Читать книгу Book 1 of Plato's Republic - Drew A. Mannetter - Страница 6

INTRODUCTION

Plato, writing in the aftermath of the devastating Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (421-404 BC), wrestled with many of the problems of political philosophy that confront us today. His Republic, as a search for the definition of justice, is a timeless classic that has great relevance for the 21st century world. We, just as the ancient Athenians, struggle to find a definition for the word justice, let alone, even if defined, with the more difficult implementation of the concept. People throughout history have desired to live in a just society, but the term still seems to escape definition today. For a communist, justice is the fair distribution of wealth; for a capitalist, justice is the accumulation of wealth by the “industrious”; for an environmentalist, justice is the protection of the biotic community; for a feminist, justice is equality between men and women. There is now even what is termed “intergenerational justice,” wherein the looming effects of the 21st century environmental crisis will be passed on to succeeding generations and many people argue that justice demands that the present generation owes a livable environment to posterity. The necessity for a very sophisticated definition of justice confronts us in the here and now. We need our justice to be a powerful force with which we may confront a web of complex problems besetting society. Although the Republic may not ultimately deliver a satisfactory answer to the question “what is justice?”, it does provide a framework for thinking about the concept as it offers a series of definitions of justice, several that are still invoked in today’s world.

The Republic as a whole can be best understood as an extended argument against the philosophy of relativism and the sophistic worldview which results from that philosophy. In ancient Greece, there was no system of public education and consequently a group of itinerant teachers, called sophists, filled the gap for those who could afford to pay. The essence of their instruction was practical and intended to promote economic success through politics or the law courts. Protagoras (480-411 BC), a Greek itinerant philosopher from the northern city of Abdera, was a very successful educator and became wealthy by teaching throughout the Greek world.1 Gorgias of Leontini taught the art of rhetoric, which was employed in the law courts and popular assemblies. Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and Polus, the pupil of Gorgias, both argued that power should be wielded by the powerful for the sole benefit of the powerful. Hence, the sophists advanced a very aristocratic worldview, one in which exploitation, manipulation, oppression, and rigid hierarchy would not only be tolerated, but even lauded as a natural state of humankind.

The worldview of the sophists depended on the philosophy known as relativism, the roots of which lay in the Fragments of Protagoras who laid the foundations for relativism with two deceptively simple statements that, when combined, allow for the political and social excesses that so vexed both Socrates and Plato:

Fragment 1: “Man is the measure of all things; of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not.”

Fragment 6: “As for the gods, I have no way of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist; nor, if they exist, of what form they are. For the obstacles for that sort of knowledge are many, including the obscurity of the matter and the brevity of human life.” 2

In the first fragment, Protagoras claimed that each person experiences the world in their own way and hence is the “measure” of the world, i.e. of what is true and what is not. In the second Testamonia taken from Plato’s Theaetetus, Protagoras is represented by Plato as using the wind as an example to exemplify this concept:

“Well, he means something like this, doesn’t he – that particular things are for me just what they appear to me to be, and are for you just what they appear to you to be. For you and I are men. … It is sometimes the case, isn’t it, that one of us feels cold while the other, although blown by the same wind, does not? Or that one of us feels mildly chilly while the other feels very cold.? … And when such a situation occurs are we to describe the wind itself as cold or not cold? Or shall we accept Protagoras’ solution, that it is cold for him who feels it cold and is not cold for him who does not feel it so? … Protagoras means, then, that perception is always of something existent, and that the knowledge which it imparts is infallible.”

Since no one can be wrong about how they perceive the world, there cannot be any ultimate truth; in this case, the wind cannot be objectively hot or cold, but only relative to the perceiver.

Once Protagoras has established perceptual relativism, he moves on to establish social relativism. Just as one individual cannot be wrong about their perceptions, so a society cannot be wrong about its judgments. For example, if a country decides that capital punishment is wrong, then it is wrong for them. Conversely, if another country decides that capital punishment is right, then it is right for them. Protagoras states in the third Testamonia that “my position, then, is that whatever seems right and admirable to a particular city-state is truly right and admirable – during the period of time in which that opinion continues to be held.” Certainly the positions held by countries lead to better or worse outcomes, but Protagoras maintains that they are not true or false. If they lead to bad outcomes they will simply need to be reformed.

