 Welcome to our first lecture on Plato's Republic. I'm Christina Hendricks, for those of you who don't know me, and I'll be lecturing this week. And Jill Fellows will be lecturing on the second lecture of Plato's Republic. This week is about politics and ethics in Plato's Republic. So we're going to talk a bit about his political state that he sets up and a little bit about the nature of a person's soul. So that's stuff in book four where he's talking about reason and spirit and appetite and how those should be put together to create a just person. I'm calling that ethics, because for Plato, if a person is put together in the right way, if those parts of the soul are put together in the right way, they will act ethically well. So that's how I'm considering both politics and ethics. And we'll talk a little bit about a couple other things as well. Those are the main themes that we'll look at. I will post all of these slides in a public place after the lecture. I haven't done so yet. And then I will have the main office send out an email to everybody with a link to those slides so that you don't have to feel like you have to write everything down. It can take a long time. I've got a lot of information on the slides, including some page numbers. That might be useful for when you're writing your essays. So don't feel like you have to take absolutely everything down right now, because you can go back and look at them later. So the first thing I want to ask you, let's get into the theme. I mean, we've already gotten into the theme. Our theme has been repetition, repetition compulsion, remaking the past. And we've already seen that pretty clearly with Kierkegaard remaking Genesis in some respect, and Atwood remaking the Odyssey. And we're going to see it with the movie that we are eventually going to watch, The Matrix, remaking the allegory of the cape in Plato. But there's a good deal of repetition and remaking and remodeling in this text itself. So I want you to think of some ideas of where you see that. Any examples of repetition, remodeling things, recreating things, yes. Yeah. Yes, he's remaking an entire city, and he's doing it in a way that's very different than anything that had existed at the time, though, as we'll see, there is a bit of a model he's using. Little bit of something that existed already that he's changing, for sure, but nevertheless, once he arrives at his view, it is a complete remake of a city. Other things, other remaking, remodeling, this repetition, yeah, Tom. Yeah, he definitely wants to revise Homer. Like, there's a lot of Homer that is going to have to be left out. A lot of the Odyssey where the gods are shown doing bad things or being the cause of bad things or possibly lying, where the heroes are doing unjust things that are not benefiting to a hero. So if we're gonna have any poetry at all in this day, which by the time you get to book 10 is highly questionable, it's gonna have to be of a certain kind. We're really gonna have to be careful in censor and remodel the kind of poetry we're gonna have. Anything else? In the dialogue and the way they come to their conclusions is a repetitive process. Can you try to explain that a little more? Yes, so there is a certain kind of method of dialogue that is associated with Socrates through Plato's own writings. That's called the Socratic method and you get a bit of that in book one. And it is rather repetitive. So what happens is Socrates will ask a person what they think of justice in this case. Then the person will give their answer. Socrates will criticize it. The person will give a revised answer. Socrates will criticize it. It will keep going like that until either Thrasymachus just gives up or I think Polemicus actually gives in. Polemicus actually says, oh yeah, you're right Socrates, I now agree with you. So there is that kind of repetition going on, especially in book one. Yeah, that could be a way to think about Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is doing a lot of different things with his different narrative styles, but yes, but he's giving you what he thinks you think and then criticizing it. With Socrates, in Plato's dialogues, it's very important that it's a dialogue because Socrates as a character has to ask the other person for what they think and then it has to be a back and forth. But of course, Plato's writing both characters. So he is writing what that person thinks given what he thinks most people might think or what that kind of person might think, right? But for Plato and the way he writes Socrates in his dialogues, it seems important that it is a give and take, a back and forth between two people, that that is something that philosophy, it's important in philosophy to do that. That's part of how you get to the truth. But as we'll see, I think Plato is actually criticizing the use of the Socratic method in the Republic and we'll get to that in a minute. So here are a couple of things I came up with. So repetition, justice has the same form, the same structure, the same pattern in both the state and in the person. So whatever kind of thing justice is in the state, it's gonna be the same kind of thing in the person. And Jill's gonna talk about this a great deal, I expect next week because Plato has an idea about concepts having absolute objective truths and anything that partakes of that concept is going to have that same structure, that same pattern. So justice has an objective truth, anything that's just, a just person, a just state, a just action should in theory somehow connect to that objective truth of justice and therefore somehow repeat it, somehow be an imitation of or a similar, have the same pattern. So that is certainly there all over, not justice but with other things. I think that in the text it's interesting that they restart the whole argument again. And this puzzles some people because when you look at book one and you look at the nature of book one, what kinds of narrative strategies are used there? And what's said in book one, by the end you find out that both Rysimachus and Socrates and Glaucon and Adamantus think the discussion in book one has been unsatisfactory. They have not been able to answer the question of what is justice. And yet there are a number of themes in book one that repeat later that the Socrates is trying to give the argument that he gives later. He's just not able to do it. So it's like, here's a first try. That didn't work. Let's start over. Because when you get to the beginning of book two, Glaucon and Adamantus say something like, well Socrates, do you want to really show us what justice is? Or do you want to simply have seen to have persuaded us what justice is? Because you haven't really shown us and you have to try again. And in fact Glaucon picks up on Rysimachus' argument, the beginning of book two and says I'm gonna restate it. So it's like they're starting over, which is kind of interesting and makes you wonder what is book one doing? That's a little odd. If it's not gonna work, why is it there? I'll try to address that question. This is something Kobe already said. You're recreating an entire city in theory starting from scratch. And it's even more radical than you might think. Let me find my book. It's on page 212. They say, the only way this possible city and the only way the city could possibly come into being besides the fact that philosophers have to be rulers is towards the bottom of 212. They'll send everyone in the city who is over 10 years old into the country. Then they'll take possession of the children who are now free from the ethos of their parents and bring them up in their own customs and laws, which are the ones we've described. This is the quickest and easiest way for the city and constitution we've discussed to be established, become happy and bring most benefit to the people. So we're not only gonna create this ideal city in theory, if it were ever to come into practice, we actually have to exile everybody over 10 years old outside of the city and start with a clean slate. How serious is Plato about this? Not entirely clear. He certainly never tries to do such a thing in his own life, but it does give you a sense of how much of a remake he thinks this would have to be, because you'd have to pull away from their previous beliefs and from their parents' influence in order for them to go along with it. Another kind of remaking, remodeling, repetition type of theme. This text, he says, gives a theoretical model that can only be partially imitated in reality. And this