ARGUMENT
The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice,
the nature of which is first hinted at by Cephalus, the just
and blameless old man-- then discussed on the basis of proverbial
morality by Socrates and Polemarchus--then caricatured by
Thrasymachus and partially explained by Socrates--reduced
to an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and having become
invisible in the individual reappears at length in the ideal
State which is constructed by Socrates.
The first care of the rulers is to be education, of which
an outline is drawn after the old Hellenic model, providing
only for an improved religion and morality, and more simplicity
in music and gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry, and greater
harmony of the individual and the State. We are thus led on
to the conception of a higher State, in which "no man calls
anything his own," and in which there is neither "marrying
nor giving in marriage," and "kings are philosophers" and
"philosophers are kings;" and there is another and higher
education, intellectual as well as moral and religious, of
science as well as of art, and not of youth only but of the
whole of life. Such a State is hardly to be realized in this
world and would quickly degenerate. To the perfect ideal succeeds
the government of the soldier and the lover of honor, this
again declining into democracy, and democracy into tyranny,
in an imaginary but regular order having not much resemblance
to the actual facts.
When "the wheel has come full circle" we do not begin again
with a new period of human life; but we have passed from the
best to the worst, and there we end. The subject is then changed
and the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy which had been
more lightly treated in the earlier books of the Republic
is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion. Poetry is discovered
to be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and Homer,
as well as the dramatic poets, having been condemned as an
imitator, is sent into banishment along with them. And the
idea of the State is supplemented by the revelation of a future
life.
The division into books, like all similar divisions, is probably
later than the age of Plato. The natural divisions are five
in number;--( 1) Book I and the first half of Book II down
to the paragraph beginning, "I had always admired the genius
of Glaucon and Adeimantus," which is introductory; the first
book containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical
notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the earlier
Dialogues, without arriving at any definite result.
To this is appended a restatement of the nature of justice
according to common opinion, and an answer is demanded to
the question--What is justice, stripped of appearances? The
second division (2) includes the remainder of the second and
the whole of the third and fourth books, which are mainly
occupied with the construction of the first State and the
first education. The third division (3) consists of the fifth,
sixth, and seventh books, in which philosophy rather than
justice is the subject of inquiry, and the second State is
constructed on principles of communism and ruled by philosophers,
and the contemplation of the idea of good takes the place
of the social and political virtues.
In the eighth and ninth books (4) the perversions of States
and of the individuals who correspond to them are reviewed
in succession; and the nature of pleasure and the principle
of tyranny are further analyzed in the individual man. The
tenth book (5) is the conclusion of the whole, in which the
relations of philosophy to poetry are finally determined,
and the happiness of the citizens in this life, which has
now been assured, is crowned by the vision of another.
Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted;
the first (Books I - IV) containing the description of a State
framed generally in accordance with Hellenic notions of religion
and morality, while in the second (Books V - X) the Hellenic
State is transformed into an ideal kingdom of philosophy,
of which all other governments are the perversions. These
two points of view are really opposed, and the opposition
is only veiled by the genius of Plato.
The Republic, like the Phaedrus, is an imperfect whole; the
higher light of philosophy breaks through the regularity of
the Hellenic temple, which at last fades away into the heavens.
Whether this imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement
of the plan; or from the imperfect reconcilement in the writer's
own mind of the struggling elements of thought which are now
first brought together by him; or, perhaps, from the composition
of the work at different times-- are questions, like the similar
question about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are worth
asking, but which cannot have a distinct answer. In the age
of Plato there was no regular mode of publication, and an
author would have the less scruple in altering or adding to
a work which was known only to a few of his friends. There
is no absurdity in supposing that he may have laid his labors
aside for a time, or turned from one work to another; and
such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the case
of a long than of a short writing.
In all attempts to determine the chronological he order of
the Platonic writings on internal evidence, this uncertainty
about any single Dialogue being composed at one time is a
disturbing element, which must be admitted to affect longer
works, such as the Republic and the Laws, more than shorter
ones. But, on the other hand, the seeming discrepancies of
the Republic may only arise out of the discordant elements
which the philosopher has attempted to unite in a single whole,
perhaps without being himself able to recognize the inconsistency
which is obvious to us. For there is a judgment of after ages
which few great writers have ever been able to anticipate
for themselves.
They do not perceive the want of connection in their own
writings, or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough
to those who come after them. In the beginnings of literature
and philosophy, amid the first efforts of thought and language,
more inconsistencies occur than now, when the paths of speculation
are well worn and the meaning of words precisely defined.
For consistency, too, is the growth of time; and some of the
greatest creations of the human mind have been wanting in
unity. Tried by this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues,
according to our modern ideas, appear to be defective, but
the deficiency is no proof that they were composed at different
times or by different hands. And the supposition that the
Republic was written uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort
is in some degree confirmed by the numerous references from
one part of the work to another.
The second title, "Concerning Justice," is not the one by
which the Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally
in antiquity, and, like the other second titles of the Platonic
Dialogues, may therefore be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern
and others have asked whether the definition of justice, which
is the professed aim, or the construction of the State is
the principal argument of the work. The answer is, that the
two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth; for
justice is the order of the State, and the State is the visible
embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek
ideal of the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in
a fair body.
In Hegelian phraseology the State is the reality of which
justice is the ideal. Or, described in Christian language,
the kingdom of God is within, and yet develops into a Church
or external kingdom; "the house not made with hands, eternal
in the heavens," is reduced to the proportions of an earthly
building. Or, to use a Platonic image, justice and the State
are the warp and the woof which run through the whole texture.