One might object to social relativism by arguing that standards of right and wrong do exist for social conduct and they can be found in religious texts. However, in the sixth fragment, Protagoras maintains the agnostic position and hence denies any type of divinely based standards to establish “right” or “wrong” conduct in a society. Very often, when people want to express a moral imperative, they invoke their religious texts as evidence. For example, a Christian may assert that violence is always wrong and then point to Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” in the Book of Matthew as evidence for this belief.3 However, if Protagoras is correct and we can have no knowledge of the gods, then we cannot know what they demand from us. We may still have a prohibition against violence in a society, but it is not due to divine command; instead, it is due to the fact that we, as members of the society, have agreed that the outcomes overall are better if we refrain from violence. If tomorrow we all agree that violence is acceptable, then it is acceptable.

When these two Fragments are combined, an entire worldview emerges, one in which human judgment is all that matters; we are the measure of all truth and decide not what is right or wrong, for that is impossible, but instead what brings good and bad outcomes for ourselves and society. But how can we decide what is a good or bad outcome if such judgments are all subjective? Protagoras has a one word answer for this question: pleasure. In the third Testamonia he claims that “the wise man is one who can alter people’s way of judging so that what appears and is to them bad now will appear and will be to them good. It is like the case of some food which appears and is bitter to a sick man but appears and is quite the opposite to a man of health. … Still, we agree that the one state is preferable to the other, and so we think that the sick man had better be changed into a healthy state. … But whereas the physician brings about the change by means of drugs, the sophist does so by means of words.” Thus it is the pleasurable outcome of food tasting good that guides our judgments when we are sick. The same standard can then be also applied by the state to capital punishment – is the overall pleasure in society enhanced by capital punishment? If the answer is yes, then it should be enacted; if the answer is no, it should be outlawed.

The philosophy of relativism was seductive in the ancient world and is equally so today. Proponents of relativism can argue their position by pointing to three main benefits of the system. The first is moral flexibility. If there are objective moral truths about the world and we know what those truths are, then moral progress is impossible. With relativism, however, we can decide that the bad outcomes of some social customs such as slavery or oppression of women, viewed as moral truths, no longer bring as much pleasure as new moral truths would and so we change our morality so as to view slavery or the oppression of women as wrong.4 Humans also do seem very often to use pleasure as a guide in making moral decisions in their life; indeed, the moral theories of hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure in life) and utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest amount) utilize pleasure as the guiding principle in determining right from wrong. Finally, relativism can also be a guiding philosophy for agnostics or atheists who lack a holy scripture to supply guidance in moral matters. One need not adhere to any religious system while maintaining relativism.

However, there are also some serious limitations to the philosophy of relativism. First is the problem of pleasure as a guide to good outcomes. As detractors of utilitarianism and hedonism point out, pleasure is very difficult to define, measure, and compare. The definition of pleasure is completely subjective; how a masochist defines pleasure differs from how an altruist defines pleasure. Pleasure is also notoriously difficult to measure and is an unreliable guide to what is good in one’s life. Even if one adopts the “enlightened hedonism” of a utilitarian, that of balancing momentary pleasure with long term pleasures,5 humans are notoriously susceptible to prioritizing short term pleasures, regardless of the advantages of long term pleasures. In comparing pleasures, John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism, lays down the principle that intellectual pleasures are superior to what he terms as “pig pleasures”, those of food, drink, and sex. Although this principle may be true for Mill, the average human tends to be highly motivated by “pig pleasures”.

A second problem in relativism is that humans very often make mistakes about the world. It may be true that even a broken clock is right twice a day, but humans aspire to more certainty about their moral judgments than being occasionally right. Socrates often entraps his dialectic opponents with the problem of mistaken judgments. For example, when Polus asserts that orators and tyrants have the most power in their city-state in the Gorgias (466.b-468.e), Socrates quickly points out that they only do what seems good but not what they actually want. While we normally strive for what is actually good for ourselves, we often make mistakes and are limited to what seems good to us: “If we admit this, then if a man, whether tyrant or rhetorician, kills another or banishes him or confiscates his property, because he thinks it is to his advantage, and it proves to be to his harm, the man surely does what seems good to him, does he not?” (Gorgias, 468.d). It may not make much difference whether my judgment concerning the temperature of the wind is right or wrong, but it is very important to be right when one begins to kill, banish, or confiscate property.