is, again, jumping towards something that Jill is really going to explain in much more depth next Monday. That this is just a model of a city. This is a model in theory, and nothing in theory can be as perfect or as exact as it is, excuse me, nothing in practice can be as perfect or as exact as it is in theory. So the best we can do in practice in a real city with real people is to approximate, to try to repeat it, to imitate it, but it's only ever gonna be imperfect, and that's what he says on those pages. And he also says in book eight, I didn't put this on the slide, but I also wanted to mention it. Page 261 of, excuse me, 216 of book eight. This is section 546 on the left. This is also related to his point in books eight and nine about how even the best city, even if this city could ever be created in reality, it would decay because nothing in practice is as perfect as in theory. So page 216, it is hard for a city composed in this way to change, but everything that comes into being must decay. Not even a constitution such as this will last forever. It too must face dissolution. You could imagine that were this thing ever to come into being, it's just going to eventually decay because it's never as perfect in practice as it is in theory, and then you'd have to start over. You'd have to go through, because he goes through, well, this kind of state will dissolve into a democracy, will dissolve into an oligarchy, will dissolve into a democracy, will dissolve into a tyranny, and then we'll have to start over. That's not what he says, but you could imagine that being a possible result. And then last thing that I thought of in terms of imitating, repetition, there's a lot of, and this is similar to what Tom said, there's a lot of criticism of imitation in the text, except this state is going to have to be an imitation of a model, but it's going to be the best possible imitation of the best possible ideal model if it's done right. But if you imitate badly, that's a real danger. You don't want people in your state, especially the rulers, the guardians, to imitate bad characters in poetry or drama. Remember, this is where he says, it's okay if they narrate bad events happening, but we don't want them to pretend like they are acting, or excuse me, we don't want them to act like the person who is doing something bad. We don't want them to take on that persona, that that is dangerous, because it actually can help shape the soul if you get used to doing that. And similarly in book 10, imitations are not as good as the original imitative artworks like poetry and drama and painting that are done by people who don't really have full knowledge can be dangerous. If they don't really know what they're talking about, they can fool people into believing things that aren't true. So Homer may or may not have had that much knowledge of military strategy, the best kind of military strategy, or what's good, what's just, what's virtuous. And of course, for Plato, if Homer was not a philosopher, he's not going to have that knowledge. So it's dangerous to have somebody who doesn't really know what they're talking about, make imitations of those things in their art, in poetry and drama, because that can lead people to the wrong idea. So there's some sense in which everything in the practical world, everything that exists around us is going to be not as good and somehow an imitation of something better in theory. And yet, it can be done well or badly. And Plato wants it to be done well, obviously. So those are just some thoughts on the theme in relationship to the book. Some of them will come up again. Here's another imitation. He's actually imitating another state. Does this sound familiar? Here's a part of the city, the citizens are the military. They see each other as similars, as equals. There's not great differences in wealth amongst them. They live together in military groups. They don't live with their own families until partway through their adult life. They can't engage in manufacture of goods or trade or amass wealth. And I didn't put it on there, but they are also not engaged in farming. They're only engaged in the military and in political rule. And also, children are educated by the state from ages seven and upwards, both men and women. And they're given some of the same education. Clearly, like Plato's state, because in Plato's state, women can be full soldiers. Women, as far as I can tell from the book, can be full rulers. That wasn't the case here. But it's close. And that women were not just left at home. They were actually educated by the state. Their education was considered more important than some other Greek city-state. There was one class of citizens. There was one class of manufacturers who made the goods, engaged in trades. They can amass wealth, but they can't engage in any political rule at all. And then there was a third class, which are basically serfs, more or less slaves, owned by the state. They work land, but they don't own that land. They work the land owned by the citizens and basically live off of its fruits. They can make money if they grow any surplus beyond whatever they have to give to the citizen, but they also can't engage in any political rule. So, does this sound familiar to the Republic? Is it too easy of a question? Or is it too hard? Stumped you. Yeah. I know. Do you wanna say something, Jill? It sounds familiar in regard to the Republic. There should be something in the Republic that looks like this. Yeah. Okay. Well, it should look like the citizens are like the rulers and the soldiers because for Plato, the rulers and the soldiers first start off being engaged in the military are the only ones who can't, are the only ones who can engage in political rule, actually only the rulers. They cannot have any wealth. They live together in barracks in a military camp. They don't have separate families. These guys do, but they don't live with them for part of their lives. So, the rulers and the soldiers in Plato's Republic are kind of like the citizens. They're somewhat similar. The manufacturing class and the serfs, the people who produce things and the farmers should be like what one might call the producers in Plato's state, the third class. So there's the rulers, the soldiers, and the producers. And the producers in Plato's state make things, engage in trade, live with their own families, know who their children are, unlike the soldiers. And yet, they can't engage in any political rule. They simply obey. Now this was actually Sparta, which is surprising because Sparta was quite a bitter enemy of Athens, not too long before this. That's why I have these dates up here on the board. The Republic was probably written and nobody's know for sure, so these are really wide dates. You get all kinds of different views when you read the scholarly literature on when it was written. Probably between 385 and 360 BCE. Not too terribly long before that is a war between Athens and Sparta. And Sparta wins. Sparta ends up putting in a puppet government in Athens. It's really awful. So it is somewhat surprising that Plato would model to some degree, and it's certainly not completely like the Spartan system, but he would model a degree on the Spartan system. He's remaking it to some extent. He focuses the rulers on reason and objective truths about justice rather than on military values, such as honor and victory, which is what he thinks, given the next bullet point, the Spartans were focused on. So we can see something like the Spartan constitution or his idea of the Spartan constitution around pages 217 to 218. So on 217, around about 547 B, he's talking about the good state dissolving into the democratic state. Thus striving and struggling with one another, they compromise on a middle way. They distribute the land and houses as private property, enslave and hold as serfs and servants, those whom they previously guarded as free friends and providers of upkeep, and they occupy themselves with war and with guarding against those whom they've enslaved. All of those things are actually what was happening in Sparta. The serfs who would work the land who were farmers were previously enslaved peoples. They were not only owned by the state, but given to each citizen. Each citizen would get a piece of land and they would get a family of serfs to work it. So when Plato says land was distributed, that's exactly what happened in Sparta. So a citizen would not make money on anything except whatever land he or she had that was given by the state and was worked