discussion.
As a final point before continuing on to Book Two’s focus on justice and injustice in human behavior (considered in this context as Virtue and Vice), it is worthwhile to note that Plato chooses three very different kinds of people to verbally spar with Socrates in this opening book. While they are no doubt based on real people that may have been well known to the Athenians who first read this work, they also function as convenient archetypes suggesting how Socrates himself was received in his lifetime by his community. Cephalus, as a man shown as nearing the end of his life, lends authority to Socrates’ teaching through his approval but also represents the kind of traditional wisdom in the Greek culture that Socrates, and Plato after him, are trying to move beyond. Polemarchus is among the generation of younger men supposedly corrupted by Socrates’ teachings and presents an amiable, if half-hearted response to his teacher’s dissection of his half-baked argument. Thrasymachus is openly hostile to Socrates at the beginning of his discussion and derides not only his arguments but his methods for arriving at them. Only after the verbal battle begins turning distinctly against him does Thrasymachus regain his sense of courtesy and exhibits something resembling begrudging respect as he leaves the conversation. While he may not agree with Socrates, the text suggests, he leaves with more respect for Socrates’ methodology and cunning debate skills.
Written by Plato circa 385 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Justice, Vice and Virtue, State
The complete text of the Republic can be read online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html for free. It uses the same Benjamin Jowett translation that is cited in this work, though page citations given for quoted material corresponds to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World set.
Unlike the emotional rollercoaster of Plato’s trilogy on the Trial and Execution of Socrates, The Republic is, in many ways, more typical of Plato’s work as a whole. It presents, in written form, a fictional conversation in dialogue form between Socrates and a number of other Greek men as they ponder a variety of philosophical issues. The Republic stands out as notable, if not unique, among Plato’s writings because of the expanse of topics methodically dissected within its narrative, the universal nature of the questions under consideration, as well as the exhaustive insights it provides into the worldview of both its writer and the audiences for whom it was intended.
One of the great questions in reading the Republic is, “How fictionalized is Plato’s version of Socrates anyway?” We know that Plato was a student, admirer, and probably friend to Socrates. We also know that, as a scholar, Plato would have to have been as comfortable retaining information taken in via the oral tradition as he was learning information from written sources. Put plainly, there is more evidence suggesting the veracity of Plato’s account of Socrates’ ideas than that of the writers of the Gospels in regards to the life of Jesus Christ. If Plato’s descriptions were, indeed, intended as transmissions from his master, they would be as close to direct as possible without being penned by Socrates’ own hand.
As tempting as this idea of an untainted glimpse into the mind of one of humanity’s great thinkers may seem, we must consider the possibility that Plato does not intend these “utterings” of Socrates to be mistaken for truth nor did the original audience have any expectation that they might be. It was custom among members of a particular tradition to attribute any knowledge acquired to the source of that tradition. By this mechanism, Pythagoras continued to gain attributions to his reputation for decades if not centuries after his death. Old ideas were the most valuable and, pragmatically, ideas would circulate further under these acknowledged information brands than they would as the crackpot theory of whatever scholar might have actually had them. We know that, in addition to his studies with Socrates, Plato was trained in a number of other schools including that of the Pythagoreans and Heraclitean. So, it is not unreasonable to posit that Plato’s writing would be a filter through which the sum of his knowledge, including much of what he learned directly from Socrates might find a more permanent home than the lecture room.
The two books of the Republic under consideration here can be broken into a series of debates over the nature of justice in which Socrates is called upon to fully defend its virtues over the spoils of injustice. The bad news is that he never even comes close in these first two books (of ten) to completing that argument. His solution to the problem of first defining and the defending justice is to create an ideal state and then contrast it with existing governments in order to see justice in those differences. In all honesty, The Republic, at times, reads like a Dungeons and Dragons manual with its careful classifications of like and unlike things (a nasty habit that will only prove more intolerable in the hands of Plato’s student, Aristotle). The good news is that those first two books alone are so pithy that they provide ample material to assess what Plato might have thought about three of the Great Ideas; in particular, Justice, Vice and Virtue, and the State.
This whole imaginary conversation begins as Socrates and his companions are detained by friends after attending a public ritual and pressed into returning to their villa to rest before the night’s festivities. Upon arriving, Socrates engages in a conversation with their father, Cephalus about the process of aging, asking him, “Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?” After establishing that how someone lives (happy, sad, angry etc) is the greatest indicator of how they will approach death, Socrates suggests that Cephalus’ relative wealth may skew his impression of how life’s end is for all who approach it by age. Agreeing that a happy man with wealth fares better in the end of his life than a happy man with none, Socrates asks him, “What do you consider the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?” After some consideration, Cephalus tells him that his wealth has allowed him to deal with men in an honorable way (ie without lying to them) and keep from dying knowing that he owed someone something he was unable to pay. When Socrates challenges him on these criteria as the foundation for a just man’s actions, Cephalus gently begs out of the conversation and hands it off to his son, Polemarchus.