And when the constitution of the State is completed, the conception
of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same
or different names throughout the work, both as the inner
law of the individual soul, and finally as the principle of
rewards and punishments in another life.
The virtues are based on justice, of which common honesty
in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice is based
on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and
is reflected both in the institutions of States and in motions
of the heavenly bodies. The Timaeus, which takes up the political
rather than the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly
occupied with hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet
contains many indications that the same law is supposed to
reign over the State, over nature, and over man.
Too much, however, has been made of this question both in
ancient and in modern times. There is a stage of criticism
in which all works, whether of nature or of art, are referred
to design. Now in ancient writings, and indeed in literature
generally, there remains often a large element which was not
comprehended in the original design. For the plan grows under
the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of
writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before
he begins.
The reader who seeks to find some one idea under which the
whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest
and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with
the ordinary explanations of the argument of the Republic,
imagines himself to have found the true argument "in the representation
of human life in a State perfected by justice and governed
according to the idea of good." There may be some use in such
general descriptions, but they can hardly be said to express
the design of the writer.
The truth is, that we may as well speak of many designs as
of one; nor need anything be excluded from the plan of a great
work to which the mind is naturally led by the association
of ideas, and which does not interfere with the general purpose.
What kind or degree of unity is to be sought after in a building,
in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a problem which
has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter. To
Plato himself, the inquiry "what was the intention of the
writer," or "what was the principal argument of the Republic"
would have been hardly intelligible, and therefore had better
be at once dismissed.
Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths
which, to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented
in the form of the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the
reign of Messiah, or "the day of the Lord," or the suffering
Servant or people of God, or the "Sun of righteousness with
healing in his wings" only convey, to us at least, their great
spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals
to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the
idea of good--like the sun in the visible world;--about human
perfection, which is justice-- about education beginning in
youth and continuing in later years-- about poets and sophists
and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of
mankind--about "the world" which is the embodiment of them--about
a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in
heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life.
No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any more
than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them.
Every shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which
is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical
imagination. It is not all on the same plane; it easily passes
from ideas to myths and fancies, from facts to figures of
speech. It is not prose but poetry, at least a great part
of it, and ought not to be judged by the rules of logic or
the probabilities of history. The writer is not fashioning
his ideas into an artistic whole; they take possession of
him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore to
discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable
or not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came
first into the mind of the writer.
For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with
their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains
may be truly said to bear the greatest "marks of design"--justice
more than the external frame-work of the State, the idea of
good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or
the organization of ideas has no real content; but is only
a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge
is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence.
It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato reaches
the "summit of speculation," and these, although they fail
to satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, may therefore
be regarded as the most important, as they are also the most
original, portions of the work.
It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question
which has been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary
date at which the conversation was held (the year 411 B. C.
which is proposed by him will do as well as any other); for
a writer of fiction, and especially a writer who, like Plato,
is notoriously careless of chronology, only aims at general
probability. Whether all the persons mentioned in the Republic
could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty which
would have occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty
years later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any
more than to Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas);
and need not greatly trouble us now.
Yet this may be a question having no answer "which is still
worth asking," because the investigation shows that we can
not argue historically from the dates in Plato; it would be
useless therefore to waste time in inventing far-fetched reconcilements
of them in order avoid chronological difficulties, such, for
example, as the conjecture of C. F. Hermann, that Glaucon
and Adeimantus are not the brothers but the uncles of Plato,
or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato intentionally left anachronisms
indicating the dates at which some of his Dialogues were written.
CHARACTERS
-->
Download
FREE -->
LATEST NEWS ON PLATO - THE REPUBLIC - ARGUMENTS
13 Aug 05 20:10:00 PST Plato's Republic
... crimes as necessary to get what they want [Book II, 359d]. Plato does not agree with this. The argument of the rest of the Republic , consequently, is that the just man would not be tempted by ...
15 Aug 05 01:45:00 PST Plato: The Republic 5-10
... effort. Thus, it is simply easier to be just than to be unjust. ( Republic 580a ) This argument makes sense even independently of Plato's larger theory; it is a generalized version of the fairly common ...
06 Aug 05 21:37:00 PST Plato: The Republic 1-4
... Plato: The State and the Soul The Republic The most comprehensive statement of Plato 's mature philosophical views ... In the context of his larger argument, Plato's theory of human nature provides the ...
10 Aug 05 12:35:00 PST Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic
... Republic . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. C.D.C. Reeve. Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato's Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. There are also valuable collections of ...
10 Aug 05 11:02:00 PST Abridged Table of Contents
... Pritchard) Chinese room argument (David Cole) Christian theology ... René: and the pineal gland Plato (Richard Kraut) aesthetics ... ethics and politics in The Republic (Eric Brown) friendship and eros ...
04 Aug 05 10:05:00 PST Thrasymachus [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
... and Woozley, A.D. Plato's Republic. A Philosophical ... Thrasymachus...or Plato ?" Phronesis 16 (1971):142-163. Nicholson, P.P. "Unravelling Thrasymachus' Argument in the Republic " Phronesis 19 (1974 ...
10 Aug 05 23:55:00 PST The Republic - Plato - Free Online Library
The Republic by Plato - best known authors and titles are available on the Free Online Library The ... of contents next The Introduction The Argument Characters I - Socrates - Glaucon II - Glaucon ...
03 Aug 05 00:48:00 PST Plato: Republic: Book VII
... he said. This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will ...
|