by the serfs. Then they occupy themselves with war, which Sparta was famously, that being a major important virtue and value, and with guarding against those whom they've enslaved, the serfs were continually in Sparta trying to rise up against their masters. They were more numerous than the citizens and Sparta had to have a secret police to go around and kill the serfs and terrorize the serfs. So that's exactly what's going on in Sparta. Then page 218 just under D. The rulers will be respected. The fighting class will be prevented from taking part in farming, that's right. Manual labor or other ways of making money. It will eat communally, that's what they did. The citizens would eat in groups, in military groups until a certain age when they could go back to their families and have a regular family and devote itself to physical training and training for war. So that's the Spartan constitution. But he's modeling some of this on that. And instead of saying, well, we're gonna focus on war, we're gonna focus on reason and the truth about justice and the rulers are gonna be philosophers rather than those who are really good at military campaigning. That's a little bit of the historical background that I think it's useful to know. Here's just a picture of Athens, Sparta and Ithaca, just for fun, just so you know where they are. Yeah, I don't really have much more to say than that. Now, it's also useful to know what Plato's arguing against. This is the situation in Athens at the time. Athens was a democracy. It was one of the most celebrated democracies in Western ancient history. It was a direct democracy. All the citizens would go or could go, I should say, to the assembly. Well, couldn't even all fit. But they were all eligible to go to vote. And there are a number of problems with this kind of rule that Plato's pointing out in the Republic. So there was an assembly of citizens. It was all male, no women. You had to have Athenian parents. You had to have completed your military training. So you had to be at least 20. No women, children, slaves or foreigners. So it's not a huge wide democracy, but it's a democracy of those who count as citizens. They would meet about 40 times a year. That's a lot. This is any eligible citizen could come and meet in one of these 40 meetings a year. This is not we vote on people who then represent us in an ML, excuse me, a parliament or a legislature. This is we go ourselves. About 5,000 to 6,000 people each meeting, it's estimated. They met on a hill called the Pnix. And this picture is what it looks like now. And you can see on the right, some what's left over of the speakers platform. So that's where a speaker would speak from. And we can't see where the rest of the people are, but they're down in front. Anyone was allowed to speak at the assembly. However, if you didn't really know what you were talking about, or people didn't think you had good reason to think you knew what you were talking about, they would just shout you down. So anyone had the right to speak, you didn't have the right to be listened to. But there was at least this sense of equality and this sense of democracy. And what the assembly did was decided on laws and policies put forward by a smaller body, slightly smaller, the Council of 500. Now you don't need to necessarily know all of these details. What I want you to think about is how democratic in a sense this is, how much they're focusing on equality, how much they're not focusing on only picking the people to rule who know what they're doing. Because you'll see that in a minute. This Council of 500, this really gets it for me. This is where the whole idea of just anybody being able to rule comes to me the most, even though the assembly is the same as well, because they're voting on everything. But the Council of 500 is setting the agenda for what's gonna be voted in the assembly. They're more or less running the day-to-day business of the government, although there's some other people who are helping with that. This is purely chosen by lottery. These people are not elected. They are just chosen by lottery from, there's 10 tribes, which are geographical areas. 50 people who are eligible, who are of the right age, male, et cetera, are chosen by lottery to be on the Council of 500 for one year. But even more than that, each of those 10 groups of people, those 10 geographical areas, serve as presidents for one 10th of the year. And that's also chosen by lottery. Nobody really knows who's gonna come up next until the lottery tells you. And even more, one person serves as chair for 24 hours, and you can't serve more than that. So you don't even have, it's very interesting, you don't even have like a leader for more than one day. That this is your 24 hour period, you're gonna be the charge of the day-to-day business of the government. Now to be fair, the main business of the government is governed by the laws and the rules that are passed by the assembly, and what that one chair person is doing is just sort of carrying out the bureaucratic aspect of the day-to-day government. But still, it really shows you how much they just wanna give everybody a say. Doesn't matter who you are, as long as you're a citizen, as long as you're male, et cetera, everybody gets a say. The only elected, well, it might not be the only one, but the one that I know of, the elected position is the generals, the military, because there, they do wanna know that people know what they're doing. You don't wanna have generals who don't know anything about the military or military strategy, right? So there they did actually elect the generals, rather than getting them by lottery. Okay, ah, last thing. Jurors, in the people's courts, and there was another kind of court that would deal with homicides, but in many of the court cases, all the citizens were eligible, if you were over 30, to serve as a juror. And once again, who is assigned to which case is done by lottery, and it's done at the very last minute. It's done the morning of the trial. And you don't know where you're going, and nobody else knows where you're going. They think probably the reason for that was to avoid bribery of the jurors, because if you know who's gonna be on your jury, you might be willing to bribe them. If you don't know who's going on your jury until the very last minute, there won't be time. The thought is. And there's a huge number. Huge numbers of people, 500 to 1500 jurors per trial, because again, everyone who's eligible should be able to have a say, and they would just vote by putting rocks into jars, and I'm sure the vote count took a long time. But again, the main things to note, significant equality and rule, many positions chosen by lottery. Speaking well in public could be very important. This comes up with racemicus. If you could, stand up in the assembly, or in the council of 500, when you're part of the council, or in a law court, and say things well, you can have significant power. You can sway all those people over to your side, as long as you can speak well. And there were teachers, sophists, who went around in ancient Greece and taught people rhetoric, taught people how to speak well. Thracemicus was one of these. The sophists wanted to help people learn how to win. That was their idea, and as I have on a different slide, the sophists were not too terribly concerned about what the truth was, or what was really morally right, but more about how can you win? How can you get what's good for you? You see that in Thracemicus, right? Plato's arguing against all this. That should be quite clear from the text. Plato does not want rulers, people who have no idea what they're doing to be ruling in the country or in the city. Plato only wants to have those in charge of political rule be those who have knowledge of what's best. And if you start giving it to any old person off the street, you're gonna have a city that's not going to be run well. And he was not alone in this. There were a lot of people who were worried about democracy, and partly because of the war with Sparta. Partly because democracy they thought was leading to bad policies in this war. You didn't have stability of governance in the state. You would have one policy this way, and then a few weeks later you might have another policy, and it would go back and forth, and there were a number of people who were against the democracy at the time. And when Sparta won in 404, they set up a puppet government, made up of people from Athens, who were against democracy. Plato's, oh, I should