Republic 1 (327a-336a)

Introduction to the Problem of Justice

Contents:

• Introduction  (327a-328b)

• Cephalus   (328b-331d)

• Polemarchus  (331e-336a)

  • Digression:  The Craft Analogy

• Suggestions for Further Reading

Introduction   (327a-328b)

• Plato sets the dialogue in the Piraeus, the port of Athens on the Aegean located six miles from Athens.  Socrates and Glaucon,  Plato’s brother, are attending the festival of Bendis. 

  • The locale seems perfect for the main topic of The Republic:  What is justice; and, more specifically, what is a just polis?  The discussants are outside of Athens so they can figuratively look back at the City to discuss it; and they are located in a bustling international port where the laws and customs of Athens can be compared with those of foreign nations.

Cephalus  (328b-331d)

• Invited back to the home of Cephalus for supper, Socrates joins a group of young men who have gathered there.  Cephalus is an elderly wealthy metic (foreign-born non-citizen).*    

  • Exploring the topic of happiness in old age, Cephalus advances the view that his superior character (ethos) rather than his wealth is the secret of his successful aging and contentment.  As opposed to his youth when he ignored tales of divine retribution for corrupt acts, his wealth now provides him with the means to pay his debts immediately, keep his word, and make expensive sacrifices to the demanding gods.  His conventional, publicly respected character, now honest and pious, protects him from the fear of divine retribution.  (328b)

  • note:  Though outwardly respectable, Cephalus is still inwardly motivated by the selfish desire to avoid punishment, rather that by the sincere conviction that men are owed repayment and the truth and the gods should duly be worshipped.

• Socrates questions Cephalus’s view that justice is paying your debts and telling the truth (to men and the gods).  He asks if it would be just to return borrowed weapons from a friend who, having gone insane, comes to repossess his weapons.  [Does the right to bear arms extend to the criminally insane?)  

  • Here Socrates demonstrates his dialectical method:   An attempt is made to define justice (Paying debts).  A devastating counter-example is evoked (returning borrowed  weapons to a lunatic).  The definition is shown thereby to be inadequate and the search for the universal nature (eidos) of justice continues.  (331c-e)

  • Socrates is fulfilling the divine commandment received through the Oracle of Delphi to demonstrate to those who falsely claim to have knowledge and wisdom that, like Socrates himself, they know nothing.  Plato seems to tire of Socrates’ sacred mission of skepticism by replacing it with the Theory of the Forms, that is, with perfectly adequate definitions.  This philosophical development is detectable in the progress from the 1^st Book to the 7th Book of The Republic

Polemarchus (331c-336a)

• Polemarchus, Cephalus’s son and heir, takes over the argument.  It is indeed not always fitting to return the insane man his weapons.  Justice is giving what is fitting to people.  Thus justice is giving goods to friends and harms to enemies. 

  • Socrates would know Polemarchus as an officer in the Athenian army [Metics were required to serve in the military though they could not vote or serve in the Council or Assembly.]  He therefore would know that Polemarchus would count as his friends his fellow comrades in arms and would be accustomed to generously distribute to his comrades goods that he has confiscated from rowdy inhabitants of the Piraeus and from the spoils of war.  These purloined material goods are hardly the kind of good Socrates believes we owe to friends and these are hardly the kind of “friends” that match the Socratic ideal of friendship.

• Socrates challenges Polemarchus’s notion that justice is giving goods to friends. He asks who, in the giving of the good of medicine, would Polemarchus utilize:  the physician or the just person?   In giving the good of food:  the farmer or the just person? And so on.

  • In each case, Polemarchus (rather foolishly) chooses the craftsperson.  Then Socrates asks when is a just person useful and Polemarchus answers:  “When goods are being stored.”  [One important function of the military guardian is to defend the temples and treasures stored within.  This section is best understood as a discussion of virtue in the military.]