Before looking at what ideas regarding justice spring out of this continued debate, let’s take just a moment to see what role Plato plays in constructing this dialogue. Socrates is depicted as having great zeal in worshipping the gods, having left his home and traveled some distance to attend a new Thracian variation on a festival honoring Artemis. This supports Plato’s narrative begun in Apology that Socrates was a deeply pious man despite the charge that got him executed, advocating for the worship of foreign or otherwise improper gods. Secondly, as he arrives at Polemarchus’ house, he is met warmly by Cephalus, a respected elder who admonishes him for not coming by to teach more frequently. This also reinforces Socrates’ posthumous defense against the charge of corrupting the youth as what father would welcome a teacher into his home that he knew taught things that were unwise or untrue? If Plato’s writing is seen as building upon the reputation of his teacher, the responsibility of burnishing that legacy belongs to him as well.
Polemarchus’ defense of his father’s definition of just action is something of a rhetorical dead-end. After some positioning on semantics, Polemarchus refines it to suggest that justice is “the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt” [298]. This allows for justice to be given to both those deemed as friends and those as enemies. Socrates counters with the idea that committing evil against one’s enemies is not just, but unjust regardless of the circumstances, asserting that:
…if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and that good is the debt which a man owes to his friends, and evil the debt which he owes to his enemies—to say this is clearly not wise for it is not true, if, has been clearly shown, the injustice of another can be in no way just. [300]
While Polemarchus seems content to leave the inquiry at that, Thrasymachus, another visitor to the home is not. In Book One of the Republic, he gleefully plays the role of the skeptic, not merely of the nature of justice but indeed of Socrates’ method of argument. The descriptions that Plato includes to add some kind of tension to the narrative borders on hysterical. Thrasymachus (in “Socrates’” words) “came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us,” also noting that:
I was panic-stricken by his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed, I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first and was therefore able to reply to him. [300]
Thrasymachus charges that none of the men have any interest in learning anything about the nature of justice, only in agreeing with one another. After mocking Socrates’ method of inquiry, Thrasymachus finally puts in his own two cents about the nature of justice, describing it as “nothing else than the interest of the stronger” [301]. When pressed by Socrates to expound on this, he goes on further, suggesting that:
…in all states there is the same principle of Justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only responsible conclusion is that everywhere there is one principle of Justice, which is the interest of the stronger. [301].
While the conversation begins with how a particular person might practice just living in relation to those in his community, Thrasymachus steers it now towards how the idea of Justice might define not only the relationship of the individual to his peers, but also a state to its citizenry. Once arrived, he presents a view of the world that, while cynical, is difficult to deny as too often reflecting our own.
…my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men…that is to say, tyranny, which by fraud or force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale…for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetuating any of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace…But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of this having achieved the consummation of injustice. [304].
Rather than addressing this otherwise common sense observation directly, Socrates attacks Thrasymachus’ argument at its core, that justice represents the interests of the stronger over the weaker. Using a series of analogies, Socrates proves to his own satisfaction that justice is, in fact, more concerned with the interests of the weaker over the stronger. “Governments,” he asserts:
…rule and provide for the interest of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger…And this is the reason…why…no one is willing to govern [without payment]; because no one likes to take in hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without remuneration…and therefore in order that rulers may be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment, money, or honor or a penalty for refusing [306].
He follows this up with a second analogy that ties the qualities of the just and unjust man with that of wisdom/goodness and evil/ignorance respectively. In the former, wisdom and goodness are predisposed towards cooperation with their like and conflict with that which they are unlike. In the latter, evil and ignorance will attempt to vanquish all competitors, good and evil alike. Socrates finishes the analogy by demonstrating that justice also cooperates with its like and against its unlike, whereas injustice seeks injustice for all. Seeing no way out of the rhetorical trap that Socrates has put him in, Thrasymachus concedes the point with as much grace as he can muster and leaves the discussion.
As a final point before continuing on to Book Two’s focus on justice and injustice in human behavior (considered in this context as Virtue and Vice), it is worthwhile to note that Plato chooses three very different kinds of people to verbally spar with Socrates in this opening book. While they are no doubt based on real people that may have been well known to the Athenians who first read this work, they also function as convenient archetypes suggesting how Socrates himself was received in his lifetime by his community. Cephalus, as a man shown as nearing the end of his life, lends authority to Socrates’ teaching through his approval but also represents the kind of traditional wisdom in the Greek culture that Socrates, and Plato after him, are trying to move beyond. Polemarchus is among the generation of younger men supposedly corrupted by Socrates’ teachings and presents an amiable, if half-hearted response to his teacher’s dissection of his half-baked argument. Thrasymachus is openly hostile to Socrates at the beginning of his discussion and derides not only his arguments but his methods for arriving at them. Only after the verbal battle begins turning distinctly against him does Thrasymachus regain his sense of courtesy and exhibits something resembling begrudging respect as he leaves the conversation. While he may not agree with Socrates, the text suggests, he leaves with more respect for Socrates’ methodology and cunning debate skills.
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