keep going, sorry. Plato's uncle and his great uncle were part of this group. Plato himself insists in our introduction to this to our book that he did not like what they did, but you can see how he would have been against the democracy itself. Perhaps not leading to what they did, but to a better kind of oligarchy, which is more or less what the Plato's Republic looks like. So the rule of 30 tyrants lasted for nine months, got rid of the democracy. They took over the judicial function so it's no longer in the hands of the people, so people are not jurors anymore. These guys are the judges. Only 3,000 people had the right to trial and to bear arms. Everybody else could be judged without a trial, nobody else could bear arms. They're trying to get rid of their enemies. They exiled the Democrats, they took their lands, they killed people to take their money and lands. This happened to someone in the dialogue, as we'll see. It was a reign of terror, essentially, for nine months. Plato says, in a letter that's given in the introduction to our text, that they also tried to get Socrates to go and arrest somebody because the rule of 30 wanted his land or his money and Socrates refused to do it. And then Plato says also in the introduction to our text, so I didn't really like the 30 tyrants, I didn't like what they were doing, I thought that was a very bad rule and they did this thing to my friend Socrates. But then, once the democracy was restored, that wasn't any good either because they ended up killing Socrates in the trial and they executed him. So Plato's not happy with either. Okay, a little bit about Plato. He was aristocratic, wealthy, politically active family, but he did not go into politics. This is the page that I've been referring to in the introduction. Because page nine, on page nine he describes the rule of the 30, he goes on to describe what happened to Socrates after the democracy was restored, Socrates got put on trial and executed for impiety. And then towards the bottom of page nine, the result was that I, who had at first been full of eagerness for public affairs, when I considered all this and saw how things were shifting about every which way at last became dizzy because we had the democracy, then we had the oligarchy, then we had the democracy again. I didn't cease to consider ways of improving this particular situation, however, and indeed of reforming the whole constitution. But as far as action was concerned, I kept waiting for favorable moments and finally saw clearly that the constitutions of all actual cities are bad. Constitutions of all actual cities are bad and that their laws are almost beyond redemption without extraordinary resources and luck as well. Hence I was compelled to say in praise of the true philosophy that it enables us to discern what is just for a city or an individual in every case and that the human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really and truly philosophers acquire political power or until through some divine dispensation those who rule and have political authority in cities become real philosophers. No actual constitution is a good one. He has to start over. That's his claim. That's why he wouldn't go into politics. He actually did kind of try to get someone to be a political philosopher, excuse me, a political philosopher ruler. He was invited to Sicily by someone who was an admirer of him to tutor, to try to get the king at the time to become a philosopher ruler. It ended badly. It didn't work. That king did not want to take on Plato's views and due to various political intrigue, Plato got suppressed and only through luck was able to escape. I don't think he tried that again. What he did do instead was set up an academy of philosophy and that's where he did. That's what he did most of his life. He would teach philosophy and write. He had quite a few books. And that's why we think this occurred. This was written sometime after 385. That before that he was doing traveling. He was going to Sicily. He was traveling other places. We think it was written probably sometime after he set up the academy. Plato's not the main character. The main character is Socrates. And we can talk in seminars about the interesting fact that Plato doesn't put himself into this text. Plato writes behind the facade of somebody else. Who was that somebody else? Hard to know because as far as we know, as far as anybody knows Socrates wrote nothing. So the only thing we know about Socrates, the only things we know about Socrates are from other people's writings. It's mostly Plato's though there are a few other ones. And as far as we can tell from those writings what Socrates mostly did is he walked around Athens and engaged people in philosophical conversations. We're not sure that's what he did. That's what he does in the dialogues. That's what he does when other people write about him. Maybe they're just making that up but that's the only evidence that we have. He does say that his wife complains about him not making enough money. He has a wife, he has sons and he's probably not making money for them. There's no clear evidence that he had a profession besides maybe a stone mason in his youth. We're not sure about that. One of the writings about Socrates, Xenophon, and again, this is a dialogue about Socrates just like Plato's. So we don't know for sure if it's true but Xenophon makes it quite clear that Socrates does not think democracy is a good idea. That Socrates thinks it doesn't make sense to have anyone ruling in a city who doesn't know what they're doing just like it makes no sense to have someone piloting a ship who doesn't know anything about piloting a ship. So you don't just give rule to those who have the most votes or to those who are selected by a lottery for goodness sake, that's almost even worse. So there's some evidence that Socrates was against democracy as well. But as I mentioned, he was tried and executed once the democracy was reinstated after the oligarchy of the 30. For impiety and corruption of the youth. And nobody is certain why this happened. The impiety charge is in God's other than those that the city approves of. It's not really clear that that was true of Socrates. Most people think it's rather the corruption of youth charge. When we look at his type of method of arguing can start to see why that might happen. If he walks around Athens questioning everybody getting them to say their views showing why their views are wrong he's gonna start making enemies. And if he's got a lot of young people following him around doing the same thing he's gonna start making a lot of enemies. And he's going to be charged with corrupting the youth. The youth are no longer respecting their elders the youth are questioning everything. But further he was friends with an infamous traitor to Athens during the war with Sparta. He didn't leave town when the 30 were in power like the other Democrats did. And he was not punished like the other Democrats. So the thought was maybe when the democracy came back into power they were worried about Socrates. They were worried that he was still going with the oligarchs that he didn't like democracy that he was gonna be fighting against democracy. The democracy in 399 had just four years before been reinstated. They're very worried about whether it's gonna get overthrown again. So many people think it might have been more like that. They were worried about Socrates and his possible connection to the anti-democrats overthrowing the democracy again. Interestingly Plato is not punished. Plato is not in danger. Plato clearly argues against democracy. But this is a number of decades later and probably things had died down by then. Okay, this is a strange title, Republic. Because it means today something like a representative democracy. That the people rule, they elect representatives and that's the government that's not what's happening here. The explanation of the title is that in ancient Greek at least whatever that word is in ancient Greek which I'm not sure, means constitution. And I've read one commenter say, well there were a number of books already at the time and were again later called things like the Athenian constitution, the Spartan constitution. And Plato is calling his constitution. This is the constitution. This is not the one that's in Sparta. This is not the one that's in Athens. This is the real one, the constitution. So if you think about it that way, it kind of makes sense. And constitution is an interesting word even in English because it