  • However, when goods are stored, they are useless.  Socrates makes Polemarchus conclude that justice is useless when goods are useful and useful when goods are useless ¾ in other words, an absurdity.

• To fully understand this argument and others throughout The Republic, we should introduce an assumption of the ancient Greek readers of The Republic:  The nature of a craft (techne).  An assumption is a belief (often unacknowledged) that is uncritically accepted as true.  Though hidden, an assumption may serve as a premise in a line of reasoning toward a conclusion.

• What every 5^th Century BC Athenian knew was that every techne has a telos.  Techne (from which we derive “technique,” “technology”) means craft or art in the broadest of terms¾ everything from carpentry to nursing to music-making.  Telos means “goal” or “end.”  Arising out of the need or desire of humans for some good (agathon), techne (crafts) are developed to meet this need or desire.  The agathon or good of the craft becomes the telos of the craft, that is, what the craftperson is aiming at achieving.

• So every techne has a telos, a good internal (that is, specific to) the craft.  (It is peculiarly “classic” to assume that the primary purpose of an occupation is to produce a product or a service, rather than for the financial benefit of the practitioner.

• Not everybody is good at his or her job.  Some are excellent.  Arete is the specific excellence of a craft. To become excellent at a craft, one needs to develop specific skills¾the skills of the farmer are different than the skills of a carpenter.  To gain these skills, one needs:

1. to gain a specialized education,

2. to emulate a model or  mentor (one who possesses the desired skills), and

3. to gain lots of experience and practice in the art (with all of the failure, hardship, trial and error that accompany real life endeavor). 

• If, however, the training and education are successful, the craftperson may be able to

1. effectively achieve the telos of the craft,

2. in a timely, efficient way, and

3. in a consistent way. 

• When craftspersons effectively, efficiently and consistently achieve the telos of the craft, they become excellent at their craft.  They obtain the virtue or arete that is proper to the craft.  The virtue of a craft is the specific excellence of the craft.  For example, a farmer who, year after year, produces a high yield of quality crops is an excellent farmer, that is, has the arete of the techne.

• The Craft Analogy:   Moral character is likened to mastery of a craft.  Later Socrates will refer to moral virtue (moral excellence) as similar to the virtue of a craft.  The Moral virtues of Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Moderation are necessary skills of a human life capable of achieving the telos or goal of human life, namely eudaimonia (happiness or human flourishing).

• Polemarchus could accept from Socrates that a physician is more useful than a just person in the dispensing of medicine only if he missed altogether the difference between 

1. the kind of value that the moral virtue of justice would bring to you if your doctor were just as opposed to 

2. the material value of receiving medication (there are Quacks out there galore).  An unjust physician could not be counted on to act in your best interests. 

• Socrates goes on to suggest that the guard who stands over the stored (useless) goods is also in the very best position to take the goods.  Polemarchus’s definition of justice as giving goods to friends makes no provision for how those goods are obtained.  Thus Polemarchus has led us to the absurd position that the “just person is a kind of thief.  In effect, he confuses justice with generosity. [This argument is called a reductio ad absurdum.  When a debater can “reduce” the argument of an opponent “to an absurdity,” we, the audience, will recognize it as inadequate.  Socrates would also have been aware that the noble craft of the warrior in the Hellenic Age was burdened with the assumption that the armed man had privileges over the possessions of the citizens and ancient warfare often was indistinguishable from marauding, raping and pillaging (“To the victors go the spoils.”)

• Socrates proceeds to question Polemarchus’s notion of justice as generosity to friends.  If  Polemarchus has ever made a mistake between a true friend and a phony, then his justice may entail giving goods to enemies (false friends) and harms to friends (falsely accused innocents). 

