Plato's Republic, part 1

The two literary works that have influenced the way you and I think as well as our parents and neighbors and ancestors for the last 2000+ years are the Bible and Plato's Republic. There is no thought or opinion that anyone in our culture can entertain that isn't enmeshed in the ideas expressed in these great books. Almost every discussion of belief that has come since has been in some way a commentary on some aspect originally outlined in them. And from the points of origin of these works, their influence has spread out and molded the whole world. Not only that, the two books work in tandem. The Bible supplies the Republic what it lacks, and vice versa. They strengthen each other, like steel in concrete, like a husband and a wife. However, while it's fair to say that a lot more people have read the Bible over the centuries than have read Plato, without Plato's theoretical framework the Biblical narratives would have been nothing but quaint stories of no interest to anyone outside of the Roman province of Judea. Conversely, without the personal and moral perspective of the Bible, Plato's metaphysical reasonings would have dried up and blown away.
So when I embark on my periodic rereading of Plato or the Bible I do so with great trepidation and devote a lot more care in pondering the meaning of each individual word than I would with any other books, even Shakespeare's. I'm reading Plato again, and I understand he was a subtle writer who had reasons for including every detail. For Instance, in his day the names of the participants in his dialogs had significance. But what? Also, anyone who writes is embedded inescapably in the controversies of his time. Today, for instance, everybody in the world has heard of Paris Hilton, but 100 years from now I doubt if that name will mean anything at all. To mention her name in a class on the cultural history of the early 21st century will be certain to put everybody to sleep. What were the controversies of Plato's time? You can read about them in Thucydides History of the Pelloponnesian Wars where the names and personalities of the generals and the rabble rousers are infinitely more difficult to keep track of than the personalities in any Tolstoy novel. Suffice it to say Plato lived in an age of societal disintegration. All previous standards of conduct had been abandoned in a fit of savagry that engulfed the entire Greek cultural sphere. Every polis was split. One party would gain power and kill whichever of their opponents they could lay hands on. These circumstances obviously motivated him to subject every commonly held belief to microscopic examination.
In reading any ancient work it's quite difficult for a member of a modern technological society to imagine a world without cars, electricity, telephones and newspapers. Sometimes I think Plato must have foreseen this eventuality because of the way he starts out the Republic. Socrates is visiting Piraeus in a scene out of a novel, filled with local color, descriptions of the various personalities and so on. He and his friend Glaucon had just finished watching a religious festival and were starting the walk back to Athens. I'm not sure of the distance, but it was something on the order of ten miles, I think.
"...we turned in the direction of the city: and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him."
You see, no horses, (too expensive- only the wealthy had horses) and no cell phone. Communications on land generally moved at a walking pace. The fastest way to send a message was by a boy who could run fast. Think about it. What a delicious way to begin one of the most important books ever written. Plato doesn't expend many more words before the conversation begins, but for some reason he feels it of some importance to tell the reader that Socrates was persuaded to stay by the prospect of watching a torchlight procession.
"With horses! I replied: that is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them from one to another during the race?" The great Socrates enjoyed a spectacle as much as anyone and he accepts an invitation to stay.
But the whole purpose of the introductory section is to set up a conversation. The participants are named and there are some others, unnamed, who will be witnessing the proceedings, as if it was a boxing match with preliminaries and a main bout between champion heavyweights. Nowhere does Plato mention himself or how he came to know about this conversation, but noteworthy to me is the fact that there was nothing out of the ordinary to his contemporary readers in the fact that he was reciting this very exacting conversation in its entirety from memory. (remember those three chambers of the mind mentioned by Spenser?) This may seem an impossible feat but one that was unexceptional before the proliferation of written material.
It began with certain pleasantries and remarks on the inevitability of old age- the usual complaints. "The pleasures of youth and love are fled away..." But the host, Cephalus, is having none of it. He recalls talking to Sophocles who felt he was freed from the slavery of his passions when he grew old, and now that Cephalus is old he agrees with the sentiment.
Socrates wants to know if it's only because he is rich that old age rests lightly on Cephalus' shoulders, Cephalus contends that he has led a just life and his conscience is good. But what is Justice? asks Socrates...and they have now set out on a long and arduous journey. With Socrates, of course, nothing is ever simple. Is justice merely a question of paying your debts and speaking the truth, he asks? But these are still the preliminaries. With Thrasymachus Socrates matches himself against a rising young middleweight.
Tired of Socrates' logic dicing, Thrasymachus finally breaks into the discussion, "...for I must have clearness and accuracy," and in due course presents his own definition of justice:"I claim that justice is nothing more than the interest of the stronger." As the modern expression goes, 'might makes right.' What follows is the best demolition of that dictum that has ever been devised, and by the end of it even Thrasymachus is convinced...that at least there is more to it than he had realized.
Even so, The Republic is just getting started. Plato's Socrates is after a much bigger fish which I hope to get to eventually on this blog. But I hurry to mention that much of Socrates' reasonings baffle me. I can't quite follow it. Moreover, I don't have any ambitions to become an expert...lacking a knowledge of the Greek language it would be impossible anyway. But there are still things I can say about his plan for reordering society. In this he was drastically wrong as have all his numerous followers. But that's for another day.
What I want to emphasize here is not so much the content of Plato's writings as the method he had for uncovering truth of reducing things to their bare essentials, of stripping away unexamined assumptions, by shining the light of human reason on every problem. To use that method it is necessary to put ones own desires and preferences aside. This is what is really meant by objective reasoning and it is objective reasoning that has made the scientific revolution possible...for better or worse. So as you engage the clutch of your BMW and feed the fuel through the fuel injectors and put it through a windy country road, that road eventually leads back to Plato.
Unlike modern scientists, Plato saw the difficulty in assigning a special privelege to knowledge gained through the senses- or our extensions of the senses. One of the popular amusements of the Greek aristocracy at the time was the newfangled study of geometry. Plato saw that geometric knowledge wasn't aquired through the senses. But then where did it come from? And so he postulated that while the light of the sun revealed knowledge to the senses, the 'light of pure reason' revealed knowledge to the mind. And from whence came this light? This humble cab driver is confident in saying that this is what the Republic is ultimately about, and it's still a lesson humanity has yet to absorb...even experts on Plato.