can mean two things and it does in this book. It can mean the kind of founding document of a state. That's very common meaning for it today. In this book it more, it tends to mean more the structure of a state. So rather than a founding document because I don't think there's any clear founding document with a list of basic principles in this book. But there is a clarity on what the structure of the state should look like. But constitution can also refer to an individual person and what they're like. What kind of constitution does that person have? And you can think about that as what kind of character does that person have? What does that person really like? And the Republic is about both. The Republic is about a constitution of the state. What is the structure of the state? And the constitution of an individual. What is the structure psychologically of an individual? Those two, if they are to be just, should mirror each other. And we'll see how. This is not a real conversation. Plato did not set about and record, obviously, a write down everything that people said that would be exhausting. But the characters were real people. Socrates was a real person. Thrasymachus was a real sophist. Cephalus, who shows up at the beginning for like two minutes and then disappears was a real merchant in the Piraeus. Polemicus was his son. These were real people. Glaucon, Atamantis. Those were actually Plato's older brothers. So all of these people really did exist. The setting really existed. This is a picture of the Piraeus. It's the port of Athens. They don't have this dialogue taking place in Athens itself. And Plato really seems to put a fair bit of care into how he sets his dialogues, how he starts his dialogues. He could say anything. They could be said anywhere. But it's quite often you can find some kind of significance to what choices he makes in the beginning. This one is set when Socrates goes to the Piraeus to engage in a festival about a new goddess, Bendis. It's just been and stated. I think this is the first year they're celebrating this new goddess. Those kinds of things, new goddesses, new gods had to be approved by the state. It was all approved by the state, so it's not impious in any way. And he's talking to people who live in the Piraeus. And the Piraeus is a place of trade, it's a port. Catholic, polemicus, that family is quite wealthy. They're starting to talk about wealth right at the very beginning of the text. Socrates says to Catholic, have you made your own wealth? Have you inherited your wealth? Catholic's view of justice, as we'll see in a moment, is all about wealth, is all about paying off debts. So here he's talking to people who are concerned about money, concerned about wealth. There's another thing, too, though. The Piraeus was connected to the rule of 30 in the following way. Polemicus, the real person, was killed by the 30 tyrants for his money. So the 30 tyrants went to the Piraeus, killed Polemicus, took his money. His brother, Polemicus's brother, who I don't think is mentioned in the text, or at least if he is, he's not named, then funded the resistance movement against the 30 tyrants. So the resistance movement in Piraeus was housed at the Piraeus. And I read one commentator saying, the resistance fighters, the ones who wanted the democracy back, were called the men of the Piraeus. Finally, near the temple of Bendis is where Cretius and Charmedes, the two leaders of the 30 tyrants who were Plato's family, were killed in a battle. So there's interesting connections that in a way, Plato is saying, well, what I'm doing is sort of related to going against the oligarchy, to rebelling against the oligarchy. It's kind of related to revolution, but it's not gonna be the kind of revolution that reinstills the democracy. And it's sort of related to the oligarchy in the sense that what I want to put forward is a kind of oligarchy, but it's not gonna be that one. So the people who would have read this may have known all these things and thought about some of these resonances in the particular setting and the people that Socrates is actually talking to. Okay, last thing before the break. How does the Socratic method work? Ask another person what they think something is like justice, where X is often some abstract concept like piety, beauty, justice, courage. Flatter that person by telling them they're smart. You should remember this from book one. He says this to Thrasymachus. You're a very clever Thrasymachus. Say you don't know the answer. Socrates also says this. I don't know what justice is in book one and that you need to be taught. Use questions to get that person to see that there are problems with their view. So the Socratic method or what's called elencus in ancient Greek is not just getting someone to say their view and then criticizing it. It's getting someone to say their view and then just asking questions. Let me just ask you some questions. And eventually, as you go through the person starts to see if they're gonna see it all that there's problems with their view. He's not actually necessarily attacking it directly. He often shows you, and this is what happens with polemicus in book one. He shows polemicus that his view of justice leads him to other views that he thinks are wrong. So polemicus eventually says, oh, okay, I guess my view doesn't work because if it leads me to that, then there's something wrong with my view. And all Socrates' does is ask them questions. The person revises their view, tries again. Socrates does too again. Ask more questions, get them to see a problem with their view, repeat. Now, sometimes there's an answer. Sometimes no answer is reached. Sometimes all you get is, well, all of your views are wrong, but we don't know what the answer is. And the person gets fed up and leaves. And that's kind of what happens with Thrasymachus, except he doesn't leave. Thrasymachus gets fed up and just gives in. At a certain point, Thrasymachus says, look, I'm just gonna say what you want me to say. I'm not gonna keep answering because I don't agree with anything you're saying. This is on page 27 at E. Thrasymachus says, all right, I'll just say, all right, nod yes and no as one does to old wives' tales. I'm not gonna take you seriously anymore, Socrates. And then going on, I'll answer, so as to please you, since you won't let me make a speech, what else do you want? And it's clear that by the rest of the book, Thrasymachus has just given up. So here's one way to think about Socrates and why he thought, nevertheless, that he was wise, that this was the right way to go about doing philosophy. This is from the Apology. This is another text by Plato. And it's supposedly a recounting of Socrates' defense of himself at his trial for impiety and corrupt in the youth. And he says, he explains why he went around to all those people and did this to them, showing that they don't think they know what, they don't know what they think they know. People would say, ah, justice is X, virtue is Y. Socrates would show them all the problems with that. Why would he do this? Well, he says, at least I know I am wiser than this man. It is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not. Whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know. So I'm likely to be wiser to this extent than he to this small extent that I do not know, ah, I do not think I know what I do not know. That at least the Alancas, what it can do is to get you to recognize what you do not know. That you think you know what something is, Socrates is pointing out how you don't know it. And that that is a certain kind of wisdom. That's important. Without, that Plato rejects the Alancas, though, in the text, in the rest of the text. It has some value, but it also has some dangers. And I'm gonna skip that. And we will, I'm gonna skip that too. We will start after the break with Thrasymachus and talking about why he may have given up the Alancas. So about five minutes, please. Okay. No, no, I forgot to start it back on after the break. Thank you. So, but how Glaucon and Atamanthus often are interlocutors in this dialogue is that they'll say things like, yes, Socrates. I agree with you, Socrates. That makes sense, Socrates. And sometimes you start wondering, does this need to be a dialogue at all? I mean, occasionally they will raise questions and they will say things that add to the discussion. But it doesn't seem like as much of a back and forth dialogue. And what I'm saying is, and I think it's pretty clear that the Alancas is dropped at the end