A third argument against relativism is that there does seem to be universals that are cross-cultural. The institutions that humans have built around the globe are very uniform and there is no great variance in moral behavior. At times, the way different cultures express their morality can be different, but underlying assumptions can be the same. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, supplies a story that exemplifies the differences between cultures:

“When he (Darius) was king of Persia he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what it would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see from this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it ‘king of all’.” 6

Herodotus here focuses on the differences between the customs of the two peoples and believes that this demonstrates cultural relativism. However, what he fails to note is that there is an assumption underlying both cultural practices, that of veneration of the dead. Different cultures express veneration of the dead in different ways, but all cultures do have some form of veneration of the dead.

The main problem with relativism that Plato attacks in the Republic is that of the “slippery slope” within the relativistic worldview. If one seriously adopts good and bad outcomes as the only measure for behavior, there is a large latitude for abuse. While Protagoras no doubt intended people to use his philosophy to build functional communities, many individuals use it instead to justify self-centered, egotistical behavior. Within the context of the larger community, it often leads to the justification of colonialism, empire, exceptionalism, and oppression of others. In order to see the destructive possibilities inherent in the relativistic worldview, one need look no further than 21st century multi-national corporate culture, where monetary profits serve as the only measure of success. There existed in Plato’s world the equivalent of unscrupulous Fortune 500 CEO’s. Plato used three characters in his dialogue Gorgias, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, to exemplify the ultimate dangers of the slippery slope in relativistic thinking.

Gorgias, the eponymous character in the Gorgias, is asked in the opening of the dialogue what the art of rhetoric consists of. After much wrangling, the art is defined as “the power to convince by your words the judges in court, the senators in Council, the people in the Assembly, or in any other gathering of a citizen body” (452.e).7 Gorgias goes on to admit that rhetoric is based on belief and not knowledge and hence the rhetorician can speak on any subject and even more competently than the expert: “I have often, along with my brother and with other physicians visited one of their patients who refused to drink his medicine or submit to the surgeon’s knife or cautery, and when the doctor was unable to persuade them, I did so, with no other art but rhetoric.” (456.b) Socrates draws the out the negative implications of this admission about his art by pointing out that “when the rhetorician is more convincing than the doctor, the ignorant is more convincing among the ignorant than the expert.” (459.b) Gorgias’ reply to this criticism is indicative of the sophistic world view: “But is not this a great comfort, Socrates, to be able without learning any other arts but this one to prove in no way inferior to the specialists?” (459.c) While Gorgias may have been a kindly old man who would not misuse rhetoric in order to manipulate his audience and claimed that he would teach his pupils right from wrong if they did not know (456.a-457.c), the history of politics is full of people who have misused the power of persuasion in front of a gullible audience for their own advantage. In the sophistic worldview, however, knowledge and truth are not paramount, but power and the pursuit of pleasure.

Polus, the second sophist who appears in the dialogue and is a pupil of Gorgias, takes up the argument with Socrates from Gorgias. Polus and Socrates view the world differently and hence have numerous disagreements. The one which best exemplifies the slippery slope in relativistic thinking is the argument of whether a wicked person can be happy; Polus maintains that they can while Socrates maintains that they cannot. Polus’ view rests on a definition of power that is very common in our present day world: “to be at liberty to do as I please in the state – to kill, to exile, and to follow my own pleasure in every act.” (469.c) He believes that this is a shared assumption between himself and Socrates: “Just as if you, Socrates, would not like to be at liberty to do whatever seemed good to you in the state rather than not, and are not jealous when you see a man killing or imprisoning or depriving of property as seems good to him!” (468.e) Polus goes on to cite the case of Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, ruler of Macedonia, as a prime example of a wicked man who is happy. (470.d-472.d) Archelaus had been a slave of Alcestis, Perdiccas’ brother, but rose to power by murdering Alcestis and his son Alexander. He then added to his wickedness by murdering the rightful heir to the throne, his own 7 year old half-brother. While Polus admits that all these deeds are wicked (“Wicked? Of course he is!”), he still maintains that Archelaus is happy. Polus is eventually defeated in the argument after conceding that, although it is worse to suffer wrong, it is more shameful to do wrong. (474.c) This admission indicates that Polus is not completely dedicated to relativism as he still has concern for what people think of him and this ultimately leads him to have to contradict himself over whether one can be wicked and happy.