  • Polemarchus is accustomed to counting people who look like him, belong to his profession, speak his language as friends and anyone else as an enemy (the barbarian).  Dehumanizing and demonizing the “enemy” often comes with military training.  Polemarchus is generous to comrades, the just and unjust alike.  So it is unlikely that he would go beyond the surface in defining justice.*

• Finally, Socrates asks whether a just person would willingly harm anyone.  Polemarchus, a warrior, is understandably confused because what else does a soldier do other than wound and kill enemies?  Socrates asks does a racehorse have a nature?  And does that Nature have a telos?  [Another assumption of the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers (later challenged by Darwin) was that natural species strive to realize natural goals¾the acorn (unconsciously) strives to realize the form of the oak tree¾the colt strives to realize the form of the thoroughbred horse.]  

  • Now Socrates asks if harming the horse will help or hinder its fulfillment of its nature.  Clearly injuring the horse will make it worse.  Does the just person try to make a person just or unjust?  Clearly justice seeks to produce justice.  But injuring a person makes them unjust, so the just person never deliberately injures anyone, friend or enemy.

  • At this point we should make the distinction that Socrates fails to provide Polemarchus.  Socrates, a warrior in the Peloponnesian Wars was no pacifist, nor did he consider his own imprisonment or execution beyond the provinces of the City-State.  Socrates distinguishes between harming a person physically and harming a person’s character.  A just person never deliberately intends to injure anyone’s character.  It is quite possible to promote a person’s moral character and to injure them physically as , for example, in the cases of a just war or rehabilitative retribution for wrongdoing.  When we act in self-defense, we prevent another from committing an unjust act.  Unless performed in a sadistic or vengeful manner, punishing a child or a wrong-doer, though physically “harming” them, could have the effect of making the child or wrong-doer more responsible and attentive to the consequences of their actions.  Punishment for wrongdoing is perfectly reconcilable with the notion that the just person never deliberately harms anyone.

    Suggestions for Further Reading

• Annas, Julia.  An Introduction to Plato's Republic. New York:  Oxford, 1981.  [16-58]

• Bernadete, Seth.  Socrates' Second Sailing: On Plato's Republic.  Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1989.  [9-32].

• Bloom, Allan.  The Republic of Plato. New York: Harper Collins, 1968.  [310-337]

• Devin, Stauffen.  Plato's Introduction to the Question of Justice.  Albany: State University of New York, 2001.

• Irwin, Terence.  Plato's Ethics.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1995.  [169-180]

• Lycos, K.  Plato on Justice and Power. Alabany: State University of New York, 1987.

• Pappas, Nickolas.  Plato and the Republic.  New York:  Routledge, 1995.  [27-50]

• Reeve, C.D.C.  Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato's Republic.  Princeton, NJ:  Princeton UP, 1988. [3-42]

• Sallis, John.  Being and Logos: Reading Platonic Dialogues.  3rd ed.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1996.  [312-346]

• Sparshott, F. E., "Socrates and Thrasymachus."  Monist 50 (1966): 421-459.

• Taylor, A.E.  Plato: The Man and Hos Work.  New York: Meridian, 1964.  [265-270]

• Tiles, J. E. "Techne and Moral Expertise."  Philosophy 59 (1984): 49-66.

• White, Nicholas P.  A Companion to Plato's Republic.  Indianapolis, Hackett, 1979.  [61-73]

1.  The choice of Cephalus and family is not accidental.  The family prospered on the manufacture of armaments throughout the Peloponnesian Wars.  After Athens’ defeat, the Thirty Tyrants destroyed the family and confiscated its property (Bloom 440).  Plato would have known this by the time he wrote The Republic, so the choice may be a comment on the fleeting, precarious nature of material well-being (as opposed to the lasting value of moral character) (See: Martha Nussbaum,  The Fragility of Goodness).

2.  Aristotle on friendship:  To the extent that a person is good, to that extent can a person be a friend.  The good person will not lie to you, cheat you, malign you, or betray you.  To the extent that a person is honest, just, respectful, generous, to that extent can that person be a friend  (Nicomachean Ethics  Book 8-1157a,b)

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