of book one. Studied Plato, that's also the case and have theories on why that might be the case. That Plato gives Socrates this Socratic method. He uses it in book one. Book one doesn't really turn out the way he wants it to. He starts over without it. What might be the point of doing that? I think so, yeah. So if he doesn't use it and reveal how it doesn't work, but just uses something else, then he's not making that point. He has to actually repeat it. He actually give the Socratic method, give it in a way that shows its flaws and then move on to something else. Now, what might be flaws with the Socratic method? So Socrates has to rely on the person to say things that Socrates finds wrong. And so, yeah, yeah. So it's gonna be a roundabout way of arguing, perhaps. Yeah, yes. So similar kind of idea. You have to start with what the other person is thinking and then you have to work through that and eventually get to whatever it is that you wanna say. Of course, Socrates claimed in some of these early dialogues that he didn't even know his own answer. He didn't know what he wanted to argue. All he was doing was trying to get at what was the wrong answer. Yeah, yeah, it only points out what's wrong. It doesn't come up with any solutions unless Socrates at the end of the dialogue says what he thinks or unless both of them together work out a consensus on what they think. But quite often that didn't happen in some of these Olympic dialogues. But that does happen here, right? So we get both the criticism of the bad views, but then we build up on it. Then we see what the good view of justice might be. I think these are all good ideas. Maybe Plato's repeating the Alencus to reveal its problems. Another idea, if people think philosophical discussion is just about winning because there's no objective truth like Thrasymachus, the Alencus is not going to work. You're not going to actually get them to change their minds to what's more true because all they care about is winning in the argument. So that's not going to be helpful against those kind of people. And there's also a criticism of the Alencus in book seven that you might want to reread later. And in it, Plato says, he doesn't name it specifically, but he says, look, when young people start engaging in arguments too early, they treat it as a kind of game of contradiction. And they just want to cut each other down. Now the problem with this, besides the fact that it's a sort of frivolous way to do philosophy because what we should really be doing is getting the truth, besides that, if that happens too often to people, that their views are criticized over and over and over again and they have nothing to replace those with, they may end up as moral relativists. They may think there just is no truth because all that's happening is people are criticizing this view, they're criticizing that view, they're criticizing that view, and as Jenna put it earlier, nothing is given in its place, so they may end up as moral relativists. So that's an important thing to consider too. And maybe in order to understand the truth about justice, you need to be brought up in an entirely different state. Maybe he has to create a new state in theory for us to be able to see why these people might be just people or this state might be a just state. We have to imagine ourselves being brought up like that for us to be able to see what justice is, quite possibly. Okay, the overall argument in the Republic, as far as I see it, there's two questions. What is justice in the state and in the person or as he sometimes puts it in the soul? So he wants to tell us what justice is, and as I said before, it's gonna be the same in both of those. And two, is it better to be a just person than an unjust one? Possibly three, is it better to have a just state than an unjust state, though that's pretty obvious. Is it better to be an unjust person or a just person is the question that Thrasymachus asks? He thinks the unjust person has the best life. It's the question that Glaucon and Atamantis ask in book two towards the beginning, which kind of person has the best life? The one who is just and appears just, the one who is just and appears unjust, et cetera. So this question of whether it's better to be a just person or an unjust person is a major question in the text. Answers, really summarizing everything. Justice in each, the state and the soul, exists when the various parts of each perform the work they are supposed to and stay in their roles, which is a very strange definition of justice. Justice in the state, justice in the soul, when the parts of each one do the functions that they're supposed to do and don't meddle with each other's work. Very strange view of justice. It's not even a normal age and Greek view of justice. That the people reading this at the time would not have thought, oh yeah, yeah, exactly, that's justice. So he's gotta argue for that pretty carefully. Two, it's better to be a just person. Better be a just person both in itself intrinsically and because of the rewards you can get by being a just person. Now you're gonna get the intrinsic and extrinsic or external rewards both at the end of book four and all the way through books eight to 10. Specifically, in book 10, towards the very end, right before the myth of Ur starts, you will get what Socrates says are the external rewards of being a just person. If you're a just person, here's what you can get. You can get the gods not punishing you. You can get an afterlife of a thousand years that is a pretty decent one versus a pretty nasty one. You can get a rebirth into a new life that's a good new life because you know what a good life is because you've been a just person. You also won't get punished by the people around you. These are all the external rewards you can get from justice and that's how he ends the book. The internal, why is justice good in itself? That's the harder case to make. Even if you get none of those external rewards or avoid any of those external punishments, but that's what else he's trying to argue for in books four, eight, and nine. And we'll try to get to that a little bit. I may, no, I'm not gonna skip this one. I'm gonna skip this one, but no, the instrumentally and intrinsically is important. Okay, book two, Glockon and Atamanthus, what most people believe about justice. So here you have to think, well, you can't necessarily just convince people of this new view of justice when this is what everybody already believes. You may have to start over, you may have to come up with a new state in theory and raise people differently to get them to see what's really right about justice. Because otherwise, if you start talking to people generally right now, this is what they believe. And it's gonna be hard to get them out of that. Injustice is better, you should be an unjust person, but the weak agree amongst themselves to be just because they're too weak to do injustice with impunity. And another way of putting that is, justice is good only instrumentally, not intrinsically. Justice, people would be just only if it gets them something good or helps them avoid something bad. Because in itself, being a just person is no good, has no value. And as they put it, if the external sanctions are taken away, if the external rewards or, excuse me, I'm sorry, the external penalties of injustice are taken away, everyone would be unjust. And this is the example of the Ring of Gaijes, if you remember that, that there was a shepherd named, was he named Gaijes? Yeah, or was he his boss named Gaijes, I can't remember. It was a shepherd, he went, there was an earthquake, he went down into the earth and found there a large horse with a very large corpse inside that had a ring. We can talk in seminars about this image imagery, this bronze hollow horse with a very large corpse inside, the ring, found a ring that made him invisible. Now, what the story goes that he then took that ring and entered the palace and seduced the king's wife and killed the king and got all kinds of wonderful things for himself, the argument is, imagine two such people with two such rings. One is a just person, one is an unjust person. Like, how they normally act, right? Normally one person is a good person, they're moral, they do what's right. Normally the other person is an unjust person, they will get away with whatever they can. If they both have the ring, the argument is, they'll both act the same way. And what that's supposed to show is the only thing holding you back from being a bad person