No one exemplifies the pursuit of the great triad of power, money, and pleasure more than the third sophist encountered in the dialogue, Callicles, who did not share Polus’ concern for what people thought of him.8 He argues instead that the powerful man is one who lives in accord with “nature” rather than by “convention”. (482.c-486.d) According to Callicles, convention demands behavior that promotes equality: “those who framed the laws are the weaker folk, the majority. … For they are satisfied, I suppose, if being inferior they enjoy equality of status. That is the reason why seeking an advantage over the many is by convention said to be wrong and shameful, and they call it injustice.” (483.a-c) For Callicles, this is an artificial system created by the weak to keep a check on the strong: “And accordingly they frame the laws for themselves and their own advantage, and so too with their approval and censure, and to prevent the strong who are able to overreach them from gaining the advantage over them, they frighten them by saying that to overreach others is shameful and evil, and injustice consists in seeking the advantage over others.” (483.b-c)

Callicles contrasts this system of equality with one based on nature wherein the strong rule and dominate the weak. When Callicles looked at the natural world he saw that “nature herself makes it plain that it is right for the better to have the advantage over the worse, and the more able over the less.” (483.c-d) He then applies this to human society and notes that Persia, as a strong empire, exercised control over Scythia and Greece, simply because it was more powerful and so could. He maintains that ultimately “the cattle and all other possessions of the weaker belong to the superior and the stronger.” (484.c) He further argues that the truly strong man in society was not hindered by conventional norms, mores, ethics, or religions, but instead wields his power without remorse:

But I imagine that these men act in accordance with the true nature of right, yes and, by heaven, according to nature’s own law, though not perhaps by the law we frame. We mold the best and strongest among ourselves, catching them young like lion cubs, and by spells and incantations we make slaves of them, saying that they must be content with equality and that this is what is right and fair. But if a man arises endowed with a nature sufficiently strong, he will, I believe, shake off all those controls, burst his fetters, and break loose. And trampling upon our scraps of paper, our spells and incantations, and all our unnatural conventions, he rises up and reveals himself our master who was once our slave, and there shines forth nature’s true justice. (483.e-484.b)

Callicles, unlike Polus, frankly puts forward his position and while it is one that many people today as well as in ancient Athens believe in, few will so openly profess it in such stark terms. While the political philosophy of “might makes right” is not normally acknowledged, it has been and is a common philosophy in world politics.

The ultimate goal, however, is not simply the power and wealth that on can amass if the conventions of society are ignored, but the pleasure which flows as a consequence of economic success. Callicles believes that “anyone who is to live alright should suffer his appetites to grow to the greatest extent and not check them, and through courage and intelligence should be competent to minister to them at their greatest and to satisfy every appetite with what it craves.” (491.e-492.a) While conventional society encouraged the virtues of temperance and justice, Callicles’ value structure opposses this. He asks “What in truth could be worse and more shameful than temperance and justice?” (492.b) Instead he proposed that “luxury and intemperance and license, when they have sufficient backing, are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel, unnatural catchwords of mankind, mere nonsense and of no account.” (492.c) Hence, the one standard that Callicles uses to judge the rightness or wrongness of an action is whether it leads to the increase of power, money, or pleasure for himself. Clearly, Callicles has slid to the end of the slippery slope that relativism allows. Callicles is using the philosophy to promote a worldview in which he is the center of the universe and is free from all moral constraint, personal pleasure being the only guide. This thinking was what led the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian expedition in the final years of the Peloponnesian war as described by the historian Thucydides where Athens decided to attack Sicily simply to enslave the people and expropriate their wealth.