or an unjust person is fear of punishment or possibly desire of reward for being a just person. Now, what Socrates has to show, because he thinks this is true, justice is good both in itself and for external rewards. And that's what he says in the beginning of book two. So he's gonna have to show throughout the rest of the text that justice has external rewards, he does that in book 10, but most of it is about how even if you never get caught injustice is worse, even if you're a just person and people think you aren't and you get put in jail, you get put on the rack, still justice is better. That's what he has to argue. He has to argue that this ranking of lives is wrong. This is from book two. Most people think the best life, be unjust, look like you're just. Have your ring of invisibility and do whatever you want to so people don't think you're the one who did those bad things. So people think you're a good person. That way you avoid the nasty sanctions from injustice and you get the good rewards from justice and you get the rewards from being unjust because you can cheat and lie and steal and get things for yourself. Like that seems to be the best life. According to Glaucon and Adamantus, that's what most people think is the best life. Middle life, well, you can be a good person and appear like a good person. That's fine, it's not great, but it's okay. And the worst life, you are a good person, people think you're not. You're innocent, you get believed guilty. So you get all the nastiness of being thought an unjust person, but you don't actually deserve it. That's the worst life, they say. Of course, there's a fourth life, be unjust, appear unjust. And I suppose that's also somewhere in the middle, right? Cause you're gonna get punished for things. But Socrates has to show that the middle life is really the best one. That's the hard thing to do. Glaucon and Adamantus want Socrates to show justice is good in itself, no matter how people appear, no matter the rewards they might get. And injustice is intrinsically bad, no matter if people are never seen to be unjust. So the life of the clever tyrant, who is somebody who is a tyrant, but doesn't get caught at it, or is acts very badly and nobody ever knows, that's not the best. All right, I'm gonna skip the next one. I can talk about that later. In seminars, the next slide was simply, why might you argue for the nature and value of justice in the city and the person by starting off creating an entirely new city? That's something you can think about later. Cause we're running low on time. Well, what he does, of course, to answer those questions is he creates a new city. Sometimes called the Calipolis, that polis is a word for, I believe, a city or a state. Cali has to do with good. So this is like the good city. Here's what it looks like. You've got rulers, sometimes calls the next one auxiliaries. And the rulers and auxiliaries together are sometimes called the guardians. It could be a little bit confusing because the guardians can refer to both the rulers and the soldiers. And we've got the producers. The rulers rule. What is their job? They rule. The auxiliaries are the military. They are also the police force. They enforce the rule of the rulers. And the producers is everybody else. I'm not sure he ever uses the word producers. Common word that many people use for that third group. He doesn't actually spend all that much time on them in the text. He's much more concerned about the rulers and the soldiers. So I'm not 100% sure he gives them a name. The rulers have wisdom and their wisdom is the kind that knows about the city as a whole, how to run the city as a whole. They're gonna be the philosophers. They're gonna be the ones who go through a long period of training to get to know the truth about things like what justice is, what virtue is, what goodness is, and be able to create the city to fit those truths. The auxiliaries, their virtue is courage in book four. Courage is described as the ability to keep within oneself the knowledge of what should be feared and not feared. The ability to not be afraid of those things that the rulers say you shouldn't be afraid of. And the producers, I put moderation in parentheses here because moderation is a virtue in book four that actually involves all three of the groups. Moderation involves two things, self-control. So in the state, one part of the state controlling another part. So when you're moderate, you don't just let yourself do whatever you want to or eat as much as you want to or drink as much as you want to because you're controlling yourself. And in the state, moderation comes from, he says the better parts controlling the worst parts. And this is in book four when he's talking about justice in the state. And moderation also, this is the second part of moderation, it involves self-control, but it also involves harmony. So he says that the state is harmonious because of moderation when the rulers, the soldiers and the producers all agree on who should rule. And they all are not upset by this. They all think this is a good situation. So in a sense, both of those kind of apply to the producers more than anybody else because they're the ones who have to obey, they're the ones who have to be controlled and they're the ones who have to agree that it's okay for them not to be the ones in charge. That's the general makeup of the city. Oops. But here's a very common question that I think is important to answer because it's quite clear that the kind of city he's got and the kind of political rule he's got is one of a fairly coercive, one might even say tyrannical rule by the rulers with the soldiers enforcing their rule. The rulers are the only ones who make political decisions. Soldiers enforce it, the producers have no say. So you can think of this state as rather dangerous and you can think of it as almost a kind of tyranny, although Plato thinks of tyranny as a specific sort of state where the person who's in charge is just run by their appetites and just does things for their own interests, which he doesn't think this is. But what keeps the rulers and auxiliaries from being corrupted and therefore ruling in their own interests, which is precisely the kind of state he does not want? Well, they've gotten certain living conditions. I already alluded to this earlier. They all live together, the rulers and the soldiers all live together like in barracks, like in a military camp. They don't have their own houses. This is all at the end of book three. They don't have their own families. They are not allowed to touch gold and silver. The only way they live is by taxes provided from the state. So they're not amassing wealth. If they can't amass wealth, if they don't have their own families, if they don't have their own property, it's less likely for them to rule in a corrupted fashion only for their own benefit. And of course, don't forget the family arrangements. In book five, one of the most notorious aspects of the Republic, perhaps, not the fact that women can also be soldiers and rulers. That's not notorious today, though it might have been at the time, but the fact that the rulers are basically going to lie to the soldiers and engage in eugenics with, there's no other way to put it, I think, because they're going to choose the best people amongst the soldiers to have sex with the best people amongst the soldiers, and they're gonna lie to them and they're gonna say, this is a lottery. And there's gonna be festivals where people have sex and you're gonna have your name drawn out of a hat, except it's all rigged. And the good, the best people are gonna have sex with the best people and some people aren't gonna get to have sex at all. And it's too bad, because it's a lottery. And if there are any defective children born, they're going to be exposed. That happened in Sparta, too. They actually were brought before the government in Sparta, all the kids who were possibly defective and the government decided which ones got to live and which ones didn't get to live, which ones were put on a mountaintop to be exposed. And the children are all raised together. Nobody knows who their child is, nobody knows who their parent is. Because as soon as the child is born, it's given away to the state and it's raised in common. And of course, the whole reason, I think, for this elaborate scheme, besides not letting the soldiers get upset that they are the ones who were not chosen, that's the reason for the lie. But the reason for taking the children away and nobody knowing who their parents are and nobody knowing who their children are is so that it's less likely that the rulers are going to be able to do things for the interest of their own family. They don't know who their family is. And in fact, all of, I shouldn't say the rulers, because this is just the soldiers, all of the soldiers think of themselves as one big family. Everybody who was born 10 months after you engaged in your sexual festival, they're all your kids. Everyone who engaged in the sexual festival 10 months before you were born, they're all your parents, et cetera. So you're all one big family. And he says in book five that what happens then is that everyone is able to say mine of the same things. There is in some sense no mine that is not also yours amongst the soldiers. Another elaborate way to try to get them to not be corrupted and rule for their own interests. Of course, there's their education, extremely complicated rules for poetry and drama in books two, three and 10. We've already alluded to those. Certain things that as children, the future rulers and the soldiers must not be hearing in their poetry and drama. They must not be hearing the gods lying. They must not be hearing the gods changing form. They must not be hearing heroes doing immoral and unjust things. They should only have images of those beings they should be looking up to, the gods and the heroes, as being the kind of people they need to become. So that's supposed to help with keeping them from becoming corrupted. And then in books five, six and seven, if you're a ruler and not the soldiers, but if you're a ruler, you can become a philosopher. And this is partly what Jill will talk about next week. You're going to learn the true nature of justice, of goodness, of moderation, of courage. I mean, Plato has given us a definition of justice, each part doing its own work, and that's kind of like a image of justice. It's an imitation. As we'll see, the philosophers are going to learn the true nature, the absolute objective truth things. And it's a very complicated kind of argument that Jill will give you. And then they can put these into practice in the city. So they aren't going to be corrupted. They aren't going to rule for their own interests because they know and they care about, they are the kind of people who love the absolute truths about these things and who love justice and who love virtue and beauty and moderation. That they know what these things really are and they're raised in a way because in part of this poetry and drama that they care about those things. Those are the kind of things that they think make a good life. Partly, they will not be corrupted because we pick the ones who love the city the most. Out of all the possible rulers, we only pick those who love the city the most. And he's very careful about saying, we're going to test them and make sure that they won't give up their love for their city. So that may keep them from being corrupted. They're philosophers. We'll get to that later. Capable of discovering the true natures of things. And because they're philosophers and philosophers care about reason above all other kinds of practices and aspects of their soul, they're going to prefer the pleasures of the soul to those of the body. So, the pleasures of the soul being things that have to do with reason and argument and truth and beauty and virtue, morality. If they don't care so much about the pleasures of the body, in food, drink, sex, he claims they're less likely then to be corrupted in their rule by money or other kinds of things that would attract those sorts of pleasures or would make them have those sorts of pleasures. Finally, they won't fear death. Again, they don't think the body. They don't think this life is that important. They think rather truth and beauty and justice are the more important things. So they're not too concerned about death. And so they are not likely to be unjust if they neither are money lovers nor worried about the pleasures of the body nor because of death, they're not likely to be unjust. Plato trying to get you to see that his view, his callipolis, looks like it could be really scary. It looks like it could be really dangerous with these people who have so much power, but he thinks it's possible that they could actually be good people and rule in the right way. Oh, finally, they don't want to rule. Sorry, I forgot about that one. You wanna have people ruling who don't actually want to rule. Because if you have people ruling who want to rule, they're gonna fight over it with others who want to rule. I don't wanna rule. So it's actually better to have people who don't want it ruling. And the reason why they don't want it, again, they're much more concerned about philosophy. They're much more concerned about reason and thoughts and ideas than they are about the stuff in this world and the political, military intrigues and all that stuff. But they're gonna have to do it anyway. Okay, last quick thing. Looking at justice in both the soul and the state. What does justice look like in the person? We've got it in the state. Justice in the state being, in both, doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own. Justice in both is whatever parts there are to the state or the person, and each part does what it's supposed to do and doesn't meddle with the work of the other. So in the state, the rulers rule, the auxiliaries enforce that rule, and the producers obey and make their goods. That's what justice looks like. Nobody tries to meddle with the other's work. The rulers do not try to make money. The rulers do not engage in trade and manufacture. Then they become producers, not rulers. The producers do not try to rule. They don't try to jump up in ranks and become a ruler. In fact, there's that whole myth of the metals thing, you may remember from book three, saying that we're gonna tell people when they're born which kind of metal they are and that they have to stay in their three classes, gold, silver, and bronze, right? Well, what does that look like in the soul? There's three parts to the soul as well, corresponding to the three parts of the city. Rulers have reason, auxiliaries have spirits. Producers tend to focus more on appetite. Reason, kind of like what you think it is. Reason is that part of you that engages in thinking about reasons for doing actions, deliberating, given one side or another. Reason is also that part of you that can think ahead, that can look forward to what might happen in the future. So you're not only thinking about what should I do right now, but what happens if I do that 10 years down the road or what have you, maybe not 10 years, 10 months down the road. The rulers have that about the city. The rulers have reason about the city in the sense that they think about the city as a whole and in the long term. In the person, your reason thinks about the person as a whole and in the long term and makes decisions. The soldiers in the city are like the spirit in the soul and that's a kind of strange word for us these days. The spirit is one way to think about it. This is from the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The natural attachment of spirit is to honor and more generally to recognition and esteem by others. As a motivating force, it generally accounts for self assertion and ambition. That part of you that wants to steam by others, that wants to be recognized, that has ambition, it's almost an egotistical part. That's the part that gets angry when there's something that violates that people are thinking about you that's wrong or something that violates how you think they should respect you. Producers have appetites. Appetites are those things that are just desires for immediate gratification. Food, drink, sex, without thinking ahead of what those might result in in the future. So what is a just person? Reason should be in charge. Reason, that part of you that thinks about the whole person and long term benefits and drawbacks. That should be what guides when you get angry, when you're concerned about your reputation, which appetites you fulfill when and which you do not. That's what I think he means by a just person and reason being in charge. If you think about it that way, I think it's pretty straightforward and fairly easy to agree with. So what I will put up that I didn't have time to get to besides the emphasis on unity is why it's better to be just than unjust. So I will put those slides on a website and I'll send you an email to those. And otherwise you and