Plato, by utilizing these three characters, was clearly laying out the problems inherent in the worldview that relativism promotes. The remainder of the dialogue is an extended argument between Socrates and Callicles as to whether pleasure is “the good” or not. Callicles concedes nothing to Socrates and hence is left unvanquished in the dialogue. It is in the Republic that Plato attempts to rebut the excesses of the slippery slope of relativistic thinking found in the Gorgias. In Book 1, Thrasymachus introduces a relativistic definition of justice very reminiscent of Callicles: justice is the interest of the stronger. While Socrates is able to argue against this position in Book 1, the entire worldview of the relativist is still unscathed. Hence, in Book 2, Glaucon and Adimantus restate Callicles’ position from the Gorgias and demand that Socrates really demonstrate that the life of conventional virtue is superior to that of injustice. The Republic is much more ambitious than simply supplying another definition of justice; indeed, this is accomplished by Book 4. It is an attempt to set out how the excesses of the relativistic worldview can be countered and replaced by a system of rule based on justice. Plato does so by appealing to the philosophy of idealism, wherein there are truths inherent in the world and his “Philosopher Kings” learn what those truths are and rule accordingly.

Book 1 specifically can be thought of as a stand-alone Socratic dialogue asking “what is justice?”. All of the elements of an early Socratic dialogue are included: the what is “X” question, a definition, a refutation, further redefinition, perplexity, and no concrete resolution at the end. The text begins with a common sense definition of justice: to tell the truth and return what one has received. This definition is criticized and goes through several revisions, ending with a definition that would have appealed to any Athenian and to many people today: to help friends and harm enemies. This definition also comes under scrutiny and is ultimately rejected. It is at this point that Thrasymachus bursts into the conversation and supplies his definition: justice is the interest of the stronger. Most of the remainder of the Book 1 is taken up with refuting this definition.

The greatness of the Republic does not lie in Plato’s definition of justice in Book 4 as it is not very satisfactory: “this principle of doing one’s own business … the having and doing of one’s own and what belongs to oneself would admittedly be justice.” (Republic, 433.b-434.a) It does serve, however, to stimulate one to attempt to define justice as something beyond the relativistic definitions of “might make right” and “justice is the interest of the stronger.” Plato was keenly aware of where the unregulated pursuit of power, money, and pleasure had led the Athenian empire – to the destruction of the Athenian army in Sicily and the eventual loss of their empire. If a person does not want to slide down the slippery slope of relativism and join Callicles in advocating for a life solely in pursuit of power, money, and pleasure, other values need to be prioritized. The values which build strong and stable communities, such as justice, fairness, equality, liberty, and solidarity, must be defended. The excesses to which relativistic thinking has led us today threaten the extinction of the entire human race. Hopefully, a consideration of Plato’s Republic will illuminate a path for us to follow with more heart than the unregulated pursuit of power, money, and pleasure.

1The importance of Protagoras as a philosopher cannot be overstated. While the philosopher Whitehead claimed that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”, I would argue instead that that the entire corpus of Western philosophy and theology, including Plato, is a one long argument either for or against Protagoras’s position. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, pg. 39 [Free Press, 1979]

2All quotations from Protagoras are taken from The Presocratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright. The Odyssey Press, 1982.

3Any time a person invokes the words “always” or “never” with the words “right” and “wrong”, such as “it is never right to steal”, they are not relativists but rather are expounding the position known as idealism.

4For a straightforward explication of progress in human morality see the opening pages of Aldo Leoplod’s “The Land Ethic.”

5For example, a student should not succumb to the short term pleasure of an all-night video game spree the night before an exam (when it brings no lasting pleasure) if one would do poorly on the exam (which will influence the rest of your life).

6Herodotus, Histories. Translated by Aubrey De Sélincourt. Penguin Books, 2003. Book 3, Chapter 38.

7All references from the Gorgias are taken from W. D. Woodhead’s translation in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Bollingen Series LXXI. Princeton University Press, Ninth Printing, April 1978.

8Callicles would not have admitted that it is more shameful to do wrong but would have argued that no deed is shameful if it leads to the advancement of his own power, money, or pleasure: “And I do not think much of Polus for the very reason that he agreed with you that it is more disgraceful to do than suffer injustice, for it was as a result of this admission that he was caught in the toils of your argument and silenced, because he was ashamed to say what he thought.” (482.d-e)